Dept. of Lasting Regret

How a Certain Movie Review from Several Years Ago Undermined The Stranger's Integrity Forever

by Annie Wagner

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We Regret These Errors
Dept. of Movies We Should Have Trashed: The Stranger Film Editor Comes Clean on His Error of Hulking Proportions by Bradley Steinbacher
Dept. of Fecal Metaphors and General Incomprehensibility: The Stranger's Worst Theater Critic Regrets His Retarded Missteps by Brendan Kiley
Dept. of Disastrous Middle-East Wars We Helped Cause: The Editor of The Stranger Was One of the Staunchest Supporters of Invading Iraq by Dan Savage
Dept. of Bad Grammatical Things: The Stranger's Stoopidest Mistakes by Scott McGeath
Dept. of Details We Failed to Disclose About Eli Sanders' Personal Life: What This Intrepid Journalist Forgot to Mention in His Hard-Hitting AIDS Reporting: He Really, Really Likes Gay Sex by Eli Sanders
Dept. of Lasting Regret: How a Certain Movie Review from Several Years Ago Undermined The Stranger's Integrity Forever by Annie Wagner

Most of the regrets in this issue focus on the past year of publication, but, owing to its seriousness and magnitude, a certain particularly regrettable debacle from our history can't go unmentioned. Over two years ago, Sean Nelson's breathless admiration for the miserable Spielberg product A.I. Artificial Intelligence was published in The Stranger, and several employees, persuaded by Nelson's candy-coated prose, made the trip to the local cinema to take in the show. The trauma of this experience has persisted uncomfortably long in the office apocrypha, and in an attempt to purge our collective memory of the offending incident, we offer this apology to readers who may have been similarly misled.

What The Stranger staffers found there in that cinema on that now historic day horrified them. Where Nelson had promised "a heroic journey," The Stranger staffers discovered a limp, two-hours-plus mess. What Nelson had described as "remarkable," "masterful," and "deeply sad and austere" was in reality ill-conceived, poorly directed, emotionally inept, and stupid. Mr. Nelson claimed that the film offered a vision not of love, but of the only thing that can throw love into sharp relief: not-love. It was an alluringly Lacanian concept, this love silhouette, the way he presented it--but, unfortunately and quite obviously, it had nothing to do with A.I.

In short, Mr. Nelson deceived himself, The Stranger staff, and, inexcusably, our readers. If said readers responded to this incident by turning their backs on our film section for all time, they are forgiven. Suffice it to say, we hope to win back the trust of these hapless cineastes. Though, frankly, with film editor Bradley Steinbacher now at the helm, this isn't likely to happen anytime soon. Did you read what he wrote about The Hulk?