This is such a great idea - Philips are offering the files so people can 3D print replacement parts as needed. This feels like the future I actually want.
Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry | The Verge »
This is truly the stupidest argument.
Quite a lot of voices say, ‘You can only train on my content, [if you] first ask’. And I have to say that strikes me as somewhat implausible because these systems train on vast amounts of data. I just don’t know how you go around, asking everyone first. I just don’t see how that would work,” Clegg said.
This reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
Before screenings of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, some cinemas are playing a short video of Tom Cruise where he thanks the audience for coming out to see the film in the cinema. He clearly sees himself as the saviour of the moviegoing experience. But if this is his vision of what he thinks films should be, count me way the fuck out. Watching a man wing-walking on biplanes is very exciting but it’s the exact same kind of lizard-brain spectacle-cinema as we were getting 100 years ago, but in Cruise/McQuarrie’s minds, films haven’t evolved since then. “I even brought a spare plane, just in case” conveniently colour-coded so the audience can keep track of who is who. I felt genuinely insulted at how badly this film was pieced together.
And I’m not even going to start complaining about reverential tones in which almost every character refers to Ethan Hunt. Or the relentless messianic images of a man with a cross fighting the antigod and the fallen angel Gabriel and who dies and comes back to life and whose face is literally 80% of the poster (I measured).
Exhausting.
Tom Cruise retire bitch.
(Tramell Tillman was great though. He fully understood the assignment.)
Fountain of Youth
Fountain of Youth isn’t so much a direct Indiana Jones rip-off, it’s Indiana Jones filtered through forty years of copycats. It’s a copy of a copy of a copy. The half-tuck henley shirt from the Uncharted games. The moment where the mystery is solved by the last likely member of the team, taken directly from National Treasure. You could literally pick apart every element of this film and find its antecedent in earlier films or videogames. It’s a film put together like a shopping list.
Not that this is, by itself, a bad thing. Indiana Jones was a tribute to the Republic serials of the 30s, and some of its set-pieces are lifted wholesale from those. Like the truck chase with Indiana Jones going under the truck is a combination of similar gags in Zorro’s Fighting Legion and Stagecoach. But Fountain of Youth fails to be anything more than a hodgepodge of reference is because it completely misses any of the emotional beats that draw us into film. The emotional beats that allow us to overlook the seams in the plot construction.
And this is down to two main problems, as I see it.
The first is that there are just too many characters that do absolutely nothing. Even Natalie Portman, the apparent second lead, has little to do apart from to be a foil for John Krazinsky’s witty banter (is it banter when its just one person who gets literally all the good lines?). She’s a capable actor but she’s the Basil Exposition of this film, just there to say the things that helps move us to the next sequence. Laz Alonso and Carmen Ejogo were also in this film, I guess, but for what? Maybe two lines each? Get that bag MM, but yikes your character could have been wallpaper for all we learned about you. Stanley Tucci appears for two minutes to be the guy who says things just for the trailer. And the extent of Domhnall Gleeson’s character development is a single cough to indicate his terminal illness. What are his motivations? Not sure! So if he turns out to be the bad guy (or doesn’t), I don’t really care! We’re given nothing to invest in him as a character.
The other problem affecting Fountain of Youth is one that I feel also contributed to the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull-hate. When everything is CGI and it lets you do anything, nothing makes sense, so we’re left just throwing our hands in the air and shouting “I GUESS??!” I leave my lawnmower in the shed all winter and when I take it out again, I have to oil the blades to get them spinning nicely. But an enormous 200-foot tall precision mechanism shoving thousands of tons of rocks into a complicated stair system buried under the pyramids that hasn’t been touched in 5,000 years? No problem! CGI allows filmmakers to set their films in incredible places, allows their camera to do impossible movements, regardless of how illogical they might be. And who cares about dramatic or emotional stakes when CGI artists can literally paint around your un-affected movements? People make the big jump at the last second because that’s what the CGI artists made it look like. When Yakima Canutt is dragged under horses in Stagecoach or Vic Armstrong is pulled behind the truck in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s thrilling because there’s a real person performing it.
On their own, nither one of these problems is enough to really sink a film. But taken together, it just leaves me feeling like what’s the fuckin point? When you’ve got me looking back fondly on National Treasure 2 (of all films), you’ve really shit the bed.
What an enormous waste of money.
A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency »
I’d like to remind you that our company policy is pro–Plagiarism Machine™. We’re a tech-forward, future-oriented company that doesn’t shy away from the promise of new innovation—even if that innovation is a Giant Plagiarism Machine™ that copy-pastes existing innovation into fake sentient sentences.
Christ, this is a little on the nose.
Sky Pirates
Cheap and cheerful Ozploitation Indiana Jones knock-off. I went into this expecting some industrial grade schlock, but it actually turned out to be surprisingly fun! Almost good, even! It’s impressive how much they achieve with so little, especially in the effects department, and a few of the stunts made me laugh out loud at how inventive they were.
Dead Man
Imagine you’re watching one of the best westerns you’ve ever seen, with a compelling askance view of the myth of the American west, along with a terrifically nuanced and sympathetic depiction of a Native American. And imagine someone else in the room is doing some of the worst guitar noodling you’ve ever heard over the top of the entire movie.
I’m not a huge fan of Neil Young but honestly, this made me like him even less.
(I realise this is not going to be a popular opinion.)
The Professionals
Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster are tremendous in this rugged revisionist men-on-a-mission western, a classic of the “just guys being dudes” genre. The relationships all feel completely believable. The camaraderie between the four leads is off the charts and the late-film reunion between Dolworth and Chiquita is one of the most badass, heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen.
Really, really great.
Warfare
Warfare does its best to thread the tricky needle between giving an honest depiction of the horrors of war told through a skirmish in the Middle East being told from the point of view of some extremely green American soldiers without descending into jingoistic oo-rah American imperialist bullshit. I’m not sure it fully succeeds, and ultimately it ends up falling between the two stools and pleasing nobody.
Still I’m glad Alex Garland got this out of his system though.
Night Moves
How 70s is this? It’s even got Gene Hackman being sexy and eating fondue, every character is completely broken and the film is thoroughly bleak throughout. None more 70s.
Really great.