41. A. I. Artificial Intelligence

by Sam Juliano

The idea behind A.I. was originally conceived by Stanley Kubrick, who subsequently entrusted the proposed project to Steven Spielberg.  When Kubrick died suddenly in 1999, his widow successfully persuaded Spielberg to assume complete artistic control of the film, including the direction.  Set in a future time when progress in robotics poses a conceivable menace to the human species, David (Haley Joel Osment), a robotic boy, is the artificial life form who is capable of experiencing love.  As a prototype, he is given to a couple whose real son is mired in what appears to be an irreversible coma.  After a discordant initiation David and his mother bond, at which point the “real” son miraculously awakens from the coma, rejoins to the family, and tricks David into engaging in dangerous things.  The father concludes that they must return the robotic boy to the manufacturer for destruction, but the mother arranges for his escape via abandonment.  For the duration of the film David seeks to be reunited with his mother, and for a time is joined by “Gigolo Joe,” a robot designed to function as a male prostitute.  David becomes frozen I an the ocean, and millennia later–long after the extinction of the human species–robots of the future rescue him and allow him to reunite with his mother for one day that will last in his mind for eternity.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence, fueled by some profound philosophical themes and issues of motherhood, is arguably one of Spielberg’s masterworks, and for this writer it ranks with Schindler’s List, Empire of the Sun and E. T. on the short list of the director’s greatest achievements in cinema.  Like the other three, it is extraordinarily moving, and it paints yet again a piercingly provocative view of childhood and of the human condition, tinged with an overwhelming sense of sadness.  The film is based on a short story by Brian Aldiss entitled “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” published in 1969, and it draws considerable influence from Disney’s Pinocchio.  

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MICHAEL MANN’S ‘BLACKHAT’ “Not easy, I know…”

 © 2015 by James Clark

      Though it could not be called a pleasure, the other day I was afforded the chance to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature film, Story of a Love Affair (1950). A text-book caution about screen writing by committee, only the architectural, fashion, landscape and industrial designs and control of light were a promise of mastery. The performance roughly based on the American novel and film, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was a non-stop lunge in some kind of mad homage to 19^th century melodrama. Fortunately, no one shot him for it, and he went on to produce amazing films.

Next day I started to deal with a film about which any number of critics and viewers seem to believe that shooting the auteur is the only answer, namely, Michael Mann’s Blackhat (2015). The rootless posturing making Antonioni’s debut a lost cause may, however, be a very different thing from the power failures of Blackhat. But to understand the difference one must have done more than detect that most of the players are disappointing wimps, even, to some extent, a square-jawed, sharp-eyed protagonist, Nicholas Hathaway, who enjoys a season of kicking ass. By the time his Blackhat had put in an appearance, Mann had mined a mother lode of dynamical phenomena pertaining to that bad form the experts decry. Rather than howling like myopic puppies, attempting to fathom those disconcerting phenomena staring them right in the face could derive an art work deserving more than inane noise. But it must be acknowledged that “right in the face” can still be a long shot when it comes to tracking down the mysteries of motion.

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