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Reviews
For Earth Below (2002)
OK, I didn't get it.
This is a inexplicable 25-minute dramatic, live-action short in which it's difficult to figure out exactly what of significance happened to the characters. A couple checks into a motel, and the following day the wife goes to visit her father, who is an invalid, to give a break to his hired caretaker. The husband stays at the motel and strikes up a friendship with another man who is staying there. The director cuts between these scenes somewhat arbitrarily. Most annoying is the fact that the loud rock-music soundtrack featuring Robin Trower and David Essex plays over the dialogue making it hard to make out some of it. (Not sure if that was intentional, or sloppy sound editing.) I enjoy avant-garde and experimental filmmaking, but this just seemed like a pointless exercise.
Conceiving Ada (1997)
Occasionally original, but mostly disappointing
Despite some occasionally original touches, like the "virtual sets" that provide the background for the Victorian interiors featuring Ada Lovelace and her circle, this film falls short and ultimately disappoints. Newcomer Francesca Faridany seems talented, but is wasted as Emmy, a character who by mid-film is reduced to nothing more than staring at a monitor watching Lady Ada narrate an autobiography. 'Conceiving Ada' takes off briefly when Lady Ada (Tilda Swinton) appears; the camera lingers on her facial expressions, mannerisms, even making her appear to be translucent or momentarily invisible, apporting into scenes to dramatize Emmy's "virtual" rendering of her.
A straightforward biopic of Ada Lovelace would have been worthwhile, but this film unfortunately makes a hash of both Lady Ada's life, and that of a modern-day computer scientist (and her broadly-drawn, doltish boyfriend).