Eliza Holliday

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I found this movie so unwatchable, I just closed my eyes right after Bobby Carnavale wrecked his dad’s car in the woods. I am a film buff and watch lots of movies but I refused to watch another second of this train wreck. The dad and grandfather character did nothing but yell and fight and create chaos around a child that needed calm, consistant treatment and it was agony to watch them screwing up and acting like bickering children. Robert Deniro plays the same grumpy, pugilistic character in every movie (including Flower Moon) and I’m boycotting him. I was interested that the young man was played by an autistic (“neuroatypical”) person, he was worth watching in this movie. The music was cloying and manipulative and close-ups were too close. “Heartwarming”? give me a break. Annoying!!

Ishiguro once again sets up a limited first person POV. In “Remains of the Day”, It was the emotionally restrained butler, in “Never let me go” it was the children raised for their organs, and now we have an AI robot who has limited knowledge of the world and even limited vision (seeing things in “boxes” and seeing masses of shapes that break into logical things as she watches, not understanding long grass in a field). She is uniquely gifted in processing emotion and “reading” humans (more than others AI’s) but is also a primitive sun-worshipping being. So we have to slowly learn her limitations and language. By the time she was naively trying to destroy the Cootings machine and Josie’s’s parents were fighting about whether to make Klara into a Josie robot, I thought the book was amazing, breathtaking, unique. The medical situation with Josie, and her sister were never explained and suddenly - Ishiguro went on vacation. He didn’t explain Josie’s cure, what happened to the father and his mysterious fascistic work, what “lifted” meant and why Rick wasn’t, why Rick and Josie drifted apart, what the two women neighbors were going to do, everything just lazily drifted away, unresolved. Why? I love this author and the first two books mentioned as some of my all-time favorites, and am so relieved other people were as confused and disappointed as I was with Klara and the Sun.