Word: robots
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Instead, the idiosyncratic universe of "Scud" is generated out of a bizarre fusion of selected elements of the popular culture of the last decade or so: action movies, popular music, noir films, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, Japanese robot cartoons. The resonances evoke the increasingly trendy ideas of a sort of "geek chic," based on the artifacts of mainstream male teenage culture of the 1980s and early 90s, overlaid with a technophilic edge: it's a world born out of John Woo movies, computer hacking and the fandom of comic books themselves. It's a universe in which attitude is everything...
...premise of the "Scud" series itself is typical of the comic: delightfully simple yet utterly absurd. In the hyper-violent, super-capitalistic universe of the future, a corporation called ScudCo manufactures "disposable assassins": three coins deposited in a vending machine will get you a robot designed to be the perfect killer, which will demolish your enemy and then self-destruct as soon as it's accomplished its mission (planned obsolescence, after all, is what makes consumer culture go). Our hero is a typical Scud robot assassin, bought by a middle manager who needs to get rid of a hideous mutant...
...cloning. Nor did screenwriter Joss Whedon (of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer) neglect to provide her with a spaceship of fools who refuse to believe her warnings of impending carnage. He has even given Ripley a soul sister (Winona Ryder) to bond with. O.K., she's a robot, but she's got a heart of gold as well as buns of steel...
...newest version of Microsoft's browser--the one that for other reasons got Gates in such hot water with Janet Reno--reverses the relationship: the Web comes to you. After you subscribe to various Web publications by clicking on a box in the new browser, a software robot employed by Microsoft scurries around gathering the latest version of those Web pages and then, periodically, "pushes" the information down the Net to your computer. The idea behind so-called push media is that you don't have to remember to go to, say, Slate every day; the new parts will...
...very title is mystifying. It seems to belong on a memoir by a minor, faintly boring old poet. It perches rather uneasily atop a story in which Robert, a sweet, dim maintenance man (a woofly Ewan McGregor), replaced by a robot, decides to revenge himself on his rich, cruel boss (Ian Holm) by kidnapping the boss's daughter Celine (a sleek Cameron Diaz). She, naturally, turns out to be spoiled, smart, willful and eager to collaborate in ripping off Daddy...