Teknolust

2002 "One part woman. One part science."
5.3| 1h23m| R| en
Details

Anxious to use artificial life to improve the world, Rosetta Stone, a bio-geneticist creates a Recipe for Cyborgs and uses her own DNA in order to breed three Self Replicating Automatons, part human, part computer named Ruby, Olive and Marine.

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Reviews

Evengyny Thanks for the memories!
Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
MBunge Teknolust is like someone wrote a terrible script for a sci-fi sex comedy and then handed it to someone with the sense of humor of a pine wood box. Since Lynn Hershman Leeson was both writer and director here, I can only conclude she has a split personality. One of them must be a talentless hack and the other a Trappist monk whose funny bone has been surgically replaced with a rod of boron.Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) is a research scientist. Yes, that's her name. No, neither she nor this story has a blessed thing to do with language or translation. Rosetta has created three copies of herself; dark-haired Ruby, blonde Olive and redheaded Marinne. Are they clones? Robots? Some sort of virtual constructs? Even if you haven't seen this film, your guess is still as good as mine. They're referred to as viruses in the movie, but this script also suggests computer viruses can infect human beings, so take that for what it's worth. Rosetta keeps her copies hidden away in color coordinated rooms, subjects them to old Hollywood movies as they sleep and communicates with them through her microwave. Yes, her microwave.Rosetta doesn't appear to have anything for her copies to do, so they basically just lounge around until nightfall. That's when Ruby goes out to find food for the copies. What do they need to survive? Human sperm. Ruby goes out, picks up a random guy to have sex with and then brings the used condom home so she can use it to brew up some tea. Ruby also runs a website, called an "internet portal" in the film. It's not entirely clear what Ruby does on her site, but it's enough to make a fan of Sandy (Jeremy Davies), a loser who lives with his mom across the street from Rosetta and company.The guys Ruby boinks start going impotent and sterile with red rashes between their eyes that turn into bar codes. That sparks an investigation by one of Rosetta's colleagues (John O'Keefe), an undefined federal agent named Hopper (James Urbaniak), and Hopper's even more undefined associate Dirty Dick (Karen Black). There's a whole bunch of floundering around where it's never all that clear what's happening with any of the characters, leading to what I can only assume is theoretically meant to be a happy ending for all involved.Despite the nature of the story I just described, Teknolust has no nudity or sex scenes. There's also no real profanity or violence. The dialog stinks and the actors mostly appear to be engaged in some sort of competition to see who can look and sound most like a department store mannequin. There's some decent set design but when you notice that, you know you're watching an awful motion picture.I could never tell the difference between when Teknolust was trying to be funny and when it was trying to be dramatic, which obviously means it failed at both. As best I can figure it, this film is an attempt at willful oddity, like one of those off, off, off Broadway plays where everybody's wearing galoshes and speaking Esperanto. This movie isn't really that odd, though. Even with the whole used condom tea thing, Teknolust is like some suburban housewife's tame concept of weird. It's the crazy ramblings of someone whose creativity was burned out by watching too many middle school plays.Unless you're entertained by stuff like a character who whispers for no reason or another who constantly has a band-aid over a different part of his body, like Les Nessman from WKRP in Cincinatti, you should stay away from this movie. It's boring and gets more boring every time it pathetically tries to be interesting.
tedg Well, it is science fiction, woman-centric in concept and execution. It features an abundance of Tilda Swinton.So it should be something worth watching. Yes? But I have to warn you off. This is written and directed by someone with such a shallow understanding of the issues involved that it is a self-parody. There are some truly interesting concepts that could have been explored if the science in this science fiction was actual science — or even if the concepts had been coherent and the writing good.The general idea here is that seduction, identity, experience, cinema and something she calls "technology" are coupled in a way that matters and is interesting and embodied in a "virus." Also that what it means to be a woman and to desire desire circumnavigates these four points of a compass.Although Tilda is more than capable of layered seduction, what we have here is manikin attraction. There is no hint of real seduction, either among the characters or with the audience. There are copious references to films, important and influential films. But they might as well have been posters on the wall as they are not integrated in any way with the film we see.The real problem is that the idea of self-aware beings, vlogs (here called "portals"), human and computer viruses, DNA, and semen are somehow conflated as if they somehow were equivalent. Tilda stars as a young woman in a university near San Francisco who is a programmer/AI researcher. She is a hidden genius who is profoundly lonely, so creates three clones of herself, independent robots consisting of code made flesh. The three each "are" a primary color and are named so. Tilda plays these women as well. At night, they "download" selected seduction scenes from movies as dreams, but are generally bored as they are cooped up in our genius's basement. Oh, our genius is named Rosetta Stone. One of the replicants, Ruby, goes out at night — Jess Franco-like — and harvests semen from males she seduces by repeating scenes from movies. The semen is needed to feed the clones and to reinforce their immune systems. Those systems are "infected" with the virus that created them — the self-replicating virus being what brought them into being. The men in question become infected with this virus, which leaves them impotent and with a bar code on their foreheads.I'm not making any of this up.After several dozen cases of infected men show up, some goofy agency is called that inspects these sorts of things, and a gaggle of incompetent males is flummoxed. At the end, the key investigator is seduced by our heroine (the real one), while our vampiress falls in love with a guy who works on a "duplicating machine" (what we would call a xerox).Oh, the investigative agency calls in a disenfranchised expert: "Dirty Dick" played by a sixty two year old Karen Black, who scopes things out, but does not interfere.So much of this is designed to resonate with me, just by the accident of what I do and who I am. But it is such incompetent storytelling, so lacking in seduction and coherence, so empty of insight that it harms, a disease. "The Love Virus," is better, as bad as it is.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
rands-4 Saw this movie at the Toronto Film Festival a couple of years ago..still can't forget how bad it was. Now wish I could somehow get that 2 hours back. Utterly unbelievable and childish. What was amazing is after the screening, the audience cheered and then asked deep philosophical questions about the meaning of the characters actions and sucked up to the Tilda Swinton (in attendance) and the director who was also in attendance...did they see the same film as I did? Honestly, I try to be as open minded as anyone to a every film I see, I like the bizarre and offbeat, this is both, but with no redeeming value whatsoever..avoid at all cost!
gab-22 "Teknolust" is so inane, it's offensive. As someone who has spent years in both microbiology and computer labs, I found the storyline & dialog completely nonsensical. It was so bad, I couldn't even laugh.Remember those "corporate bs generators" that randomly chose one word from each of 3 columns to create phrases that sounded like they meant something, but didn't? I think the writers for this movie combined a "computer bs generator" with a "virology bs generator" and used that to create the script.Lame, lame, lame!!! Don't waste your time.