The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
If there’s a common thread in stories of artificial intelligence, it’s that we can think that we, the programmers/creators, can control it all we like, but if we’re truly successful - if we succeed in creating actual artificial intelligence - we can’t do a damn thing to control it. It will grow and learn and eventually decide things for itself.
In Pixar’s masterpiece WALL•E, we don’t know exactly how our hero gained what for lack of a better word we have to call a “personality,” but we can imagine. Human ingenuity can do a lot of things, but one thing it is notoriously terrible at, on the whole, is predicting the future correctly. Which, coincidentally, is one of the ideas at the heart of Pixar’s masterpiece. [More...]
Amir, welcoming you back to Team Top Ten! We are returning after a long hiatus with not one, but two top ten lists for April. In connection to our theme of the week, Artificial Intelligence on the big screen, we are here to celebrate science fiction cinema. As with the horror genre and to help ourselves a bit by narrowing down our options, we're cutting the list in two halves. Our dividing point is 1977, when two of the cinema's most enduring science fiction films were released:Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars ushering in an era of huge advances in popularity and visual effects technology. And yes, those are both science fiction films and your contrarian arguments will not be heard.
We were spoilt for choice for the second part of this poll, for the simple reason that far more science fiction films have been produced since 1977 than before it. Still, this first list is comprised of eleven films that have all become part of the canon and among the best in film history in any genre. Without further ado...
Team Experience Top Ten Best Science Fictions Film Produced Before 1977...
Tis I, Jason from MNPP, here, with another week's new edition of our "Beauty vs Beast" series. So over the next several days The Film Experience is going to be diving into the cinematic realm of Artificial Intelligence (known as "A.I." to people in a hurry and Haley Joel Osment fans), and to get the ball rolling I figured we'd make ourselves like science-fiction and hop in the way-back machine to the year 1927, when a little chap who went by the name Friedrich Christian Anton Lang, known to his friends as Fritz, made a little movie called Metropolis. In case you don't know the story, it goes like this: Boy meets Girl, Girl Gets Clones Into Evil Robot, Dystopian Nightmare Explodes, and a Kiss, The End. Somewhere in there dancing happens, and it is crazy awesome.
But thanks to a ferocious performance from actress Brigitte Helm you really couldn't get more of a clean split between the two Marias to choose from - Original Maria is all Goodness and Light, while her robot counterpart is Sex and Chaos. But what Sex and Chaos! Where does your heart belong?
Whose team are you on?
Team Maria0%
Team Robot-Maria0%
You have one week to vote!
PREVIOUSLY While I was out of town last week Nathaniel took the chance to sneak a musical (a genre I'm somewhat allergic to) in - can I just tell you that even though I've lusted for The Ten Commandments era Yul Brynner a'plenty I've never seen The King and I? So I'll be damned if I know the right choice for this round, but y'all went with Anna (Deborah Kerr) by only a slight margin (54%). Said Jija:
"I'm maybe biased because I'm Thai but I find Yul's performance ... irritating. I don't expect accurate history or anything. It's a very lovely musical but I can't get past his overacting, silly gestures and ..that accent. He's very cartoonish. Deborah Kerr, on the other hand, is everything."
We're going Sci-Fi (in part) and Artificial Intelligence especially in these last days of April. Here's Sebastian...
Here's a film featuring artificial intelligence very much unlike those in theaters right now: Jake Schreier's Robot & Frank (2012) starring Frank Langella as an aging man reluctantly learning to accept a robot, voiced by Peter Sarsgaard, taking care of him when he begins to show signs of dementia. Robot & Frank garnered some critical acclaim but didn't make much noise at the box office. It's a quiet film, a deliberate one, set in "the near future" with a sentient, talking robot as a title character. It might be labelled as science-fiction but it isn't actually all that interested in playing to that genre's tropes and familiar storytelling devices.
The exact year Robot & Frank is set in is never explicitly stated, but it can't be too far off into our future from what we see on screen. In fact the technological advances shown in the film aren't so much future as they are extremely current present. The phones, screens, cars, and appliances in Robot & Frank are of our time, they're just not common in our time. Some of those choices are made out of necessity by the film-makers – it's cheaper to have characters drive the very latest car models than make up and build new ones – but it also serves to give the world of the film a rich, lived-in feel that wouldn't be achieved if every single thing in it was new and shiny and ultimately strange to us. [More...]
Science fiction stories have wondered for ages if people will accept technology that simulates human behavior, but honestly, it probably won’t be much of a struggle. The robots will win in a walk. The urge to empathize is hard wired into the human psyche. I can remember when I was young, watching other kids develop deep emotional bonds to plastic eggs with crude blinking pixel displays just because they were called digital pets. What chance does the species have when a robot arrives with supermodel looks and a subtle range of emotion, one that can take you by the hand, gazes deeply into your eyes and say, “I love you” like it means it? Game over, man...
Thursday, April 23, 2015 at 6:30PM 
Dancin' Dan here to continue TFE's Artificial Intelligence Week with a little something on my favorite dancing robots.
