A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)

I find myself revisiting A.I. again, 8 years after it was originally released, because I’ve been skimming through a book about Stanley Kubrick this week (see farther down). I vaguely remember the excitement and trepidation of seeing the film in the theatre when it came out amongst a great deal of critical confusion (as Kubrick’s movies were usually prone to). I also remember the groundbreakingly awesome piece of viral marketing/online game that we eventually found out had absolutely nothing to do with the movie but was still awesome. I do remember watching the film in ecstatic confusion the first time, in the theatre. This is my third time seeing the film.

Here is a movie, planned by Kubrick for a long time, from an original story worked out in the early 1990s in collaboration with various notable sci-fi authors (since the seed of a short story by Brian Aldiss, published in 1969), that Steven Spielberg took up after his death (or perhaps as far back as Jurassic Park in 1993, when he discussed its digital effects with Kubrick at length). It is well-known that Kubrick felt the available technology was not up to the visual representation of the film he wanted in all the time he worked on the project. After seeing Jurassic Park, he apparently warmed to the idea of it as a serious future possibility. Regrettably, he missed making the film himself by a couple of years – that is assuming he would have been satisfied enough (or propelled by Warner Brothers accounts) to do it (I’ve heard stories that he actually had, among other people, Chris Cunningham building him robots that would possibly stand in for the main character of David). Maybe I’ll watch this again after Avatar comes out and brood about how Kubrick could have had late night phone conversations with James Cameron about technology….

So, we have a movie that is inevitably rooted in a cerebrally calculating style of irony and detachment that is usually attributed (perhaps in slight excess) to Kubrick, and a shooting screenplay by Spielberg (his first since Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977), who is equally coloured as a master craftsman, but also happens to be a sentimentalist; an emotional manipulator with severe mommy and daddy issues (i.e. E.T., Close Encounters, Empire of the Sun, Hook, etc.). So, what we get is a weird mesh of two auteurs in one movie, one in the flesh and one by (artificial) proxy.
Therein lies the first of many ironies. In the final product, in a film about the division between realness and artificiality, we have the everlasting question of what of this film belongs to Kubrick and what to Spielberg. Or in the cynical critic’s eye, what parts has Spielberg messed up and what did he add to its incompleteness?

The film is rife with all sorts of literary devices that would make Kubrick proud. The adherence to Freud is particuarly noteable. This is, after all, a film about a (robot) boy who wants more than anything to get his mother to love him above all else. The conscious decision to retain some of its ‘headiness’ is not lost on those wanting “that one more Kubirck film”; after all, Mother is reading, in the bathroom no less (a location in nearly every Kubrick film), Freud on Women, when David barges in on her in a misconstrued game of “hide-and-seek”.

There’s also the scene with all the mannequin-like robot shells, which one can assume is most certainly a nod to Killer’s Kiss (sorry, I don’t have that one for screen comparison):

<– And Spielberg doesn’t really overquote Yeats in his usual movies (Yeah, ok, I had to look it up).

As a homage to Kubick, I think the gripes against Spielberg are still vaild. While he is ‘growing’ as a filmmaker, making more ‘adult’ story decisions these days, those made during A.I. were perhaps among some of his first (Schindler’s List, of course, aside). He still frames the majority of this film though a child’s viewpoint (perhaps his own?), which would be fine if the story was written that way, but it’s not (The narrator is, as we come to find out eventually, closer to Starchild than child).
The choice to have John Williams score the film (a frequent Spielberg collaborator) overburdens the film with too much sentimentality (even in places its not needed, like when the scientists are talking in the beginning). Kubrick may not have gone the classical route ala 2001 again (it was his idea to use Ministry as the Flesh Fair band, though that was in the late 1990s when people actually still knew who they were).
The Rouge City sequences are all much morally tamer and less story crucial than anything Kubrick would even half-ass. While some argue he would be just as much of a conservative in his depictions of the ‘celebrations of life’, I would hope….well there’s no point in speculating I guess.
James Naremore put it best in his On Kubrick (which I’ve been skimming through lately) by stating that, “Throughout, the Disneyish atmosphere is inflected with an art-cinema irony” (p.269). I would just argue that it feels the other way around. I really really want to know how far Spielberg did or did not stray from whatever ending Ian Watson (Kubrick’s self-professed “mind slave“) had originally come up with. If Spielberg didn’t completely just tack on the last 20 minutes of the movie himself, he was born to direct it anyway….

There are many ways to pair down the film. For some it’s a sci-fi exploration of “artificial intelligence” as a concept and a potential reality. For some, it’s a postmodernly, self-conscious update of Pinocchio (and a bit of Oedipus). For some, it’s slightly political apocalypse allegory, warning us into the environmental climate change that will do us all in and the technology we depend upon overrunning our human utility and purpose. I’d like to think it’s all of those and more. For the mess of a film that it is, it still more captivating than any other studio-gestating sci-fi of recent memory.

I’m not sure what I was intending when I sat down to write about this film. There’s too much to cover and not enough brain power (at the moment) to even scratch the surface. For as much as I remembered (which is a testament to the filmmaking I suppose), there was a lot to it that I had forgotten. I wasn’t as in awe this time, but there was definitely more than enough to think about (again). It posits several core ideas throughout the film:

1.

“FEMALE TEAM MEMBER
But you haven’t answered my question. If a robot could genuinely love a person, what responsibility does that person hold toward that mecha in return? It’s a moral question, isn’t it?

PROFESSOR HOBBY
The oldest one of all. But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?”

What is the nature of man’s relationship to the world? In all our seeming dominance of the planet, are we really in control? And if so, how do we protect ourselves from our own control? The idea of God does not reach beyond Its so-called power and glory. We explain away the lack of control over our species as a gift (of free will), but in giving that to our own creations (of artificial intelligence), we would attempt to deny this free will, while also expecting love; the idea of love programmed to extrapolate from some pre-conceived algorithm. Yet, aren’t the chemical and electrical impulses in our own human brains performing the same function, somehow conceived as “organic” in their creation because we did not manipulate the original construction? These are the questions that the film flirts with; what is the difference between “organic” and “mechanical”. If you want to explore these questions more, they are at the core of the recently ended Battlestar Galactica television series…

2.

“DAVID
Mommy, if Pinocchio became a real boy and I become a real boy can I come home?

MONICA
But that’s just a story, David.

DAVID
But a story tells what happens!

MONICA
Stories are not real! You’re not real!”

The nature of storytelling. My favorite films have this as an underlying theme; presenting a story itself, while questioning the purpose of such a thing is a difficult tightrope to walk (a recent example, a failure in terms of direction perhaps, might be Lady in the Water; a recent pinnacle of this sort would, of course, be Mulholland Dr.). Kubrick is using the shell of the Pinocchio story, a well-known fairy tale that spans various cultures to provide a basis of familiarity, and expanding upon it to fit a current need. The piece of dialogue above is crucial. It is the part where I tear up at the masterful simplicity at which this particular story distills all of human art(ifice) into a single exchange. Stories are real, because we created them out of the world. The world is, in turn, perceived as a story, forever changing, forever updating, forever behind us.

There are lots of literary precedents I could point to, from Bruno Bettelheim to Joseph Campbell (who George Lucas, and certainly Spielberg as his close collaborator and friend, is well-known to have perused in the creation of Star Wars). But doing this in film is a rare thing (so far, anyway). Most stories are presented as ‘not real’; as escapist fantasy for us all to hypnotize ourselves away from what we define as the Real. We both make the distinction and continue to seek out the difference to stay sane (and entertained in our existence). Combining the two is the definition of intellectual. I’m not trying to be pretentious or laudatory when I state that this story is an example of ‘intellectual filmmaking’. It simply defines itself. The peculiarity of this film, however, is in how it so visibly struggles with itself to maintain this dichotomy; it is both story entertainment in the clearest of Spielbergian grammar and story reflexive in its groundings in the genre of science-fiction/fantasy. The combination of this manipulation of emotion of its audience and the unfolding of ideas is key to defining a piece of art as “relevant”, or some may argue, as simply defining it as “art” in the first place. Is what we feel real or imagined when we experience a piece of art? Are we viewing the film as a piece detached from reality, aware of our own separateness or Are we applying the ideas to our own existence, participating in its creation for us as an individual? These are the questions that define my devotion to Art(ifice) as a guide through life. It is best way how I can describe why I love movies (and books and anything that ‘tells a story’).

3.

“JOE
She [MONICA/MOMMY] loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them. But she does not love you David, she cannot love you. You are neither flesh, nor blood. You are not a dog, a cat or a canary. You were designed and built specific, like the rest of us. And you are alone now only because they tired of you, or replaced you with a younger model, or were displeased with something you said, or broke. They made us too smart, too quick, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That’s why they hate us, and that is why you must stay here, with me.

DAVID
Goodbye, Joe.”

And, as they say, here is the rub. Artifice, by definition, is not real. What we experience when we view a film, read a book, is usually seen as a temporary displacement, at worst a distraction, from our real, everyday lives. Yet, what we take from it, what we think and make of it, becomes part of our real lives, informing and creating what we individually define as real. This is where I could quote Jean Baudrillard and possibly stoop to referencing The Matrix, which is basically the filmed example of his Simulacra and Simulation (or the parts I could understand anyway). Whose to say what we do in our real lives is any less artificial, especially these days in our much more intimate melding with (virtual) technology? I’m not suggesting we live in a literal “Matrix” (I’m not that cracked), but emotionally, most of our lives (or maybe it’s just me?) are surrounded by stimuli that have no barring on our interaction with individual human beings. Our dispersal of cultural viewpoints and endless amount of specialized, perhaps trivial, knowledge does nothing to connect us in communicating with another, real, live person. Or are we all so inundated with this artificiality, that it has become our connection with others? Joe presents a rather similarly bleak view of the world in the piece of dialogue above. He’s talking about the difference between he and David being mechanical robots and humans being something else; Us and Them, but he could just as easily be talking about the difference between human generations (like say the digital divide between Baby Boomers and their kids).
A challenging thought: when all is defined by our perception of the world through the story we’ve created for it to be, then isn’t the Real, by definition, the ultimate human Art?
Metaphysical rant (and boring vacation) over.

Kataude mashin gâru (2007)

I clearly saved the best for last (of the Japanese exploits that I currently have anyway). Machine Girl is crazy fun. And it even has backstory to spare that isn’t needed (unless it’s expanded on in the spin-off short).

This is basically a gore revenge flick with extra lots of blood and gore, used in that charmingly “extreme” way (as opposed to say the ‘brutally exteme’ way of something like horribly draining Marytrs, which I may never watch again unless someone else really gives me a reason).
The British tagline for this movie is “A film so incredibly outrageous it couldn’t possibly exist”.  Way better than “It’s Payback Time!”.

Ami Hyuga (Minase Yashiro) has been raised to believe that violence doesn’t solve problems. That all changes when nothing but it comes at her when she tries to find out who killed her brother. Her brother’s friend was also killed and Ami finds a sidekick in Miki (Asami), who is quite-a-bit-too-young-to-be-the-mother-of-a-teenager (but is probably the most watchable actor of the bunch). They need each other, because it just so happens that a gang run by the son of the local yakuza boss is responsible.

I was disappointed with OneChanbara (see below), but this one pulls out all the stops. This isn’t just an off-the-cuff J-Vid splatter film. Even though it blantantly steals some ideas from Grindhouse and The Evil Dead (which are and have been ripped off completely anyway), the (minimal) plot and pacing actually keep you in the story as the body count piles up. This probably has something to do with the fact that writer-director Noburo Iguchi displays some obvious filmmaking talent. I’ll have to check out some of his other films (if I can get my hands on them), especially his next feature: RoboGeisha. Yoshihiro Nishamura (director of Tokyo Gore Police) is doing the effects for this one, and for his own next feature: Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl. A must see for the title alone!

I was trying to find a suitable blood-drenched still to post, but there are too many to choose from. The anticipation of this one will have to do:

Machine Girl trailer here

Dans Paris (2006)

While watching this film, I get the distinct impression that I do not understand the culture of French people. I also come to realize that Roman Duris is an amazing actor.

Christopher Honoré’s Dans Paris (Inside Paris) is a 90 minute romp of a film that is ultimately about how two brothers choose to deal with the way their (broken) family has shaped their seeing the world. And it has a lot of scenes with people hanging about half-to-completely naked or in their underwear.
One brother, Paul (Roman Duris), fights with his wife, laughs with her, then fights some more, before ending up back home to literally wade in the depression of his mid-life. The other, younger Jean (Louis Garrel) is a University student who skips class to roam the city, happening upon sex with multiple woman in the same day, because, well, apparently he just can. The two are staying in their father’s apartment and it’s almost Christmas.

The film, in its choice of music and editing (free and choppy, presents itself in a playful nature, starting out with a narrator who talks to the camera and then joins in on the diagesis as if he hasn’t. Yet, at the core, the film deals with, and has quite a nice speech about, sadness; the disconnection that grows from within between people who know each other (too) well.
While I’m sure that some would complain about the lack of a proper plot or arc for these characters (the movie doesn’t really “go anywhere”), there are quite a few remarkable scenes that convey the kind of honesty that only a so-called “low-budget indie” film such as this can accomplish. One scene involves reading a children’s book (I assume one of Honoré’s own) and another involves singing a song over the telephone. The latter is an amazing piece of cinema, among many that save a movie like this from ultimately being a tedious viewing experience.

Kaun? (1999)

I bought a bunch of Bollywood movies from Eros a couple of holidays back, during one of their unbelievably awesome sales, and I picked up this early Ram Gopal Varma horror/thriller for 99 cents (plus shipping). This movie is definitely worth a dollar, even before seeing it.

Kaun? (1999) is one of RGV’s first attempts at subverting the Bollywood mold. It is a 99 minute film set in one location with absolutely no song or dance routines. While kind of slow in a couple of stretches (you have to sit through almost 10 minutes or Hollywood horror cliche moments before the plot starts), even within these stretches, or perhaps in spite of, you can see a fillmmaker deeply literate in a film grammar outside the norm of his own culture (which if not impressive, is a rarer thing than one would imagine).

Bollywood films are well known for blantantly ripping off plotlines from popular Western films and recycling them into a Bollywood mush (see here and here; more on this when I watch some more of my blind buys). And while this film is not immune from this plagirism/inspiration entirely, it does not seem like a rip-off. It is merely derivative in spirit (I mean that as a compliment, though).

I am predisposed to liking stagey whodunits. Simultaneously asking you to think about what’s happening throughout and beating you over the head with it at the same time, I hesitate to reductively say that am I  merely ‘enjoying it for what it is’. That implies that the effort put forth in this film is somehow comparatively sub-standard to its Hollywood predecessors. I would argue, especially with the recent spate of ridiculous recycling going on in Hollywood horror these days, that Kaun? is a better-than-average attempt at the horror/thriller, avoiding the post-Scream influence altogether (maybe more on that after I watch Raaz; a ‘remake’ of What Lies Beneath; my personal marker for ignoring the said Scream zeitgeist).
All in all, not a bad way to spend a holiday evening!

OneChanbara (2008)

OneChanbara (2008) is another in a slew of J-Vid exploitation movies that I’ve been watching lately (Tokyo Gore Police, though overly long, is a much higher quality example, benefiting from being produced by Nikkatsu). This one, however, is a lower rent movie adapatation of a series of video games in Japan (soon to be coming to the Wii in the U.S.). Which, I guess, is supposed to give it some sort of pre-existing fan base.

From what I can tell, this game must either be repeatively boring, or the game-to-cinema adaptation just doesn’t do it justice (I’m thinking the latter). The premise sounds awesome: Zombies roam the streets (and countryside) of Tokyo after botched science experiments (a pre-requisite for ANY good Japanese sci-horror, right?) and they eat anything in sight. Some kick-ass idol-type looking girls roam as well; one strapped with a double-barreled handgun that amazingly never has to be reloaded, and the other with a samurai sword that shoots magical beams of light (illustrated like a video-game power-move). The latter of the two girls travels with an overweight comic relief/exposition functioning guy who carries a puny knife and hides in the corner most of the time. The girl (see poster) often sheds her long flowing coat ala Sergio Leone to fight in her leather bikini getup (more like Russ Meyer), which one would assume makes for better flexibility in jumping around and slashing stuff, if not for the weighty feather-boa that hardly ever leaves her neck.
The girls are hunting an evil doctor and an evil sister, respectively.

The problem with this slightly enticing set-up is that it takes nearly an hour of the 85 minute running time to get out of the first night’s abandoned industrial complex (read: cheap set) zombie attack. There is very little plot beyond explaining what motivates these three characters, with fragmented flashbacks straight out of multiple samurai flicks I’ve already seen. It’s basically non-stop cheap CGI fights (complete with computer-generated blood splattering the lens of the digital camera) and some seen-one-seem-them-all zombies in makeup creeping around with a slight J-horror crink in their step.

A few intentional laughs succeed (oh yes, these types of movies are all intentionally campy in case you didn’t “get it”; i.e. the girl’s bicep tattoo is shown rather prominently to be an iron-on that is peeling off in one or two scenes). Most notable is that the fight choreography is definitely above-averagely awesome. Other than that, there’s really no reason to watch this above plenty of other choices out there.
It should be noted, for fans of the genre, that there is only one (like 20 second) pre-zombie sex scene with disposable characters that hardly matters (there’s a spin-off I can point you to, if that’s what you’re after); Half a boob is shown. Since I don’t have a rating system set up (yet), that’s what I’ll give this movie: half a boob.

I don’t know what this will be called when/if it hits the U.S. (the German title is lame, non-descript “Zombie Killer”). I watched the Japanese DVD, so it’s called OneChambara, or Chambara Beauty, or Bikini Samurai Slayers (all after the  video game series). As the paranthetical link reveals, the actual title is a clever mash of the words ‘big sister’ and ‘sword fighting’). Chanbara/Chambara is also the genre-film designation given to samurai sword movies, in case you care.
I guess this is one that you file under “so bad, it’s good, but bad on purpose, so it’s not really that good”.

If you’re still interested, the trailer is here.
And oh, lordy, there’s a sequel already. Do I watch or not?

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Once in awhile I come across a film that I expect to be enjoyable, but in watching it, I’m surprised at how “near-masterpiece” excellent it is. A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is such a film.  I’m not sure why my expectations were so levelheaded. I am a fan of The Archers (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger); Black Narcissus is probably one of the most beautiful films ever, and Peeping Tom (granted only a Powell film) is one of the strangest. I even adore The Red Shoes, despite not having the least interest in ballet.

So, having had the opportunity to finally see this film, I’m glad I went in without any expectation of greatness and came out assured of it. Though part of the ill-compressed (DVD5) Michael Powell Collection (of which the late and completely unrelated Age of Consent is the only other film that technically makes it so), it marks the first time its ever been available in the U.S. under the original edit and title (it was originally released in the States under the more upbeat title “Stairway to Heaven” with cuts).

I usually try to spare a plot summary, but the appeal of this film (aside from the usual lush visuals of Jack Cardiff) warrants one: Peter Carter (David Niven) is a WWII bomber pilot who falls from the sky out of his doomed-to-crash aeroplane without a parachute, to awake, by way of Heaven’s error, still alive on Earth to meet June (Kim Hunter), the radio operator who talked him through his previously certain, pending death. Peter is soon to be visited by envoy from Heaven to explain the predicament to whom he refuses to follow off this mortal coil. He asks: Surely, there’s an appeals process? Well, the rest that follows is a rather deft case-study of a man who is portrayed as caught up in this fantastical, supernatural matter, or perhaps (also) suffering some sort of brain damage or psychological trauma.

Alternating between the real world in color and Heaven (no doubt jokingly) in black-and-white, Powell & Pressburger give us their first true gem of postwar British cinema (to be followed by the aforementioned, perhaps greatest three-films-in-a-row trifecta of, this, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes).

Oliver Sacks has written a short piece in this month’s Film Comment that mentions a new book that apparently explores the great depth to which the realistic medical argument can be taken. When watching the film I was also taken with the fact that the film is deviously objective about this point of fantasy versus reality.

The only other thing I can think to add at this moment is that I now finally know where Albert Brooks stole a large portion of his idea for Defending Your Life (one of my all-time favorite comedies).

first

This is the first post.
The rest of the posts will probably be about movies.
This space is meant to be a constructive product of all the time I spend watching movies. Which, of course, requires even more time not doing something else.
If you are reading this, you should make a comment. This will let me know that I’m not just writing to myself (which I would expect to be doing most of the time).