Word: robotization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is a measure of irony in the robot industry's plight. Although industrial robots account for only 2% of the $24 billion factory-automation business (such items as computers and other electronically controlled industrial machinery make up much of the rest), the mechanical menials have drastically altered many sectors of the American workplace. Robots perform more than 98% of the spot welding on Ford's highly successful Taurus and Sable cars. At Doehler-Jarvis, a major Ohio metal fabricator, robots load and unload die-casting machines, trim parts and ladle molten metal. At IBM factories across the country, robots...
...showpiece of the operation was the Navy's Deep Drone, a sophisticated undersea robot. The drone was connected to the U.S. Navy tug Apache by an umbilical cord that transmitted commands and returned data from an array of cameras and sensors to shipboard computers and monitors. An acoustical locating system, accurate to within 20 in., will guide scientists in assembling a photomosaic of the more than 2,000 high-resolution still photographs the drone has taken of the ship's hull. In addition, a sonar scan will be used to make a false-color three-dimensional computer...
...relationship that develops between Frankie and Ulysses, her robot dreamboat, is pleasant but conventionally screwball. This seems rather dismaying, considering that Director Seidelman showed such a fresh eye and so much wayward comic originality in 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan...
...scientist who created Ulysses, and the mechanical marvel himself. The former is a ferocious misanthrope, misogynist and klutz; the latter is, naturally and logically, everything his master cannot hope to be. He moves, for example, not with the herky-jerky nervousness of his creator or a too cute movie robot. Instead, Malkovich invests him with a preternatural smoothness. His character is equally subtle. It may be based on the wise-child conventions on which the typical sci-fi robot is modeled. But Malkovich informs and energizes his performance with the deadpan bravery, the relentless will, the invincible ignorance...
...gambit is brilliant, for surely a robot would feel exactly what a human two-year-old feels as he sets forth on the exploration of his strange newfound world. Malkovich gives a wonderful performance where we do not expect one, and it makes the rest of the film problematic. On one hand, it grants the picture a distinction it would not otherwise enjoy. On the other hand, it is a continual reminder of just how routine the rest of the movie is. In effect, his performance, together with Seidelman's former success, creates an expectation of sustained comic brilliance that...