11 JULY, 2001: I’ve been making fun of the ‘I Love Sunsets’ movie for about half of my life, since they started running it at Northrock 6 when I was a teenager. You know the movie I’m talking about? "I love sunsets…" "Are you going to talk during the movie?" "No, I—" "Shhhh." And then a title comes up that says "Thank you for not talking during the movie." Gee, you’re welcome. Then, after a while, Northrock switched to this new one, showing this wacky fat guy talking to his hot blonde date (we all figured that she had to be his sister) about how last time, he talked during the whole movie, and deciding "You hold the Pepsi, I’ll hold the talking." Meanwhile, the Warren opened and brought back the sunset movie, and then, as of late, Northrock has stopped showing anything except commercials (don’t even get me started) and trailers. I don’t know if the Pepsi mention in their talking announcement collided with the Coke they sell at the concessions or what, but I’ve started to rethink my anti-sunset movie stance, because it seems to work at the Warren, and at Northrock, people can’t seem to shut the fuck up.

It’s not just the occasional comment or a little bit of chatter. When we went to see Steven Spielberg’s brilliant "A.I." on opening night, the couple next to us talked, in normal, conversational voices, from the beginning to the end of the fucking thing, mostly about the movie (helping each other’s feeble minds try to figure it out, I guess), but about other stuff as well. The girl on the other side of us had to be at least eighteen years old, but took it upon herself to giggle like a drunken twelve year old every time the character of Teddy, a robotic teddy bear, did or said ANYTHING. A little annoying by the end of the movie.

I was luckily able to tune it out and really lock in to one of Spielberg’s best films, the child of an already-legendary collaboration between the late Stanley Kubrick (who had been planning the movie for something like twenty years and waiting for the technology to make it possible) and Spielberg, who directed and wrote the screenplay (his first since "Close Encounters") from Kubrick’s extensive notes and ideas. That he has made a film that is closer in tone to Kubrick’s cold and subversive school of storytelling than his own warm and commercial one is both a masterful accomplishment and a decided gamble. The film’s love-it-or-hate-it reaction is not the least bit surprising to me, as I marveled as we left that it was, without question, Spielberg’s riskiest film to date.

I’ll skip the tedious plot summary, in the hope that you, like me, are fortunate enough to see the film without knowing more than the broad strokes of the story (robot boy, wants to be real, quests to do so, blah blah blah). I will say that Haley Joel Osment has officially passed the point where he must have the qualifier "child" slapped in front of his job description; he is simply an actor, and one of our best, of any age. Jude Law is nearly perfect in his surprisingly small role (he only appears in one of the film’s very clearly drawn three acts). And the whole show was nearly stolen, for me, by the aforementioned Teddy, whom I’ve heard correctly described as "the anti-Jar Jar", a fully realized, perfectly achieved computer generated character. Many visuals from this film will remained burned in my memory, but the one that will probably stick the longest is the simple, heartbreaking image of Teddy, sitting in his chair, threaded needle in paw and spools of thread at his side, sewing himself up. Perfect.

The whole movie is thoughtful, strangely beautiful. That riskiness I mentioned earlier may be what I liked the most about "A.I." (or "A.I. Artificial Intelligence", it’s full title). Yes, the film is too long. Yes, some sequences do not work. But these small failures are what make it fascinating. I saw an interview with Steven Soderbergh recently, where he spoke about the rough edges and accidents inherent in "Traffic’"’s handheld photography, and why they work—because otherwise you’ll do things until you get them perfect, and "perfection is boring". Usually, Spielberg thrives on perfection, but chanelling a filmmaker whose aesthetic is decidedly different than his has given him the freedom to make a looser, more fragmented, and in some ways more interesting film than the ones he’s made previous to it. And, by the same token, Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, known to do countless takes and spend years making a single film. What would his "A.I." have been like? I’m not sure, and sadly, we’ll never know. But I’ve got a sneaking suspicion, and I mean this as the highest compliment to both men, that we may have gotten the best possible version here.

The chatter factor was even worse at John Singleton’s "Baby Boy", but there’s this weird double standard where we’re supposed to "expect" a talky audience at "urban films"; it comes with the Wednesday openings and the extra sercurity and the signs on the box office, I swear to God, that stated that the Northrock 6 would not tolerate any gang affiliated colors and clothing. The chattiness of the audience was a little more distracting this time, particularly the ignorant bastard on the other side of the aisle from us, who burst into laughter and applause during the heartbreaking scene where the main character hit his girlfriend, and hollered out "NOT SNOOP DOGG!" when Snoop’s character was shot down towards the end. I had a sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t quite "getting" Singleton’s message.

And it was hard to miss. Maybe the audience felt free to chatter because the characters onscreen were so damn talky. "Baby Boy" though a fine film, is one of Singleton’s weakest films, predominately because of his reliance on nonstop, repetitious dialogue. It is awfully preachy—there were times when I recalled the Wayans brothers’ otherwise unsuccessful parody of "Boyz N The Hood" and other ‘hood movies, "Don’t’ Be A Menace to South Central etc. etc." wherein, every once in a while, Keenan Ivory Wayans would pop up after a preachy line and shout "Message!". But these moments are forgivable and, to a degree, expected from Singleton, who at least bothers to make thought-provoking films, and, to be sure, he tells a story here that is lived out on the streets of America daily but almost never makes its way into our multi-plexes.

The problem is that, in some ways, "Baby Boy" feels like more of a first film than "Boyz N The Hood", because it looks like the work of a director who has not yet learned to tell his stories visually. Too much of the film consists of people, in apartments or on telephones, talking about the plot—disturbing, because Singleton has shown himself to be a more than capable stylist, and indeed there are occasional flashes of brilliance in certain visual touches (the key opening image, of a young black man in the womb, or the baby rocking under its grandmother’s eye and she hears another careless sexual encounter in the next room) and a couple of wonderful scenes with no dialogue at all (particularly a late scene between Tyrese Gibson and Ving Rhames). Maybe Singleton is afraid that the message must be stated, boldly, to be clear, but he has never seemed a director who made movies for dumb audiences, and the thing that might ultimately be most troubling about "Baby Boy" is that it seems to be the first film where Singleton is talking down to us.

However, the Northrock chatterfest reached its peak last Friday when we took in "Kiss of the Dragon", a fine action film nearly ruined by the three most obnoxious men in the world, sitting right next to us, who talked, yelled at the screen, laughed inappropriately, and generally made a stunningly effective case for late-term abortion throughout the entire film. It’s one thing to hoot and holler and have a good time during the fight scenes; we all do that. It’s quite another to yell out stupifying responses to the dialogue and commentary on the characters during its many quieter scenes; they apparently thought they were clever, but their comments weren’t funny, and the film wasn’t bad, so it was kind of like watching "Mystery Science Theatre" starring Pauly Shore and Carrot Top.

The film’s biggest asset is it’s intelligent script, written by co-producer Luc Besson (who wrote and directed the excellent "The Professional" a few years back) and Robert Mark Kamen. Jet Li stars as a Chinese cop called in to help investigate a drug ring (or something; it’s never 100% clear) in Paris, where his police contact (Tcheky Kayro, who overplays as if he was dared by Besson to top Gary Oldman’s scenery-chewing in "The Professional") frames him for a murder to protect his own dirty-cop doings. It may sound hypocritical to say that the script is intelligent while running down a half-hazy basic cop story; what I mean is that it is not insulting, it draws characters with at least two dimensions, and it knows when to get the hell out of the way of the action. The fight sequences are breathtaking; Li’s natural charisma and athleticism are wonderous to behold, and are given a much better showcase here than in last year’s over-edited and over-effected "Romeo Must Die".

What do these consecutive poor movie-going experiences tell me, besides to avoid Northrock or that the stupid sunset movie might make a difference? I know what I hope they don’t mean. In the midst of this period, I went to see "crazy/beautiful" at the Warren, and was struck by how the girls in front of me chatted, giggled, and left for minutes on end to take and make cell phone calls. Back in the 70’s, Pauline Kael wondered if Americans were infected by a "fear of movies", staying away from American films that might challenge or disturb them. They did, and still do. However, I think there’s a worse infection coarsing through our theatres these days-- an "indifference to movies", which leads people to talk through them, talk to them, take calls at them, and only see the ones which everyone else sees. So what if you miss most of the movie engaging in these other activities? To these people, movies aren’t an art. They’re just something to do.