Heartbeeps

A deficient model, live actors and some jokes. Nowadays they phone it in from a great height, as one says, every bit, it’s all done by computer is the boast.

Actor’s and Sin, Ben Hecht said, streng verboten. All that remains is to replace the audience with apps in seats, to assess the output.

Critics, in short. “A woman went to her psychiatrist and said, ‘Doctor, it’s about my husband. He thinks he’s a refrigerator.’” This is Jack Carter as the robot voice of Catskil. “‘That’s not so bad,’ the doctor says, ‘it’s a rather harmless complex.’ ‘Well, maybe,’ the woman says, ‘but he sleeps with his mouth open and the light keeps me awake!’” A joke by Henny Youngman.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times, “would-be comedy”. As Germaine Greer says, “we must regain the power of the cunt.”

This goes back before Spielberg and Lucas to The Day of the Dolphin, a job of work for Mike Nichols, in several aspects. There is also the junior executive couple in Airplane! (dirs. Abrahams, Zucker & Zucker), here with offspring. And it’s why nowadays you could just spit in a movie star’s eye, second fiddle to kewpie dolls on wheels, making goo-goo eyes voiced by Jerry Garcia.