Blogcritics: Comments on The Duke Offers An Intellectual Assesment Of "I, Robot"

Comment by Aaron, Duke De Mondo

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 21:07:52 EDT

eric, the rocking wont stop for a single second. and thank you, that was one i was kinda proud of, is what, so far as the literary concerns are involved. Duane, that idea is something aproaching genius. And also, the hip young teenager whos really 30, he can't get no political backing for to attack the beast, since it has made friends with folks from all sorts of persuasions. What can he do to end this madness? Maybe in the end it gets bought by Time Warner and then loses all credibility. Who knows? Incidentally, no, the idea is terrible and you should never ever think about it again, especially if it should appear in a film written by The Duke De Mondo, with a story very very similar to the one you obviously stole from me one time. ;)

Comment by Eric Olsen

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 20:56:11 EDT

Picked almost randomly, this is a sentence to reckon with: "Something happens involving the farmer from Babe, and he commits suicide as a means of killing himself." Rock on, Duker.

Comment by Duane

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 19:11:03 EDT

And then there's The Blog where a young handsome internet savvy stud who lives a bit on the wild side like driving a convertible and stuff finds out that people are being hypnotized by this monster called The Blog which is a high-tech kind of monster but when he tells the local authorities nobody will believe him because he's the kind of guy to go around making practical jokes just to impress girls but when the local folks find out that The Blog is on the loose they blame those galdurned scientists who always find things they can do but never ask whether they should do those things.

Comment by Aaron, Duke De Mondo

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 18:45:52 EDT

also, being something of a fan of the Asian horror, it's interesting how much these recent flicks borrow from hollywood sci-fi in so far as the perils of technology. In kairo, the internet was something evil that killed folks and led to us becoming atomised nothings. Ring obviously had killer video tapes. Phone had, fittingly enough, killer mobile phones. The Eye had evil eye transplants (although that right theres not a new one, going back so far Hands Of Orlock, and also The Hand, oliver stone's second film, the one about Michael Caine gets an evil hand). I'm still waiting for iPod, about someone dies in the middle of listening to a song and then everytime that song is played on an iPod the listener has seven days to put it on kazaa and get someone else to hear it or something. Patented, by the way, by iPod idea.

Comment by Aaron, Duke De Mondo

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 18:37:31 EDT

hi folks, thanks for taking on the old "message" and what-not and granting it legitimacy. some times in the "jokes" and stuff The Duke's deeply intellectual musings get lost. I've always believed sci-fi (on film, at least) to be a very reactionairy genre. AI was interesting for a number of reasons (especially the one about how it was very brilliant indeed), but also becuase it played on these fears of technology, and had the "baddies" as the ones who don't trust science, ie, the parents who end up assuming that the robot is gonna get all homicidal at some point. It's interesting that the flicks with the most vehement opossition to scientif progress (the matrix, for example) are the ones which owe their success most to technological advance. odd.

Comment by JR

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 16:59:46 EDT

But it's all too common to present scientists as ineffectual, sexless, naive, impractical, unkempt, physical weaklings, or as insufferably pompous manipulators -- scientists bad means science bad. I think we could come up with a pretty long list of portrayals of movie makers (actors, directors, entertainment executives) as complete assholes. That's not the same as saying movies are bad. I think Real Genius did a decent job of portraying science as fun, while still prone to the same personnel issues as any other profession. What you're describing is more of an anti-establishment message than an anti-science message. In this case the iconoclast, the one who solves the problem created by scientists, is himself a scientist. Contrast that with, say, Frankenstein or Terminator II, where the solution is for the "common people" to kill the scientist and destroy his technology. THAT's anti-science.

Comment by Duane

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 16:36:03 EDT

In the movie Contact, even though based on Carl Sagan's novel, which obviously casts the scientific enterprise in a favorable light, you will recall that the Tom Skerritt character pulls strings behind the scenes to see to it that the Jodie Foster character is marginalized. The religious point of view, as presented by the Matthew McConaughey character against this backdrop of scientific chicanery, comes off sounding eminently reasonable. The popular support for making contact with the aliens is represented by the usual band of credulous kooks.

Comment by Duane

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 16:09:31 EDT

Real Genius features a member of the faculty at a reasonable facsimile of Cal Tech saying to a student, "We're smarter --- better," when referring to the boy's parents and other "normal" people. He's in bed with The Pentagon, and is made out to be a pompous asshole. Scientists bad. Val Kilmer, the iconoclast, comes along and battles against the science establishment. He is the remarkable one, while we are supposed to believe that the establishment is made up of assholes. Then there's the guy who at first appears to be living in the closet. Eccentric, out of touch loners compose the second type of scientist depicted in the movie. I understand that it's all in fun, and if the themes presented in Real Genius were rare, I could take it that way. But it's all too common to present scientists as ineffectual, sexless, naive, impractical, unkempt, physical weaklings, or as insufferably pompous manipulators -- scientists bad means science bad.

Comment by JR

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 15:51:44 EDT

Was Real Genius anti-science? It was certainly critical of some applications of science; but overall, I thought it was one of the few movies that accurately portrays science as fun. And we would need a list of "pro-science" movies to measure whether there really is a bias against science in Hollywood. (Of course there is, but it wouldn't be very "scientific" to just select the data that makes your case.) Okay, for starters: Contact um...Outbreak others?

Comment by Duane

Mon, 9 Aug 2004 15:31:03 EDT

Duke, I see that through your scientific research you have discovered one of the fundamental laws of movie-making, which, to be as concise as possible, reads as follows: SCIENCE BAD There are many, many examples. Some of these examples you might consider to be good movies. The Andromeda Strain Jurassic Park Deep Blue Sea Colossus: The Forbin Project Demon Seed The Terminal Man The Terminator The Real Genius with the guy from The Doors Fail-Safe The Matrix Blade Runner I am a Robot (I think you mentioned that one) The China Syndrome The Frankenstein (of course) and hordes of others. And these don't even include the mad scientist movies (except for The Frankenstein) and the nuke-mutated monster movies. How do you explain this lopsidedness?