Pirates of the Silicon Valley

A movie review for Pirates of the Silicon Valley.

“No empire lasts forever.” Kerry Douglas Dye

The method of using these folks to narrate the story is dynamic and fun. At one point, Ballmer leaps from the screen to explain the scene that is happening. A super use of special effects! Surprisingly, the film does a very good job of capturing the public persona both of these individuals have become known for. Steve Jobs is portrayed as a domineering visionary who always has an eye on the melding of art and science. Bill Gates is shown as a shrewd businessman who always sees the how’s of the business deal.

The primary problem with Pirates of Silicon Valley is that it paints every person and event in it like Central Park caricatures. Wyle tries too hard at being the brilliant asshole. Anthony Michael Hall plays Bill Gates like the unpopular kid trying to take over the clubhouse. It also plays lip gloss to a lot of the real reasons for the popularity of Windows (hardware interoperability, business computing needs, supply chain distribution, and developer friendliness).

Eagle Eye

A movie review of Eagle Eye.

“On the Run From Terrorists and a Disembodied Voice” A.O. Scott

From the start of the film you get a sense that something big is happening. Bigger than the people we are quickly getting to know more about. Jerry is a normal guy working at “Copy Cabana” and Rachael is a single mom working as a paralegal . With Jerry’s twin brother just dying and Rachael’s son just sent off on a school field trip, they are both very alone in their sad lives.

With a twist of fate the two each receive a phone call from a woman with very explicit instructions to follow. This is when the action becomes so intense I thought my fingers lost circulation from holding onto one another so tight.

So far, so good. The principals are a bit confused about what’s happening to them, and so is the audience, but that’s as it should be. Are Jerry and Rachel, who have been receiving menacing phone calls from a mysterious woman with an accentless, affectless voice, patsies in a terrorist conspiracy?

It seems that way, but then again, why would a terrorist organization with the capacity to hack into cellphone lines, construction cranes, city buses and security cameras need to mess with stressed-out ordinary citizens? Maybe it’s not terrorism at all but some kind of government conspiracy.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if the government could spy on me without my knowledge. This picture takes things a little farther when it injects a faulty computer capable of committing devious deeds. The battle between the computer’s mind and the human mind is fascinating. I ROBOT comes to mind. The very thought of what could happen should this fantasy become a reality is scary.

I, Robot

A movie review for I, Robot.

The year is 2035 and Will Smith is Detective Spooner with a distrust of robots. You see, robots are everywhere doing just about everything and society in general is quite happy about this. Robot cooks, maids, garbage men, just about manual labor job you can think of a robot is able to do. What the humans do to make money now isn't brought up, but you really have to wonder. Or not, it is just a movie after all.

Robots are perfect helpers. The three laws hardwired into their brains make them utterly incapable of harming a human. No robot has ever broken a single law, let alone hurt anyone. Still, Spooner doesn’t trust them. In fact he hates them, with the kind of fervent prejudice usually displayed only by more devout members of the Klan. Since he’s a cop, his hatred leads him into all sorts of bad situations. On his way to work he sees a robot running down the street with a purse and gives chase, automatically assuming the robot is a thief though no robot has ever committed a robbery. He tackles the automaton, only to discover the robot is racing to bring its owner her inhaler, a mistake which lands him in trouble with his cliché police chief (Chi McBride).

The ideas aren’t strictly fresh, some of the plot devices are a little too convenient, and yes, Will Smith is for the most part still doing the same old stuff you’d expect from Will Smith. But none of that really hurts. If there had been someone with the courage to avoid plopping in those extra “Big Willie” quips, Will could easily have made his character something special. As is, he shows enough flashes of intensity and grit to keep things on track while Proyas fills in the gaps with a robust mix of serious and fun. This isn’t the dark, heady Asimov movie we might have hoped for and this certainly isn’t Proyas at his best. But I, Robot is solid and exciting entertainment, well worth a lingering look.

Surrogates

A movie review for Surrogates.

There's one moment in Surrogates that's so completely fantastic, so face-meltingly awesome it represents everything we hold to be true as human beings, and if they just made this scene the movie it would win every award from Academy to Nobel AND it would unify nations to one global consciousness. It involves Bruce Willis emerging from a room (after drinking some scotch, naturally) and beating the holy hell out of a laughing robot with his bare hands.

The rest of Surrogates isn't nearly as awesome as that brief moment. It starts off alright, but quickly becomes a warmed over stew of missed opportunities and movies (and chases) you've seen in the past, complete with unnecessarily convoluted plotting that's more obnoxious than clever and a "twist" I literally called during the opening credits. (It should be pretty obvious to anyone who's a sci-fi nerd. Or anyone who's ever read a science fiction story). It's pretty much a slightly dumber version of I, Robot, but with far less product placement.

WALL-E

A movie review for WALL-E.

“In a world left silent, one heart beeps.” – A. O. Scott

That exactly is how I can elucidate this movie. Its first 30 minutes or so is I can say mind-numbing for there were no human figures neither any dialogues spoken nor narration that would at least explain what the character is doing. The scene is an intricately rendered city, bristling with skyscrapers but bereft of any inhabitants apart from a battered, industrious robot and his loyal cockroach sidekick. Hazy, dust-filtered sunlight illuminates a landscape of eerie, post-apocalyptic silence.

WALL-E (Waste Allocator Load Lifter - Earth Class) is the last of his kind, a robot created by the Buy-N-Large Corporation to clean up the piles of trash left on Earth by the conspicuous consumption of human beings. The humans themselves have evacuated the now-toxically trashed Earth for a Eden-like spaceship habitat called the Axiom (also created by BNL corp.), where they spend their days sipping meals out a cup and reclining on floating easy chairs. Though all his robotic compatriots have long since compacted their last, WALL-E continues plugging away at his job in an endearingly human way. He wakes up each day to the chime of a Macintosh starting up (score for the iFolks! Thanks Steve!) and heads out for another day among the trash heaps. He brings a battered coolie along with him to save the things he likes: a ping-pong paddle, a plastic dinosaur toy, a light bulb, a small seedling saved in an old boot. He ends each day in his home, watching an old video tape of Hello Dolly! - an important motif throughout the film.

WALL-E maintains a quiet, dutiful, and lonely existence. His sole companion is an indestructible cockroach, perhaps a direct descendant of Jiminy Cricket, whose presence confirms the rumor that roaches really will be the last creatures left on Earth. But WALL-E's life changes -- and our story takes off -- when a skyscraper-sized spaceship drops off a second robot, EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), and teases our hero with the potential of friendship.

Things change drastically for WALL-E the day EVE shows up. She is slick and futuristic and quite obviously a girl; WALL-E falls in love almost immediately. It turns out EVE has been sent from the Axiom to scan the earth for signs of habitable life. Their convincing courtship is done completely without dialogue, quite a feat for sound designer Ben Burtt who found a way to make ambient noise into recognizable words for WALL-E. Trying to impress the coolly modern EVE, WALL-E shows her the seedling he found, at which point EVE goes into a hibernation state and awaits the return of her spaceship. WALL-E, of course, cannot abide by his beloved EVE's status and hitches a ride into space to save her.

Though he is tiny and relegated to the dirtiest of the dirty jobs, WALL-E truly understands how to find value in sullied things and how to create magic out of useless objects. He is more human than the humans in that way and slowly, without preaching (he can't even talk), WALL-E begins to show them how to regain what they have lost through sloth and over reliance on technology. It's an environmentalist film, but also a poignant homage to simple joys in this era of iPods and digital everything.

This movie, for as hilarious and touching as it is, is at its heart a brutal indictment of corporate consumer culture. I laughed, I cried too, sometimes out of sentimentality but mostly out of sadness. A world without growing things is indeed uninhabitable and horrible, but a culture that puts comfort and money above ethics and shepherding the resources that make such comfort possible will indeed come to ruin. By the end of the movie, Wall-E's romance with Eve didn't make up for the not-so-subtle damning of our society and its misplaced values.