BLINKY™

I've had a Roomba (which is the greatest thing on Earth) for a few weeks now. If you're unfamiliar, Roomba is a vaccum cleaner with a robotic brain, that when summoned will scurry around your home and clean every inch of the floor a few times over. Then when it's finished the job, it finds its way back to the dock and recharges. The somewhat eerie thing is that the company that creates Roomba (and its bretheren Scuba, Verro, and Looj) is called iRobot--also a film about killer servent androids and a forlorn Will Smith. We're just a few steps away from Skynet and a time-traveling nude Arnold Schwartzenegger.

So on cue, here's a short film by director Ruairi Robinson. The special effects are good, especially the cityscapes. The automaton design is kind of hokey, but the real calamity is Max Records, the boy from Where the Wild Things Are. Once again he plays a kid that you wish bad things would happen to over and over.