Conceiving Ada1997
Recognition
What makes this film worth watching?
2 members like this review
Timely and generally a well done movie. Tilda was excellent and a believeable
character. Fascinating subject: catching lost memories from the past with computer intellegence. However, a pipe dream and probably impossible considering there was no "connected interface. anywhere." However, generally an excellent movie and worth watching.
Starring
- John Perry Barlow - John Crosse
- Karen Black - Anne Isabella Byron, Baroness Byron
- David Brooks - Children's tutor
- Francesca Faridany - Emmy Coer
- Timothy Leary - Sims
- Lynn Hershman Leeson - CD-ROM voice
- Esther Mulligan - Mary Shelley
- Owen Murphy - William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace
- John O'Keefe - Charles Babbage
- Michael Oosterom - George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron
- Henry S. Rosenthal - CD-ROM voice
- Ellen Sebastian - Dr. Fury
- Tilda Swinton - Ada Augusta Byron King, Countess of Lovelace
- J.D. Wolfe - Nicholas Clayton
Directed By
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Cinematography
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Member Reviews (8)
Cheap production hurts this conceptually ambitious, if obvious in construction, film. Tilda Swinton is achingly beautiful and has some interesting soliloquies but it's all talk and little show. Although there are interesting images in the the film, they should have been used to tell the story. Rather, we get images relaying the concepts of the author and the characters telling us what they mean while relating the story through direct address--blah--it's bad horror movie technique relating a schlock psuedo-intellectual indie film. The synthesized music really sinks it for me. I give it three stars because there is a good idea for a better film here and Ms Swinton is amazing to me, when they say the camera loves someone (even a crappy camera) she is what they mean.
Timely and generally a well done movie. Tilda was excellent and a believeable
character. Fascinating subject: catching lost memories from the past with computer intellegence. However, a pipe dream and probably impossible considering there was no "connected interface. anywhere." However, generally an excellent movie and worth watching.
The more you know about Ada, the stranger and more distant she becomes. All her correspondents kept her letters, but she kept none of theirs. Her letters' baby talk put lots of people's teeth on edge, but being the daughter of mad, bad and dangerous to know Lord Byron, and married to one of the richest (and nicest) people in England confused all issues. So are the facts that she had no affection for her children, and was cared for by her mad (and most badly done by) mother. Mother took Ada off opium while she was dying of cancer so that she'd hurt enough, week after week, to repent her (really many) sins and die in a tortured state of grace. Boy! What a bunch of bastards and bitches (except, always, her husband until her mother captured him late in the piece) always righteous and at each other's throats.
Stoppard managed to finesse his way around all this in Arcadia, but these people abjured all Stoppard's tricks and games. They picked the most amateur biography and biased biography. They did have Tilda Swinton to act Ada, but even she couldn't dig her way out of script and situation.
So sad, because Ada really needs a wonderful and tragic movie which starts from the assumption that most known facts are suspect and there are far too few of even these.
As Facile abd disjointed as the fake sets, this film was a major disservice to the memory of the incredible Ada Byron Lovelace. The filmmaker seemed to be learning how to film as she put this badly and highly amaturish narrative together. Tilda Swinton's passionate performance was the only saving grace in this slipshod production. She even got the number of years wrong between 1852 and 2000 (158 not 166).
148
I loved it..totally loved it..thank you
Tilda ~
Now I will have to research Lord Bryon, Ada, Babbage and more.
very interesting, I liked it//