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Broadway show directed by a pedophile

Well said. But I don't think the ending of A.I. was the least bit happy. (He has one fake day with a faux family and dies! the implication being that the only way the ideal Spielbergian nuclear family can be realized these days is in a fantasy). It's self critical to say the least.

I will never forgive the guy for A.I.--possibly the dreariest, most pointless movie ever made.

Until I think of the next one.

Lucas and Spielberg should have stopped at the top of their game -- maybe 10 years ago.

Yes, I'm not sure many people got A.I. Many people thought of the robots at the end as being extraterrestrials of some kind, they're actually highly evolved robots. The boy robot sees his mother again, but only for one day, then he gets to go to sleep, the big sleep (he was actually unable to sleep earlier in the movie). One key point: this was hard science fiction. The boy is told by the future robots that they're able to recover his mother's soul through the cloning procedure but only for one day. Of course, this is an impossibility: But they have all of the boy's thoughts and memories, so they can certainly fool the boy into thinking his mother exists again; they only do this for one day because otherwise the boy would catch on. Because of the boy's programming, this is the only thing that can gratify him, otherwise, he is in a permanent state of distress. The ending was coldly logical. Even though I knew that it was just trademark Spielberg manipulation, the movie made me intensely sad.

And I really liked the band Ministry, which performed in the Flesh Fair scene.

My biggest problem with AI was that it felt like Spielberg wanted to make this Kubrick project just to make it and didn't think the script through. It starts as some kind of takeoff on the Wizard of Oz, with the climax being a downer--he CAN'T become a real boy, so he ends up spending eternity wishing for it. Kubrick could have done something with that, but Spielberg, it seems, stapled on this ending in which the boy achieves the goal of spending another day with his mother--when did THIS become his goal? It's like he couldn't become a boy, so he tosses that idea aside and is happy just to spend one more day with a fake version of the mom. It's like another movie.

It feels like it properly ends when he's trapped face to face with the Blue Fairy.

But even so, the whole movie just feels slightly OFF, as if there is some unifying idea missing.