October 2001 Volume 82 Number 10 "serving the protectors"
Edited by John Ballantyne

Artificial Intelligence (M)

The year is 2035, the icecaps have melted and the seas have risen. It is a time when natural resources are limited and pregnancies require a license.

Where you live is monitored and what you eat is engineered. Pregnancies need a license; and the person serving you is not a person at all. It’s artificial.

Gardening, housekeeping, companionship - there is a robot for every need. Except love.

Emotion is the last, controversial frontier in robot evolution. But with so many parents not yet approved to have children, Cybertronics Manufacturing has recently developed a robotic boy, the first programmed to love, called David (Haley Joel Osment, The Sixth Sense).

Cybertronics employee (Sam Robards, American Beauty) and his wife (Frances O’Connor, Mansfield Park), whose own child is so ill that he has been cryogenically frozen until a cure can be found, adopt robot David as a test-case. David gradually becomes a substitute for their sick child, but a series of unexpected circumstances makes this sort of role impossible for him.

Without final acceptance by humans or machines, and armed only with Teddy, his supertoy teddy bear and companion, David embarks on a journey to discover where he truly belongs.

During his travels, David meets by chance another robot, Gigolo Joe (Jude Law, Enemy at the Gates and The Talented Mr Ripley). David becomes very attached to Joe, his protector, and Joe himself becomes more human.

But David and Joe also find that the more human they become, the less comfortable humans are in their presence.

This lengthy movie is one of Steven Spielberg’s most ambitious productions, and is a posthumous tribute to the late Stanley Kubrick who originally developed the idea from a science fiction story by Brian Aldiss, published 32 years ago.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a disturbing vision of mankind’s possible destiny and raises haunting questions about what it is to be truly human.

The Bank (MA)

Once in a while it does the soul good to see a film that makes the blood boil.

The Australian producers of The Bank have struck a sympathetic chord with contemporary audiences.

The villain of the piece is a fictitious bank called CentaBank, previously the Central Bank of Victoria.

Once upon a time, in the good old days, the bank was the battler’s friend. The film opens with a nostalgic scene set in 1977 at a primary school in rural Victoria, with the kindly local bank manager giving the children a talk on how prudent it is to start saving early in life.

The film cuts to the present, where old-fashioned values such as customer service, loyalty and business ethics have gone out the window.

Welcome to the dog-eat-dog era of economic rationalism.

Heading CentaBank is Simon O’Reilly (Anthony LaPaglia), a repulsive cross between Chainsaw Al and Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko, who relishes eliminating rural and suburban bank branches and foreclosing on his customers, so that he can boost the profits of greedy shareholders.

“You’ve got to have grit to make a pearl,” is O’Reilly’s abrasive business philosophy.

Helping him on the road to record profits and the elimination of all his banking competitors is Jim Doyle (David Wenham), a computer whiz and ace mathematician who, in collaboration with the Japanese, has devised an intricate software programme designed to predict accurately fluctuations in the financial market.

Victims of this chilly environment of turbo-charged capitalism and bank foreclosures are a down-to-earth Australian couple, Wayne and Diane Davis (Steve Rodgers and Mandy McElhinney), who have unwisely borrowed money from CentaBank to set up their small houseboat renting operation, but find the rug pulled out from under their feet.

To help them take on CentaBank, the Davises hire an idealistic lawyer, played by Mitchell Butel.

The film is a well-paced story of greed and vengeance, and unashamedly enlists the audience’s sympathy for the underdog.

Rush Hour 2 (M)

The fastest hand in the East re-teams with the biggest mouth in the West in Rush Hour 2, in the sequel to the 1998 blockbuster action-comedy.

Chief Inspector Lee of the Hong Kong Police (Jackie Chan) and LAPD detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) arrive in Hong Kong for a holiday, only to end up doing battle with Triad boss, Ricky Tan (John Lone), suspected to be behind a money-counterfeiting scheme and a bombing of the American Embassy.

As Lee and Carter lead a fast-paced pursuit of Ricky Tan and his gang, they wreak havoc through a variety of Hong Kong locales, including a karaoke bar - where Carter teaches the gangster clientele how to sing the definitive version of Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop ’Till You Get Enough.

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