Change Your Image
Hutch48-2
Reviews
Schande (1999)
Harrowing, hard to forget
This is one of the most disturbing yet accurate portrayals of child sexual abuse that I have ever seen. It underlines how much the child victim is psychologically at the mercy of the perpetrator, and how indelible are the scars of guilt and shame which the abuse creates. It left me shaking. If your standard of TV drama is the ABC Disease-of-the-Month weepie, then see this German made-for-TV movie (broadcast as OUTRAGE on French-language TV in Ontario) and learn how it ought to be done. There are no happy endings or trite plot resolutions. The characters, even the sympathetic ones, are flawed, self-absorbed. The performance by child actress Stephanie Charlotta Koetz as the abused child Bernice is quite overwhelming. Don't miss it if you get a chance.
Bicentennial Man (1999)
Isaac Asimov would be appalled ...
Isaac Asimov would be appalled to see the fate of his almost-human robot, Andrew Martin, at the hands of Hollywood, the great vulgarizer. Given a robot's longevity, what human ideal could be striven after in a way which human mortality and decay currently make impossible? Why, falling in love and having decades of great sex, that's what! The spirit which turned HEIDI into a police chase in 1937 is still alive and well. The orgasm may be the current godlet of choice in North America (especially Southern California), but Asimov's (and humanity's) vision is not quite so narrow. To be fair, the film does show, if obliquely, some of the tireless agape-style love which the First Law of Robotics implies. Asimov's Three Laws (see the Trivia section) are introduced in the first few minutes, as is right and proper, but they are never exploited as cunningly or as consistently as Asimov employed them. (SPOILER) For example, a very old Portia orders the robot Galatea to unplug her from life support after Andrew dies. She acquiesces promptly, without any argument or resistance, in complete defiance of the First Law ("A robot may not harm a human being."). The scene could have been played, to great emotional effect, with Portia explaining that not permitting her to die, with Andrew gone, would in fact be allowing her to come to harm. And then there's the "robot-as-nigger-of-the-world" theme. By the Second Law, a robot must obey the command of any human. During Andrew's long odyssey to discover his own kind, did he never run into any humans who took advantage of his obedient robot nature? As the late Dr. Asimov himself said in the original "Bicentennial Man" story collection in 1976, "I don't like to get tangled up with the visual media directly. They've got money, but that's all they've got." This film, unfortunately, opts for lightness and superficiality when it could be so much more profound. And it's a shame we don't get to see anyone impersonate the redoubtable Dr. Susan Calvin of U.S. Robotics. Nevertheless, the film's surface is admittedly gorgeous. Seeing how the future develops, the aircars and futuristic cityscapes, is a blast. The performances are good, especially Sam Neill as Sir and Oliver Platt as the lugubrious robotics genius whom Andrew finances and partners. But the film starts to go downhill into improbable territory pretty much as soon as Robin Williams gets skin.