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dozens of people flipping burgers
Tuesday, January 1 2008
The Will Smith vehicle I, Robot has been gathering dust in the Tivo for months, and today Gretchen and I finally watched it. It's rare that I watch movies quite this poorly-written, and I found it a surprisingly unusual experience. When one watches science fiction, one normally expects to have one's mind blown by some new insight on reality, but nothing even close happened in I, Robot. After a certain point, the only joy the movie had to offer was the delightfully-bad lines grunted by the actors. I found myself thinking, "With the special effects budget this movie had, they couldn't have spared a couple more grand on the screenplay?" Seriously, if they'd given me just $10,000 and a month with that screenplay, I could have made that dialogue sparkle (and possibly introduced a few mindfucks along the way, things that would have given it the buzz it couldn't possibly have had in the form I saw it in). Indeed, I'm sure Hollywood has dozens of people flipping burgers full time who could have written a better screenplay, and yet the movie's producers went with that one. One more thing: that stunning relic of a suspension bridge we keep being shown in the final third of the movie is a physical impossibility: the main cables of that bridge are shown snapped off at the bottom of their parabolas, so (being cables) they should immediately go limp and fall, along with the roadway hanging beneath them.
This evening I shoveled the driveway clear of a further six inch accumulation of snow that had fallen this morning.
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