Tag Archives: Technology

Desk Set Review

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It’s time for another classic comedy movie and this is one that has definitely aged pretty well. It’s fun seeing the battle between worker and technology although the machine is definitely set up to fail quite a bit here. It’s a fun movie with a lot of fast paced dialogue and likable characters. At the end of the day it may have less depth than some other titles but works out well enough for me.

The movie starts by introducing us to a mysterious guy named Richard. He’s walking from department to department of a big company and nobody really knows what he is doing here. He spends the most time over by the reference section where he has everybody nervous. The head of the department is Bunny and her team has always done an all star job here. Why should big business have anything to say about it? Well, they are throwing in a machine to replace the humans and get things even more efficient. Can she prove that humans are more than a match for any machine?

It’s the classic dilemma of man vs machine. It’s always a classic debate but at the end of the day you can’t really stall progress. In the short run things will get real disrupted of course but in the long term it just ends up working out. That’s really how these things always go. That being said, you can fight it for a little while and Bunny does bring up a good point that this section is one of the last where you would be able to use a robot. Here’s how the job goes: Someone calls in asking for the answer to a fun fact, then the worker goes and finds the answer.

It’s a very labor intensive section but one that is difficult to automate because the circumstances are different every time. Using a machine for payroll? Sure that makes sense but for something like this in the short term it will only create more work. Particularly since in this movie the characters know all of the answers almost off hand and the few that they don’t are easy to find. For the robot you have to type in the question, then wait for it to print out the response. Additionally you have to make sure that all of the details are right and then input the corrections.

There is no way to stop an answer once it has started and the machine is super fragile. You could say that it was really set up for failure. Now there is a twist about the robot near the end but I would say that the twist doesn’t even make much sense. It may have some slight utility in helping out but the negatives outweigh the positives. For starters it takes up a vast amount of space and it’s quite loud. It would definitely mess up the office atmosphere without a doubt.

As the main character, Bunny does a good job of proving why humans are still needed at this point in time. She does an incredible job of remembering details and locating the answers to things in a cinch. She has so much experience and genius that she could probably have risen to CEO status if she felt the urge to do so. It’s why her coworkers get annoyed when she is being used by Mike the whole time. He doesn’t seem to appreciate her intellect except for when it benefits h8im like in writing papers. He sort of takes her for granted and is always canceling their dates.

You can certainly cut some slack when there is a job that has you on call but the problem is how these occurrences are so regular. Additionally, to be dating for I think they said 8 years and not proposing is crazy. I know some do the whole endless dating routine but to me 1 year is pretty much good enough. By then you should have made up your mind. Ignoring any special circumstances or exceptions, you shouldn’t be dating for longer than that without making things solid.

So Mike’s not very likable but Bunny is a little at fault here for being to patient. I would also say this is what prevents the main romance from being any good because even up to the final scene she seems prepared to go back with Mike and it takes Richard speaking up to prevent her from this. Good on Richard for making his move but I would have liked to have seen more initiative out of Bunny.

Meanwhile Richard doesn’t always look that great here. I know he had orders about not telling anyone why he is here and about the computer but at the same time when you are hanging out with a group for so long, you can’t just suddenly show up with a new computer and expect them to be okay with this. He took way too long to try and explain himself. Some things he could not anticipate like the glitch where everyone thought they got fired but explaining himself more would have helped.

I will say though that the workers didn’t make themselves look great in getting so drunk at the party. If you’re going to do that, you should probably at least have some signs up about how work is paused for the day. I’m guessing there was probably no voicemail back then so there’s nothing you can do about the ringing phones but at least it’s clear this way that everyone is occupied. It seems like otherwise this was a very unofficial kind of thing. I am glad that they all get to have fun though, most Christmas parties don’t tend to get quite so wild at the office.

While Richard didn’t handle some things well, he was a very entertaining character though. I liked that he was actually fairly aggressive with Mike when the guy showed up on the stormy night. Richard may be forgetful but at least he’s more direct than some of the characters and he adds a lot to the humor. A comedy has to be funny after all and he always ensures that it is. I also liked Bunny’s supporting cast. They were all good at their jobs and had developed personalities. While they may not get to do too much in the story, they all felt like real characters as opposed to just being there to fill out the cast.

Overall, Desk Set is a pretty fun film. It all may be dramatized a tad but hey that’s what you’d expect out of a comedy. The romance tends to be on the weaker side and the characters may not always be responsible but you should still have a pretty fun time all the way through. The film’s pacing is pretty good as well so it never dwells on any scene for too long. It may feel like the kind of film that you will quickly forget after watching it but that’s okay. It’s the kind of movie that you have a good time with even if there isn’t much to discuss afterwards.

Overall 7/10

Electric Dreams Review

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Electric Dreams is one of those films that is trying really hard to balance out the comedy and romance perfectly. The problem though is it usually can’t get this just right and leans more on the comedy angle. That’s not necessarily a problem but the romance ends up being very poorly written and even some of the jokes don’t make too much sense. The film is trying very hard but I don’t think the humor has aged particularly well and at times you’re almost wondering what the main conflict of the movie even is. It feels like there wasn’t as much tension/drama as you would expect and it’s not like there is an end of the world threat going on. It just feels a bit aimless.

The movie starts off by introducing us to Miles who is an architect and he helps by planning out different ideas. He is not very tech savvy though and is super behind the times so it’s time to finally buy a computer. He gets one and almost immediately blasts it with some champagne. This causes the computer to turn into a sentient A.I. named Edgar. Edgar can do just about anything and has some really nice musical skills. This attracts a musician named Madeline who falls for Miles and he is rather enjoying the attention so he decides to lie to her about this. Edgar is upset because he likes Madeline and it’s his music so he decides to start causing some havoc. Meanwhile there is already a guy in the band known as Bill who is with Madeline. Which of the 3 guys will be able to claim her?

The first thing you have to realize here is that none of the characters are even remotely likable. Miles is the kind of guy who is mild mannered among the cast except with Madeline where he will yell at her at the drop of a hat. He’s definitely rather rude at times and lying to her about the music the whole time is pretty rough. Yes, he tries to come clean once or twice initially and Madeline doesn’t believe him but what you have to remember is that she’s not very smart at all. Miles continues to lie more and more about basically everything and that’s not a good look for him either. Miles is just not the guy you would really want to hang around. He feels way too sorry for himself and is the kind of guy who would get corrupted by a super computer immediately. The fact that Edgar is dominating him the whole time is crazy.

Miles is also too desperate for Madeline the whole time. Even after going backstage and seeing Bill having his fun with her, Miles is excited for the date coming up? Shouldn’t he talk to Madeline or confront Bill? Bill’s the most random inclusion in the film to be honest because there is really no point for this guy to be here. He’s only here to complicate matters and probably has less than 5 minutes of screentime. His appearance also makes Madeline look bad as a result.

Madeline should have set boundaries and cleared everything up right in that first scene instead of letting Miles be obviously awkward about the whole thing. Madeline is also one of the least intelligent heroines I’ve seen in a while as she misinterprets everything and has no clue what is going on. Yeah you could say that’s part of the comedy to which I would say it’s not very well written comedy. Madeline doesn’t seem particularly loyal or trustworthy with how quickly she gets into relationships. Also, her reaction of grinning when Miles wrecked her big concert (Thanks to Edgar) was completely bizarre.

Imagine someone making a lot of noise during your big performance and you’re just grinning. The alternate answer is that she didn’t hear what was happening, but everyone in the audience could and the conductor could, so is her hearing bad? The issues continue to mount over and over again. So as you can probably guess I wasn’t exactly rooting for the relationship to work out here. Seems like it’ll be really toxic and not be a good long term plan.

Finally you have Edgar who is super whiny the whole time. He wants to know about love and he wants Madeline to be with him but the guy is a program. Why is he so desperate here? He practically starts crying after a while. He has a good time messing with Miles but at the end of the day is unable to finish him off. So much for computer power. At least by the end of the film he figures out a way to expand his reach so instead of just annoying a few characters, now he can annoy the entire planet. That’s definitely one way to make your mark on the world.

It feels like you could have come up with a much more compelling storyline here if you really wanted to. It doesn’t even have to be the usual thriller kind of story where the machines take over. Just have it be a more intense rival that doesn’t whine so much. Give Madeline more agency, cut out Bill, and also make Miles more likable. Basically you just need to switch a whole lot of elements about the film and then this could be a good one. At its core you could say it’s a writing issue. The writing in the movie just isn’t good.

Overall, Electric Dreams is not a particularly good film. It’s a comedic film that is trying too hard and doesn’t end up being very funny. It felt like the movie didn’t exactly know what its end game was for a while there. I’m not saying you had to have some kind of a big and ambitious plot the whole time but the movie absolutely could have done something to stand out more here. The best thing I can say for it is that it does make using the computer really fun the whole time. I liked the graphics and how everything was voice activated. When Edgar turned on a Pac Man simulation to beat up Miles that was also pretty fun. We should have had more of this, direct man vs machine. You may be thinking that it should be easy to just smash the CPU but Miles makes that look like an absolutely impossible challenge the whole time.

Overall 4/10

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets Review

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Time to check out a recent Sci-Fi film by the name of Valerian. I remember seeing the trailer a few times but being skeptical as to whether it’d be good or not. It looked like the kind of movie that would rely on weird environments and good visuals over the story or good characters. I wasn’t really wrong on some of that and the characters are pretty bad, but the film is reasonable. At the very least the film is pretty fast paced.

The film starts off with our two main characters, Valerian and Loreline. They are tasked with collecting a money hedgehog and do so after beating up everyone involved with the transaction. During a universal peace conference they are attacked by a group of blue beings who were thought to be long extinct. The heroes head off to stop them but they may be in for a political war that is above their pay grade.

Valerian is unfortunately a pretty bad main character. He’s a serious flirt who even has a playlist of everyone he has “conquered.” That’s as bad as it sounds. His next target is Loreline and he is slowly breaking through her defenses. Even aside from his morally disappointing personality, he isn’t even that strong. He is portrayed as an elite agent who never fails and that’s why he is supremely confident. Yet, in his first mission in the film he has to be rescued by Loreline because he made a bunch of rookie mistakes and got wrecked. It’s something that happens a little too often in live action productions where the hype characters simply can’t live up to their reputation. He just never becomes a good character which is unfortunate.

Loreline is the main heroine and I can’t say that she is any better. She is also supposed to be a hype character as well as the “tough” one in the group. This is quickly negated as she loses to Valerian in wrestling during the opening minute. She gets her ”burns” in as she mocks him and his playlist but knowing about it just makes her inevitable pairing with Valerian even worse. She also spends the entire film glaring which is certainly trying a little too hard to be tough.

It’s the side characters who are a little better as is sometimes the case. The main villain is a political General from the army who covered up a bunch of murders. He keeps his confident persona even when being attacked and threatened. He makes a good speech at the end and is always many steps ahead of the other characters. He was playing chess while they were playing checkers. One weird moment was when he was kidnapped though. The whole time I figured it was part of his plan, but it seems unlikely by the end. I guess he just wasn’t ready for the aliens to make their move.

Naturally the film has to force in a very long strip show scene which introduces a shape shifting character. Not only is this the worst way to introduce a character but this is a sci-fi trope that needs to die. It seems like a bunch of alien based films love to show off the costumes or cgi by including a scene like this or set pieces where everyone forgets to dress out well. It’s something that should never happen as if you feel a need to show off your animation then it probably wasn’t very good to begin with. The character is all right I guess but her role is rather small and needlessly tragic. I didn’t really see a point to her dying. It doesn’t work for shock value since we didn’t know her and from a narrative perspective it had no impact on any of the characters.

This film apparently had a really big budget and I think it was misplaced. Through my followings with RWBY, I’ve gotten to see a lot about how a budget is spent in terms of animation and how it is often not worth it. You can spend a significant chunk on a cgi landscape with a lot of NPCs in the background. Those guys don’t matter so why spend budget on them? I’d say that a budget should be spent primarily on fight scenes, backgrounds are secondary. This film had some nice backgrounds, but a good chunk of it was in a very ancient desert planet and then on a beach with no technology. So I’m assuming that the bulk of the budget was spent on Valerian running through various worlds in the quick 5 minute scene. Using up a huge budget on a minor scene is just not worth it and using practical effects would possibly have cut the budget in half then. The sci-do guns look good and the fight scene where Valerian takes on a bunch of ogres was good. Use the budget for that instead and have a super speed battle where he is zipping around then at lightning speed and dodging energy blasts. Now that would be hype!
I have to question how useful the cannon tech from the first scene was as well. Sure, the villains were pretty scared of Valerian and he was invisible so they had a hard time hitting him but he was still there and would have been destroyed if he couldn’t jack out. An impressive piece of tech to be sure and virtual reality has certainly peaked in this universe but the heroes may want to start thinking of better security options.

The robots made for pretty good minions for the main villain. They would have been perfect if they had also been bulletproof. As it stands, Valerian was able to dish out the pain against these guys but they got a lot of the aliens in the process. The aliens really shouldn’t have just walked outside while defenseless in front of the enemy. They were practically asking to be shot and I get how they’re pacifists and all, but at least do the peace thing behind the magical barrier. Alls well that ends well for the survivors though so at least the race isn’t extinct.

As mentioned earlier, Valerian’s best strength is in the film’s quick pacing. It’s over 2 hours, but the movie never drags on and you’ll stay entertained the whole time. It may make its share of mistakes and so I wouldn’t call it a good movie, but at least it’s a fun one the way that Resident Evil is enjoyable. The two are still in completely different leagues when it comes to quality as well. I think there could be some potential for a sequel here since there’s a lot you can do in space, but I want them to head to a high tech world that can take advantage of the future setting. Also, give the main actor/actress some more sleep before filming next time. They look dead tired in every scene of the film to the point where I’m sure they must have gone through many takes for each scene.

Overall, Valerian is one of those movies that just tries to throw a lot of things at the screen and hopes they will stick. Unfortunately it is very 50/50 in this regard. The film needed more action scenes and choosing a desert planet and then a beach planet when the film is supposed to be futuristic was a mistake. Get some better characters and then we can really begin thinking of a sequel. Until then, this film will need to stay under the radar as we open the way for other sci-fi films. If you just want a film where you get a future setting then I suppose this is a film worth checking out. There weren’t too many films that take place in the future this year. If you want a better film about the future, check out the DBZ Trunks movie.

Overall 5/10