Today's Film Review: Antitrust
I saw it today. A guilty pleasure. It's a stupid B-minus TV-grade movie, but it's such an obvious send-up of Microsoft that it's unendingly enjoyable. Plus Scott McNealy appears for one second, and is actually credited in the final credits, "As Himself". He's in a news clip, standing in front of a wall covered with the Sun logo giving an award of excellence to a minor character who eventually gets killed by the evil Bill Gates character ("Gary Kingston", played by Tim Robbins). Actually, "Evil" isn't exactly the right word, it's more like he's the Antichrist. Robbins clearly gets a kick out of playing the role even though he has to read lines that really make you wince.
In one scene, the hero, a brilliant Stanford computer science student that "Kingston" is trying to recruit to "NURV", (Kingston's huge software company in Oregon) is being honored with a visit to Kingston's palatial mansion on the shores of a gorgeous lake. As they walk from room to room, the pictures on the walls change from still-life to ugly modernistic abstractions as soon as Kingston enters each room. The new grad is awed. "Oh that", Kingston says. "The house is smart. It knows what kind of art I like." "Doesn't Bill Gates have something like that?" the student asks. "Bill who?" replies Kingston with an evil grin. "Oh yes, but his are primitive."
They actually show computer code several times, taking up most of the movie screen, it's kind of absurd. The characters point at the code and say things to each other like, "Isn't that beautiful?" and "That's very nice, the data structures are perfect." Some of the code is HTML, but most of it is JAVA<g>.
The movie flopped at the box office and will go straight into the video dustbin--it wasn't even in the national top ten its opening weekend, which seldom happens to a Hollywood movie starring name actors. That's because there aren't enough Sun shareholders! I think twister boycotted it. twister if you had gone it would have moved the picture onto the charts.
Go see it and help the cause. Bring a pillow in case you fall asleep, but try to stay awake for McNealy, he's about an hour in.
--QS |
