S1m0ne (2002)
Directed by Andrew Niccol
The career of a disillusioned producer, who is desperate for a hit, is endangered when his star walks off the film set. Forced to think fast, the producer decides to digitally create an actress "Simone" to sub for the star — the first totally believable synthetic actress.
5 connections found
View:
5 connections, in both directions
What critics compared S1m0ne to
Ensuite, plus rien avant 2002 où Niccol revint dans une forme fort discutable avec le décevant S1m0ne.
But there's one factor in the equation that is easy to overlook, and that's the presence of writer-director Andrew Niccol, who was behind the intriguing sci-fi drama Gattaca and, most notably, earned an Oscar nod for writing Peter Weir's highly-regarded The Truman Show .
The brainchild of inventive and otherworldly writer-director Andrew Niccol ( "Gattaca," "The Truman Show" screenplay), who plucked the picture's concept out of the film industry's paranoid collective subconscious, "Simone" stars Al Pacino as Viktor Taransky, a washed-up and somewhat neurotic director whose last chance at making a big studio film has just walked off the set along with his petulant leading lady (Winona Ryder in a cameo).
The creator is Andrew Niccol, the writer/director of Gattaca and scribe of The Truman Show.
It is worth clarifying; characters in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Moon,” and “S1m0ne” were disembodied computer programs, not physical A.I. robots.
While Samantha may not be the first Manic Pixel Dream Girl (Al Pacino fell in love with a CGI “actress” in S1m0ne back in 2002), Her is something new nevertheless: a soothing, gentle science-fiction horror movie.
Among Samantha’s movie predecessors, HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey was the computer as whiny tyrant; the digitized movie star in Andrew Niccol’s S1m0ne was the invention of a desperate producer.
In a sense, this is a kind of contemporary “Frankenstein” tale — a sort of first cousin to “her” and an ancestor of “S1m0ne” from 2002.
Advertisement
As lame as its tone-deaf title, “In Time” is the latest dystopian vision from New Zealand-born writer/director Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca,” “S1m0ne,” “Lord of War”), a filmmaker whose mother apparently hit him over the head with a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” when he was an infant.
Writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1m0ne) has hit on a smart concept, then takes it nowhere.
New Zealand-born writer-director Andrew Niccol, he of “Gattaca” and “S1m0ne,” has been making chilly, satirical, almost-excellent science-fiction movies and thrillers for years; he cannot possibly have known that this particular one — which advocates nothing short of full-on class warfare — would land right on top of the Occupy Wall Street moment.
The director, Andrew Niccol, previously wrote and directed such weird-science specials as Gattaca and S1m0ne, so you’d think he would know his way around this territory.
Writer/director Andrew Niccol consistently has used fantasy to explore troublesome social issues -- genetic engineering in "Gattaca," deceptive mass media in "The Truman Show," manufactured celebrity in "S1m0ne."
This is one of those Big Metaphors that writer/director Andrew Niccol ("Gattaca," "S1m0ne") specializes in, and even he doesn't seem to have the creative control on this one that he did on those, he's such an interesting thinker that his ideas glide you through the dumb-dumb action scenes and clumsy narrative.