Word: automaton
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...even some real people - saw the film's popularity as some triumph of the clones. It's not that the killer-toy action adventure was a bad movie, though it was, but that it amassed its fortune almost by rote, as if its title alone, promising to duplicate the automaton thrills of its predecessor, justified laying down money for it. Transformers 2 didn't enter the national consciousness; it anaesthetized it. Nobody buzzed about the movie, but everybody saw it. The industry, it seemed, had finally figured out a way to mass-produce blockbusters. Pringles pictures on the grand scale...
...Third Kind popularized astronomer J. Allen Hynek's classification of alien encounters. The third kind was contact. The fourth is abduction. We're reminded of this at the beginning of the new movie. Then Milla Jovovich (taking a big step down from her celebrity-making role as the gorgeous automaton in The Fifth Element) tells us she'll be impersonating a Nome psychiatrist, Abigail Emily Tyler. At times a split screen shows Jovovich as Tyler on the right, consulting with her patients, and "actual footage" of the allegedly actual Dr. Tyler on the left...
...Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, esteemed psychologist Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, notes that we usually conceive of emotions as diseases: we say we are "mad with rage," for instance, or "sick with love." We think the ideal economic decision maker is an analytical automaton. But Keltner, who has made a career of studying the social effects of our emotions, says emotional behavior is sometimes just what we need...
...Black Mass” ultimately fails to answer how realism will empower us. Gray’s advice to take up “stoical determination and intellectual detachment” is vague and leaves us wondering how it would be better if President Bush were a well-oiled automaton instead of an ardent neo-conservative utopian. Gray offers a convincing and incisive critique of utopian thought, but his solution is hardly any better...
...Viswanathan is not a fan of this approach. “You can put the girl in couture,” one of the Haute Bitchez tells Opal, “but you can’t put the couture in the girl.” Similarly, put the automaton in Manolo Blahniks and all you get is an automaton in uncomfortable shoes...