Word: android
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...older daughter Jingwen (Faye Wong), pining over a broken affair with a Japanese man (Takuya Kimura). She encourages Chow, a journalist who writes erotic books on the side, to switch to science fiction. Soon she is helping him write a novel called 2046, in which Chow creates an android version of Jingwen. The novel is set in a futureworld where people go to recapture lost memories. Chow can't escape his memories: of Su Lizhen and another woman with the same name, a casino gambler (Gong Li) who once did him the favor of allowing him to fall in love...
...simulacrum that makes Sonny the film's most complex and human character--granted, by default--and sets him apart from the killer "can openers" in pursuit of Spooner. There's a nifty car chase, with the cop (in an Audi, its logo prominently displayed) set upon by a vicious android posse. Even if the scene is not up there with the 14-min. freeway free-for-all in the second Matrix movie, it's a smart, vigorous blend of live action and computer graphics...
...Robot - "suggested by" Isaac Asimov's pioneer collection of short stories published in 1950 - is another gloss on Blade Runner. The cop here is Spooner (Will Smith), investigating the death by defenestration of an inventor (James Cromwell) days before his company's new line of "automated domestic assistants" - home androids - is to be unveiled. Because he's the standard cop-hero sociopath and also because he just can't stand robots, Spooner suspects everyone. Dammit, he suspects anything modern. As the U.S. Robots boss (Bruce Greenwood) says, "You would have banned the Internet simply to keep the libraries open." Spooner...
...that constitute the experience of being alive in 2004 while providing mordant insights into how our experiences are relentlessly manipulated by advertising and marketing executives. Sure, it feels good when the flight attendant in business class pays you special attention-but Kunzru's protagonist detects the hypocrisy in her "android charm, the way this disciplined female body reminded him that it was just a tool, the uniformed probe-head of the large corporate machine in which he was enmeshed...
...darker and more ambitious piece of filmmaking is Casshern, which was released in April. Based on a 1970s animated series, the movie depicts an Orwellian dystopia where mankind is threatened with destruction by robots and mutants of its own creation, and humanity's only hope is the idealistic android Casshern. Though the premise is run-of-the-mill sci-fi and the actors often sound absurdly bombastic, the movie is visually breathtaking. Director Kazuaki Kiriya brings to life a sooty, machine-age hell that's all grinding gears, clanking metal and monolithic buildings swathed in Cyrillic characters. The fact that...