Word: driverless
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...Nomad is unquestionably the most successful attempt at robotic exploration ever attempted. Looking something like a driverless dune buggy, Nomad weighs 1,200 pounds and measures 2.4 meters square. It's built around a chassis that mechanically changes shape to conform to the demands of the landscape, and each of its studded, snow-tired wheels has an independent motor. It's powered by a gasoline generator and makes a top speed of .5 meters per second...
...watch and marvel. Watch any of the wonderful stunts: balancing on a three-man pyramid in Neighbors, say, or careering over collapsing bridges on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle in Sherlock Jr. Watch, and see how beautifully the impossible can be made both visible and risible. The wonder is that the same person had the sharp mind to conceive these amazements and the supple body to perform them. When Buster Keaton got them all to work together--his mind, his body, his intelligent love for film--anything was possible...
...ride is bookended with a pair of thrill sequences, either one of which would provide enough of a plot for most movies. Speed begins with a crowded elevator that is sometimes in free fall and is rigged to explode at a certain floor, and it ends with a driverless subway running out of control, the heroine helpless inside...
...past. His wife, his mistress, his dead son and his surviving one, the theater managers who wronged him and the leading men he saw as his incompetent rivals, all are evoked by Kingsley in brisk, meticulous sketches. Too brisk, perhaps: melodramatic incidents rumble past like a fleet of driverless stagecoaches. And interspersed are snatches of Kean's most famous soliloquies, none long enough to allow Kingsley to shift into character. It might be a Shakespeare's Greatest Hits album hawked on late-night...
...opera, with Lee Iacocca as chief of the sad clowns, and a cast of thousands unemployed. Art imitates death. The Solid Gold Cadillac disintegrates pathetically into My Mother the Car, then goes nuts entirely. In 1977 Hollywood produces The Car, a movie equally moronic and spellbinding, in which a driverless sedan plays mass murderer. No Freudians necessary. The only medium to keep the faith is television, always a cultural anachronism, with the cop shows half consumed with cars chasing cars. Even here the four-wheeled protagonists carom off walls a lot and wind up as junk. The machine is dead...