Word: osment
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...Disney and Pixar sounded a death knell for antiquated hand-drawn cartoons with Toy Story 2. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, opening in July, stars a cast of disconcertingly realistic CGI humans. In Steven Spielberg's A.I., opening this week, a teddy bear comes to life, and Haley Joel Osment communes with eerie, translucent aliens. As a robot, Osment never blinks because of his Stanislavskian discipline--and because the special-effects wizards at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) removed more than a dozen blinks from his scenes...
...some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe. A.I. boasts a beautiful central performance--Haley Joel Osment, 13, plays David with a kind of buoyant gravity--and a canny turn by Jude Law as a robo-stud, while other actors are wan. The film is bold, rigorous and sentimental by turns, and often all at once, as should be expected from a two-man movie where both...
...could be seen as a work of artificial emotions and genuine cinematic intelligence. It is more than that because Spielberg laid the burden of the film on Osment like a backpack, and the young trouper carries it. A meticulous actor, Osment made sure that "whenever [David] turns a corner, he turns it the same number of steps every time, the same movements. And the eyes were important. Turn the eyes first, then the head. Don't blink...
...blink watching Osment. He has a, well, sixth sense for the hint of ecstasy or despair in a glance. Inhabiting such a character, letting humanity seep into him: that's not artifice. It's a fine actor's art, and enough to make any mother love him. Not to mention his two fathers, Spielberg and Kubrick...
...complete interviews with Steven Spielberg, Jude Law and Haley Joel Osment about A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, log on to time.com