today's AC

[rm]

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/39582/fabulously_flawed_films_steven_spielbergs.html
A.I. review (repurposed from old content)

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/39783/making_the_decision_to_join_sag.html
Making the Decision to Join SAG

Comments

[briansiano.livejournal.com]

Personally, I loved _AI_, not the least reason being that Spielberg put his own projects on hold just to give us one last Stanley Kubrick movie.

And I especially liked the extended ending into the future, for all kinda reasons. Foremost was that it really was an echo of _2001_; rememeber that amazingly shocking first shot of the white hotel room? We were this entirely strange realm, and Kubrick had managed to _astonish_ us rather than frustrate the unwilling. Suddenly the movie had vaulted into a perspective _utterly removed_ from any kind of human perception... something a lot of people didn't like about Kubrick's work.

And the sequence developed into one of the most ravishingly emotional scenes ever put on film; when David was reunited with this ghost of his not-mother. The scene was, just to _begin_ with, a conversation between Kubrick's intellectual drive and Spielberg's emotional content. It was also about emotions that, in a sense, didn't exist, and which were directed and misdirected by David's designers. It drew all of this into a _fairy tale_ of the purest sort, and it _still_ left me in tears.

The film's reception was, well, fucking tragic. People expected a Spielberg schmaltz-fest, thinking he's still the same man who made _E.T._ Others wanted a Kubrick movie, but they were still thinking of the Kubrick of _Full Metal Jacket_ or _A Clockwork Orange_, forgetting that Kubrick had also made _Lolita_ and _Barry Lyndon_, he never repeated himself, and had _wanted_ to make an emotionally ravishing fairy tale. (These were the ones who wanted the film to end with David under the ferris wheel, thinking the ending was Spielberg's invention.) Others wanted to bash Spielberg for not being Kubrick, even accusing him of raiding the man's grave for prestige, even though Kubrick had _wanted_ him to direct it.