Just been reading Wendy Grossman's blog - she does reviews of film she's seen - what a great idea in a why didn't I think of that way, or a this is really what blogging is about way...
Last night saw Speilberg's A.I. (or as I should say A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Yanks being unable to distinguish A.I. and A.1. which is a type of ketchup. See Madness of George III, Licens/ce Revoked etc.) Anyway, /Minor Rant. Back to A.I. - what a mess, what an awful film. It was really the sort of Sci-Fi stuff I could write when I was 12 years old. Nothing made sense, the whole thing was choc full of potholes, er plot holes. SS seemed unable to distinguish the fantastical from the implausible, like so many, many Sci-Fi films. And probably books only I don't read SF in general, bar Asimovs years ago (mostly hole free) and Ballard (mostly deviant and not really anything to do with technology, just human madness.)
Sci-Fi that does not have huge plausibility gaps - Matrix managed it, almost uniquely in the last few years. Kubrick managed it with 2001 : Space Odyssey, which was the last but one film I saw. Of course alien portal blocks that make you age in a few months and come back as an extra-terrestrial baby is not grounded in fact, but it's something one is ready to accept as it doesn't come about as false of phony / phalse or fony / my little pony. (of / or is interchangable in my Dutch-influenced language construct.)
The danger with SS is cute (strange that Steven Spielberg's initials are SS as in Wehrmacht etc.) This destroyed Schindler's Lifts / List, which was going wonderfully until the extended close ups of various kids in the Warsaw Ghetto. No emoting kids please, the film didn't need it. And the scene where Oskar Schindler parts with his workers is one of the most emetic scenese in the anals of cinama history. Yet that film had Liam Neeson looking fantastic in Janusz Kaminsky B&W, and a star turn from old Ralphy Feinnes. AI had nothing, except maybe Jude Law who could probably be lovable in a Brittney Spears video. The Joley Haley Osmety actor person was actually not that bad, for all the emoting and cuteness - I knew he was just a droid so that was OK, I could really take HJO / JHO in a way I never could imagine. Think of his speech at the Oscars where he said something to Jamie Bell and made JB look adult and mature. But SS messed it up completely by having the winsomeness transfer to the Teddy bear. Ugh-a-rama!
Some of the implausibilities in AI (let's drop the punctuation)
- Why didn't they give the kid robot to a couple with a real dead kid with no chance of resurrection?
- Why didn't they do psychological profiling on the mother, who was obvously completely mad?
- Why weren't the scientists controlling the experiment?
- How could they lose a robot? Haven't they heard of GPS / GSM etc.?
Enough of the first part of the film. In the stupid third act the following didn't work for me:
- If the seas froze, the level of the sea would drop and so Manhatten would no longer be buried.
- If the skyscapers were encased in ice they would be destroyed as ice moves!
- There was a shot of a skyscraper fallen half-over - buildings don't collapse like that.
- How come the (what was it called) aquatocopter wasn't crushed under all that ice, idem the Blue Fairy statue that shattered when David gently touched it?
- How come the batteries in the robot boy and ted were working 2000 years later?
- How come the robots performed flawlessly after 2000 years?
- How come experiences stored in the fabric of the space-time continuum can only be re-lived once?
Etc.
There was just too much implausibility. Kubrick's 2001 didn;t have that, Matrix had a bit but not enough for me to be annoyed.
I'm always reminded of that Stallone film (forgotten the name) where he comes back to fight Wesley Snipes after years in cryogenic suspension. Where there is the joke about the swearing detector that backfires as they realise they have to maintain this conceit for the whole length of the film. So that later when Sly is cussing away you hear the machine issuing fines in the background and no one takes any notice. Idea badly executed, should have been cut. Lazy film making.
One thing intrigues me though - the robot that William Hurt stabbed in the first scene proceeds to fix her lipstick - cut to the mother and father in their "Robin Reliant" with the mother fixing her lipstick. I honestly thought the mother and the robot were the same. I'm confused about that. It doesn't make any sense, but the lipstick was surely deliberate. Must search the web for an answer sometime...
Today I got a double DVD of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of / Life and Death / of Colonel Blimp. (Never noticed that L & D were common) What a wonderful fantastical story AMOLAD is, with it's stairway to heaven, celestial court room, cheeky special effects, and bags of humanity and compassion. I never tire of watching these films. I'll never intentionally watch AI again, there's no point.
Monday 31 March 2003
Thursday 27 March 2003
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