Frank is Frank Langella, and the voice of the robot is Peter Sarsgaard in this comedy-drama about family, friendship, thievery, and Alzheimer’s. Also, it’s set in the near future, when cars can drive themselves, libraries are getting rid of books, and all phones are videophones, which 2001: A Space Odessey said would happen in 2001 and Back to The Future Part II said would happen around now. But a dutiful son (James Marsden) and a flaky daughter (Liv Tyler) are still the same. Dad’s having trouble taking care of himself, so dutiful son brings the latest technology. It looks boxy, not too human, and Sarsgaard sounds like a less-sinister version of 2001’s Hal.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” says the machine. “How do you know?” Frank answers, but like most people eventually adapts to the idea of having a machine do things for him. Things like theft, his old career. The notion of a buddy comedy with a friendly robot suggests the potential of being a little too cute, like that 1980s movie Short Circuit, but this is just the right amount of cute. It made me think about artificial intelligence, but at the same time it’s a mostly fun movie for those who aren’t into sci-fi. The ending is a reminder that, at bottom, all stories told by humans are human stories.
IMDb link
viewed 8/13/12 7:30 pm at World Cafe Live and reviewed 8/24/12 and 8/27/12
Showing posts with label robot(s). Show all posts
Showing posts with label robot(s). Show all posts
Friday, August 24, 2012
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Hugo (***1/2)
Though best known for violent tales such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Departed, Martin Scorsese has made several movies in other genres, but this is the first one you can take the kids to, and should.
With his Aviator screenwriting collaborator John Logan, he’s adapted Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret into a film whose storytelling mostly equals its considerable visual impact. Unlike some other 3-D releases, the 3-D really does add an extra dimension to the production. Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a 12-year-old boy in 1931, is an orphaned boy who winds the clocks in a cavernous train station in Paris. (But everyone speaks English with an English accent.) Exterior shots of the city and interior shots of gears and wheels, give one a sense of traveling on a monorail. It’s obvious that much of this is created on a computer, but the slightly other worldly quality that provides works fine here.
The mystery relates to an automaton, a mechanical man Hugo’s late father acquired and repaired, but Hugo lacks the literal key that will unlock the mystery. Helping him solve it is the young grand-niece of an older man (Ben Kingsley) who sells toys in the station. Another mystery attaches to the old man and somehow links the girl to the boy. Hugo encapsulates most of what makes a good all-ages story: a resourceful hero (and heroine) with just the right amount of mischieviousness, a mystery, and a touch of the fantastic. Scorsese’s own love of cinema history plays into it as well. Hugo and his friend (Chloë Grace Moretz) sneak into a theater and watch a Harold Lloyd movie. The automaton recalls the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And an even older part of movie history lies at the center of the mystery, which is based on a true story, though the boy’s is fictional.
If I had any quibble with the movie it’s in the very self-conscious way it peddles nostalgia and braininess. Or maybe it’s trying too hard to be a “magical,” like The Polar Express. For example, it’s not enough that Hugo’s friend is a book lover, or uses fancy vocabulary, but you can almost see the ten-cent words underlined; when Hugo manages one himself, she actually says, “good one” to him. Yes, a quibble. Aside from making little kids fidget a bit—it’s better for those old enough to follow a scene in which the kids do some library research—the mildly highfalutin’ aspects of the film are overwhelmed by plain wonderful ones.
With his Aviator screenwriting collaborator John Logan, he’s adapted Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret into a film whose storytelling mostly equals its considerable visual impact. Unlike some other 3-D releases, the 3-D really does add an extra dimension to the production. Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a 12-year-old boy in 1931, is an orphaned boy who winds the clocks in a cavernous train station in Paris. (But everyone speaks English with an English accent.) Exterior shots of the city and interior shots of gears and wheels, give one a sense of traveling on a monorail. It’s obvious that much of this is created on a computer, but the slightly other worldly quality that provides works fine here.
The mystery relates to an automaton, a mechanical man Hugo’s late father acquired and repaired, but Hugo lacks the literal key that will unlock the mystery. Helping him solve it is the young grand-niece of an older man (Ben Kingsley) who sells toys in the station. Another mystery attaches to the old man and somehow links the girl to the boy. Hugo encapsulates most of what makes a good all-ages story: a resourceful hero (and heroine) with just the right amount of mischieviousness, a mystery, and a touch of the fantastic. Scorsese’s own love of cinema history plays into it as well. Hugo and his friend (Chloë Grace Moretz) sneak into a theater and watch a Harold Lloyd movie. The automaton recalls the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And an even older part of movie history lies at the center of the mystery, which is based on a true story, though the boy’s is fictional.
If I had any quibble with the movie it’s in the very self-conscious way it peddles nostalgia and braininess. Or maybe it’s trying too hard to be a “magical,” like The Polar Express. For example, it’s not enough that Hugo’s friend is a book lover, or uses fancy vocabulary, but you can almost see the ten-cent words underlined; when Hugo manages one himself, she actually says, “good one” to him. Yes, a quibble. Aside from making little kids fidget a bit—it’s better for those old enough to follow a scene in which the kids do some library research—the mildly highfalutin’ aspects of the film are overwhelmed by plain wonderful ones.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Wall•E (***1/2)
Another year, another brilliant movie by Pixar Animation Studios. This was written and directed by Andrew Stanton, who performed the same chores for Pixar’s Finding Nemo and wrote screenplays for Monsters, Inc. and the Toy Story movies. Here, he may have come up with his most original effort yet. Like I Am Legend if Will Smith were a robot, or like a less-dystopic A.I., Wall•E imagines an Earth fallen victim to its own folly. A battered, rusty old machine, Wall•E patrols the land stacking garbage, “working to dig you out,” as a left-behind billboard broadcasts to no one. For fun, Wall•E watches very old movies on an ancient VCR salvaged from the day job.
I could’ve watched this opening segment, mostly silent except for music, for much longer than it lasts. There’s something intriguing about watching what someone, even a sentient robot who looks like an R2D2 knockoff, does alone. (I love Cast Away.) Earth is so realistically rendered in its fetid glory that I only slightly wondered what happened to all of the people, and was mildly disappointed when the movie literally goes off into space. This happens shortly after a newer robot called EVE crash lands looking for life. Wall•E, on the other hand, is looking for love, and if it sounds corny to have a robot romance, Stanton keeps it so low-key, and nearly wordless, that even (or especially) adults will be charmed. The hovering, sleek EVE looks like nothing so much as a robot designed by Apple computer. (Apple CEO Steve Jobs also was Pixar’s main shareholder until its recent acquisition by Disney.) Scruffy Wall•E reboots using the Microsoft Windows startup sound, so much of the story resembles kind of a computer version of Romeo and Juliet.
But it’s Romeo and Juliet sent to a world that resembles a odd cross of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Idiocracy, the latter being the Mike Judge comedy in which machines take over and human intelligence devolves. It won’t do to give much away here, other than that Stanton rather hilariously satirizes modern consumer culture. Back on earth, we had already learned that a giant corporation called BNL controlled nearly all aspects of human existence before everyone disappeared. This is taken to its logical conclusion.
Even more than other Pixar films, Wall•E can be enjoyed by adults, as a straight sci-fi film with a satirical edge. Smaller children are actually likely to have trouble following the plot, especially the first half. Only the last part seems like familiar warm-and-cuddly family film territory.
It’s worth noting that each and every one of Pixar’s main characters has been a male, even when it’s a male car. (The Incredibles has no single lead character, but male characters outnumber female ones.) It seems incredibly depressing that studios so clearly see girls as box-office poison, and even more so that they may be right. Wall•E may be sexless, but even so has a male-sounding name and voice, and EVE, an acronym, sounds female; it would have been more daring to avoid any hints of sexual identity. Leaving this aside—I don’t mean it as a criticism of this movie in particular—Wall•E is a mostly remarkable film.
IMDB link
viewed 6/28/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 6/30/08
I could’ve watched this opening segment, mostly silent except for music, for much longer than it lasts. There’s something intriguing about watching what someone, even a sentient robot who looks like an R2D2 knockoff, does alone. (I love Cast Away.) Earth is so realistically rendered in its fetid glory that I only slightly wondered what happened to all of the people, and was mildly disappointed when the movie literally goes off into space. This happens shortly after a newer robot called EVE crash lands looking for life. Wall•E, on the other hand, is looking for love, and if it sounds corny to have a robot romance, Stanton keeps it so low-key, and nearly wordless, that even (or especially) adults will be charmed. The hovering, sleek EVE looks like nothing so much as a robot designed by Apple computer. (Apple CEO Steve Jobs also was Pixar’s main shareholder until its recent acquisition by Disney.) Scruffy Wall•E reboots using the Microsoft Windows startup sound, so much of the story resembles kind of a computer version of Romeo and Juliet.
But it’s Romeo and Juliet sent to a world that resembles a odd cross of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Idiocracy, the latter being the Mike Judge comedy in which machines take over and human intelligence devolves. It won’t do to give much away here, other than that Stanton rather hilariously satirizes modern consumer culture. Back on earth, we had already learned that a giant corporation called BNL controlled nearly all aspects of human existence before everyone disappeared. This is taken to its logical conclusion.
Even more than other Pixar films, Wall•E can be enjoyed by adults, as a straight sci-fi film with a satirical edge. Smaller children are actually likely to have trouble following the plot, especially the first half. Only the last part seems like familiar warm-and-cuddly family film territory.
It’s worth noting that each and every one of Pixar’s main characters has been a male, even when it’s a male car. (The Incredibles has no single lead character, but male characters outnumber female ones.) It seems incredibly depressing that studios so clearly see girls as box-office poison, and even more so that they may be right. Wall•E may be sexless, but even so has a male-sounding name and voice, and EVE, an acronym, sounds female; it would have been more daring to avoid any hints of sexual identity. Leaving this aside—I don’t mean it as a criticism of this movie in particular—Wall•E is a mostly remarkable film.
IMDB link
viewed 6/28/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 6/30/08
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Transformers (**1/4)
Having been too old to play with the original Transformers toys when they came out in 1984, I had for the following 23 years also managed to avoid the comic books, the video games, the TV series and the 1986 animated film based around the concept of battling robots who can turn themselves into various machines, mostly the kind you drive. But with Michael Bay’s live-action extravaganza landing in American cinemas like the evil transformer Megatron stomping on an SUV, I found myself for a time transported, though not transformed, by Bay’s vision of Earth as a battleground for the powerful Decepticons and Autobots. (Guess who the evil ones are.)
Bay, director of big, loud, and emptyheaded blockbusters like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, has never made a movie you’d call deep, but has occasionally made entertaining ones, most notably 1996’s The Rock. So, for about the first 45 minutes I was entertained. It’s true that the story has barely progressed, but it hasn’t gotten dumb either, and the first sight you get of the airplane unfolding itself into a giant killer robot will probably have you about as much in awe as the frightened soldiers about to get their asses kicked. The screenplay takes the usual effects-movie approach of splitting its time between befuddled government types and a random male youth, played by Disturbia’s Shia LaBeouf (whose parents, I guess, dreamed of raising a female porn star). Not only does he happen to unwittingly own the key to victory for the Decepticons, but he (coincidentally?) buys a car that turns out to be even more special than Steven King’s Christine, which also boasted a self-tuning radio.
It’s the lengthy midsection where the movie spirals downward. The semi-dorky teenager gets outfitted with a hot (but also savvy) female sidekick, the USA threatens to go to war on false pretenses (the satire being, I think, unintentional), and then there’s where someone thought it was time for some lame comic relief. It’s probably when the robots start calling the boy by his ebay user name that it starts to seem silly. Certainly it’s before Anthony Anderson turns out to be a computer expert living with his mom who’s the key to saving the world. (Wow, this is exactly the role Kevin Smith plays in Live Free or Die Hard, and yet somehow it was more believable there.) But for sure things have soured by the time we hear the robot voices. They all sound like, well, robots, male-sounding robots, except for (shall I call it) the aspiring “urban” transformer, who sounds like he’s TiVo’d a lot of bad TV shows. Can studio executives just get together and declare a moratorium on robots and nerdy white people and anyone else, for that matter, screwing up and then saying “my bad” in any way that suggests that the line is humorous?
Not only isn’t the movie funny, but it’s so silly that it ends up undercutting the action in a way. What I think an audience really wants from a movie like this is a big Godzilla/Kong Kong-type scene where the big monster or robot or whatever goes apeshit and starts ripping things apart. Ideally, this ought to be thrilling but also put you into the scene enough so it’s a little scary as well. And it really doesn’t help if you have a ten-year-old boy in a car saying “cool!” about a second after the Decepticons have just barely managed not to get him slaughtered by a falling overpass. It’s the people who paid to watch who are supposed to be saying that. (On the bright side, or not, depending on your point of view, the movie’s body count is fairly low.)
Yes, we finally do get to see the (overlong) battle between good and evil in the big city with skyscrapers getting knocked about, after quite awhile without anything really interesting happening or the story developing much further. (Um, exactly why do the Decepticons want to kill everyone? Oh, right, they're evil.) But even though the effects are flawless in terms of realism, the live-action Transformers still winds up seeming as cartoonish as anything on Saturday-morning TV, only much less compact in its storytelling. I didn’t expect this movie to be a master class in screenwriting, but nor did I expect to be as bored as I was.
In short, this toy story could have used some tinkering.
IMDB link
written 7/12/07
Bay, director of big, loud, and emptyheaded blockbusters like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, has never made a movie you’d call deep, but has occasionally made entertaining ones, most notably 1996’s The Rock. So, for about the first 45 minutes I was entertained. It’s true that the story has barely progressed, but it hasn’t gotten dumb either, and the first sight you get of the airplane unfolding itself into a giant killer robot will probably have you about as much in awe as the frightened soldiers about to get their asses kicked. The screenplay takes the usual effects-movie approach of splitting its time between befuddled government types and a random male youth, played by Disturbia’s Shia LaBeouf (whose parents, I guess, dreamed of raising a female porn star). Not only does he happen to unwittingly own the key to victory for the Decepticons, but he (coincidentally?) buys a car that turns out to be even more special than Steven King’s Christine, which also boasted a self-tuning radio.
It’s the lengthy midsection where the movie spirals downward. The semi-dorky teenager gets outfitted with a hot (but also savvy) female sidekick, the USA threatens to go to war on false pretenses (the satire being, I think, unintentional), and then there’s where someone thought it was time for some lame comic relief. It’s probably when the robots start calling the boy by his ebay user name that it starts to seem silly. Certainly it’s before Anthony Anderson turns out to be a computer expert living with his mom who’s the key to saving the world. (Wow, this is exactly the role Kevin Smith plays in Live Free or Die Hard, and yet somehow it was more believable there.) But for sure things have soured by the time we hear the robot voices. They all sound like, well, robots, male-sounding robots, except for (shall I call it) the aspiring “urban” transformer, who sounds like he’s TiVo’d a lot of bad TV shows. Can studio executives just get together and declare a moratorium on robots and nerdy white people and anyone else, for that matter, screwing up and then saying “my bad” in any way that suggests that the line is humorous?
Not only isn’t the movie funny, but it’s so silly that it ends up undercutting the action in a way. What I think an audience really wants from a movie like this is a big Godzilla/Kong Kong-type scene where the big monster or robot or whatever goes apeshit and starts ripping things apart. Ideally, this ought to be thrilling but also put you into the scene enough so it’s a little scary as well. And it really doesn’t help if you have a ten-year-old boy in a car saying “cool!” about a second after the Decepticons have just barely managed not to get him slaughtered by a falling overpass. It’s the people who paid to watch who are supposed to be saying that. (On the bright side, or not, depending on your point of view, the movie’s body count is fairly low.)
Yes, we finally do get to see the (overlong) battle between good and evil in the big city with skyscrapers getting knocked about, after quite awhile without anything really interesting happening or the story developing much further. (Um, exactly why do the Decepticons want to kill everyone? Oh, right, they're evil.) But even though the effects are flawless in terms of realism, the live-action Transformers still winds up seeming as cartoonish as anything on Saturday-morning TV, only much less compact in its storytelling. I didn’t expect this movie to be a master class in screenwriting, but nor did I expect to be as bored as I was.
In short, this toy story could have used some tinkering.
IMDB link
written 7/12/07
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