BillSaysThis

Star Pie Movie Forum has added me to the list of friends on the front page of their forum for my reviews. Very nice of them and good luck in their plan to build a site with reviews for all movies and TV shows. An ambitious goal but possible though I think a more realistic plan would be to make a RawSugar collection of all the other movie review sites.

On a similar note I belatedly added Danny Broomeman to the blogroll. He’s sent me as much traffic as any personal site except dangerousmeta over the years and I’m remiss for not returning the favor.

Notes written in the last seconds of the game: 64 freaking yards to his roommate on fourth and 12! Then pretend you’re gonna down it and Leinart sneaks over the top!!!!! WOWOWOWOWWOW!!!! Unbelievable. Why did USC get a celebration penalty but ND didn’t after Leinart’s fumble? What a win!

Attention Downtown Athletic Club: Three TDs for Reggie Bush but Matt took over in the end–my Heisman vote is still undecided.

(Checking the post-game reports, emotion got the better of me. Leinart threw for 61 yards and it was fourth and 9.)

The victory today has to be one of the most exciting football games I remember watching. Like the Notre Dame players and fans. All the hype about ND ending big win streaks, the special kelly green uniforms, the celebrity alumni pumping up the Friday night pep rally, maybe was going to come true.

The game looked to be over when Leinart was stopped short of the goal with USC having no timeouts. I watched the clock count down to zero and was totally dejected that after the brilliant catch and run by Jarrett we couldn’t get the last twelve yards. The ND crowd were racing all over the field, the Trojans were looking downcast.

But I saw Pete Carroll plus a couple of assistant coaches and players trying to get to the referees, then the TV guys must have gotten the message in their headsets, ABC shows the replay and sure enough Leinart fumbled the ball out of bounds with seven seconds left on the clock.

Since the Fighting Irish are our biggest football rivals this was starting to smell much sweeter. The refs got all the celebrants off the field, reset the clock to seven seconds and gave us the ball first and goal at the one. Leinart pretends he’s going to down it, to stop the clock so we can organize the real try but instead takes the snap and makes like a power fullback, ploughing into the line and rolling off a tackle to spin in. Six points baby, 34-31 USC.

Now it’s really over, the streak still runs, and Irish eyes are not smiling tonight.

[Want to join in the fun? Post your memories to your blog and tag it with were14 at RawSugar or delicious.]

I just drove TS1 to a daylong art class at Deanza College through grey dreary skies, puddles from an overnight shower up and down the roads and when Earth, Wind and Fire’s September came on the radio for the last few minutes of the ride home I found myself thinking back to the ’70s and specifically to the fall of 1975.

The most memorable event for me was the release of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. Never before had a record consumed and connected with me in such a deep way. In the months before hitting the stores, the title tune was constantly on the radio and for the first time I was at Sam Goody’s the day it came in. I think it was 1976 before another record got on my turntable. Through all the years since only U2 has come close to Bruce in my affections. Not that I don’t love the music of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles almost as much but–perhaps because I was too young for the most part when their big releases arrived–with them it’s just the music.

The question I’d like to see you answer isn’t (necessarily) about the music of the year you were 14 but this: What did you want to be then? What future did you wish for yourself? Was it about a job, or to be a music or movie star? 14 is too old for cowboy, astronaut or fireman boy fantasies, though not more earnest desires for those jobs, of course. Despite reading deeply in the science fiction backlists, my desire at the time was split in two opposing directions: rock star or accountant.

Strangely, or possibly not in the post-’60s hangover yet not quite punk/disco sunshine, I didn’t think much about having a wife or family. I spent a completely expectable amount time fantasizing about girls and sex, mind you, just not about what might be happening with one of them ten or twenty years down the line. Even when I gave a few cycles to what being an accountant might be like I never completed the suburban image with a pretty Jewish wife and a son and daughter.

What aspect of being an accountant attracted me isn’t clear any more, if it ever was, but I know the person who put the thought in my head. Our family’s accountant was a man named Jack Kaye and if I wasn’t reading science fiction or about rock and roll I was reading about the stock market. Like the recent scandals at Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia, 1975 had front page headlines about companies (Boeing, for instance) bribing foreign government officials to win deals. Interesting, meaty stuff. Oddly I didn’t think of working on Wall Street, that didn’t happen for another none years. There was just something about Mr. Kaye that put the thought in my head.

Rock star, well I suppose 82.7% of 14 year old American boys wanted that future and the same number’s probably still true today. I never came close to making it happen–people who know me now might easily laugh at the thought–but I did give it a try. A couple of years earlier I’d taken drum and then piano lessons. Drums were too loud for my mom and the piano I guess took up too much space in the living room so it got traded in for one of those family fun organs after a year.

The next year I talked my way into an electric bass and lessons from Rick Kerner, at whose mother’s school I’d taken dance lessons in the pre-Bar Mitzvah season of 1973. A few months in my mom learned a lesson of her own: she would’ve been better off keeping me on drums or piano. I had always set the volume on high and, for accompaniment, had a record playing even louder.

Rick also had a business providing bands for Sweet 16s, Bar Mitzvahs and other occasions, which he hired me into after maybe six months of lessons. Sadly, being too young to drive (this was spring of ’77) and not talented enough to outweigh the hassle of arranging transportation, my first gig was my last gig. I did have fun since the party was some girl’s Sweet 16, fresh territory because it was a town or two over from where I lived so none of the girls knew me.

But back to ’75. This was also the after-party for Watergate and the Washington Post and the New York Times were still mining the rich fields of both parties’ backlog. I suppose it was about this time of year I began to read about Jimmy Carter. Not that I realized he’d be the next president though I did know that the Republicans were roadkill. Gerald Ford was such a non-entity that the idea he might win election on his own name was simply laughable and the open question for me was whether the Democrats would take every seat in both houses as well. Yes, that was a naive thought but 14 year olds are generally not political cynics.

I believe I was peripherally aware of the first baby steps a few companies were taking towards personal computers. Mainly, though, my expectations were simply that computers would continue to advance and become ubiquitous. I wondered, and to a large degree still wonder, why science fiction authors haven’t accounted for this in stories. Star Trek, the original TV series that is, did one of the best jobs even if they were completely ridiculous in the number of blinking lights and variety of sliders, knobs and buttons.

1975’s conception of 2005 was unsurprisingly far too optimistic than our reality; if we avoided Trek’s World War III and genetically engineered supermen, well, the margin was narrow and the light at the tunnel’s other side is still faint in the distance. Despite ending the Cold War without launching a single ICBM in anger, an outcome which many Americans thought nearly as probable as not, the path to it, work done in its name, nonetheless scattered seeds that have recently grown into a crop perhaps more dangerous from the likelihood that we’ll be unable to disarm the combatants in any meaningful way.

At 14 I was far more excited to meet the next 30 years. Girls were turning lovely and on rare occasions felt the same about me. Music could take me to some distant place for minutes or hours at a time. Nixon’s campaign at empire had left marks on me but Woodward and Bernstein’s triumph had erased most of them. I wanted to be an accountant or a rock star and both were attainable.

Tell me about you at fourteen, your aspirations and expectations in life.

Great bit of dialog from Jayne in The Message, the episode of Firefly shown on SciFi today: “What’d y’all order a dead guy for?” Said in his typical deadpan, this is a perfect example of why the show was so good. I’d like to hear one line as good as that from shows that ran for much longer like Walker, Texas Ranger, According to Jim or Diagnosis: Murder. Seriously, there are times when I just hate Fox plain and simple.

Bob Dylan is a visionary indeed: Marijuana May Grow Neurons in the Brain.

Robyn DeuPree, the Bloglines Product Manager, announced new features for the service today and asked for feedback. The additions are keystroke navigation, unread vs. keep as new, mobile and universal inbox. Since I don’t use the mobile interface, my response doesn’t apply to it. Short answer: wow, totally unimpressive.

Actually, since none of these features are useful to me I shouldn’t have excluded mobile. Seriously, there’ve been about zero new features for about 12 months, even though Bloglines was bought out by deep pocketed InterActiveCorp, and this is the best that could be done for the first release of the new regime? I’m still waiting for news on the bug I reported a couple of months ago, that read items come up again as unread despite no visible changes. At the least they could have added a read but changed indicator (which, for example SharpReader has) to make that possibility visible.

The most laughable of the new features, and I mean I actually laughed when I read it, is the so-called “ginsu knives of Bloglines…” the Universal Inbox. What warrants such a lofty name? “We’ve partnered with Astrology.com to deliver daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes, and Lottery.com to bring you lottery winning numbers and jackpot values for any state in the USA.” I realize that RSS use is spreading beyond the techie community, which is great, but the idea that Bloglines thinks lottery results and horoscopes are the highest value adds at this time is hilarious.

File this one under nice, literate and honest. Not great, not a revelation. Zack Braff, more widely known as the star of NBC’s Scrubs sitcom, wrote and directed Garden State and got some festival awards and critical plaudits. To some degree this seems to have been a reaction to the idea of a network sitcom star writing and directing a low budget indie film since the movie is, like I said, nice but not great.

Braff plays Andrew Largeman, an actor successful enough to be semi-recognizable enough in his hometown but not to avoid waiting tables while between roles. His medicine cabinet is filled with vials of prescription pills and his bedroom is completely white, down to the pillowcases. At the open, Largeman gets a call, which he screens, that turns out to be his father (Ian Holm looking distinctly un-Bilboish) notifying him that his paraplegic mother drowned in the bathtub and died. He gets on a plane to New Jersey, giving us the title.

In the course of four days he meets up with high school pals and acquaintances–they’re all 26 years old now–who give him comps for how life is working out. A reasonably typical assortment and everyone calls him Large; from watching I didn’t realize this was his name, I figured since his character is Jewish it was something more like Larchman or Lachman. Large complains of odd headaches and so his father, also his psychiatrist and the prescriber of all those pills, sends him to a neurologist (Ron Rifkin) where he meets Natalie Portman. Portman is not coiffed with strange braid patterns.

The remainder/bulk of the film covers the next few days during which Large bonds with Portman, comes to terms with Holm and realizes, and this is why I made the comment about not being a great revelation, that life is to be lived. Not wasted on pot (his best friend from back in the day), pills (as his dad would have it) or fighting a constant battle to understand “Why?” (his mom). Interesting, decent acting from the key players, but all in all more of a promise of Braff’s potential.

Braff did a blog though after he finished all the post-premiere and DVD publicity chores he stopped posting; which is okay, the film’s essentially done and the blog is still out on the web for reading. The posts attracted fairly heavy quantity of comments, I must say.

recommended

My friend Beau recently relocated to San Francisco (from Perth via Maui, ouch!) and based on a co-worker’s remark is now eagerly awaiting his first Halloween in the city. All I can tell you dude is remember what city you’re, the movie Crying Game, and watch out for just who you approach 😉

Beau Lebens repackaged the PHP Blogger API project he, Kathryn Aaker and I originally published a while back so that it’s now under a BSD license. Somebody from MIT wants to use it and needed this and who am I to say no to MIT?

I do believe I pissed off some suprnatural entity, hopefully not the Flying Spaghetti Monster, because I’m having just the most annoying experience getting the Rails book in my grubby chubby hands. First it was an eBay bookseller pulling a fast one–which eBay, to their discredit, seems uninterested in correcting–and now the good ol’ Post Office forwarded the Amazon shipment containing my second attempt (and a book for the Sweet One too!) to the San Francisco facility.

At least that’s the semi-coherent explanation given by the Mountain View carrier annex supervisor this morning. Neither he, the carrier he said sent the package to SF nor their database can tell me why or offer a solution other than patience and hope for the best. Being in the customer service game myself I don’t have sympathy for them though I have learned to skip the screaming, threatening, and/or cursing as useless.

Everyone’s dealt with the USPS at one time and we all know that no one there ever takes responsibility in a meaningful way. They have little in the way of resources despite the numerous recent increases in price and with email and UPS/FedEx eating away at the volume that’s not going to change. Wish Amazon had been upfront that shipment was with a DHL/USPS joint venture, something not at all conveyed in the phrase “via Airborne Home.”

Doesn’t change the fact that I’ll have missed another weekend for getting elbow-deep in Rails.

A bunch of people are starting to debate whether the recent string of acquisitions are harbingers of a new bubble in tech. Despite the whole conversation on what is Web 2.0 being little more than a red herring, most of the comments I’m seeing appear to be missing a key difference from the last go round: IPOs. Other than Google, which is an outlier if not a special case, very few tech companies (outside of China) are able to go public and those which do are seeing minimal first day price jumps.

What’s happening lately, which I guess dates to Yahoo acquiring Ludicorp (Flickr), is that enough of the companies formed in the last decade have survived and prospered. They’ve grown large enough to find that to continue growth at sufficient levels, and to overcome a certain level of bureaucratic inertia, products must sometimes be acquired rather than built internally.

Why this would be a surprise to anyone is puzzling to me because it’s happened over and over again in technology and elsewhere. If Yahoo had paid $250 million for Ludicorp or Winer got $25 million for weblogs.com I’d be worried, deals at those bloated valuations would give real evidence that no one learned the lessons from the ridiculous paper deals of 2000.

But the price tags weren’t pie in the sky–okay, Skype, not sure about that one but they do have real revenue and seemingly committed user base plus provided a life-changing event for eBay–and as such are more reminiscent of Microsoft’s deals to buy the companies which created FoxPro and PowerPoint, back in the day. All the deals fit well with the acquirer’s business strategy.

Perhaps the reason some people are looking at the activity as a negative indicator because of the success of our tools, they give a sense of interconnection and immediacy that was never possible before. We all “know” Dave Winer, Jason Calcanis and Stewart Butterfield and with RSS feeds, tech.memeorandum and the like it’s like we’re all in the same neighborhood, trading gossip the way our grandparents did about the family two doors down.

In fact, Web 2.0 reminds me of the old saw about Microsoft’s release pattern: 1.0 just to get in the market, 2.0 to get the feature set and 3.0 to fix the bugs and make it usable for the mass market. So no, it’s not 1999 again. Call me when Zimbra does their IPO and the stock triple on opening day.

The major problem I have with the Google/NASA deal (Is Google’s NASA campus a search for a tax break?, 10/2/5) is that Google is not just building office space on federal land but also housing (up to 2,000 units) and retail space. That local taxes won’t be paid on the office space is not great but within the realm of reasonable.

But guess what? There won’t be any taxes paid on the homes and stores either. Most Google employees are younger, many in the age range when having kids is common, and those children will be going to local schools while this deal will avoid paying into the school district to fund the increased enrollment. Google does pay local taxes now–the Googleplex is in Mountain View–and one can assume that some revenue currently going to city coffers from housing and stores, which would otherwise be located on ratable land, would evaporate with this deal as well. Altogether a significant loss to the city not easily made up by having more jobs in the region–I don’t see the restaurants and clubs on Castro St. doing quite that well.

Even given these negatives I believe that Google and NASA should make the deal. However, if the company executives want to live up to “Do No Evil” then they should alter the terms to account for the cost the development will incur. Otherwise this will be just one more in the recent skein showing Google’s corporate morality is now second banana to a misguided self-interest.

World Chess Boxing Organization Yes, your eyes are working properly! This is the governing body for the new sport that blends chess and boxing, alternating between them for 11 rounds. The same two guys, not a brain for the chess portion and another for the fisticuffs. I remain convinced that boxing is a throwback which does little good in our culture and is the type of entertainment that makes me cringe. But at least I got a big laugh from finding out about this.

PBS series American Masters broadcast the Bob Dylan documentary last week but I finally got to watch the second part last night. Zimmy is a musician who’s always been in the background for most people my age and younger, making new music occasionally, sending out some strange messages at times, but this film goes back to his origins and the days when he was very much in the spotlight’s glare.

Covering his life only until a horrific motorcycle accident in 1966, No Direction Home is a deeply flawed production though it offers a view of Dylan that’s informative and enlightening. PBS included after the second half a brief interview with Martin Scorsese (by the nearly useless Charlie Rose) during which the acclaimed director explained that all the interview segments we’d seen of Dylan were conducted not by Scorsese or a journalist but by one of Dylan’s associates. This explained the complete lack of any really probing questions.

In fact, if I understood correctly, all of the material in the movie was assembled prior to Scorsese’s involvement and his major contribution was to “find the narrative” and oversee an editor piecing together the footage. For just this part, I’d say he did a good job and overall I feel, other than a few slow spots in the second hour, the documentary is worth watching for any fan of American culture. I know that the man has never been interested in answering those questions, not seeing them as interesting or perhaps even possible, but I feel the lack of real insight from Dylan himself was a missed opportunity.

One of the strong points is that though interviews with contemporaries (Liam Clancy and Pete Seeger particularly), performance footage and some surviving radio interviews and press conferences we get a very good understanding of Dylan’s early development and his effect on the folk music scene. Most of the film, after all, takes place before he became a pop star; that really didn’t happen until about 1965, after his “shocking” electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival. 40 years on, there’s still controversy about the crowd’s reaction but the footage used shows that they did boo. In fact footage from the subsequent tour of Britain shows that audiences there were also quite upset with the change.

To some extent, after watching, I can understand it. Up until these concerts the show was Bob Dylan onstage with his guitar, harmoica and voice. Period. Hearing, for example, his original versions of “Blowing in the Wind” and “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” are revelations. No band behind him, I can see the simple power of his poetry; a lot of things about Bruce Springsteen are more understandable now.

No Direction Home is a very good film. I don’t think you need to be a big fan of his music to enjoy it. Scorsese could’ve used his scalpel a little better and reduced the run time by 20-30 minutes, and certainly the circumstances of the Dylan interviews should have been made clear. Nonetheless, worth watching.

recommended

Fox (the TV network) has a habit of putting on very cool shows and cancelling them just as I get hooked; Firefly, John Doe, Greg the Bunny are three examples that come to mind. Just who the heck was John Doe going to turn out to be anyway?! I try and resist but it’s like any other addiction. So when I first read that Universal had picked up the rights to Firefly and was giving Joss Whedon pretty free reign to make a big screen version, well, you know what happened.

Fortunately for me, Serenity delivers. With one significant exception, which I prefer not to detail so as to not spoil things for you, the movie is packed with the smarts and humor of the television show and adds the visual impact only possible on the much larger canvas. Box Office Mojo and IMDB list the production budget at a mere $40 million and if that’s accurate then the crew stretched every penny of it. The imagery is stylish, taking cues from the series but not being limited by it, though there’s much less of the Old West flavor.

One of the challenges Whedon had was to make a movie that didn’t expect familiarity with the series but still rewarded it. One of the trickier aspects of this was conveying the basics of the ‘Verse, the fictional future’s backstory, and the problem with River Tamme (that forms the core of the movie) without getting bogged down in them and the device used was brilliant because the opening scene took care of both while opening the plot at the same time.

I was also glad to find out that Whedon didn’t feel trapped by the need to keep absolute continuity with the series, something that absolutely became a heavy stone for the Star Trek franchise. Two quick examples where Serenity breaks it: Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) is not a crewmember but rather a good friend and provider of refuge for the ship after deals are done and, well, the movie starts with River and Simon’s rescue of her with help (presumably) from the Serenity crew while in the series the two come aboard as passengers, already escaped from and wanted by the Alliance.

Nathan Fillion really does well playing the leader of our little band, definitely a post-modern future Robin Hood. His Captain Reynolds is good with a gun but not much more than a club boxer with his fists and he’s kept in character by not doing any wire-assisted martial arts. Adam Baldwin’s Jayne gets a smattering more smarts but remains most concerned with himself and his pocketbook. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who I’ve enjoyed in quite a few movies and one or two British import TV shows, rides his accent and an unwordly serene temperament (which I wonder if Whedon had him do intentionally) to provide an antagonist, a front for The Man since no time’s wasted on showing him getting instructions. Summer Glaus is called on as River for a much wider range than any other character, from the disconnected, nearly mad gibberish to world-class, wire-heavy ninja sword and battle ballet and does stuning work.

As mentioned, there’s one event right before the final confrontation that I truly question. When you see the movie you’ll recognize it and I hope you’ll agree that it does nothing for plot development–included to provide a final motivational push (I suppose), it just seem unnecessary and pointlessly deprives Whedon of tools for the sequels that are sure to come. Not a huge big bad, just the least good aspect of the movie.

definitely recommended

Correction: I received an email a few hours after posting this review from Stephanie (the only name she left) explaining that I misunderstood a few parts of Serenity. To set the record straight I’ll quote her mail in its entirety:

“A little off there. You must have missed the three comics that were recently released as official continuity for the series. Shepherd Book left the boat, so in the film it isn’t that he was never crew, but that he no longer was at that point. This isn’t a break or adjustment for the movie. Same with Inara, she’d also left. The Operative is also introduced in the comics. Simon’s River retrieval didn’t happen with help from the Serenity crew in the movie either. Nothing changed from the series. I’m not sure why you perceived that it was otherwise? Could you clarify that for me? That retrieval at the beginning was a flashback, that was not in time with the film. While we as the audience were able to watch parts of their escape for our own benefit, it’s clear that is but a flashback. In fact, a record of it, shown clearly when the Operative pauses the sequence. We were just watching what he was watching. -S”

Fair enough. As I pointed out to her, though, we watched every episode as SciFi recently rebroadcast the Firefly episodes and I can’t recall a single mention of the comic books. That the opening was a flashback was apparently understood by my wife and does make sense in retrospective. Doesn’t change my opinion about the movie, I don’t give all that many definitely recommendeds.

You’d think Microsoft could get past its own selfish concerns and allow users to install service packs with Firefox and not just IE. Dizzam! Furthermore, I just had a nasty dealing with a big bookseller on eBay, a1books, who are really bumming me out. To put it mildly, for now at least, though I’ll probably give the details when all’s said and done.

On the bright side: Bruce Springsteen has just announced the details and release date for the 30th anniversary edition of Born to Run. Coming November 15 (which is actually a little late), included are remastered versions of the original songs, a DVD with the entire Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 film of Bruce and the E Streeters legendary 1975 concertin London; the new film Wings For Wheels: The Making of Born To Run; and a 48 page booklet of previously unpublished photographs. With its two DVDs, the package offers approximately four hours of previously unseen footage including three songs recorded live at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theater in 1973: Spirit In The Night, Wild Billy’s Circus Story and Thundercrack.”

I read all the time on the web that Ricky Gervais’s BBC series The Office is screamingly funny and great, possibly the best comedy in many a year. Tonight HBO had the premiere of his new show Extras which got good reviews so I tuned in for a trial. Honestly I couldn’t make it through an entire episode of Office and only watched all 30 this time because, well, I kept waiting for something better and The Simpsons wasn’t on yet.

Science fiction being perhaps my choice if forced to pick one type of fiction to read, and certainly the first ‘adult’ books I read prodigously as a child, I read the original Asimov novels and short stories early on. As others have remarked the Good Doctor had his weaknesses as a writer but a shortage of ideas and situations in which to deploy them were not problems at all for him; the bulk of his great works were written between 1939 and the early 1960s and his sharp eye moved easily from newspaper and journal pages to fiction.

The movie Alex Proyas and Jeff Vintar made called I, Robot began life as an original script by Vintar called Hardwired and in that mysterious process Hollywood calls development was merged with the rights Twentieth Century Fox owned to Asmiov’s works. Accordingly the movie gives Isaac Asimov only a suggested by credit and, other than a few character names and constant reference to the Three Laws of Robotics, little really connects the two. Put it down to old human emotional response but I would have enjoyed the movie more if they’d stuck with Vintar’s title.

Trying to judge the movie by what’s on the screen then. Will Smith is the lead, a police detective who still has nightmares over a car accident in which he nearly drowned, a little girl in the other car did, and he was saved by a robot. He’s called to the scene of an apparent suicide of the main designer/inventor of the robots, who helped him recover from that accident, and who left Smith a holographic recording which is not a suicide note but does have a small database which can respond to Smith’s questions in a limited way.

Our copper doesn’t believe this was a suicide. Even though no person could’ve killed Dr. Lanning, the security records quickly show it, and no robot could so much have hurt him–that would violate the First Law–Smith suspects a robot did it. Of course US Robotics’ chief scientist Susan Calvin (played moderately well by standard Hollywood hottie Bridget Moynahan) will hear nothing of it and when Smith takes the robot to the station for questioning, semi-villanous USR CEO (Bruce Greenwood) shows up in 30 seconds with a court order and the mayor on the line to reclaim his property. Seriously, could police leiutenant Chi McBride be any more generic? We go on from there following the too predictable breadcrumbs and red herrings until Smith and a converted Calvin have won the day.

I, Robot is a big, pretty movie with special effects that do honestly stand out from an otherwise ordinary couple of hours. The NS-5 robots truly impress visually and in how they’re able to move, and the car chase between a couple of robotic robot transports and Smith in a 2039 Audi is almost as good. But a live action movie that credits an order of magnitude more people for visual effects and stunts than for acting almost certainly means too much effort on one than the other and Smith has the only part meaty enough to make a difference but he gives a here for the paycheck only performance.

I have a bit of trouble blaming Proyas, whose main previous significant work is the cult classic Dark City, for not being able to fully control a film with a ridiculous nine figure budget. Some of the producers though, like Laurence Mark and John Davis who have plenty off big picture experience, should have done better for a film that ought to have connected with the science fiction fan base in the same way Lord of the Rings and some of the recent comic book superhero movies did.

barely recommended

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