Live from Austin!

We finally got to watching A.i.: Artificial Intelligence. We’re probably the last people alive who haven’t seen it, so I trust you will allow me the indulgence of a few spoilers in the course of my criticism.

Let’s start with the big issue: the movie has the most egregious deus ex machina ending I have seen in years of movie-watching. It’s so hideous that it could be used as the canonical example when educating future generations of movie makers in what not to do. Apparently the ending was part of the Kubrick script for the movie, but Spielberg gave it that final saccharine twist. I’d like to think that Kubrick would have seen sense and removed the whole thing, like he did the original pie fight ending to Dr Strangelove.

A.i. is supposedly some kind of tribute or homage to Kubrick…but of course, the problem is it’s hard to pick two directors whose styles are as dissimilar as Kubrick and Spielberg, unless you start talking about (say) Errol Morris and John Waters.

Visually, there’s really nothing Kubrick to see. The fight with the bike gangs is a frenetic MTV cut-up, rather than a sequence of smooth menacing tracking shots. Even when David finds rows of boxed Davids, and Spielberg finally tries to use a Kubrick-style tracking shot for effect, he keeps the camera too high and the result is merely tedious. In fact, it brought to mind the groundbreaking camera work of Ed Wood, as lovingly recreated by Tim Burton.

Perhaps the worst thing, though, is that Spielberg just can’t seem to avoid the temptation to try and make every single story into a kid-friendly movie. Thus a male robot prostitute suddenly takes David to visit the cartoon head of Albert Einstein, voiced by Robin Williams, which we’re told is conveniently situated in the middle of the biggest red light district on earth. No, that’s not the noise of Stanley Kubrick spinning in his grave, it’s just the whirling pulleys as my suspended disbelief comes crashing to the ground.

In the original script, the mother’s an alcoholic, and the robot kid inadvertently feeds her problem when he keeps making her Bloody Marys just the way she likes them, in a futile attempt to get her to love him. Yeah, that would have worked. What doesn’t work is making mom a nice mug of coffee. Not even if you whirl the coffee containers around in an inexplicable fashion in the middle of the shot. But problem drinking is an Adult Situation, so we can’t have that in a Spielberg movie.

Yes, it’s a fairy tale, but I’m old enough to remember that fairy tales used to have wicked witches and evil monsters in. C’mon, Mr Spielberg, I know you can do better.

Yesterday I watched Mr Death, Errol Morris’s documentary about Fred Leuchter Jr. The movie tells the story in Morris’s usual style: stay out of sight, and let the subject do the talking. Illustrate with interesting composition, archive footage, and re-enactments. Refrain from moralizing or pushing a particular agenda.

For those who don’t know: Leuchter was an engineer who, quite by accident, built up quite a reputation in the death business. He started out renovating old electric chairs, before moving on to design the lethal injection system used in many US states. Then one day he was asked if he could provide expert testimony in a Canadian legal case in which a Holocaust Revisionist was being prosecuted for hatemongering.

Fred took a plane trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau with his wife, a translator, and a cameraman. He wandered around the ruins, chipping off bits of brick and plaster without permission. He smuggled them back to Massachusetts, where he sent them to a chemical lab for analysis. He then wrote an infamous document called The Leuchter Report, which you can almost certainly find via Google if you want to.

The problem was, Fred didn’t really know anything about the chemistry of gas on solids. The lab tested for cyanide—but they tested the entire sample, not the few microns near the surface that might have shown traces of exposure to gas. Fred didn’t know about history either—he stumbled around assuming nothing at the site had changed, whereas in fact many of the buildings were disassembled to rebuild nearby farmhouses. Fred also didn’t know German, so he didn’t visit the Auschwitz archive, which has extensive original blueprints and other documentation showing that there were in fact ventilation systems and other essentials of mass execution by gas.

After publishing his report and testifying in the trial, Leuchter suddenly found that his old business contacts no longer wanted to associate with him. His wife left him, and he was driven out of Massachusetts for practicing engineering without a license. He turned to his new friends—he headed for California, where he was promised a job by someone in the Holocaust Revisionist movement.

The job failed to materialize, and Fred found himself locked out of his room. He now apparently makes a living giving speeches to adoring fans at Revisionist conferences.

It’s a sad tale of how a gullible nobody believed what people told him, and told them what they wanted to hear, so that he could feel important and famous. And in the end, it destroyed his marriage and his career.