AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Tymon Sutton The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

robotbling (www.plasticpals.com) Rather than making one really good short film, director Greg Pak decided to film all four of his robot-themed short stories and compile them into one film.The first story, My Robot Baby, follows a couple as they take home a robot baby to show they are responsible enough to handle a real one. It's not a bad concept for a robot-themed film, and is a plausible scenario that will be familiar to anyone who had to take care of an egg for a sex ed class. As it turns out, the robot baby looks quite a bit like a football-sized egg with cardboard eyes stuck onto it. Despite the cheesy props the story does contain some interesting ideas, like when the robot's "mother" reprograms the bot so that it automatically takes care of itself. Unfortunately the concept was better explored and in much greater detail in Steven Spielberg's A.I., and it quickly dissolves into a silly suspense film when the baby robot runs amok late at night.The second story, The Robot Fixer, isn't really about robots at all. A distraught mother is visiting her comatose son, who has been hit by a car. While cleaning up his apartment, she and her daughter find his collection of robot toys. The mother decides to complete her son's collection in a symbolic bid to put her son back together. By the time this one was over I was ready to stop watching this turd, so I did.

Dockelektro Great ideas for making us think about our times are the triumph of this picture. Made of four short stories, it offers us projections, realities, and premonitions. Each story ends up being very significant of some spectres of the man / machine interdependence. Slowly paced, shot on video, it looks like it's not very exciting, but still has a lot to take from it, with some patience. The two initial stories, the first about a couple that have to adopt a furby-like machine to prove that they are able to adopt a real baby, the second about a mother who starts completing his comatose son's toy robot collection, are the weakest. The two final stories (one about an android who develops human feelings and the other about a man dying in a world where you no longer die, but instead you're uploaded), are the strongest, even if at a minimal level. So, the real achievements of "Robot Stories" are discrete, and very minimal. But it still pays off.

hapa-1 Caught the film at a special preview in Los Angeles. Four Twilight-Zonish stories with themes spanning birth to death. Particularly liked Tamlyn Tomita in "My Robot Baby" and the amazing actress who played the grieving mother in "The Robot Fixer." It's incidentally the best looking tape-to-film transfer I've ever seen.

mindeyed You will be thoroughly confused if you get hooked in on the one-liner that promotes Robot Stories; Love, Death & Robots or something to that effect. It confused the hell out of me when 3 friends and I went out of our way to attend the screening. Robot Stories is set around four stories all shot on digital video. The stories are bland, campy and utterly boring. Any attempt at an artistic or original plots or vision is null and void with this film and director. It seems that Robot Stories is unfortunately another product of a $60,000.00 a year film school education. I'd also like to add that the VC film festival made it very difficult for people to purchase tickets during the last few days before the film. It's very annoying to drive long distances and not know if the show is going to be sold out.