Posted by crumbsroom  10/16/2023 3:40 pm | #81 |
So is that AV article claiming that Scorsese is complaining that artier fare isn't getting the kind of budgets devoted to superhero films?
Can these fucks at least pretend they understand the premise of what he's talking about before wasting everyone's time with this shit?
Oh, and the crux of his argument is Scorsese is jealous because he's a failure for not banking hundreds of millions of dollars a movie? Is it possible to wrestle cultural commentary from these people who reduce everything to dollars and cents?
And fuck off with the toxic masculinity shit? He's seriously just throwing out the question of whether Scorsese is celebrating or examining these facets of his characters? We of course know where this turd stands, but he doesn't actually try and detail why he believes Scorsese is treating a Jake LaMotta with reference? I wonder if that's because it's obviously stupid to think this, and it's too much to ask for a hack to put his mind to.
A total embarrassment. I bet Yarn would suck his cock though.
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Posted by Jinnistan 10/17/2023 12:08 pm | #82 |
crumbsroom wrote:
I bet Yarn would suck his cock though.
He should appreciate the ultimately fascist proposition that only the top-earning films, and their audiences, deserve all of the spoils. The subheading of that article makes the point: "[Scorsese's] fighting a war he's already lost". That's plain "might makes right" English right there. This writer seems to be most upset that Scorsese is unwilling to submit to the capital powers that be. But of course, this is a particularly slippery point to make after a year where a handful of the top $200+ million blockbusters have flopped at the box office. Apparently that war is not so cold, and audience consensus not so certain. And it's only the fear of this fact that inspired this unnecessary and unprovoked attack piece in the first place. One commenter pointed out the asninity of the writer's mention of "return on investment" by asking, "does anyone believe that this AV Cub writer is some kind of shareholder?" Of course not, he's just a toadie. Another commenter made the point that, given the obvious cultural dominance of these blockbusters, superhero films specifically, over the past 20 years, than if they truly have won the "war", then why is it necessary to then stamp out any remaining dissent like Scorsese? This is the kind of fascism that gets Yarn's lips wet.
I'm not going to link to the article for obvious reasons. I do want to take a slight issue with the last line which has been bugging me, that bit about defending Marvel entertainment as being necessary pleasure in our "crisis-haunted time". Which crisis? It can't be the pandemic, because Marvel has been dominant for over a decade prior to that. Is it Obama? Are we at war or a depression, such as the time when Marty was born? No, let's be serious about some of the very real crises that our society surrently faces - climate change, dwindling middle class wages, post-truth epistemic dissolution, the psychological manipulations of social media. In other words, our crisis is inextricably rooted in late-capitalist decline, where wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the same "return on investment" assholes who are seeking a total economic and cultural dominance. The same assholes who burn fossil fuels for their bitcoins, squeeze or eliminate labor "outputs", break down our public infrastructure including education and health care, manipulate our consumer behavior with predatorily predictive algorithms. And propagate a conformist, predictably lucrative consumerist entertainment culture where super-rich libertarian vigilantes are unquestioningly venerated as omnipotent heroic saviors.
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Posted by Jinnistan 10/21/2023 3:25 pm | #83 |
After writing my initial thoughts for Killers of the Flower Moon, I went through some other reviews out there, honing in, of course, on the bad ones, which aren't many, but, hello Armond White ("woke white guilt" to paraphrase).
The laziest criticism is of course the length, and equally lazy negative comparisons to Heaven's Gate. Although my bladder be damned, the length is clearly a boon. These tickets are the same price. You mean I get twice as much top-shelf Scorsese filmmaking at the same price? That's just value.
The more challenging criticism comes from the fact that many critics, it seems, wanted this film to be a more typically pedantic social justice morality tale. I'm glad that I was able to phrase it in my review, that this is more a film about complicity than justice. Scorsese doesn't want to spend an entire film condescending to us about the obvious atrocities committed against indigenous peoples. He's more interested in finding what we can discover, finding new and interesting emotional terrain that isn't so obvious, and he does that in looking at the delusions of human motives that can justify and ignore such atrocity. And this leads some critics to paint this as Scorsese "siding" with the white settlers, because the film remains largely from their perspective (as was the book, btw, but there from the FBI's perspective). So it becomes another twist on the depiction/endorsement fallacy, the outdated notion that the 'protagonist' (the character which drives the plot's action) is necessarily the 'good guy'. In other words, some critics, and audiences I'm sure, wanted a film that was a lot more formally and morally simplistic and easy to digest, which is exactly the opposite of the film Scorsese intended to make. Less generously, some critics apparently wanted straight trauma porn.
But regardless, it looks like the film is still overwhelmingly being positively received.
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Posted by Jinnistan 10/23/2023 10:21 am | #84 |
Today's AV Club article about the weekend's box office, which saw Killers of the Flower Moon coming in 2nd to the Taylor Swift concert film, included a rather unnecessary slapback on Scorsese, claiming sarcastically that he was "a man, unfortunately, soon to be forgotten by history".
Is anyone supposed to think that Scorsese is the unreasonably hateful party in this dispute at this point?
I'm not a "Swiftie" by any stretch, but I don't think I'll ever be condemning her to historical oblivion or anything. But this article failed to point out that, in fact, Flower Moon actually sold more tickets than Swift, because Swift's tickets cost twice as much for a film that's a half-hour shorter.
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Posted by Jinnistan 11/28/2023 7:37 pm | #85 |
Bit of controversy at the Gotham Awards this year. Robert De Niro openly accused Apple (producers of Killers of the Flower Moon) of editing his speech prior to the show. (As an aside, it's also interesting that I read this story today, which is Jon Stewart's birthday, that other guy that Apple has recently thrown under the bus.)
From Variety:
A revised version of the speech was delivered to the teleprompter less than ten minutes before the event started, according to sources with knowledge of the show. A woman who told the teleprompter operator to upload a new speech was overheard identifying herself as an Apple employee. At 6:54 p.m., the teleprompter company was sent an email from two Apple employees with the new text, which omitted explicit references to Trump.
During the actual speech, when De Niro realized that his speech in the teleprompter had been altered, he "stammered" and the cameras cut to a clip montage from Flower Moon. Once the camera came back to De Niro, he openly said "The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out", and, retrieving the original speech from his phone, continued:
History isn’t history anymore. Truth is not truth; even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness. In Florida, young students are taught that slaves developed skills which could be applied for their personal benefit. The entertainment industry isn’t immune to this festering disease. ‘The Duke’ John Wayne famously said of Native Americans, "I don’t feel we’ve did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves." Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office and he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution. But with all of his lies he can’t hide his soul. He attacks the weak, he destroys the gifts of nature, and shows disrespect; for example, by using Pocahontas as a slur.
De Niro followed up by again repeating the accusation, "This is where I came in and saw they edited all that. I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did. How dare they do that, actually."
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Posted by Jinnistan 12/14/2023 7:16 pm | #86 |
The cracks are starting to appear in the corporate facade of our media goliathopolies. The latent, unspoken concern is the use of nondisclosure agreements to keep talent in line, to muzzle any dissent in the ranks, which does make for some interestingly strange press junkets where everyone except the press seems to understand the rotten Danish wares that they're trying to insincerely sell. It gets even more insidious as the years go on, like how someone like Roony Mara is still incapable of being perfectly frank about her Dragon Tattoo experience. ("I need to be careful about how I say this...." - jesus, what kind of demon lawyers are we dealing with here?)
Thankfully though, we're seeing a few more brave souls deserting the Disney flagships, with an increasing number of participants willing to call out what should be obvious to the rest of us. The latest being Adam Driver, an actor talented enough to truly give no shits about needing Disney money in his career, who now, four years after Rise of Skywalker, is ready to admit that, yes in fact, that whole Kylo Ren shit was kind of a waste of everybody's time. Maybe we'll see someone patch together a similar montage of awkward discomfort on the red carpet, as has been done with Mark Hamill, perhaps the highest profile example of someone who has been willing to call out the naked emperor with an implicit dare to Disney to do anything about it. But maybe due to whatever statute of limitations, Driver has now joined the chorus. Welcome to the party, pal.
So let's look at the biggest Disney shills in entertainment media - the AV Club - and look at their tell-tale coverage. First off, they're trying to bury it. Despite being the third most viewed article today, it's missing from the rest of their "front page". And it's immediately evident why. The article starts out by whining about why we're even still talking abut this, "Will we ever be finished re-litigating the Star Wars sequel trilogy?" Aw. These articles have a tendency of blaming the problem, not on Disney or the filmmakers, but on the audience, the fans, the obsession to not being satisfied by getting duped by this elaborate creative fraud. And, pretty much as always, the blame turns political by pointing towards the anti-woke response to Last Jedi, as if the problem was restricted to diverse representation. Driver wisely steps right over this strawman. And, not surprisingly, his initial dilemma happens to be the exact same issue with the prequels, which is that the secrecy of the creative process stultified any potential feedback from the participants who might have otherwise given a heads-up that this shit is half-baked, y'all. But even if JJ Abrams "overall arc" seemed (to me) as pretty dumb and counterintuitive to the Star Wars ethos (which was also Mark Hamill's main beef), at least it was an arc. The problem becomes compounded when the arc is more, um, theoretical, and that the story doesn't actually exist yet on day one of shooting, and the filmmakers are just going to wing it like some kind of Star Wars madlibs, and who knows who cares people love Star Wars, right? This was Driver's rude awakening, and he rightly questions whether he would have taken the role had he known the resulting finished story, or known the fact that there was no finished story from the get-go and he's submitting to being at the whim of people who are just making this shit up as they go along. It's a reasonable attitude for an actor to take, and one of the main reasons why actors tend to read the scripts before signing onto a project. This secrecy of the process, investing in the brand rather than the story, allows the studios to bypass things like writing drafts and rehearsal time and other things which once upon a time were assumed to improve a film production.
So back to the AV Club, their article bookends Driver's revelations with apologia - "Listen," (haha, I like this tactic of feigned authority - OK, I'm listening...) "sometimes, stories change and evolve while they’re being written". That's true, but that's not the problem that Driver is describing. The problem is that the story was never written. "Nevertheless, we got the Star Wars that we got." I like this attitude that somehow we should just be grateful. Hey, it's better than nothing, kids! Think of all of those bored children in Somalia who didn't even get a Star War this Christmas! So sure, accountability be damned, this is simply how the fates have rolled their inscrutible dice, and who are we to question the Magic Kingdom which provides and nourishes?
Luckily, I do have the Star Wars that I got. The original trilogy.
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Posted by Jinnistan 12/16/2023 11:53 pm | #87 |
Alex Garland is getting the response to his Civil War that I wish was also being received by all of the other polarization-exploitation films from the last few years. Maybe people are more offended because Garland still manages to have a certain amount of goodwill among the self-serious cineastes. Still, at best, this should perhaps be a good opportuity to call out the trend more generally. For example, I find it more than a little hypocritical that the other recent polarization-exploitation piece of garbage, Leave the World Behind, has not received such concern, and I'm sure some of the same people will say, "Well, what did you expect?" To which I wonder what they were expecting from the increasing opportunist of cynicism, Alex Garland? Putting aside the pretense that any of these films offer anything resembling actual social commentary (which they don't), then the obvious indictment is that these films are exploiting the exact things that they pretend to condescend about to the "average" American. I don't see any intention in these films to wake these audiences into averting these kinds of schisms. In essence, they're marketing opportunities, no more sincere or respectable than Eli Roth's Thanksgiving, The Hunt (the 2020 one), or any of The Purge films. And if I wanted to get right down to it, it's no different than the decade-and-a-half's worth of apocalyptic libertarian survival manuals (Walking Dead, et al). All of these pop culture products are in service of rationalizing and normalizing, in addition to exploitating, the cynical anxieties of late capitalist collapse. I hate to ape Mr. Armond White, but the lack of constructive inspiration is glaring. It does feel as if Hollywood is enjoying training us how to hate ourselves and abandon our civic virtues. I don't believe that this entertainment media is the primary cause of our social malaise and dissolution, only that it's doing nothing to help alleviate it, and, increasingly more often than not, it's actively pouring fuel on the fire. Like our social media algorithms, the prerogative is to exploit anxieties and fear as a surefire strategy to maximize and monopolize attention. When extremism becomes essential to profits, what's the incentive to stop sharpening that blade? So cultural apologists will say that this media is simply a reflection of our times. I'm not denying it. All I'm saying is that it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop that's accelerating these anxieties and fears.
There's the old legend from Jack's Easy Rider speech, that Hollywood has been slowly preparing through film and television for the shock of the inevitable revelation of extra-terrestrial contact. It's almost amusing now that this was considered the height of diabolical Hollywood conspiracy theories at the time. In practice, regardless of whether any of that is true, the flood of media stoking the popular imagination towards such alien contact was mostly (not counting the occasional Alien or V) not only inspirational but transcendent. Again, it doesn't really matter whether the theory is true, but that values such as cooperation and mutual achievement were elevated, as was a objective for a "better" future. Even the most dystopian of 80s sci-fi (Day After, Terminator, Road Warrior) never lost their hope for humanity or dignity. Now, cynicism and nihilism are fashionable, and the current media output seems to be having the opposite effect. In a post-Survivor society, cooperation is for the weak or the duplicitous. Selfishness and ethnic provincialism have replaced equality and empathy as central virtues. All of this is represented in this societal collapse porn that we find so atavistically attractive. The cycle of guilt and revenge so prominent since 9/11-Iraq has rotted our best natures and integrity of conscience.
Sure, I haven't seen Garland's Civil War yet, Who knows? I do know that all of that I just described is absolutely embedded in Leave the World Behind, it's notion of social suicide being unapologetically right in the title. Our mental and spiritual sickness can be very entertaining for those not inclined to heal.
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Posted by Jinnistan 12/22/2023 3:26 am | #88 |
I guess I'll do this thing.
What is the first film you remember seeing?
Fantasia
What film scared you the most?
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
What film made you cry the most?
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling
What is a film that is critically and popularly hated, but you love?
Four Rooms
What is a respected award-winning or widely beloved film that you hate?
So very many. Let's go with Whiplash.
What is a film that you used to love, but you’ve seen it again recently and it no longer holds up? Either simply not as good as your memory or elements that have dated badly.
Hawk the Slayer may not be awesome as I remembered.
What is the film that means the most to you? Not necessarily due to the quality of the film, but the memory or the circumstances around seeing it?
Raiders of the Lost Ark
What is the film you found the sexiest?
La Piscine
What is a film you found arousing maybe you shouldn't have?
Harold and Maude
What movie do you most relate to? The character, world, or atmosphere seem to be most like you?
Young: Rushmore; Mature: Ironweed
What film could you or have you seen the most times?
Psycho
What film do you objectively think is the greatest – not necessarily your personal favorite?
Mirror
What is the worst film you have ever seen?
Rampage (2009)
What is the funniest film you have ever seen?
And Now For Something Completely Different
What is a film that changed your perspective on something?
Yojimbo (it's like they have different words for everything)
What is the best opening sequence to a film?
Raising Arizona
What is the best ending sequence to a film?
A Clockwork Orange or Taxi Driver
What is your favorite film?
2001
What one film would you take with you to heaven to screen for everybody when it's your turn to host movie night?
Der mude Tod or Hour of the Wolf or maybe The Devils. We'll have time.
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Posted by crumbsroom 12/23/2023 12:29 am | #89 |
Off the top of my head
What is the first film you remember seeing?
The Amityville Horror. Screamed on the floor until my parents decided it would just be easier to bring me with them to see it.
What film scared you the most?
The Exoricst. Watched it on television with my mother when I was about 3. Pleaded with her to turn it off. She didn't. And now I am who I am
What film made you cry the most?
Dancer in the Dark. Sobbing, even though it was clear the whole thing is a manipulative mother****er. Von Trier gets forever props for being able to get this kind of emotional reaction, while clearly and deliberately pulling the strings of his audience in the most grotesque ways.
What is a film that is critically and popularly hated, but you love?
Good God, where do I even start? Probably Hallucinations, if the critics were even aware it existed (trust me, they would all hate it)
What is a respected award-wining or widely beloved film that you hate?
It's probably got to be some music bio-pic. Rocket Man? Anything that is respected is usually awful, so there is a lot to choose from here.
What is a film that you used to love, but you’ve seen it again recently and it no longer holds up? Either simply not as good as your memory or elements that have dated badly.
The Dog that Stopped the War. It probably ranked near the top of my favorite movies of all time when I was a kid. And it's charms as an adult are very limited.
What is the film that means the most to you? Not necessarily due to the quality of the film, but the memory or the circumstances around seeing it?
Another one where there are just too many to choose from. Maybe Return of the Jedi? The first movie that, because I kept asking to go and see it, my grandmother just started sending me to the movie theatre alone. Got to realize that was the best way to see anything, at such a young age.
What is the film you found the sexiest?
I generally find moments sexy, and not entire films....um, Swimming Pool?
Troubling boners/worrying wide-ons: What is a film you found arousing maybe you shouldn't have?
Having once been a teenage boy, there are all sorts of answers I could have for this, but they'd all probably need to be qualified with many shameful paragraphs and I'm too lazy and unwilling to do that.
So the quickest answer is probably Revenge of the Nerds, where I thought it would be great to grow up and put secret cameras in girls change rooms. At the time, it seemed totally okay. It was what boys are supposed to do.
What movie do you most relate to? The character, world, or atmosphere seem to be most like you?
There are probably way more affirming films that I could align myself with, but I think it would be a disservice to my life if I didn't just say that the documentary Crumb is basically the household I grew up in. I can smell that carpet.
What film could you or have you seen the most times?
There are a number of films I've seen at least 25 times, but the only one I think is nearing a 100 is the Exorcist. I don't think anything is touching that.
What film do you objectively think is the greatest – not necessarily your personal favorite?
2001: A Space Odyssey. Duh. And there are only about four possible answers for this that I have any time for
What is the worst film you have ever seen?
Wired. The John Belushi Story. I don't hate many films, maybe almost no films, but this one, both morally and as a piece of art, is about as worthless as any film I can think of.
What is the funniest film you have ever seen?
Airplane is up there. Spinal Tap is up there. But when it comes to a movie that I think I laugh the most too, nearly uncontrollably, it's Windy City Heat
What is a film that changed your perspective on something?
Shoah. It's easy to point to documentary footage of bodies being bulldozed into mass graves, or re-enactments of gas chamber death, but it was a real eye peeler to slowly have this film draw attention to what evil truly is: slow, boring, methodical planning to do all of these things.
What is the best opening sequence to a film?
Walkabout
What is the best ending sequence to a film?
I'm sure there are better, but the first coming to me is Blair Witch.
What is your favorite film?
Exorcist
What one film would you take with you to heaven to screen for everybody when it's your turn to host movie night?
Being that I assume in heaven everyone finally has good taste in movies, and the time and patience to appreciate good things, probably Jeanne Dielmann. First, to show all these dead dopes how great it actually obviously was. Second, to remind us of what it was like to be here. A kind of chore porn since I imagine in the afterlife, they've got mother****ers to clean up after us. Make us pot roasts.
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Posted by Rock 12/24/2023 11:18 pm | #90 |
Without thinking too long about any of these...
What is the first film you remember seeing?
The first movie I would have seen most likely would have been a Bollywood movie, but having trouble remembering specifics from those first few years. And the ones I remember I remember too clearly for them to have been the first one. Maybe Sholay? For whatever reason King Kong vs Godzilla seemed to play on TV a lot when I was that age, so I'll pick that.
What film scared you the most?
Most horror movies don't really "scare" me in the conventional sense outside of a few moments, I usually feel something closer to dread. That being said, my parents owned Child's Play and Moby Dick (the John Huston one) on VHS when I was a kid and those scared the shit out of me at the time. Closer to adulthood, The Blair Witch Project did a number on me, despite having seen it many years after it came out. More recently, I've been responding strongly to some of the hardcore roughies I've seen as they put you on the side of evil, but Forced Entry is uniquely repellent and harrowing.
What film made you cry the most?
Recently, I tore up a bunch of times during Godzilla Minus One.
What is a film that is critically and popularly hated, but you love?
There are a lot of horror movies that were ignored or hated on initial release but whose reputations have definitely recovered, so I won't pick any of those. I see Out for Justice with Steven Seagal is sitting at 23% on Rotten Tomatoes and I think that's a genuinely great action movie, so I'll pick that.
What is a respected award-winning or widely beloved film that you hate?
While it was divisive when it came out, it seems to be considered a canonized classic now, so I'll go with The Night Porter. I'm also on the record for hating Michael Haneke, so I'll throw in Cache. In terms of widely beloved, Avengers: Infinity War might be one of the most unpleasant experiences I've had in a theatre. I could keep going.
What is a film that you used to love, but you’ve seen it again recently and it no longer holds up? Either simply not as good as your memory or elements that have dated badly.
I watched Beverly Hills Ninja a lot as a kid, but had to bail halfway into a rewatch.
What is the film that means the most to you? Not necessarily due to the quality of the film, but the memory or the circumstances around seeing it?
The Guns of Navarone is one of my dad's favourite movies and as such I grew up watching it constantly.
What is the film you found the sexiest?
Something Wild. Although if you ask me what I find sexy in movies, I tend to think of characters rather than actual movies.
What is a film you found arousing maybe you shouldn't have?
Videodrome definitely unlocked something in my brain.
What movie do you most relate to? The character, world, or atmosphere seem to be most like you?
I think Superbad captured me as a teenager pretty well.
What film could you or have you seen the most times?
Jurassic Park
What film do you objectively think is the greatest – not necessarily your personal favorite?
2001: A Space Odyssey
What is the worst film you have ever seen?
On a technical level, one of the many low budget horror or porno movies I've seen, but I have a hard time hating those even when they're really bad.
What is the funniest film you have ever seen?
The Producers
What is a film that changed your perspective on something?
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was the movie that made me realize there was something to film as an artform and have any real understanding of direction.
What is the best opening sequence to a film?
Suspiria
What is the best ending sequence to a film?
The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter
What is your favorite film?
Apocalypse Now
What one film would you take with you to heaven to screen for everybody when it's your turn to host movie night?
Zebedy Colt's The Devil Inside Her. Let's see if they kick me out of heaven for that one.
I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
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Posted by crumbsroom 12/25/2023 12:48 pm | #91 |
I knew I wasn't remembering my favorite opening ever.
Definitely Suspiria.
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Posted by Rock 12/25/2023 2:12 pm | #92 |
I considered putting Suspiria as my fancier m favourite ending as well lol
I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
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Posted by Jinnistan 12/27/2023 11:02 am | #93 |
I knew I wasn't remembering my favorite opening ever.
Definitely Suspiria.
I'll stick with my pick but I will allow bouzouki > banjo
I considered putting Suspiria as my fancier m favourite ending as well lol
I also thought about it for ending. I love the no-nonsense of it. As soon as she leaves the house, "OK, we're done here. Get out of the theater."
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Posted by Rock 12/27/2023 11:53 am | #94 |
I think of it as the cinematic equivalent of blowing up your TV or theatre at the end of the movie.
I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
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Posted by Rock 12/27/2023 11:57 am | #95 |
Also, I signed up on the BlueSky waitlist a few months mostly on a whim. (There are a few Twitter accounts I used to check up on periodically despite not having an account myself because they would post interesting stuff, something that the Musk era changes made difficult to keep doing, and I understand they’d set up BlueSky accounts as well).
Finally set up my account today and followed just the official BlueSky account. The rest of my feed looks to be people complaining about Twitter, people complaining about Elon Musk, random posts in German and a naked hairy man talking about Hump Day. Was hoping to follow some news accounts but doesn’t look like there are many such accounts set up just yet.
EDIT: This probably isn’t the thread for this but I’m too lazy to start a new one.
Last edited by Rock (12/27/2023 12:26 pm)
I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
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Posted by Jinnistan 2/28/2024 12:52 am | #96 |
"What the hell is wrong in Hollywood?"
Good question. Lately, we've been seeing all kinds of industry analysis blaming last year's strikes for the trouble, but this doesn't quite explain why studio production has slowed even more drastically in the last two months, long after the strikes had ended. We keep seeing doomsday news about the elimination of physical media, ostensibly due to the overwhelming popularity of streaming services, but then that doesn't really add up to the numbers of the actual reality of the streaming business. What seems to be conspicuously missing from such industry analysis is to point out that the top three films of last week's box office - One Love, Madame Web, Argylle - has an average tomatometer of 25%. Unless there is an admission forthcoming, that performance cannot be blamed on AI, however reasonable such an admission would be.
And yet, AI is still being touted as a make-or-break moment for the industry, as if all of the above problems are due to Hollywood's hesitance, and the creative guilds' obstinance, to adopting to the technology. "I think we’re at the edge of a disastrous time if we aren’t careful. As leaders and stakeholders, we’ve got to work together like we never have before to fix what I think is a growing industrywide mess." This is a (exiting) CEO of Avid Technology, a company which makes editing software for the movie studios, and for the record, Avid does not appear to currently be marketing any generative AI products itself. So a generous read of his comments is the implementation of non-generative AI tools. But the above Variety article refers to "AI as a job stealer" and links to an eariler article specifically about generative AI displacing creative jobs. So that's the implied context when this CEO says bluntly, "I’m not afraid of it taking anybody’s jobs away. We have to take away work to get efficiencies so that people can do more." Presumably, this means "more" free automatic creative labor. (The "efficiencies" of the studio executives is oddly undiscussed.)
"We don’t have enough people to keep up with the content requirements that the world demands." Ah, the problem is not enough content! These human writers simply can't manage the demands. We need AI to take these workload strains off of our poor indentured creatives. Clearly this is why the studios have to raise their prices of their streaming platforms for so much less content. Of course you could always make a lot more movies by making fewer films with $100+ million budgets, but do you think the world wants that?
At some point, we might even have to start firing some of these executives for making all of these non-creative decisions.
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Posted by Jinnistan 2/28/2024 3:10 am | #97 |
Another interesting quote: "Our industry has proven one thing—when you give it new technology, it will find a way to use that technology to create better stories and better storytelling." Ah, yes. That must be why 3D didn't fail in four different decades.
This kind of "technological inevitablity" talk is often used to lubricate itself into our lives, You can sometimes determine the insidiousness based on the amount of sheer dishonesty used in the pitch. Another recent example is the not-secret but not exactly loudly advertised plan from Google to preview an unnamed new generative AI tool to "news publishers, especially small publishers". Another red flag is that Google is promising to pay an annual five-figure sum to these publishers for participating in this run-through, which is reassuring since, as the article points out, as Google is largely resposible for "extracting revenue from the publishing world", "many of the commercial problems it aims to solve for publishers were created by Google in the first place". But here, instead of Google sharing its billions of annual ad-revenue to help publishers pay their journalists, Google is paying the publishers to cut journalists out of the loop. Naturally, Google is claiming the opposite, that this tool will "help journalists with their work" to "produce high-quality journalism", and stresses that "These tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles". "Creating" might be the semantic key there since, like other generative AI, it doesn't technically "create" anything, but aggregates content inputs. But one has to ask, if this tool isn't intended to replace journalists, then how come "the program does not require that these AI-assisted articles be labeled"? I doubt it's due to being humble. Meanwhile those "sources of original material are not asked for their consent to have their content scraped or notified of their participation in the process". And this program would "also draw traffic away from the original sources, negatively affecting their businesses", which I'm presuming will further deflate the incomes of these real journalists that this tool totally isn't hurting at all. If this tool was really intended as something like a digital "wire service", merely regurgitating press releases and already public information, then why not get the consent of the source material? Because it's deliberately, deceptively intended to give the impression of original reporting?
I'm not a lawyer, but if I was, I might be trying to contact any legitimate online publications to protect the copyrights of any potentially scraped news articles from now on.
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Posted by Jinnistan 3/07/2024 11:34 pm | #98 |
I've been disappointed in Stephen Colbert's handling of the AI issue. It was a red flag that in his first edisode after the writer's strike, where the use of AI was a central controversy, he downplayed the threat of AI while his guest, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, promoted its positive applications as an analytic tool as opposed to a creative tool. For the latter, Tyson only spitefully pointed out that "all of the liberal arts folks pooped their pants" without going into why. (Which is par for Tyson's long-standiing hostility to "liberal arts folks", even in a more recent episode of Colbert huddling down into a false dichotomic tribalism between the value of scientists ("my people") and science fiction writers - and then unconvincingly tried to denounce tribalism in the very next segment!) Tyson says that analytic AI tools can help scientists process information, which is true, although then he points out that this allows scientists to "sit on the couch eating a twinkie, which is what we all want". No, Neil. That's not what I want. And I suspect that people will not long want scientists sitting on couches while AI does their jobs for them either. Who's supposed to pay for those twinkies, Neil? (Is it appropriate that he chose the very cheapest food to make this point?) AI being beneficial to help or streamline our work is not the issue being discussed. Scientists will still have plenty of things to work on with the free time afforded by having a machine crunch all of this complex data for them. The problematic issue is AI replacing workers, and this labor displacement issue has been conspicuously absent from Colbert's segments on AI.
There was another perverse segment this week, with Colbert interviewing Yuval Boah Harari, a writer who is wisely more concerned about AI than Colbert is. But most disconcerting was Colbert's rationale for not being worried:
A lot of people are worried. I'm not that worried about AI. It doesn't get my blood going to get worried about AI. I think of some positive aspects of it. I have seen how humans have handled history and....not great. So I'm ready for the big machines that make big decisions programmed by fellows with compassion and vision. I'm ready for the machines to tell us what to do.
Check out the look on Harari's face at 3:31 where he's asked to support this logic, because it's the funniest moment of the show. But Harari, as the guest, politely demurs for the obvious reason. Then Colbert remarkably says that we shouldn't fear the AI because it is "just an extention of us". Which, you might notice, would completely undermine his earlier point about "how humans have handled history". (Oh, you mean how we've faithfully and enthusiastically committed to technologies - fossil fuels, plastics, nuclear fission - before having an understanding of any of their potential toxic impacts?) And who are these "fellows with compassion and vision"? Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? How exactly do you determine the "compassion" in the programming of an algorithm? Whence this faith?!?
So it's an easy question: Who kidnapped the real Stephen Colbert? Is this brain-fog from Covid? He's ready for the "Big Machines" to tell him what to do? He's never heard of the game of Go? I don't know if it's more disheartening whether Colbert has softened his spine in his old age, whether he's simply sold out to corporate tech, or whether he turns out not to be nearly as smart as I've been giving him credit for all this time.
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Posted by crumbsroom 3/09/2024 11:46 am | #99 |
Tyson has always been an art boob. He's never shown the faintest whiff of grasping the value of anything creative, but frequently speaks with some kind of authority about how invaluable art is in comparison to the wonders of the universe. And in a lot of ways, I get that. Because what can compete with the universe? But, there are obvious things he is completely overlooking in why art matters. Why people are pulled towards it. And it has nothing to do with whether or not the science shown in something like Gravity holds up.
As for Colbert, I've increasingly found that he has been increasingly saying kind of dumb, or maybe the better word is naive things, over the last few years. And I've also wondered if he's always been like that, or if maybe he was never the super smart and nuanced thinker I've always assumed him to be. Maybe playing that character on the Colbert Report camouflaged it a bit. Or maybe it's how brilliant he can be in thinking in comedic terms or how he clearly has little pockets of genius floating around in that brain of his that created that illusion. Or if just continually aiming his talents towards the middle of the road, which is how I mostly find his television show to be, has slowly neutered his more caustic or layered material. Maybe he's just slowly turning into this vaguely humorous and affable persona that most Americans probably would prefer him to be. At this point he just seems like little more than a smarter and funnier version of Jimmy Fallon to me.
Stewart is clearly the champion in these matters. And it's what is probably going to keep him in hot, or at least lukewarm, water all the time. Because he is the kind of guy who challenges assumptions and tries to speak to all the endless bullshit everything is coated in these days. How deeply everyone has shut their brains off and resents those who also haven't. And people really don't like the implications that maybe, regardless of what their ultimate political convictions may be, they are part of the problem. That you can be on the right side for the wrong reasons. Or your on the wrong side, and you've got no one else but yourself to blame for how wrong you constantly are.
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Posted by Jinnistan 3/09/2024 1:08 pm | #100 |
Tyson has always been an art boob. He's never shown the faintest whiff of grasping the value of anything creative, but frequently speaks with some kind of authority about how invaluable art is in comparison to the wonders of the universe. And in a lot of ways, I get that. Because what can compete with the universe? But, there are obvious things he is completely overlooking in why art matters. Why people are pulled towards it. And it has nothing to do with whether or not the science shown in something like Gravity holds up.
Tyson's a glorified Mr. Wizard. He's useful for being inspiring to grade school children.
But I can't not remember his dumb take that the only thing he can say to a philosophy student is to tell them to drop out and enroll in STEM studies instead. Which is rich considering how his own definition, from his Cosmos, for the birth of Western science, in 1600 AD, means that it was born directly as a result of Enlightenment philosophy.
As for Colbert, I've increasingly found that he has been increasingly saying kind of dumb, or maybe the better word is naive things, over the last few years. And I've also wondered if he's always been like that, or if maybe he was never the super smart and nuanced thinker I've always assumed him to be. Maybe playing that character on the Colbert Report camouflaged it a bit. Or maybe it's how brilliant he can be in thinking in comedic terms or how he clearly has little pockets of genius floating around in that brain of his that created that illusion. Or if just continually aiming his talents towards the middle of the road, which is how I mostly find his television show to be, has slowly neutered his more caustic or layered material. Maybe he's just slowly turning into this vaguely humorous and affable persona that most Americans probably would prefer him to be. At this point he just seems like little more than a smarter and funnier version of Jimmy Fallon to me.
I just want to add this because this is a clip from this past week as well, where he had previously mentioned these people with "compassion and vision" programming the AI. He's talking about these people. Would you trust these people with your algorithms?
Stewart is clearly the champion in these matters. And it's what is probably going to keep him in hot, or at least lukewarm, water all the time. Because he is the kind of guy who challenges assumptions and tries to speak to all the endless bullshit everything is coated in these days. How deeply everyone has shut their brains off and resents those who also haven't. And people really don't like the implications that maybe, regardless of what their ultimate political convictions may be, they are part of the problem. That you can be on the right side for the wrong reasons. Or your on the wrong side, and you've got no one else but yourself to blame for how wrong you constantly are.
I hope he finally gets around to doing that episode dedicated to AI that Apple wouldn't let him make.
