How sad is this?

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

As a young teen, I was lifted to delight by Isaac Asimov and his robot stories. The late Isaac Asimov was president of The Humanist Society, succeeded by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. As a scientist and a humanist, Asimov used the frame of the robot story to illuminate human nature.Greg Pak goes a long way towards filling the Olympian shoes left by Asimov. In a very gentle, but textured, way, he uses "far-fetched" premises to examine subtle emotional events that are so close to us that they normally escape our notice.For a young film-maker, Pak has a firm grasp of sketching the subtlety of human feelings with an economy of style and an ability to direct actors to express them. I anxiously await his further artistic endeavors.

First of all I choose not to compare movies, I take them on their own merit. We can compare these stories all over the place, but then again we can find similarities everywhere we look if we really want to. Let's empty our cup for this movie, and express from the heart for a moment, because that's what Robot Stories is all about.The movie starts with a tiny segment which runs during the opening credits, a cartoon short about little robots with red faces spitting out binary numbers, ones and zeroes float up the screen, at different pace... then one looks around and his face goes blue and he pops out a 2... he looks around, the rest of the little robots stop and before you know we have all the colors of the rainbow spitting out all the numbers... what a simple yet poignant way to explain the beauty of diversity... at least I enjoyed it... so I settled in to watch Robot Stories, with a smile on my face.Story 1:My Robot Baby is about 2 parents in Japan who want to adopt a baby, they are made to practice on a robot baby first. This segment stars Tamlyn Tomita who I have always loved. You might know her from Joy Luck Club or Day After Tomorrow where she played a reporter. It's a cute story.Story 2:The Robot Fixer begins in a hospital. The first thing you hear is a female voice over the loud speaker, "Doctor Blair..." That's actually the introduction to the song Operation Mindcrime by Queensryche, not sure why it's in there but I recognized it instantly.A boy is in a coma because he got hit by a car crossing the street. His sister and mom come to help, and mom decides to get in touch with her estranged son by fixing all of his old toys, his prized possessions from childhood. It's endearing and an original story I've never seen anything like before. We watch the story develop as mom seeks to fix his toys and come closer to understanding him, she takes responsibility for the part she played in the distance that set them apart, it's a very beautiful story."There's a change that even with regret cannot be undone." -Division Bell Pink Floyd.Story 3:Machine Love takes place some time in the near future with the Gi9 Person. A coder tech robot named Archie who delivers himself, does his work, like a clockwork orange, until he meets a female robot, and discovers something outside his parameters, love. The story symbolizes how we limit each other's capabilities, and each other, in a world without limits, without boundaries, without definitions. Too cool.Story 4:Clay. In 2027, scientists make the first perfect digital copy of the human brain. When you die, you are uploaded into a collective consciousness where you live forever, knowing everything... kind of sounds like a pleasant yoga session to me. Very Zen.Overall nice stories with thoughtful premises.

"Robot Stories" is a collection of four thematically related short films, written, produced, directed and, in at least one, acted by Gregory Pak. They are humanistic "Outer Limits" episodes with the usual ending twist. The first two particularly rise above the genre with touching insight into human and machine interaction, the fourth almost succeeds, and the third just seems like the usual android of the future amidst the humans, similar to "Data"'s experiences on "Star Trek: The Next Generation."One unique resonance is the preponderance of Asian-American actors, which adds a subtle layer of commentary about "the model minority" with the pressures on them to succeed that can only be met by machine perfection, perhaps leading to the pressure to opt for tekkie, rather than artistic--like filmmaking--fields. The movie concludes with a sweet tribute to a friend or relative of a worker on the film who died at the World Trade Center.

The film "Robot Stories" carries many of the same positives and negatives that many films have that are, in effect, a series of thematically similar short films tied together."My Robot Baby"This film was the second least broad concept of the four and is consequently the second most interesting tale. Like a Real Life `The Sims' game, this film offers a scenario in which a couple receives a robot child as test to see if they can care for a real baby.Of the four, this one is perhaps the most naturally acted and directed. It's a smart choice to have as the first film in the series, because it is impossible to figure out what direction it will end up going in until it finally inches to the end. There are times when it seems like it is a Twilight Zone style alternate universe tale, times when it seems like a charming family drama. While we care for the relationship between the couple, we can't figure out how we should care about Marcia after the beginning scene of her as a child. The robot child starts to act more and more berserk, and the film starts to veer off in a direction like it will become a horror movie.While the film sometimes seemed like it would go in an obvious direction, let it be said that Pak never takes the easy way out and has a way of controlling just what expectations are made for the viewer. This Story deserves ***/****."The Robot Fixer"Easily the most moving, timeless tale of the four, this story gives the film an early peak. The story is the tale of Bernice Chin and her daughter, Grace, as they visit Bernice's estranged son Wilson, who has been hit by a car and is in a coma. Bernice and Grace stay in Wilson's apartment during their stay to see if Wilson recovers.Bernice is frustrated by how estranged she has gotten from her son in the many years previous. She attempts to make up for lost time by cleaning everything in his rooms and making them spotless and presentable. When Grace finds a brand of toy robots that Wilson collected as children, Bernice finds a new mission: She will replace all the missing pieces of the toys and make Wilson's collection complete. She believes that if she can repair his treasured toy collection, perhaps Wilson could be revived from the coma.The direction, acting, and screenwriting give this piece a wonderfully natural, believable feeling. Because of Pak's charming simplicity, the story is beautifully relatable with just about anyone that could watch it. "The Robot Fixer" finds Pak catering completely to his strengths. The movie includes many subtle nuances and builds on its main themes quite knowingly, as when Grace tells her mom of how valuable each of Wilson's organs could be donated to many hopeful organ receivers around the country. It becomes evident how meaningful Bernice's struggle to mend her child with the toy pieces is, and we start to see there is a bigger meaning here than simply Bernice trying to mend her estranged relationship with her son."The Robot Fixer" is a timeless tale that moved me to tears. If this section of the film could be separated into its own short, it would certainly be one of the year's very best. On its own, it gets ****/****."Machine Love"After an early peak, the film hits its lowest point with "Machine Love". This film's premise seems to be made on a series of "What if?"'s so long that a viewer either has to be with it or totally against it. For some reason, there is a requirement for computers to type up information they already know for 12 hours a day. Also, robots long to have love only to be like other people in the workplace. This premise didn't have any believability to me, and especially will not appeal to anyone that didn't buy the film A.I. (which much more confidently and thoroughly explored the same thematic issues this film does)This film isn't particularly amusing or interesting, and the premise is thin even for a half hour short. The whole story seems like it was written by someone with lesser talents and a lot lower filmmaking vision than the previous two films, even if it is admittedly very well acted and directed. The robots actually seem and look like robots, and the little touches of the robot discovering about personal interactions are nuanced. But overall, it gets */****."Clay"The purpose of "Clay" seems to be to transcend the previous three stories into a tale of the finality of life. If you take the aspect of substituting love for humans with love for a robot from "My Robot Baby", combine with it the futuristic innovations of "Machine Love", and the aspect of coping with death through machines with "The Robot Fixer", you could possibly come up with the film "Clay" as an ending point. The premise involves a man who is dying of a terminal illness and his potential future as a "scanned" person in the computerized afterlife. This film has the most inventive premise of the four, but...Unfortunately, there isn't a single aspect from this film that hasn't already been explored in another film. Any of the visions of technology have been given to us before, most notably in the previous two Tom Cruise Sci-Fi vehicles, Vanilla Sky and Minority Report. They both explore using technology to recreate lives after death. Soderbergh's Solaris goes even a step further, in that it explored the psychological underpinnings of living with a false version of a past love. Anything explored here has been explored much more deeply before.Basically "Clay" is as uninspired in its view of the material as "The Robot Fixer" was unique and powerful. It gets **Overall, the film gets **1/2, but "The Robot Fixer" deserves to be seen by anyone interested in independent cinema.