gw143 Reviews

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Take Blade Runner and Pinocchio. Stir for 2 1/2 hours. Get AI.

[17 March 2002]

"AI" really consists of (at least) three parts, and each of these parts has enough material to fill a movie of its own. And each of the three parts leaves many open questions and/or contains inconsistencies that might have been resolved if more time had been devoted to them. But the way they have been put together, the result is a pretty long and pretty bizarre movie that, especially in its second half, makes little sense.

The first part, which comes closest to being relatively well-rounded and consistent, bears few surprises for anyone who has read even a two-sentence summary of the movie. But even in this part one might have liked to see more about the way "David" was created or about the global climate changes that are summarized in a brief narration at the beginning of the movie and that seem somewhat gratuitously thrown in.

The second part (the "Flesh Fair" and "Rouge City") gets a lot stranger already. "Blade Runner for Toddlers", as someone else wrote, isn't too far from the mark. The movie continues to build parts of a science-fiction world that are insufficiently motivated or explained: Where do all the "unlicensed" robots come from? Why are "Flesh Fairs" tolerated?

But the third part (in New York City) is just outright bizarre. It certainly could have easily filled not just one, but two movies, but it's all condensed to about 45 minutes spanning, no less, 2000 years of events. Given this, details cannot possibly matter, so why not suggest (as the movie does) that Coney Island is at the Rockefeller Center?! (Ok, I guess it might have moved in the future...)

It is hard and almost pointless to rate this movie. I can see why some critics thought it should get an Oscar for "best picture" while others awarded it their own "worst film of 2001" award. The points about parent-child relationships that the movie tries to make in its own manipulative kind of way simply do not warrant this elaborate setup (that isn't nearly elaborate enough to make any sense). There are simply too many things that are irrelevant to the movie's main message. One might say it's still worth seeing this movie because there isn't anything quite like it - but perhaps it's good that there isn't.

Nothing to Lose (1997)

one-joke movie, but not that bad

[6/10 · 21 February 2002]

This movie feels like it was based on a single funny idea - a car robber runs into the wrong guy, someone who has "nothing to lose". To build a whole 90-minute movie around this one idea is not so easy, and, while it doesn't fail completely, this movie certainly does not succeed either.

First, the introduction is weak. I would have hoped to see more bad (and funny) things happen to the Robbins character before he is ready to take on the car robber.

Then, the Lawrence character is just utterly unbelievable. Note that he is not just some thief who has to steal to make a living, but he holds up people at gunpoint. He lives in a bad neighborhood in a somewhat rundown apartment building, but he has quite a nice apartment in that building and a nice family, too. When he is not robbing people he is neatly filing away all the rejections he received to his many, many job applications. He is quite intelligent, but - perhaps because he is black? - companies just won't hire him. (This issue is not further explored in the movie so one can't really make much of it.)

At least there are a number of funny scenes which make this movie an ok comedy. But there are much better ones out there.

Boogie Nights (1997)

astonishingly overrated

[2/10 · 18 February 2002]

"Boogie Nights" is a lot of talking, a lot of dialogue that goes nowhere. Not much happens, and if something does happen, it is of little or no consequence for the rest of the movie. A woman overdoses on cocaine at a party - she gets carted away to a hospital and is never seen or heard of again. One character shoots two people and then himself, and that's that. There are two other shootings later, but the survivors just walk away. No police ever show up. One character does land in prison, but for something else that isn't even part of the movie.

While the movie focuses on the Mark Wahlberg character, it does not exclusively follow his rise and fall as a porn actor. It occasionally follows other characters' lives (such as "Buck"'s) for no good reason, and it could have easily been an hour shorter if it hadn't digressed so many times. There are also scenes at the beginning which I suppose are meant to motivate the main character's actions - like his mother yelling at him. But he seemed to have already made up his mind anyway, so the glimpse into his home life doesn't really add much information, and since his parents are never seen again, it is yet another loose thread in a movie that has a lot of them.

There is a lot of drug use and some of the main characters spend quite a lot of time acting drugged out. But except in the case of that one overdose, which is treated as no big deal and not followed up on, the drug use seems to be of little consequence.

At best, this movie feels like a somewhat boring and rather tedious pseudo-documentary of the porn industry in the late 70's and early 80's. It even contains the making of a (pseudo-)documentary of the main character's career! Since a few other reviewers have commented that the documentary aspect of the movie is not very good (i.e. it is far from a true representation of the porn industry), I don't really know what's left of this movie that one might recommend.

The Devil's Advocate (1997)

Hallucinating fundamentalists?

[7 May 2000]

Am I the only one who thinks that this is a movie about a bunch of small town Christian fundamentalists who come to New York just to find themselves having hallucinations in which they see demons in everyone and everything (including such benign things as clouds and weather changes)?

And finally they encounter the devil himself who has a rather bizarre idea of how to produce the anti-christ - by having two of his many children (who are only half-brothers and half-sisters, of course) mate? Whereas, one might argue, there have already been plenty anti-christs, i.e. all his existing children (and if there were so many, why was Lomax character so important to him?). Just to point out one flaw in the "logic" of this movie.

The single most annoying moment was when the devil called himself a "humanist" thus playing to some Christian fundamentalists' equating humanism with satanism. He did have a point, though, as far as his criticism of God is concerned.

Apart from all that, I didn't like the fact that Pacino playing the devil was kind of implied by the title of the movie and by one-line summaries of the movie, but was not actually something the movie itself showed conclusively. After all Lomax's wife could have just had hallucinations when she saw people turn into demons. And the whole New York episode a dream. I suppose the ending implies that the movie really does believe in the devil. Fortunately, I do not.