Supertoys Last All Summer Long

As James Lileks wrote in 2002 when he reviewed Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence:

Global warming, melted ice caps, and William Hurt – and that’s just the first five minutes. The scenes with the robot boy and the family were quite affecting; Jude Law was tremendous, but the movie took great pains to alienate me, and finally succeeded. Part of the problem was the set design – like those execrable Batman movies, they seemed to think that Funky Urban Futurism can be established by an excess of neon. But it was the dank Kubrickian fog of hopelessness that grew tiresome. The boy’s search for meaning and redemption is just another variant of the human search for the same, since we’re all machines in one form or another. He prays uselessly to a Coney Island statue, humankind prays pointlessly to various deities, and none of it matters because the world freezes over and everybody dies.

Thanks, Steve! Thanks, Stanley! It’s been fun!

Time to buy that future beachfront property in Trenton, NJ apparently: “New York will bear brunt of uneven sea level rise.”