Teknolust (2002)

Best movie of this year hands down!

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Well, it is science fiction, woman-centric in concept and execution. It features an abundance of Tilda Swinton.So it should be something worth watching. Yes? But I have to warn you off. This is written and directed by someone with such a shallow understanding of the issues involved that it is a self-parody. There are some truly interesting concepts that could have been explored if the science in this science fiction was actual science — or even if the concepts had been coherent and the writing good.The general idea here is that seduction, identity, experience, cinema and something she calls "technology" are coupled in a way that matters and is interesting and embodied in a "virus." Also that what it means to be a woman and to desire desire circumnavigates these four points of a compass.Although Tilda is more than capable of layered seduction, what we have here is manikin attraction. There is no hint of real seduction, either among the characters or with the audience. There are copious references to films, important and influential films. But they might as well have been posters on the wall as they are not integrated in any way with the film we see.The real problem is that the idea of self-aware beings, vlogs (here called "portals"), human and computer viruses, DNA, and semen are somehow conflated as if they somehow were equivalent. Tilda stars as a young woman in a university near San Francisco who is a programmer/AI researcher. She is a hidden genius who is profoundly lonely, so creates three clones of herself, independent robots consisting of code made flesh. The three each "are" a primary color and are named so. Tilda plays these women as well. At night, they "download" selected seduction scenes from movies as dreams, but are generally bored as they are cooped up in our genius's basement. Oh, our genius is named Rosetta Stone. One of the replicants, Ruby, goes out at night — Jess Franco-like — and harvests semen from males she seduces by repeating scenes from movies. The semen is needed to feed the clones and to reinforce their immune systems. Those systems are "infected" with the virus that created them — the self-replicating virus being what brought them into being. The men in question become infected with this virus, which leaves them impotent and with a bar code on their foreheads.I'm not making any of this up.After several dozen cases of infected men show up, some goofy agency is called that inspects these sorts of things, and a gaggle of incompetent males is flummoxed. At the end, the key investigator is seduced by our heroine (the real one), while our vampiress falls in love with a guy who works on a "duplicating machine" (what we would call a xerox).Oh, the investigative agency calls in a disenfranchised expert: "Dirty Dick" played by a sixty two year old Karen Black, who scopes things out, but does not interfere.So much of this is designed to resonate with me, just by the accident of what I do and who I am. But it is such incompetent storytelling, so lacking in seduction and coherence, so empty of insight that it harms, a disease. "The Love Virus," is better, as bad as it is.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

TEKNOLUST (3 outta 5 stars) Reading a synopsis of this movie you'd think it was some strange-sounding porno... or a wacky comedy. A lonely, nerdy female scientist replicates herself into a trio of cybernetic copies. In order to live, these "clones" need regular doses of male chromosomes, found only in male sperm. So the eldest copy goes out into the world, collecting samples for the sustenance of her and her "sisters". Yes, this definitely sounds like something that came out of the imagination of some sex-starved sci-fi nerd. Except... that the film was actually written and directed by a woman. So there is plenty of "subtext" and "symbolism" to "legitimize" a plot that sounds like it was dreamed up in "Letters to Penthouse". Tilda Swinton is the main reason to watch this movie... she plays the scientist and the three copies and she does a great job of making each one of them a different character. Also there is one wacky scene where the three "sisters" are doing some weird interpretive dance (all on screen at the same time) that is just sublime! Unfortunately, except for Swinton, the acting is pretty awful. Actually, Jeremy Davies is okay playing a lovelorn copy guy who falls in love with one of the copies but all he really gets to do is make cute puppy eyes at Tilda. For a comedy... the tone of this movie seems awfully sombre at times. A quicker pace and some livelier dialogue might have helped this movie become a classic. As it is, it's an okay movie enlivened by the talent of Tilda Swinton.

Don't be fooled by the provocative title and the R-rating, this film has only implied sex and only the briefest nudity. Rather, it is a thought-provoking but odd piece of work that delves into the meaning of relationships between men and women, the need to experience life's pain along with pleasures, and the different roles that we play to survive in society. The film is about a scientist who creates three computer generated/robotic duplicates of her own self. The duplicates exist in a virtual reality "safe" from the harm that the real world can levy on them. As the film progresses, we see through the interactions with the main character that they have become her alter egos. Trouble brews when they start to become self-aware and want more freedom. As I watched the film I was surprised by the apparent low budget it was made with but how it outshines most big-budget Hollywood blockbusters in its depth and scope. The acting is OK but amateurish, with occasional bad timing and wooden responses. The dialogue seems to get a little too long and pretentious at times and you have to be very attentive to catch the double entendres and metaphors in order to keep up with the script. Despite all this, it was a very good movie that proves that there is under-appreciated talent out there that Hollywood refuses to acknowledge. People that liked films like Slaughterhouse-5, Orlando, or the Handmaid's Tale would be advised to give this film a try.

Magnificent acting performance from Tilda Swinton, who plays four characters so convincingly you fully accept all four. This film is sort of like those popular 3-D posters of the early 90's, where if you relaxed your gaze long enough you got "into" a whole new realm (while others just kept staring and staring and never got it.) I was amused to see from the ratings here that women prefer it widely over men--probably the uptight men always on the edge of a virility crisis anyway.