OK OK, so there is a lot wrong with this movie. The rich white kids ending, Cuba Gooding Jr floating, and the reaction shot of a person in heaven getting pooped on by an angel bird, or whatever. Some of that is stupid. OK, all of that is stupid. But is all of this movie stupid?
When Robin Williams is walking into hell, there's the image of a road paved with the faces of the damned, all of them talking. He stumbles on a guy who claims to be his father, and it turns out that the actor is---WERNER HERZOG. Alone, this little easter egg saves WDMC from WMOAT territory.
But regardless, WDMC won its Oscar because some of its imagery was/is incredible and inventive and doesn't occur in the same movie where someone seduces Liv Tyler with animal crackers. That this incredible imagery happens in a movie with Robin Williams, doing his Robin Williamsy things, dooms it to the current wave of internet snark.
I think these WMOAT articles are hilarious, and they definitely pick up on the embarrassing things that lazy viewers like me might just casually skim over (I could LOL at the Cuba floating clip indefinitely). But why are we snarking on movies like WDMC, which try to show us new things? I don't think it's a coincidence that Herzog, the man who said that we as a civilization are starving for new images, appears in the film.
Shouldn't we be more cynical toward movies like S1M0NA? Maybe I'm just embarrassed that I like a lot of the movies Gabe ends up reviewing.
"You?ve seen images of a bloody girl running, of a Nazi with a swastika carved into his forehead and of Eli Roth as the Bear Jew swinging a Baseball Bat into a Nazi skull. This is, without a doubt, a perfect teaser. You don?t know who the girl is. You?ve no clue what Hitler is screaming 'Nein' about so red faced."
--Harry Knowles, on "Inglourious Basterds" and being horrible at anything critical
Who is that bloody girl?! Why is that guy swinging the bat?! What's with the Neinz, Hitler?!
Aside from Harry Knowles hate, which is admittedly the easiest thing to do ever, I have to say that I am not looking forward to Inglowreous Wattevr. While violence through art can be used as catharsis, and the Holocaust deserves a great deal of catharsis, I'm not sure that bringing it about through a plot that resurrects the really violent and racially-tinged tradition of scalping and places it into the context of WWII, with Nazis, is going to make anyone feel better about anything.
Tarantino's traditional approach (Kill Bill, Jackie Brown) has been to transcend traditional genre material into the literary or--I guess for film--high cinema. That might be generous of me. This all just seems ridiculously cynical and garbagey, the trailer scored with the same sort of awful neo metal that traditionally accompanies video games.
Which is something--those video games. Is this some weird extension of all the WWII first person shooters, where you get to blow up mindless waves of Nazis, endlessly? Don't they have computers with those things set up at the end of the Holocaust Museum?
I tend to view AI as a good film (maybe even great?) that is unsuccessful. Haley Joel's performance, especially when his love switch (love switch?) is turned on, is the thing I keep coming back to: equal parts creepy, beguiling, sometimes sympathetic, he inspires all sorts of uncomfortable questions in the viewer. For instance, why do I instinctively love (or hate) something cute and small? Why do I feel revulsion at the concept of an inorganic thing making a theater out of love? You're right-- the film, intentionally or no (which I'll get to), lets the viewer examine his/her own programmatic responses, the things that were "hardwired" into our evolutionary design over the course of millions of years. Does the fact that we are made of carbon--ORGANIC--really matter? One building material for another. We point to the notion of a soul, but the soul is an abstraction; maybe we invented it from a sense of horror that we were not ever unique.
This is the stuff that all science fiction dealing with robots/cyborgs/doppelgangers/etc has gotten its hands into. What we are looking to in the robot, the cyborg, the OTHER is ourselves. If robots are subject to the questions of existence, of the soul, then why do we resist turning the questions onto ourselves?
I think what a lot of people react negatively to in AI is the sense of intentionality, on Spielberg or Kubrick's part. Kubrick wanted to make it dark, wring it of its humanity until what you had left was a sterile paring knife (to stab the viewer with). Spielberg, that rascally humanist, would of course inject it with his sense of warmth and humanity, he would be responsible for that saccharine "happy" ending, rather than stopping it at the Blue Fairy. The ending is brought up over and over in discussions of the film, and I agree that there are a lot of things wrong with it, including the cliche of making the most intelligent characters in a movie British, stretched to thebatshit craziest extreme with BRITISH SPACE ALIENS. But for my part, I see the ending as almost apocalyptically cynical: our search for love and connection with another person would send us out, if we could live forever like the robot boy, across time. But at the end we would see that we had never connected with this person, that the love we had thought was mutual was only ever in ourselves. We are all programs running the same endless code; we love, we love, we love. We all end up buried--alone--in our own prisons, ice or otherwise.
Because it was made by Spielberg--the man who found a happy ending in the holocaust-- most viewers wouldn't allow for the possibility of this type of cynicism. I think my point is that it IS there, if you are looking for it. Great movies, and let's be honest, this is definitely not the worst, spread tentacles out beyond the director's/writer's scope of intentionality. These things don't exist in vacuums. Sorry for the novel-in-response.
This was a fair comment, on Toby's part. If that escolar had gotten outside of the restaurant, it probably would have ended up killing hundreds of police, dozens of judges, and controlled 80% of the world's cocaine supply.
Toby should be metaphor extradited to Simile Prison.
This is actually good news. Hugh Jackman will pee his pants in surprise every time there is a surprise. We will know a surprise is coming by the new pants he is wearing, before they get filled with his pee.
No mention of the unbelievable elimination ceremony? When Brody and two friends dressed up in sombreros, ponchos, and fake mustaches? And blindfolded the final two and positioned them like a firing squad? Then shot paint pellets at the "loser?" That might have happened after the second clip of Brody showering.
"I think part of the problem is people get a hit of energy when they are negative about something, and it is a very detrimental way for them to get that hit of energy. They do not understand why they do not have a happy life."
Gwyneth's critics: crack addicts!
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