Vol. I, 2004

Review of "AI: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE"

by Bryan Adrian

"Once you've had a Mecha-Lover, you'll never want a real man again."

So said the robot stud, Gigolo Joe [Jude Law], the most likeable hero of AI, to his billowy breasted client. With the panache of a Porsche, fresh off the assembly line, Robo Joe then quips, "... you wind me up inside baby." The compliant woman eyeing his crotch is quite evidently aroused, from the looks of her agape and wide open mouth, her body tense in anticipation as she implores him " ... what DO you HAVE ... down there!"

Once you've convalesced through this Spielberg film, you'll be begging for a real life again, since you'll be constantly fretful of what you'll never find, in there, deep in the marginalia of nowhere, the place to which Spielberg carried you, into a virtual coma state.

Get real. Save your money. Don't see the film "AI". Don't even speak the word "AI". Do like those people who find "G-d" unspeakable. Apply these same standards to "A-I". The word 'artificial intelligence' might soon be decreed blasphemous, all the way from the Vatican to Jerusalem to Tibet to monoliths on the moon, so position yourselves today, ahead of the crowd. Do you want to wear a scarlet letter, broadcasting your sacrileges? You can take the name "A-I" in vain, or you can walk out your door and rent or buy the 1999 video of the "trip film of the millennium," "INFINITY'S CHILD," instead. It will be the first step on your stairway to heaven, far away from total Spielbergian darkness in the vacuum of SpielbergSpace.

Rather than drone on about a clone of a movie, such as "AI", let us instead look [below] at a deconstructionist breakdown of Spielberg's "AI" treatment. Yes, of course, ... looking over the ENTIRE flick, scene by scene, piece by piece, filament by filament, in addition to going over many viewers' opinions of Spielberg's artistry. Any body out there possessing a copy of Kubrick's original 90-page treatment, of "AI", please forward it on to us here at our offices. We need a copy, badly, as soon as possible, of Kubrick's original treatment in our hands, much more than "GETTING the TREATMENT" from Spielberg's film, right up in our very own faces.

click here now for the TREATMENT synopsis used by Steven Spielberg, for ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

http://quiller-for-hire.blogspot.com/

Jude Law plays an non-human loverboy in two recent films ...

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VIEWERS OPINIONS of AI:

· “too many pseudo Kubrickian sets”

· “Frances O'Connor plays Monica, or "mommy," like a mummy”.

· "Robin Williams has way too many voice overs, so many fudged in that I felt cheated by Spielberg. So much fraud going on … oftentimes Robin Williams seemed to be Teddy's voice also. I just got sick of it.”

· “... the very best Spielberg scene in AI runs along the same lines as his car chases in an earlier film of his, SUGARLAND EXPRESS. Here, his Mecha Hounds, motorcycles with Doberman jaws, run down obsolete robots and chew them up into scrap metal.”

· “Moon-on-the-Rise" Anti-Mecha, hunter-patrols are fun, man!”

· “Teddy, the supertoy's existential question, "... can you help me find David?" uses the same HAL 9000 voice, apparently, from Kubrick's 2001. I can recall that the real voice of HAL 9000 who Kubrick hired for "2001" was the Canadian actor, Douglas Rain. Is he still alive and did he get paid well by Spielberg for his voice over?”

· "I was angered by the very frequent and cloying use of tabletop framed family photographs. They are aesthetically and spiritually debilitating, when over applied to such garish extent, to any semi-intelligent person. Spielberg should know better than to use such kitsch.”

· "William Hurt, although a very fine actor, is wasted here in this role and it shows in his frequent "idling" on screen, awaiting direction from Spielberg, with whom Hurt was obviously not comfortable as his director."

· "Dark lighting oppresses every scene, almost identical to Joel Schumacher’s lighting in FALLING DOWN. When did Spielberg go "Batman" or vampire flick? I didn't read about it in People magazine."

· "The scene where we first see David is total Spielberg schlock, in which a spindle-necked alien child, in shadows, with a plasma like pod-shaped head, is shown standing in an open doorway, and then we have to see his teenager-size white shoes, robotically shifting weight, hinter and hither on the welcome mat, shown in the next frame. Then we must wait still longer to see the Vaseline smeared face of the David we grow to detest, as the film straggles on. The constant waiting for any shred of a story plot was the nightmare I experienced throughout this sorry film. By the end of the film I couldn't care less if the Blue Fairy disassembled David and sold his parts to Maytag."

· "My friend in the biz told me that Ian Watson, the writer who did a nearly full novel-length treatment for AI for Kubrick, was told by Stanley "I need somebody to smear this [90-page treatment] with vaginal jelly." Spielberg got the wrong jelly, obviously, cause his petrolatum jelly that he is so fond of is quite a different lubricant that vaginal jelly! He must have been thinking with his ball bearings."

· "Often times throughout the film, I felt as if I too, like Martin Swinton, the orga [i.e. "organic"], human brother of David, was in a coma for several years myself, preserved in a cocoon of liquid nitrogen, watching a film drag on mercilessly for eons, and never being able to cry out ENOUGH!"

· "Dude. I noticed that the music at the Flesh Fair was provided by the same band that sang "Jesus Built My Hotrod," in 1991. I can't remember their name any longer. Did anyone else think they heard the voice of Jewel, in the killing scenes of the Flesh Fair? Many of the androids marked for death in the Flesh Fair looked like vampires lost on the set of "The Lost Boys," an old Joel Schumacher film. Spielberg must be enthralled with the artistry of Schumacher, because he plagiarized Schumacher's trademark use of dim lighting and dusky shadowing, and distracting darkness, throughout the entire "AI" composition. Was Spielberg using an 8mm camera, uuhhh, ... with just kitchen matches for light? Just who is Falling Down now?"

SPECTATORS' PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHTS RELATED TO THE FILM, "AI":

· "If we genetically engineered dogs to have 180 IQs, what global implications would this have? Would they overthrow humanity? Would it be more critical a social issue than if androids were being treated as objects, machines, ... as slave appliances?"

· "Implanting microchip processors into the human brain to enhance memory and computational skills, ... wouldn't that be a huge drawback because of the door it throws wide open for mind control, electronic surveillance of our innermost thoughts, and brain stem espionage and counter-espionage?"

· "I believe ancient man had a far superior computational and thinking brain to man's brain today, that back then used swirling magneto-plasma, and not connective dot.A with linear connected dot.B electrical neurons, that we have today. We were genetically altered by an invasive entity that defeated and re-engineered Mankind long ago. Evidently, Machinekind has already won the war."

· "Spielberg should be charged with CHILD ABUSE for taking liberties with Haley Joel Osmet in directing him to such extremes, as to depersonify him into a toaster appliance smeared with Vaseline, and keeping the thirteen year old’s face in a kind of knotted and frozen seizure, for so many months of shooting. The SPCA should have been called in to prevent cruelty, you know, the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Androids”.

· "The prominence of the Internet in assisting android infiltration of human thought and information processing and our psychic dream continuum is becoming more and more evident, so I say fuck it to all AI, in that my brain ain't never going to be hot wired or wet wired, or whatever things are building up to in our day and age."

· "Humankind or Machinekind. Will it come down to that choice?"

· "ARTILECTS: Artificial Intellects. My father works on that project for MIT, and also with the MIT research team on installing emotions into androids called the AFFECTIVE COMPUTING RESEARCH GROUP. This stuff is old hat and nobody seems to have figured it out, yet, that is on the outside, and nobody on the inside is "telling". Maybe Spielberg was right to take the robots side against humanity, as he did in this film, in what appeared to me, a Dreamwork's celebration of the victory of robots over organic life."

· "I saw THE WISDOM OF CROCODILES last night. UK vampire film with Jude Law. What blew my mind was when the Finnish-fanged, French-accented starlet, finished off the male vampire android [Jude] in the end. It was far more exciting than the Robot Executions in AI during the Flesh Fair mayhem."

· "NASA and their psychologists are using “Therapist in a Box” on people, using computers to conduct psychiatric therapy. Very unsatisfying, like making love to your blender."

· "Imagine a classroom for 10 year olds, five years into the future, in a world which unabashedly celebrates the human body and bodily functions. “Children, please don’t kick your computers when they are slow, the flying chips might hurt the other children, ... but you may piss on one if it helps you to de-stress. But if you do piss on your computer, you will have to wait to get a new one, unless the day suddenly arrives when electricity and water resonate harmoniously together as one!”

click here now for the TREATMENT synopsis used by Steven Spielberg, for ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE