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I've got a bone to pick with Banana Republic's advertising department.
It's about their new summer billboard that you see as you're coming off
the Bay Bridge and entering San Francisco. If you've taken this route
recently you might have noticed it, as they appear to be selling tits and
pussy. A photograph of a woman is placed next to a photo of an exotic
flower being held by its stem. The woman meets the gaze of the viewer in
what is meant to be a sultry manner. Her hair is damp and tousled and her
eyes are smudged. She is falling out of her top. You can't really tell
what she's wearing at all due to how the photo is cropped. The exotic
flower in the photograph next to her face is unabashedly suggestive of
female genitalia. Very artfully done, but breasts and vagina nonetheless.
Objectification does not become you, BR. Maybe the execs had no sense of
how this ad would translate when placed on a huge billboard, but I have a
feeling they knew exactly what they were doing. I'm reminded of the
Campari ad that so offended me a few years back where they painted a naked
woman orange and pictured her with a huge slice of orange held
strategically across her butt. Woman as consumable commodity. Lovely.
Slightly less offensive is the new Spielberg movie A.I., though
within five minutes of the opening credits I was groaning and rolling my
eyes in pain. My prejudices were firmly set in advance on account of my
being a huge Kubrick fan, and I went into the film with no small amount of
apprehension. I'll definitely give Spielberg credit for trying to make a
very ambitious movie, a futuristic fairy tale about a prefabricated boy
searching for love. Haley Joel Osment was perfect as David the robot boy,
and I definitely need to get around to seeing him in The Sixth
Sense. Jude Law too makes his every moment on film a sheer delight.
In fact, the middle section of the movie in which Law's Gigolo Joe
character is prominently featured is close to perfect. As many reviewers
have noted, A.I. feels like three very different movies cobbled
together haphazardly. The middle is great with its dark tone and touches
of camp, but the beginning and end are kludgy as all hell. Spare us the
painful exposition! The cloying voiceovers! The swelling music! The
audience in my theater was laughing out loud at what were intended to be
wrenching emotional moments, and I don't think I've ever seen Spielberg
lapse in his judgments as severely as he does in this film. Believe it or
not, though, I'm glad I saw it, and I cautiously recommend it. Even
better than the movie itself were the previews we were treated to in
advance: The Fellowship of the Ring, Ghost World, and
Harry Potter. Those were worth the price of admission right there.
Speaking of artificial intelligence, I went to the opening of the
"LifeLike" show at New Langton Arts Thursday evening after work, and I
liked what I saw there. The gallery literature insists that the ten
artists involved in the exhibit "do not create artificial life; rather
they blur the distinction between natural and man-made processes, working
in the liminal spaces where seemingly disparate arts, disciplines, and
systems merge." Right. What that translates into in this case,
fortunately, is a lot of interesting art. In my favorite piece I entered
a darkened room in a corner of the gallery. As I struggled to determine
who or what else was in that space with me, the first thing I made out was
a faint whirring sound coming from the floor. I looked down and saw
bulbous dark forms making their way across the floor, leaving glowing
trails across the darkness. Other neat things included a glass panel not
unlike the one at the Chabot Space Center that illustrated the swirling
currents of subduction, two vaguely sexual creatures moaning at each other
from separate television sets, and Stephanie Syjuco's technical drawings
of computer equipment that I found strangely absorbing.
A.I.
Mapping the Web Infome
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Heidi J. De Vries
