Well, here’s a new one for the pile, since Dead Man Walking has been mentioned: The Life of David Gale. SPOILERS follow.
TLoDG is clearly and obviously an anti-death penalty movie. The plot is, basically, that David Gale, a vehemently anti-DP college professor (he essentially runs the local branch of the Innocence Project) is on death row, about to be executed for murdering the woman who helped him run the anti-DP center. The evidence against him is staggering. In his final days, he grants a series of interviews to one lone reporter, to whom he seeds some information about his innocence. The big reveal at the end is that the friend had a terminal disease, and they plotted together for her to commit suicide, make it look like a murder, and let ol’ David take the rap for it and bravely get executed. After his death, a videotape would be released showing exactly what happened, proving his innocence. Supposedly, this would cause public outrage at the execution of an innocent person, and the death penalty would be ended forever. Hooray, right?
Yeah, I didn’t get the “hooray” part. As I saw it, this wasn’t an honorable or brave action, this was criminal. David Gale lied, concealed, and manufactured evidence in order to ensure his execution. He didn’t prove that “an innocent person can be put to death”, he proved that he could intentionally get his stupid ass killed. You can’t claim that the system is at fault unless you do everything possible to prove your own innocence, which Gale did not do, and yet still get executed anyway. So, he committed several criminal acts (concealing and manufacturing evidence), didn’t defend himself, got executed, and I’m supposed to believe this proves that the problem is with the death penalty? “I don’t think so, Tim.”
It’s been said before, but not often enough for my tastes. I didn’t see Rent until around 2003, by which time it had already become a period piece, and I was surprised by how shallow, whiny, self-important and unlikeable everybody was. Which is more or less the same quality that ensures its popularity among high school theater students like those mentioned above.
The movie hopes to get the audiences to care for the little android. To suffer along with him and ultimately sympathize with his overwhelming need to be loved by a mother. Feeling sorry for the mother’s dilemma about what to do with the robot is another goal of the film.
I came away completely disgusted with the action of the mother and especially the robo-boy, as well as other characters such as the jackass who created the little boy in the first place. To me the robo-boy is good example of the so called banality of evil.
This is especially true when compared with the film’s source material, Pinocchio. In Pinocchio the wooden-boy is tasked to learn how to become a real boy by learning to reject selfishness. It is not until he grows as a person by rejecting selfish desires that he is granted life as a real boy. He has to learn that he is not the center of the universe.
Yet in AI the opposite happens. This miserable little walking laptop exhibits supreme selfishness throughout the story and never makes any attempt toward self-sacrifice, and he gets rewarded for it at the end by . . . literally becoming the center of the universe! He never exhibits even a shred of nobility or dignity, staying sharply focused of only his needs; never once considers the needs of complications relationships he is not a part of.
Not that the behavior of the actual humans is really that much better. What kind of monster creates a sentient robot that does not have the ability to grow? And what kind of mother goes and replaces her comatose child with a robo-surrogate? Sick! To top it off the mom doesn’t even have the decency to take the little love-nazi back to the factory when she done loved it all up. Cowardly! The dad and the real son are the only decent people in the whole story. They at least realize that this sick creation should be shut down pronto before it hurts someone.
The last act of the film is truly sickening. In an act of supreme evil the robo-kid raises his former owner (not his mother) back from the dead and forces her to love him whether she likes it or not. Only to kill her again after he gets what he wants.
This film depicts pure evil in action. Maybe this is what Kubrick was aiming for, but with certainty I can say that Spielberg was trying for the opposite and failed miserably.
This was such a horrible, badly thought out film. If it weren’t for the people behind it (Spacey, Pakula, etc.), I would almost think it was a pro-dealth penalty film trying to show the hypocrisy of the other side. But no, they just failed miserably at what they were trying to say. What I got from the film was that the system works. An innocent man would not have planted manufactured evidence that showed his guilt in the first place. He *wanted *to be executed, he did everything in his power to look guilty (planting fingerprints & blood at the scene IIRC? Hell he even slept with the woman that same night so it would be clear he was there.)
This film pissed me off so much, though not in the way they wanted.
I second Das Boot. I saw this movie when it first came out and all I could think about was that those Nazi submariners were trying to sink the ship my father was serving on. At the end of the picture when the end credits rolled and the message came on screen “During the war xx thousands of Germans served in submarines and only xx survived”, the theater broke out into spontaneous applause and I joined in. Not the reaction hoped for by the movie’s makers!
It’s a compendium of every stupid chick flick cliche in the book. The framing device is James Garner reading a journal written in a notebook to Gena Rowlands, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s.
:::wavy lines:::
In the days shortly before WWII a poor country boy falls for a rich city girl. He courts her by stalking her and harrassing her and ultimately by hanging from a ferris wheel and threatening to drop, because stalking and suicide threats are always so charming and endearing in these movies.
They date over the summer. Mom disapproves. Mom takes girl back to the city before she gets a chance to say goodbye. Boy writes letters every day for a year, but mom never lets girl see the letters. Boy and girl go on with their lives.
WWII comes. As is required by all WWII era romances, girl becomes a nurse while boy fights in war and sees terrible things.
Girl meets rich guy and becomes engaged.
Girl and boy finally meet up again (it isn’t worth explaining how). Girl finds about about letters. Girl has to choose between boy and rich fiance. Who will she choose?
Back to Garner and Rowlands. Why they ARE the boy and girl. The girl wrote the notebook so that the boy could read it back to her and “their love [gag] will make her remember.”
Briefly, Rowlands gets memory back, then loses it again. Garner has heart attack. Garner eventually goes back to her and she asks him if “their love [retch] can take them away.” Garner says “Our love [dry heave] can do anything.”
The next day, a nurse finds them dead in each other’s arms.
If you ever have to choose between getting a root canal with no anasthaesia or watching The Notebook, choose the root canal. It’s less painful and it will be over sooner.
Probably true that the film makers didn’t intend for the movie to be watched by people who were on the other side of the war, and I guess I can’t argue that the film didn’t effect you the way the film makers thought it would, but…I do think your reaction sort of misses the point of the film. If it had been the exact same movie but about an allied sub would you have felt the same way?
I watched the movie twice, I think, and never saw any evidence for this. You are supposed to be horrified that the parents abandon David. They are obviously doing the wrong thing and I saw zero ambivalence about it in the movie.
Well, yeah, true - but he’s supposed to be a 10-year-old.
I thought the whole idea of the relentlessly-drummed-in “he can’t love” plot was that he is not able to understand those kinds of emotions, so he can’t consider the complications because he doesn’t know how they work.
You don’t think you were intended to feel that way? I think you’re completely wrong, because this is pretty much the whole point of the movie.
Again, same.
Hyperbole is a terrible thing to waste, and this is not an accurate reading of the events: the robot doesn’t kill her (she dies ‘naturally’) and he doesn’t force her to do anything. I’m not sure it’s even really her as opposed to a made up wishful vesrion of her. It’s a crummy ending, but it’s childish wish fulfillment.
That would explain it: the second film was a piece of crap. You should check out the first one, though. It’s an excellent, witty action film, very much in the spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Of course not, but that was the point of the op’s question. And I did not miss the point of the movie; it was made by Germans for a German audience and hence presented the story in a way sympathetic to the German submariners. I’m sure if I was German (of a non-Jewish background), I would have been moved by it. But I’m not, and I wasn’t.
Right, but in the movie, the only part that was released to the public was the videotape of the lady committing suicide.
So, as far as the movie goes, the public now believes that an innocent man has been executed, and will demand abolition of the death penalty. (His goal all along)
Only the reporter has the video showing that Gale had set up the whole thing, and that video was “off the record”…
To be honest I found it utterly impossible to discern what anyone involved in the film was trying to accomplish. I’ve heard fifty different explanations and to be honest yours was as accurate, or more so, as any. The movie started out as a story, was sat on by Stanley Kubrick forever, and then was written by the third or fourth writer Spielberg cycled through in trying to be faithful to Kubrick. The movie was in development hell for literally decades, and by the time they actually set about making it it’s pretty clear much of the original inspiration was lost. Furthermore, the actual production of the movie, when they finally got around to it, was rushed; Spielberg ended up writing it himself, and it shows.
The movie’s story, as well as the story of the movie, is riddled with people referencing “Pinocchio,” but as you point out, the entire theme of “Pinocchio” is missing from “AI” - it is no closer to “Pinocchio” than it is to “Apocalypse Now.”
In AI you have a prime example of how a hundred million dollars won’t do you a lot of good if you’re not sure what it is you’re trying to accomplish.
Hey, like I said, totally fair that the movie effected you differently. It’s just you aren’t the first person to bring this up and Das Boot really is a wonderfully made and effecting movie. Maybe not for everyone, but…I have the need to defend movies that I think are really great. My hangup not yours.
I say this as an American Jew who’s grandfather survived Dachau.
The rich fiance is crazy about this girl. And while planning the wedding she runs off to boy and stays at his house for days having sex and being ‘romantic.’
Nevermind her rich fiance still thinks they’re getting married. She hasn’t told him any of this. And in the end she isn’t even the one who called him to tell him she’s been fucking her ex. He called her, she lied, then he had to track her down only to hear that she’s a dirty whore (he didn’t call her this, although he should have).