RANDOMLY-GENERATED THOUGHTS ON A.I.: THE TRUE POTENTIAL PERILS AND BENEFITS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

So, a while ago I watched one of those "30 for 30"'s on ESPN. I watch those sometimes, they're usually good. I don't watch all of them or anything, but if there's one I'm interested in, I'll usually seek it out, and even if you're not a sports fan, there's some top quality filmmakers and top quality storytelling going on most of the time. Some are better than others, but ESPN's made enough of them now over the year that when they don't have sports to show and don't feeling like poisoning the airways Stephen A. Smith, or whatever random former athlete blowhard or obnoxious former sports journalist-turned obnoxious sports columnist they have on talking nonstop about whatever sports soap opera they're trying to conjur up, they'll some old "30 for 30" episodes. I personally wish they'd air something like women's 9-ball, or hell, just make "Sportscenter" more tolerable like it used to, but these docs are fine. Anyway, the one I was watching was called "Al Davis vs. The NFL".

      

It's fine on it's own if you want to watch it,- actually it is pretty interesting- it's about the Raiders' longtime owner Al Davis and how he fought the NFL, several times, but about the big one that got all the way to the Supreme Court was when he moved the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles in the early eighties, against the approval of the league. It's not a new or unusual story to me or anything, but I still liked the documentary for going over all of the details 'cause if you know about these people involved, particularly Raiders' longtime owner Al Davis and then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, there's a lot of history that spreads decades there, and going over every point of it in one thing,- it's a good retelling of those events in ways that we might gloss over otherwise. That said, from a filmmaking and storytelling manner, they-, made a weird choice in my mind.... 

You see the documentary begins with shots of Allegiant Stadium, the Raiders' current home stadium in Las Vegas, NV, and begins with legendary announcer Brent Musberger talking about the then-new staidum 'cause the Raiders had just moved to Vegas from Oakland then he talks about how the stadium, despite being built years after the deaths of both Al Davis and Pete Rozelle, it claimed that, their ghosts, were still luring around the stadium and, in essence, haunting the place? It was weird, and then, the movie tells us that they hired actors to stand-in for Davis and Rozelle, and through the magic of a.i., has replicated their look and appearance for this documentary, essentially being interviewed about each other, in order to talk about the events of the documentary. In essence, they're giving their sides of the conflict, through the their recreations through artificial intelligence. 

Umm, that was, a choice.... I-, hmm.... like, okay, I kinda see it, like, the Raiders fought to move to Los Angeles, and that opened the door for other teams to move, as well as instigate expansion, and the creation of the Raiders new stadium in the Vegas desert is something that literally couldn't have happened with the court cases and conflicts between these two titans of the league, so they're presence, while not literal, is still there. I kinda see the idea. On the other hand, Al Davis had nothing to do with the Raiders moving to Las Vegas, he passed away in 2011, it was Mark Davis, Al's son and current Raiders priority owner who moved the team to Las Vegas, and even though the state and taxpayers paid for a lot of that building, I think if anybody's fingerprints are on the building it's Mark's way more than Al, plus Pete Rozelle also had passed away long before, back in 1996, and he hadn't been commissioner for seven years prior to that,- I haven't been to Allegiant Stadium yet, even though I do live in Vegas, but I can't imagine there's the ghosts of these two there! I get it, it's a storytelling device, but it's a weird one, right, just on that level, it's weird, but like, that's not even the part that concerns me. Like,- why do the a.i. recreations, like, at all? 

I mean, the documentary, is mostly archive news footage and highlights,- Al Davis and Pete Rozelle-, I guess they were a little coy to the cameras when talking about each other, but they didn't exactly make their feelings unknown about each other, nor were they particularly camera shy in general, there's plenty of footage of both of them, in general and talking about and to each other at times. And, okay a lot of the people who were around back then, they aren't here now, but not all of them. The movie has plenty of talking heads and it's not a super-obscure story they're telling. If you need to get, like, the "thoughts" of Davis and Rozelle, like, you don't need to get it from their own words. You could just, have like a close friends or representatives of both of them, just say the copy out loud of what their thoughts would've been, in their own words, describing what Davis and Rozelle felt and were thinking when appropriate, if you really couldn't find like, the silver bullet archive footage you want of them, but like, even then,- like, the main thing I'm getting at here, is that this was clearly a decision by the filmmakers, that wasn't necessary in order to tell this story.

Does that mean it's bad? Does it mean it's good? Umm..., honestly, I don't know. It has an effect, I'll say that, but I think it could've been done a different way.... I'm not bringing it up, 'cause I liked it or hated it, I'm bringing it up because it's the first time I saw something in a film or TV show that really genuinely made me think about artificial intelligence, or a.i. in terms of it's use in filmmaking. I don't know what other peoples' moments for that would've been, I'm sure most people have seen A.I. in films or television and certainly in online media recently and had a striking reaction to it, in one way or another. Honestly, I don't have an immediate story like that.... Maybe I haven't seen anything so striking before, or really, it's probably that I just have a terrible uncanny valley meter to begin with. (Sorry, I- I've heard people use that term for decades now and give me examples of it, and I don't get it. I've seen the Kyle Kallgren video about it, I've seen other things, and 99% of the time, I don't see what they see mean and I just don't get it in general. Whatever example you can name, I probably will not have have the same effect. Sorry animators.) 

Anyway it wasn't the effect of it, so much as, the decision to use it at all. It's so clearly unnecessary that it also clearly means that it was a stylized choice by the filmmakers; they believed that it would improve the story. And this isn't an ESPN-thing, they're pretty hands-off on most of these docs in general, and also their latest "30 for 30", "Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott", begins with a specific note that all of that film's audio is source from archive footage and that none of the audio has been manipulated with, so I doubt this was something insisted upon or anything. (Yes, Stuart Scott's story is probably a little more personal to ESPN than this one about Al Davis, but still..., unless I hear otherwise, I suspect this wasn't a choice made against a filmmaker's wishes or anything. BTW, I watched that documentary too, and it was excellent. Sad, but excellent.) That's the part that struck me, it's never what it creates, it's why are they using it, and what are they using it for?

I know others have talked about a.i. for awhile now, I'm probably the last person who's talked about it at this point, but honestly I hadn't had anything to really say about it. I mean, I get why people hate it; I see why people use it.... 

(Shrugs) 

Honestly, I only kinda understand what it is. On the surface it doesn't seem that different to me, than things people already had been doing, just a lot easier. People had been warning about, say computer animated models taking the place of actors, forever-, I remember when "The Sopranos" got in hot water over recreating Nancy Marchand's character for a scene after she had passed away-, they didn't use the term A.I., but essentially it's the same thing.

 

Yeah, this scene, that frankly I didn't know/believe was CGI until after people told me and were upset at how unnatural and wrong it looks? (See, told ya, I don't have an Uncanny Valley meter, this looked fine enough to me; I was convinced they shot this scene and then changed the whole rest of the episode to have it be about her actor/character's passing.)

CGI/a.i.... is there a difference? (Shrugs)

Sometimes it doesn't really seem like it, but yes, the difference seems to be that, instead of painstaking humans doing the actions, it's now, easier, through the use of machines? Algorithms? Something like that?- I'm not here to pretend I'm an expert on it. A.I. seems to be a catch-all term for a lot of things, but the basic difference I see is that, unlike having to teach the machine how to do what you want it to do, the machines can be programmed so advanced that they can help you out instead. This is through a process called "Machine Learning".

Okay, I might not fully get what we're calling, A.I., but I definitely remember the first time I heard the term "Machine Learning". If was fifteen or so years ago when I saw a machine do something that few people thought a machine could do. 

  

If you're not familiar, Watson, was an IBM supercomputer that was designed specifically to win on "Jeopardy!". And not just, win, against anybody, those two players that he's competing against, current host, and still the all-time record-holder in consecutive wins on "Jeopardy!" Ken Jennings, and Brad Rutter, who at the time, was the highest money-earner ever on "Jeopardy!" and I think is still, 2nd or 3rd on the list-, basically, the two greatest "Jeopardy!" contestants ever, and Watson, despite admittedly a few hiccups, like thinking Toronto was in America, for instance, still, he beat the crap out of both of them. This was the modern-day equivalent of Big Blue defeating Garry Kasparov times 1000, it's one thing to teach machine how to move chess pieces on a board, but getting it to understand speech and language, and figure out "Jeopardy!" clues,- hell teaching it to ring in, is hard! Teaching it to answer in the correct format, is hard!...-  It was undeniably impressive, and even then, I remember hearing that the technology used to build and create Watson, would inevitably help lead to other greater advancements where machines could assist in things like, figuring out genetic codes or diagramming unknown disesases and helping find cures faster than scientists trying to do it alone, and you can look up the things that WATSON been doing, it's technique have advanced the world. It's also the same kind of technology and process that would create something like ChatGPT. 

(Sigh) 

I'm a little, um, hmm, uncomfortable, talking about ChapGPT or other similar programs; they're quite controversial, and especially as a writer, it-, it makes me a little queezy to a degree. That's not true for everybody; when it first started to break out a few years ago, I saw a lot of friends of Facebook, many of whom were way more successful writers than I am, using ChapGPT, you know, to create, laughs basically. Like, they would give ChatGPT a concept and a style and tell it write something and then we laugh and whatever it blurted out. It was funny then, 'cause we were laughing at it, on some high level, but the more ChatGPT has become in use, the more natural it's become for many to use. There's good and bad to this, obviously, these are tools; it's not what they do, it's how you use them....

(Sigh) 

I guess you all might be wondering if I've ever used it, right.... Well, not on this blog, no. I'm not pretending that's good or bad either, but I've never used it here. I have used it in my writings, and I did it recently. I don't really talk or promote some of the other projects I work on a lot, but I did write a short film recently. This one: 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34443645/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_accord_2_cdt_t_1

I guess, I could probably find the actual short film and post it here, but.... eh,; I'm sure it's somewhere online; I'm just happy it got made and finished personally, it even got screened publicly. Most people who saw it seemed to like it. It's a cute little short. It was shot during something called a 48 Hour Project, where a group of filmmakers work together under a given set of conditions, and they have to make a short film, from writing to filming to editing, all the way through completion in 48 hours. Anyway, I helped write the screenplay with a friend of mine, and the plot was her original idea and basically, and we had to turn this idea about mystery shoppers into a superhero movie. It was the genre we picked, that's one of the conditions; we pick the genre at random. Anyway, at some point, we had to come up with a superhero name for one of the characters, and that's what we used- honestly, I don't even know if it was ChatGPT, but it was one of those sites. It might've been some other kind of name generator, which,- isn't that another version of a.i. anyway, although I've seen name generators, even before I heard of Watson, so...,- but yeah, we put in some descriptions and asked for a superhero name, and if I'm being honest, I don't even remember if we used any of those suggestions or not. I think we did, but, it's possible we saw one of the suggestions and came up with something we liked better. That's literally about the only thing that I even remember trying to use it for. To me, that's kinda what it's there for, to help, or assist in the creative process, or the writing process, if it's not something that's inherently creative. I'll admit when the idea to use a.i. was brought up, I was a little apprehensive at first, but y'know, if that's all it is, and if I can't think of anything better than what a machine would come up with, than absolutely use the machine. It's one part of a much larger thing, it's not creating it entirely, and it's certainly not doing the work for me. In my mind, that's not any different than when I have to use a thesaurus to try to find a better word to use. 

Of course, not everybody uses it that way, and, some of the recent stats on how prevalent ChatGPT has become, across everything, honestly is pretty frightening. That's before you look into a lot of the recent plagairism claims that are out there, even before ChatGPT became really prevalent, everywhere from lazy video essayists to people who reached the highest levels of academia and governments.... Business reports, law briefs are being dismissed for being obviously A.I...., if you want to look it up, there's so much where a.i. has reportedly been taking over everything. I'm not the first to bring this up, hell, "The Simpsons" did an episode about how kids are using ChatGPT to do homework and how the teachers have to combat it with A.I.-recognition software..., they're not even the first, or fifth show to even do something about that. Just a couple weeks ago, there was another published book where the "author", left in the writing prompt in their book. (Yes, another, that's happened multiple times too now.) 

(Another prolonged sigh)

You know, despite all of this, I was still basically gonna ignore all of this and not write anything about ChatGPT, a.i. or anything else. I didn't really have any strong feelings about it. Like,- people have been finding ways of cheating forever. And sure, some people have to write things for their jobs and that's not their best skill or something, there are times where I don't think a.i. is the worst thing, I don't mind if I a.i. is used to say, create a generic business contract letter or something of the sort of something of that nature that can be tedious to put out, and sure, it can be used to do the things that we can't do some times, right? And on top of everything else that's permeated our media over the years that I've bitched and complained about on here, and elsewhere, like, honestly, a.i. being used, it isn't nearly as close to the list of complaints for me. I mean, if I heard that the next "Spider-Man" movie turned out to be written by A.I., my complaint wouldn't be that it was written by A.I., my complaint would be that we were making a new "Spider-Man" movie at all! Like, c'mon, don't we have more than enough; I'm sick of these things! See, where the energy and the angers should go, not towards, the a.i., right? 

The thing is, I did see a tweet somewhere awhile ago. This one, by fantasy author, Carol Maciejewska, I don't know her work, but apparently this tweet went viral enough for me to see it pop up somewhere, and I can't get it out of my head: 

"You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction!

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

I know, it's just a funny line, and the perfect kind of thing to randomly throw out into the world; which is how a website like Twitter, should be used..., (And no, I'm not calling it that letter.) but, this kept sticking into the back of my mind every time I heard something about some flagrantly bad use of A.I., and she dismisses as more than a funny observation as well, but the more I think about it, I think she nailed it here. Like, I don't need my jetpack, but, why exactly do we have this instead of, Rosie the Maid? 

  

Okay, look, I'm gonna warn you all now, um, a lot of the rest of this post, is gonna get a little, tinfoil hat-like.... I'm aware of that, so I'm letting you all know that now. I don't dive into, for-lack-of-a-better-term, "conspiracy theories" or anything ridiculous like that normally, and I don't think that's even what this is,- and I do try to avoid making too many giant leaps of logic, especially pertaining to some of the things I'm gonna bring up, even I feel like I'm bordering on turning into a crackpot for thinking about some of this way too long,.... I realize that I'm about to put 2+2 together and coming up with a formula for how the stock market is rigged or whatever ridiculous thing you want to put at the end of 2+2, and maybe the stupid computer algorithms and my general surrounding are putting these observations into my head, it's very, very possible, but, I'm gonna knowingly risk it, this one time. This is my one, grand theory of the modern ways of the world, so forgive my indulgence, if this sounds like the meanderings of that old crackhead at the bus stop who thinks the government's hiding the cure for cancer in the AIDS vaccine they secretly made out of dandelions and alien DNA but still asks you for a dollar and tells you "God Bless" when you get on the bus but that he never gets on,- anyway, if it sounds a little like that, I'm apologizing for that now. 

(Long deep sighing breath)

Okay, if you're still with me, thanks for your indulgence..., but yes, why, exactly, do we have ChatGPT and not Rosie?! Not literally, obviously, although looking at my sink full of dirty dishes, yes, I would rather have a robot maid than a tool that would help me write this essay faster; it's literally just four dishes and I feel exhausted just looking at it, but why did the first really huge mainstream advancement in A.I., come in the department of writing and creating.... Like, who benefits from that? 

In my experience, the idiots who kept trying to copy my answers during school tests.

Okay, that's a little facetious, sure some people have learning disabilities and struggle with writing in general, I'm not thinking about them, but is it, that facetious though? Like, it's not the people who can't write or can't create that bother me, it's the people who see the mere act of it, as an annoyance. Something that they shouldn't be doing, and shouldn't have to do, something that, some other person should be doing for them, or some machine. The people who could do all the hard work of, actually writing or creating, but don't exactly want to do it, or those want to say they've done it but don't actually want to do it. I mean, people get hired to take tests for people all the time, to get threw school, get into college, to go threw college..., people who just shouldn't be in those positions, but they somehow can afford it. And, I'm not expressly talking about one person here; it's a whole problem with modern society, when you think everything is commodable and disposable...,- like, I'll give an example here, 'cause it's easy to look at politicians or business leaders and see how incompetent and/or corrupt they are, but how many people do you think "passed" the BAR exam, and became lawyers but, didn't actually take the test? Even if it's say, half of 1%, wouldn't that scare you? Or, how about doctors! You don't think it's happened occasionally? Probably not at the same level as other positions, but would it not worry you? Usually people who do that kind of thing, you hope would get weeded out by their incompetence pretty quickly, but y'know, not always I bet. Certainly not at positions that might still hold a lot of power, but might not be that intense. 

Okay, let me bring it back to something fun and entertaining to show my point here, you know, I have a friend who we discuss one of our favorite television shows together, "Abbott Elementary". I'm a couple seasons behind admittedly, I'm trying to catch up, but I do have one observation...- see, a few years ago I participated in a poll listing the greatest villains in literature, I posted my ballot at one point: 

https://davidbaruffi.blogspot.com/2017/10/my-top-100-villains-ballot-50-1-for.html

I don't know if that entire ballot holds up now, and if you look at the actual results of the list, my ballot was not even close to the final results, like, my number one didn't even make their list, but I still like that ballot for the most part, however if I did that list today, there's absolutely one name that I would absolutely find a place for, and yeah, it's from "Abbott Elementary". 

 

My friend tries to defend her, apparently she, "gets better" which I guess is true, but, Principal Ava is fucking evil! One of the most evil characters on television, maybe the most evil. I mean, just think about it for half a second people, she hates school, she hates teaching and learning, she blackmailed her way into a job as a school principal over somebody who wanted the job and was more qualified for the position, she's the most self-centered person ever, and based on how she's built things like private toilets for herself, she's probably stealing funds from the school district, and she's the one running an elementary school! Imagine your kids going to this school, and praying that they're somehow able to learn-, I mean, it's already bad enough there's a lot of idiots and psychos on schoolboards across the country trying to give our kids very bad educations now to lie and manipulate and brainwash our students, and that's even besides every other problem with our modern school system, but here, you have a sociopathic nutjob like Ava, as your school Principal! I mean, we really should be madder at incompetence at positions of authority in general, but this is like getting Frank Burns as your doctor! Okay, it's not that bad, 'cause at least she's not killing the students by being bad at her job and excusing it by saying it was "God's will", (I should've put Frank Burns way higher on that list, especially in the books, he's way worst than you realize.) but here's the person in charge of molding young minds! All, because she wants to be in charge and bully around her co-workers and not do anything substantive, and this is all at the expense of an elementary school, their teachers, their students, a place for learning for those who need the best advantages the most! (Oh, yeah, big fish in a small pond syndrome, all this to have the power as an inner-city elementary school principal! She doesn't even have the grand ambitions she thinks she does!) I love the show and the character is hilarious, Janelle James's performance is magnificent and underrated; she's funny as hell, but I can make a legit argument that she's the epitome of everything wrong with this country. I won't go that far, but I shouldn't legitimately be able to do that.

BTW, it's not easy to get a job as a school principal! I'm sure, at the very best, she coasted through all the classes and credentials needed to even become eligible to be a principal, if she didn't, you know, pay/bribe/blackmail somebody to make her pass all those exams and classes too.... I mean, she probably was a teacher for a few years, I doubt she was a good one, but even with all the blackmail in the world, you need a Bachelor's Degree, years of teaching experience, a Master Degree in Education, several other state-required licenses and exams....- I mean, this is Ava, do you think she legitimately did all this to get this job!? You don't think she'd use A.I. to do this, if she could've!? There were Presidents of Harvard and others in highly-ranked positions in Ivy League school caughts plagairizing, do you think it's not happening on the lowest levels of the education systems in general?! At all levels of society, in general!? 

And with A.I., it's so much easier now, for people like Ava, to advance to positions like that. I get chills thinking about that. I mean, it's one thing that it's poisoning the arts right now, and yeah, that does annoy me, but it's honestly, everything else that bothers me about it. Like, how far does this go? The people who are using A.I. to find cures for cancer or stuff like that, I mean, I have nothing but great things to say for that. Even a.i. when it's needed to help improve art, it's fine. Artificial intelligence is never gonna fully replace true talent and skill,- the problem is never gonna be a.i. taking over- all those fears about machines taking over the world and whatnot,- I don't buy that. What I am concerned with is idiots using those machines to take over the world. Or maybe even worst, smart-enough idiots with very ill-intent, using those machines to take over the world. (Yeah, think about that too, sometimes when make something too easy to do, that means that some people who shouldn't be doing things are now doing those things, and that's not necessarily good either. Oh god, can you imagine some of the world worst a.i.-created films from some of the most incompetent of human beings would come with like-, it could make Tommy Wiseau look like a competent filmmaker, Jesus.)

And, for those people, the smart-enough idiots with ill-intent, what's the ideal endgame for them? I'm not saying this is what's ultimately gonna happen, I honestly don't think that, but these are people who aren't skilled enough to actually be in positions of authority, trying to cheat and bribe their way into positions of authority, and like, for the time being, let's ignore all the great things that are coming from a.i. for moment and people trying to use it to genuinely benefit humanking and whatnot, I get the use of a.i. for that, but the percentage that's not interested in that, what do they want society to become? What are they trying to lead us towards? They already are thumbing their nose at academia, politics, arts, and if you want to include all kinds of modern automation that's ruining our job markets-, (and to be fair, not all automation is bad either, like McDonald's had to hire more people when they put in self-check outs 'cause people ordered more food so they need more cooks, and it ultimately benefitted everyone, I get that, but there is a lot of automation that, all it does is kill jobs, and frankly can just ruin things in general) it's like they don't want anybody to do any work of any substance, at all, unless it's in service to them. 

Like, that's my conspiracy theory, the incompetent, the rich, the-, as George Carlin once called them, the real "Owners" of our country, the richer and more powerful they get, the poorer and dumber they make us, they're slowly using and manipulating the trappings of modern society in however they can, in order to destroy us, the regular people, and a.i. is another tool for that. They don't really want us to be around, unless they need somebody to go fight a war or tie their shoes, or whatever. Anything that they can't do, or don't want to do/learn or are unable to take the time to learn how to do it themselves, they think it's beneath them, and not something that they should ever be doing and therefore anything that makes that part of their lives easier, they're going to press it onto us, and a.i. is so much another tool in the ultimate goal of that for them, that it makes me cringe a little every time, even when it's perfectly reasonable to use a.i. And the more they take away, from what we can do, not just to create, but to make a living like a regular person, like, what's going to be left? I mean, are we all just gonna end up being OnlyFans models at this point, cause it's either sell ourselves to get what crumbs they give or nothing else? It feels like it, although a.i. has probably penetrated, no pun intended, porn as well,- hell, the industry is probably got the best a.i. technology of everything right now. I mean, it makes sense, if they can't get us humans to satisfies their most bizarre desires and fetishes, you can make the fake humans do it, although they're probably rich enough now that as long as it's physically and anatomically possible, they can probably pay them to do it now. 

I know, I'm going off the rails on this, and it's probably bad to talk too much about porn in this but, if you go to a porn website, there's sixty ads for a.i. porn on them, and of course it's the first thing that explodes in popularity; the industry is a better trend forecaster than anybody wants to admit and realize. Also, isn't it freaky, that people are getting so much richer on those model sites? Free porn is easier and cheaper than ever to get and yet, people are paying a lot of money to a lot of those "amateurs" and others on those websites...; who are those people, some of them are giving a lot of money to those performers, and I certainly don't begrudge them for making it, but,.... I mean,...- maybe they couldn't afford a seat on Epstein's plane, but the way they give to some of these performers, unless way more people are going broke by donating to OnlyFans models than we realize, or these are the people who could probably afford to buy a plane of their own.

Yeah, I get it, we don't want to think about it, but I do think about it. I think that's part of why "Anora" hit so hard for me and works for me so well. 

   

It is cliche and all, and I don't know how accurately it portrays the escort or stripper parts of the sex industry, and sure, maybe living in Vegas and working in the service industry effects me too much, but if you've ever had to deal with a lot of these people, especially the younger yuppie people, who can spend thousands on the dumbest of bets without thinking or worrying about it, 'cause they're families are some kind of oligarchs or something, that movie brutally nails everything wrong with capitalism right now. I feel it in my bones, seriously. They're turning us all into hustlers just to get a little ahead, and eventually you buy into your own con because, there isn't anything else you got.  

I also think it's that same train-of-thought though, that also made me absolutely despise and hate "Ready Player One" so much too. 

   

Like, that's basically a film that's about how great living and being in an a.i. world is, one created by an eccentric rich billionaire and everybody's in a symbolic power struggle to control this virtual reality heaven, meanwhile everybody lives in fucking trailers and abandoned cars repurpose as crates, everything's run by drones, and everyone's obsessing over famous pieces of nostalgia that they're iconic hero was obsessed with, so like, literally instead of trying to create a better world, or even just, be pissed off that the world around them isn't better, they're stuck trying to make a fake world better...-, a fake world they didn't even design...- God, I hate this fucking movie! And yes, there's some girl in the opening, who's dancing around a stripper pole in that a.i. universe, and sure, maybe she enjoys doing that, or maybe she thinks she does because the world that's evolved to in this universe makes it seem like a quality and productive choice of lifestyle than whatever else she could've been doing? I don't know, it's so annoying and depressing and it's media like this that I believe is sending out all the wrong messages to the populace. Ignore the world's problems and just worry about your own little portion of the fictional world we give you, hell, fight for that fictional world to be better, instead of trying and fighting to make the real world better. (Sarcastic voice) "Don't teach the audience to be critics, or critical teachers at least, just congratulate them on being such big fans of them!" Ugh. 

So, is there a greater thing I've come to with my thoughts on a.i.? I don't know? Probably not. Despite my Revelations-level projections of how a.i. is gonna end us, I still think I might be giving a.i. way too much credit honestly. I'm not even convincing myself of these delusional predictions I'm spewing honestly, and frankly, I obviously hope I'm wrong, and there's plenty of evidence to indicate to me that a.i. is a bubble that's gonna eventually burst soon. People will realize how genuinely minimally useful it is, and that it's just gonna be better and easier to do most things the good old-fashioned way. A.i, is only as good or bad as it's user and it's developer. Some are better than others, some are better at some skills than others..., hell,- you want to really get laughs at a.i. and ChatGPT in general, don't try to give it obtuse and bizarre writing prompts, watch competing a.i. play chess against each other. 

  

Yeah, this is what I need when I want to not be afraid of a.i. I know they're not chessbots like Stockfish or Komodo or anything, so they're not designed to know chess, although some have learned and have apparently some of them have gotten better...? But, yeah, 40 years after Big Blue, we have machines that could beat the best at "Jeopardy!" but still some machines that think pawns can go backwards if needed, your queen can jump over a horse, and your bishop can you magical powers to cross the board and turn into a queen to checkmate your opponent's queen, before offering a draw. 

And you know, the annual CES Convention was in town last week, and you know what the huge think was this year? Vacuum cleaners! No, seriously, vacuums; they were the big thing. 

  

Look at that? I mean, my sink is still fully of dirty dishes right now, but look here, after everything else, we are indeed taking a.i. technology and it's being used to help make our lives better by indeed, doing the chores that we would've been too consumed with to write stuff like novels, scripts, and yes, blogposts before. And these are way more advanced than even those old Roombas. They're climbing and descending stairs, switching between mopping hardwood floors and vacuuming carpets,- they're moving old socks from the floors, they're identifying how things move on the floor.... Maybe we're a lot closer to having our own Rosie the Robot Maid's than we think, and once we get those things, the more useless a.i.'s like ChatGPT are gonna be gone the way of other old modern programs we thought we once couldn't live without like America Online or MySpace or, eh, whatever civil liberties we lost today? 

(Sigh)

I'm trying to smile through this, I swear, but we're never gonna be able to afford any of those machines, right? By the time they're cheap enough and useful enough to actually buy, they're gonna figure out that the mop and the broom are still gonna be so much cheaper and just as good that it won't make the investment worth it, right? That's not part of my the rich want to make us their servants' rant, that's just-, that thing's gonna break, a large kid's gonna step on it or think it's a frisbee and throw it off the roof-, you all see that right? I wish it would work but it's just gonna be easier and cheaper to trick an OCD friend of yours to clean your place for you than to ever use buy or use any of those things, right? 

Yeah, those things are cool but it's kinda the same with recreating Al Davis and Pete Rozelle using a.i. technology, just because we can, doesn't necessarily mean we should. 

Certainly! I've written a closing passage that calls back to your previous reference to "Al Davis vs. The NFL", as a way of connecting most of the previous prevalent ideas and threads from this blogpost together, to make it appear more coherent, while still keeping it in your trademark meandering and insipid rambling, first-person faux-stream-of-consciousness style of mediocre commentary. 

  

MOVIE REVIEWS #211: "SINNERS", "F1: THE MOVIE", "A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY", "POOR THINGS", 'THE BOY AND THE HERON", "SING SING", "CHALLENGERS", and "HOPE (Sodahl)".

(Sigh) 

So, I thought I'd be posting a little earlier this blog, but life got in the way, again. Somebody really need to put a stop to that kind of thing, in this case, if you read my last movie reviews blog, I mentioned I was working on my health, which I was and still am, and am most doing okay. I put off some teeth issues but otherwise, other than being on more prescriptions, I'm doing okay. However, I still ended up not posting nearly as often as I would've liked, because I had some computer issues this time. 

Basically, my entire hard drive reverted back four years and I lost basically in the meantime, and the only USB Drive I had was corrupted to the point where I had to send it to a place in California, in order to recover the files. It cost, a pretty penny, but thankfully, they managed to recover everything, thank you very much, DriveSavers Data Recovery. Seriously, these people were amazing and it did cost less than they said it would, but it was a lot of money. I took out a loan of 401K just to make sure I had some money to live on, 'cause it wiped me out, but it was better than my entire work wiped out. Lots of screenplay and documents and files that I needed, yeah, I can't promote them enough for everything they've done. And during the few weeks they were working on and I had to get the money together to pay them, I was pretty depressed and basically shut down from anything entertainment, movies, TV, and I'm already behind on everything. I didn't even watch the Emmys this year and honestly still I don't know who won, so if anybody wants to let me know, go ahead. 

However, I've recovered, and actually gotten to the movie theater a few times more recently than normal, and have finally finished a new batch of movie reviews. And apparently movie theaters are showing more older films as some classics are getting some re-releases to the big screen, which is pretty great honestly. My Canon of Film post on "Hamilton" recently was inspired by me seeing it on the big screen, and if that's still playing, absolutely go see that, but the theater experience, really is the place to see a lot of these, and I'm glad to see that stuff like "Jaws" and "Back to the Future" are getting major re-releases to theaters at the moment. Things like that should be done more often anyway, and if you can afford it and have the time, go see something in the theaters in that way. On the big screen, with an audience, in the dark,- remembering how that great that experience can be is a genuinely great feeling. 

So, that's why this absense has been for longer, but I'm back here again, so let's get to the reviews! 

SINNERS (2025) Director: Ryan Coogler

⭐⭐⭐⭐

After trying to digest "Sinners" for a day or so, I think I've come to the conclusion that this is probably the first real time Writer/Director Ryan Coogler, decided to just have fun making a film. That's not to say that his other films and ideas weren't passion projects, or anything, they were, and they were good, sometimes great. They were also personal, you can feel that most of the time, but you can't say that, as great as "Fruitvale Station" was, that it was a fun film he was making, and even "Creed" and "Black Panther", their franchise films, and he did them well, and definitely cared about them, and told some stories that he definitely wanted to tell and was heavily inspired by them, but they were cries of a deep-seeded need to express himself and scream that we see him and know him; they were the held-down thoughts of a deeply complex young man, deeply in touch with the stories and themes and ideas that he felt that he needed to express his way. He's still doing that with "Sinners", but, now that those initial screams of artistic frustration have come out, he realizes, it's time to have a little fun. 

Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight, maybe play a little guitar before the Sunday morning sermon. Like I said, there's definitely still stories he wants to tell, deeply personal and important tales and "Sinners" is that. It's a period piece that takes place mostly in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 inspired by tales his grandfather would tell him, some of the ghost stories and folk tales of the time, and uses a lot of the elements of that time and place, where the Blues were born at late night juke joints the locals would go to after spending their long days on the cotton fields. The movie follows two twin brothers, Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a duel-role) who years earlier had left the area for Chicago to make some bigger money, but claim they've come back, to deal with the devils they know instead of the ones they didn't up north. Despite some of the more supernatural elements that will arrive soon enough, there's a lot of history here already. For instance, there was a huge migration of African-American to the Chicago area from the south around the beginning of the 20th Century, especially during World War I where immigration was halted and factories up north began allowing African-American workers. 

This also artistically effected the area especially musically; the 1930s was around the beginning of the Chicago Renaissance and to some degree, the birth of modern blues and jazz. Delta blues in particular play a part. On top of Smoke and Stack, the next major character is their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton). Sammie is a blues guitar virtuoso known as Preacher Boy because his father (Saul Williams) is a strict Baptist preacher who believes that he's playing the devil's music. Yes, this was a thing that happened way before what we tend to think of as rock 'n roll came about. Coogler is playing with a lot of old Delta blues legends and tales here, most of which I don't know, but clearly Sammie is inspired by Robert Johnson, the legendary delta bluesman who basically invented rock & roll, and according to legend, made a deal with the devil by the light of a graveyard moon in order to become the best guitar player in the world. Sammie's inspired by him but Coogler takes the story in a different direction. 

The SmokeStack Brothers by a local sawmill from Hogwood (David Maldonado) the local Klan leader, with the intent of turning the place into a local juke joint. They've brought some fine Irish beer and Italian wine and have gone through their old town to bring together the gang for the endeavor, and opening night's promising to be a humdinger. 

I love the sequence where Sammie starts playing at the club, and the spirits of music past, present and future seem to be summoned altogether and colliding with each other the more he plays, as though he isn't just playing the so-called Devil's Music, but that the music itself seems to have otherworldly special powers; it's like a fuck you to anybody who's complained that somebody isn't really "Rock & Roll" every time the Hall of Fame names somebody that they don't like. Of course, it also summons those undead spirits and they, well, put a stop to the party, in a sense. I don't know how much I want to give away here, but a cynic could say that this is Coogler jumping in on the trend of mainstream African-American filmmakers diving into the horror genre a la, Jordan Peele, but I like that trend, part of it is because it gives horror a new flavor and depth. Setting a story like this in the south adds so many more interesting elements, like Hailee Steinfeld's character Mary, who once was Stack's girlfriend, and even though she passes for white, she's actually half-black and kinda prefers being around their world and culture. Or Delroy Lindo's character as a drunk old blues musician legend who performs for beer instead of money and has seen it all; in another time and place, he'd be as big as Buddy Guy is now, but back then and with fewer opportunities..., not to mention elements that are naturally horror, like the Hoodoo princess character played by Wunmi Mosuka, which is a horror trope, but also brings more engagement and depth to the time and place, and her character has layers to her and significance. 

I guess the movie has a few too many endings personally, including a post-credits scene that I like enough not to fully dock the film for having it, but mostly, I think the movie is just fun. This is what horror at it's best is; it takes the personal elements of the storyteller and then adds the supernatural and horror aspects to accentuate the fears. I saw this movie in the theaters and among the fifty or so trailers they put in front of the movie was a sequel/remake of a horrible dead teenager movie from the '90s that frankly we didn't need a remake of and frankly nobody wants a remake of. That's the era of horror that I grew up with and I hated it then and I hate it now. Dumb characters, uninteresting cliche stories, violence and blood for the sake of violence and blood, and maybe something scary about sex thrown in, to try for a PG-13 rating and maybe this version is done better, but why are they even bothering, when were getting some of the most fascination, fun and inventive new stories in the genre in recent years. I'll take "Sinners" and other recent horrors over stuff like that any day. 

F1: THE MOVIE (aka F1) (2025) Director: Joseph Kosinski

(Shrugs) ⭐⭐1/2

Ugh, I don't know how to rate this film.

This is the movie I've heard the most about recently, and I don't know what people want me to say on this one. Joseph Kosinski is the modern-day Tony Scott, or at least he's trying to be, and frankly, I hated Tony Scott's films. One of his films I hated the most was "Days of Thunder", which was his racing movie, except that was about NASCAR. This is,- even more blatantly a product placement for the racing league they're covering and I have thoughts on that too. 

"F1: The Movie", is about a fictional Formula-1 racing team. Now, Formula-1 has been gaining in popularity in America in recent years, which is actually kinda surprising, 'cause Formula-1 is very much not an American sport. At one point, long ago, it kinda was, because IndyCar and Formula-1 basically have the same similar roots, and the Indy 500 used to be a Formula-1 race, but that was decades ago and they've long-since split up, and open-wheel racing in general, had been going downhill in America for decades, especially after the IRL/CART racing split in the nineties, and Formula-1, in particular, already being more of a European centralized sport, basically died out after the disastrous 2005 U.S. Grand Prix, which basically turned the whole of Formula-1 into a joke to us Americans, and they only really recently have started to begin to have regular races in the United States again. In fact they now have three American races on the schedule, the most they've had in a while. There's also been some good movies and documentaries made about Formula-1 and other F-1 adjacent racing stories, Ron Howard's "Rush" for instance, made my Ten Best List the year that came out, and that still is a good movie, I highly recommend that one. There's also been some good docs about some of the sports' best stars from the past and present, as well as a very popular reality series on Netflix, "Formula 1: Drive to Survive" that details the teams and the drivers that take on and race Formula-1. 

And here's the thing...- F1 fucking sucks! 

The racing league, not the movie,- I mean, yeah, it kinda sucks too, but, (Shrugs) eh, it's whatever, I'll talk about it in a sec, I gotta rant about this here and I might not get the opportunity again, but Formula-1,- I mean, okay, the drivers, especially at the top level are good,- I don't think they're as great as they think are, and as somebody who did grow up as a bit of a NASCAR fan, I should point out that Michael Schumacher, did lose that head-to-head NASCAR vs. F1 race in '08 to Carl Edwards, and that was on a track designed supposedly, specifically for Formula 1 cars; just because you're smaller and open-wheel doesn't mean you're the best racing league, nor does it make you better that you're an International league, as opposed to NASCAR's more regional presence in the U.S. Yeah, F1's big thing is that it races all over the world, supposedly at the world's best tracks and road courses, although what it really wants is to show off how they're always in the most exotic, extravagant locations in the world, often in the streets of these locations. The most famous race of there's and probably the only one that I would say is actually worth watching at least once to say that you did, is the Monaco Grand Prix, where they race around the streets of Monte Carlo. This is funny to me for several reason, firstly because road courses make for terrible racing generally. The reason you race mainly in circular courses, especially on large ovals, like for the Indianapolis 500 in IndyCar or the Daytona 500 in NASCAR, is so there's room for the cars to go faster and room for multiple cars to manuever and actually race each other for the long stretches, and sure, you give up having right-hand turns, but this actually is better racing. Road courses can be fun occasionally, Watkins Glen is great road course for instance, and it's a nice change-of-pace, but open-wheeled cars like Formula-1 are actually faster and better-designed for these oval tracks, so they're running around the world, creating and running on courses that are actually not designed for the cars they're running!? And it leads to shitty racing, that's why the same cars win all the time. Like, Verstappen or Norris or- I guess it's Piastri's turn this year, but it was Verstappen for how long before then and Hamilton for twice as long before he hurt his back. And frankly, they're mostly winning 'cause they're in the McLaren's now. Verstappen would still be winning if he wasn't on Team Red Bull and stuck with Tsunoda as his teammate. That's the other thing, F1 isn't about who the best driver is, it's about who the best car constructor is, 'cause whoever has the best car usually wins, especially with these terrible courses they have where passing is almost impossible half the time. There's teams and car constructors in other racing sports, that matters too, and it might not be, as much, about the cars in F1 now as it used to be with more regulation than there was, but historically it mattered in F1 way more than in any other other racing leagues, and it still matters way more now, and it shows if you look up the history of Formula-1, 'cause even by old standards of auto racing at the time, they did not give two shits about driver safety until Ayrton Senna's death in '94! Since then, there's only been one death of a Formula-1 driver, Jules Bianchi in 2015, which is great compared to what they used to be. Like, there were times where the average might've been three deaths/year and they might've been lucky it was that low. That's how little, historically Formula-1 gave a shit about the drivers of the cars. That's because, and this is big reason I hate Formula-1, it's not just that it's European-centric, it's that, Formula-1 is the worst of what that means; Formula-1 was started by rich cocksuckers who had nothing better to do but put a bunch of money into building and racing the fastest cars they could construct, just to see if they're penis was bigger than the other rich cocksuckers penises. This is why half the teams are car manufacturers like Ferrari, McLaren, Aston-Martin, and BMV, it's a sport for rich capitalistic motherfuckers to show off how they're successful at being rich capitalistic motherfuckers! And that's why they go to these famous places all over the world! They have a race now in Las Vegas, which is where I'm at, and it runs right down the Las Vegas Strip, and whoever allowed this race to happen on the City Counsel, I hope get voted out by landslides and get burned alive in a gasoline fire. And it's not just that it interrupts the locals who have to find alternate routes to get to work and shit, they black out the rooms and the streets during that whole time when F1's in town, including the bridges over the Las Vegas Strip, unless you pay extra to watch the race from your hotel rooms, so it's fucking over the casinos, the locals and the tourists! The FIA are some of the greediest pieces of capitalist garbage I've ever been around! 

Fine, they can't race at the Las Vegas Speedway, it's an oval but it's not built for open-wheeled racing, we found that out the hard way..., RIP Dan Wheldon, but they're still not worth the time and investment we put into serving them every fucking year now! Say what you want about NASCAR, and yes, part of why Formula-1 is starting to come back is because NASCAR has so fucked up their sport in the last two decades that it left the opening for disillusioned racing fans, but NASCAR, was started by rumrunners and bootleggers who had to figure out how to modify their regular cars themselves in order to run alcohol up and down the East Coast during Prohibition in order to outrun the cops; it might be a strange Southern sport filled with redneck fans who will too proudly wear the Confederate flag and cheer on "Brandon", (And those fans have been fucked over by NASCAR for decades now, someone tell the France's to sell! And get rid of their stupid goddamn playoffs!) but here, I'll defend NASCAR and even it's fans, 'cause at it's core, it's a working man's racing sport, full of fun eccentric characters who are just as great athletes as the Formula-1 guys, if not better. Let's see those precious open-wheel cars runs on some dirt tracks once in a while, than maybe I'll start to be impressed!

(Long exhale)

So yeah, I'm not inclined to enjoy a giant 2 1/2 hour advertisement for F1. That doesn't mean I couldn't enjoy it, part of why Formula-1 is so fascinating is because of how fucked up it's history and the racing actually is, but yes, in general, they are the most obnoxious, snooty, impressed-with-the-smell-of-their-own-farts part of the racing world, certainly the people running it, the people who put their money, time and investment into it, and to be honest, a lot of their fans are too. The drivers, the people in the pit crew, some of the designing and building the cars, and the spotters and whatnot, I can respect them, and there's definitely incompetent pricks at the top of running most every sport, but it does feel worst with Formula-1 than most. 

(Shrugs) 

As to the film, um..., I guess I liked it more than "Days of Thunder", eh? Kosinski's been around for awhile, but he got really big when he directed "Top Gun: Maverick", which somehow everybody seemed to love except me, but I hated the first "Top Gun", to begin with and the sequel just felt like a better "Top Gun" to me, better but not good. Kosinski's not an untalented filmmaker, but he very much feels like he wants to make this action spectacles a la those Tom Cruise '80s films, complete with very simple-minded characters and plots. In this case, we follow a terrible F1 team owner, Ruben (Javier Bardem) who's about to lose his losing team to a board of directors, unless he can get a win with either of his drivers in the last nine races. Frankly, I'm on the Board of Directors' side, he's had this team for three years and he hasn't gotten the team a single point! You just need to finish one of two cars in the Top Ten to get a point, how have you not had one point in three years?! I don't think Williams at their worst was ever that bad. (Okay, maybe they were) Anyway, he's got one driver, a young British kid, Joshua (Damson Idris) who is an up-and-comer, and he's got several other drivers at the lower levels, (Oh, it's called Formula-1, because it's the top level, but like minor leagues in baseball for instance, there's lower levels of racing, F-2, F-3, F-4, etc. There's even Formula-E now for electric cars.) but instead, he decides to scout and bring in Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) who is an aging racer who takes whatever ride he can get when he's not living out of his car. He last raced in Formula-1 back in the early '90s, and while he's still handsome like Brad Pitt, he's known for being a little reckless on the track. Reuben finds him after he was one of a team of racers winning the 24 Hour race at Daytona. I guess, he's supposed to be the rogue racer-type, who comes in and saves the day? I mean, there are people like that, who will just take any and every race they can, not for the riches but just, for the thrill, like a 24 Hour team race, or even something out there like the Baja 1000. If the Iditarod was run on cars, I imagine he might run that. They/He don't/doesn't really portray that in his character, great, but... (Shrugs)

Anyway, he's brought in, to try to either get a win, or help Joshua get a win, or at the very least, some points. Him and Reuben are old friends from when Reuben was a racer, and- I guess, that relationship, is one, he cares deeply, about?! I-eh, I-, whatever, I don't know. This sounds like a ridiculously stupid plan that wouldn't work in real life. Honestly, this movie kinda reminds me of "Draft Day", one of the worst sports movies ever, on top of that movie being about the behind the scenes of the NFL draft, which-, I mean, I love the draft, but it's not an engaging sporting event for a film, and it's also about a fairly incompetent idiot GM, who makes some terrible moves until he happens to get incredibly lucky that other GM's were just as awful and incompetent as he was. It's kinda weird that F1's movie about their own sport is about a fictional awful team. It made a little sense for "Draft Day", because, the draft is where the bad teams have the first shot at trying to get good, hypothetically at least, but couldn't this be a story about a team owner that's close to being the best and just never quite getting over that hump, and then they find the rogue group of drivers and crew and they run that perfect season scenario where they just finally pull off that miracle championship season?! This is how you know how euro-centric this sport is, they can't even get the underdog Cinderella story narrative right! This is a film that's about not being dead last at being a rich multi-billion dollar racing team!? Also, why are the announcers focusing so much on the last place team?! Shouldn't they be focusing on what Hamilton and Verstappen are doing at the front of the race?!

Oh, and there's a love interest character, Kate (Kerry Condon) the team's technical director. She's filling in the Jennifer Connolly love interest role, except she's like half Brad Pitt's age. And apparently, despite the quick-cut editing, which for the most part was pretty good, you can tell a lot of the time when it was Pitt and when it was his stand-in, at least that's what my friend Elicia was telling me when we were watching this? She's an actress so she probably would focus on that,- honestly I didn't notice or pay attention enough to notice. The movie looks good. I was entertained, I guess. It was basically just every other sports/action movie with this narrative. The cliched out-of-town stranger-with-a-past, the young up-and-coming hotshot, they conflict, the owner, they conflict, there's a love interest because the handsome stranger needs a love interest. There's a bad guy reveal too, (Shrugs) 'cause the modifications they've begun making on the cars to make them better and faster might not be legal with specs? Also, their strategy is kinda just friggin' things up, since Sonny comes aboard, he basically begins manipulating the race in some sketchy-but-legal ways, like causing small accidents in the back in order to have Joshua stay out on the track and gain positions instead of coming in to pit, or using softer tires to go faster even if they don't last as long,- basically the strategies that Ferrari were using back in the early 2000s to run away with most races. I don't know, you might like watching "F1," but I mostly felt like I was watching the three-act structure screenplay formula on screen, and one that could've really used some better exposition dialogue. 

I won't begrudge anybody who finds "F1: The Movie" interesting or fun; I've definitely had worst 2 1/2 hours, but this movie does get worst the more I think about it, and I don't think the movie wants us thinking at all. Maybe if it's the first intro to Formula-1 for some, you might be a little intrigued; I know a few Formula-1 fans who do like this film, but from my experience car fans will tend to like anything with cars in them,- that's the only reason I can figure why those damn "The Fast and the Furious" lasted so long. (Hell, I know grown adults who still watch the Herbie movies 'cause they want to see the cars.) I think there's better entries to F1 though. Personally, I hope F1 fans eventually find "F1: The Movie" as laughably enjoyably bad as "Draft Day" is to NFL fans. As for me, I'd rather hear some interesting real stories about Formula-1, but most of the interesting ones are probably not the ones that Formula-1 wants a movie made about so, this is what we get. 

A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY (2025) Director: Kogonoda

⭐⭐1/2

Before I begin this review, I saw this film at a screening setup by David Rosen where he afterwards recorded for his podcast "Piecing It Together". One of my friends was a panelist on that episode, hi Darlene, good to see you, and I've known Rosen on Facebook for years, even before he had this podcast and it was fun being at the recording and screening. It's the first time I've attended one of his recordings, and if you're local I recommend it, and his podcast is a pretty fun one too. They take a movie, usually a newer release and then analyze what influences that the filmmakers might've been inspired by. It's a fun, quick little podcast, and he's been doing it for years now; I linked his website above, and you can find the Piecing It Together Podcast on most places you find podcast if this interests any of you at all.

And this was an interesting film to do that with oddly enough since Director Kogonoda is almost more of a film historian in my mind than a filmmaker, so whatever he is referencing, he knows his stuff. He's switched over from primarily being a video essayist to filmmaking himself awhile ago. I was impressed with his debut feature "Columbus", which follows two characters as they had a flirtatious and thought-provoking walk-and-talk few nights around Columbus, Indiana, which if you're familiar, it's actually a strangely famous location in archetecture circles, and the movie revolved a bit around that. I haven't seen his previous before "After Yang" yet, but I heard good things about that one, and this movie, his first,- well, I wouldn't say, "big budget", but it's one of his first real commercial film, I would say. 

It's also kind of a strange movie, and the more I thought about it and discussed it with others, I found myself having a pretty hard time buying into it. It's kinda going for that similar Linklater-esque feel of "Columbus", it even plays with time more, something Linklater does as well. And there's archecture in a way, there's characters going through a lot of doors mostly. So, very, Antonioni, although I don't know if he ever did a video on him; I know he did one on Linklater that I highly recommend. This film is kind of a romantic, magical-realism,- rom-com, I guess....? This is one of those movies where, whether you liked it or not, you can discuss "What's wrong with it", with a bunch of people and they'll all come up with some different answers. 

The movie begins in the city of...-, um,..- actually,- I don't know where any of this film takes place weirdly enough, which is kinda odd since this is a road movie. (I'm sure it was shot somewhere, but I don't think any place is named directly.) Anyway, David (Colin Farrell) is going to a wedding, when his finds his car booted, and a weird sign for "The Car Rental Company" right next to his car. Already late, and nowhere else to go, he ends up borrowing a '94 Saturn and at the insistence of the Agency's Cashier (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) takes the GPS option, in case his phone craps out on him. I guess that's something I never really thought about as modern cars have made some of the perils of typical road trip films avoidable these days, but...-, anyway, he rents the car, and then he gets to the wedding where he meets Sarah (Margot Robbie), who lives in his city, but lives Downtown, while he lives Uptown. She also, has apparently had to go through this same sketchy rental car company to get here, and also has a '94 Saturn with a paid-for GPS. They flirt a bit at the wedding, but don't seem to hit it off, but then, the GPS insists on having David go on the titular, "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey", and makes him stop over at the nearest- I guess it was a Burger King, although I swore he was eating a Big Mac at first. (BTW, apparently people brought this up as particularly cringy product placement, not just at my screening with the podcast crew, but it's even in the Wikipedia and not a plot summary.... Um, I personally was fine with it. I thought it fit in kinda whimsically into this strange, surreal romance. I don't get that criticism honestly; there's so much way worst product placement out in much bigger movies that frankly, this one just seemed,insignificant to me.) Anyway, that's when he runs into Sarah again, and they find out that their GPS told them to go here, and now Sarah's Saturn won't start, so now, they're both on their, big bold beau-, okay, this is getting annoying, they're both on this, "Journey". 

And this journey, leads them to a door. A door, in the middle of-, nowhere. They go through it eventually, and eventually through many other doors that the GPS happens to lead them too. Some lead them to far away places, like Canada and Musuems and High School.

(Sigh) 

God trying to explain this movie,- I know what he's trying to do, and a lot of this is funny and clever and well-acted even, but does it work? It might be a clue that this wasn't written by Kogonoda; it was a long-delayed Blacklist script by Seth Reiss, a longtime comedy writer for television, who got a film breakout by writing the script for "The Menu", which is an amazing film and a great script I might add, but this feels like it was, underwritten. It's got some interesting ideas like, when Danny has to revisit his childhood heartbreak which happened when he said he loved a girl who didn't love him back while they were both in a school play together. (Actually, if this movie works as anything, there's a surprising amount of talk about acting, whether doing it literally, or pretending your way through life and romance, and that's actually the most interesting part to me, but it's not nearly focused on enough.) I like the scenes with Sarah having to go back and deal with memories involving her mother (Lily Rabe), but ultimately I didn't know if I wanted these two to come together, and I wasn't sure why they were going through this weird journey. I guess it's more interesting than just two people getting to know each other through a long car ride, there's plenty of great movies like that already, but in terms of the narrative, it felt like they were going through these emotional epiphanies because this is a movie where characters have to go through emotional epiphanies in order to be together. I don't even need them to be together at the end, but I need a reason to care either way, and I found that lacking. I also wonder if this film might've been miscast a bit. Colin Farrell is one of my favorite actors honestly; I don't think he gets nearly the credit he deserves especially in smaller films like this one. (If you've never seen it, look up a very small indy called "A Home at the End of the World", his work in that film is one of my favorite performances of the 2000s.) But, I do wonder if this movie would've been better with some more naturally comedic performers in the leads. I could easily see Melissa McCarthy or Katharine Hahn giving a lot of extra levels to Sarah's character; nothing against Margot Robbie, but yeah, the more I thought about it, the more this role feels miscast. (Also, the age difference between her and Farrell; it's not a dealbreaker for me, but this film could've been more interesting with an older actress I think.) 

The more I thought about this film, the more I think this might've been-, like, not a spec script, but an example script which is a writer's, eh, not-so-much as a finished product but a script written to show the writers' various different skillsets. Show some comedy, show some ideas for visuals, some surrealism, some comedic scenes, some emotional scenes. I remember having to read a script like this once, which didn't fully come together, but had a little bit of everything and there's a reason never got made, but the writers did get work eventually from that. This movie feels like one of those accidentally got made and maybe Kogonoda wanted to see how it would be to try something like that.and hope that his filmmaking skills and styles could overcome some of the underwriting in the script. Even as I'm writing this, I'm thinking of ways that I would've altered this script to make it work, like perhaps move the introduction to the rental car company 'til after our two leads meet at the wedding? I bet that woulda helped. 

"A Big Bold Beautiful...-," ugh...- (also, a better title would've helped) "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey", probably does live up to it's promise, but ultimately I wondered too much why these characters were on this journey, and then I wondered why I was supposed to care about them. It's an interesting film, and I think you can have with the ideas in it, and sure, eh, thinking about how they came up with these ideas, but ultimately, this was an interesting miss for me. 

POOR THINGS (2023) Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

⭐⭐⭐1/2

Okay, finally getting back into watching movies again. Oh boy, and this DVD, is way overdue at the library. "Poor Things", okay. 

Huh, Emma Stone, jumping off a cliff, okay? Now she's what she doing, playing piano- AHHHH!

What the-, what happened to William Dafoe's face?! It's like Picasso tore is apart and somebody put it together. Wait, does Emma Stone not talk? Does anybody?

Who directed this, again?

(Grabs DVD box)

Yorgos Lanthimos, I should've known. The Greek Freak of modern cinema. He's made some great films, like "The Lobster", or  "The Favourite" which co-starred Emma Stone; that one in particular was an amazing film. He likes to create or examine some very bizarre and insular worlds in his movies. Sometimes they're sci-fi, like "The Lobster" others take a very disturbing look at society in general. Huh, why is the Emma Stone character, why she's so-, as Dafoe's walking out the front door, she's like trying desperately to go outside? That's weird,- that's almost like she's never been-, uh-oh! Oh, no! Oh no! What am I walking into!? Is this a "Dogtooth" thing-oh, okay, it's not that, she's just.... Whew! I was a little worried there, it's not that. Instead it turns out she's just...- um wait, WHAT IS SHE?!?!?!?!?!?!? 

Okay, um, Emma Stone, her character, committed suicide, and was then brought back to life, by Dafoe's character, after he replaced her brain, with that, of her, unborn child. Okay, well,- oh boy, this-, well, I'll say this, as with all Lanthimos films, I'll definitely have a lot to say about this, after this film is done. 

(3 HOURS LATER) 

Ummm,- hmmmm.....

(1 WEEK LATER) 

Hmmm.... Hmmmm... 

(Long pause)

Hmmmm.

(Sigh) 

Huh. You know, I've been thinking about this film for awhile, and I don't know if there's actually a lot to say about this film. 

I know, that seems wrong, and weird, but, I-um,- I mean the movie, clearly has, a lot to say, that's not the problem, the movie has an abundance of things it's trying to say, intriguing things, interesting things, maybe, they're not exactly, "Poor Things", but-um, hmmm...

Okay, like the thing with Yanthimos's films, whatever they've been in the past and whatever you may think of them, I always got why they existed. Like, okay, his international breakthrough, "Dogtooth", that movie is,- some people think it's funny, but I found it disturbing. It's basically about parents who stunt the intellectual growth and maturity of their children by forcing them to stay inside their compound and completely disconnect them from the outside world to the point where they're creating their own world within their world, and it's- really dark and disturbing, and frankly as good as a film it is, I don't ever want to see it again, but I get why it exists and what it's trying to depict. What it's trying to say. And just to be clear, when I say "Trying to say", that doesn't mean it's got a moralistic point to make necessarily, like I don't think the movie just exists to say, "Do don't this to your kids", but it is saying something in a way that makes us think about certain things, it's trying to show what happens when such an extreme and insular world is forced upon people. 

His next film, "Alps", was about a young woman, who is essentially acting as a prostitute in a way, but more importantly, she's paid to act like a recently deceased loved one, in order to help those get through their grief of losing that person. It's an extreme version of that, but I got what he's showing you and why that exists, why some people would do that, why some would hire for that job, etc. etc. I got why he wanted to create and/or show us this world. And that film is touching. 

\

"The Lobster" he made next, his first English language film, and it also creates a world, a dystopian future where single people have to find a mate or they're forcibly turned into an animal of their choosing. It's out there, but it's saying stuff about how extrovertedness can smother introvertedness into rebellion, as well as just the awkwardness of forced romance,-there's a lot going on in that film. 

"The Killing of a Sacred Deer", where a family's life turns deadly and turmultuous after the father brings home the son of a former patient, it's about bringing in people or anything that's ultimately bad for you and then, the inability to get that force out of your life until it takes over and destroys you everything you love.

"The Favourite", is just,- well, firstly it's just hilarious, but it also, is focuses on a created and absurd world of royalty where everybody's playing "All About Eve" to be a gout-infested queen, because she's the Queen. It's saying a lot about societal power, how artificial it is, and also, how much we strive for it. 

So, what exactly is "Poor Things" here to show us, to tell us? I mean, it's got all the elements in which to say something, it's an absurd futuristic world, it's got a character who's had a strange insular existence who then has to react to it, and it's really symbolic and metaphorical,...- I kept looking for deeper meaning to it, constantly, 'cause it feels like it should have something deeper there. Like, Bella, (Oscar-winning Stone) at first is, this disturbingly childlike creature, who's mentally not fully equipped. Honestly, having an autistic brother kinda gave me some moments of flashbacks with the early moments of this film. The surgeon who brought her back to life, Godwin (Dafoe) brings in a young surgical student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to take notes on her development, which eventually does happen, to an extent. He also, begins to have an emotional connection to her, which, is also kinda disturbing, but he's also not the only one. At some point, she agrees to marry Max, but first, she wishes to go on an adventure with Duncan (Oscar-nominee Mark Ruffalo) a lecherous older excessive man, who she finds enjoyment out of his furious jumping, which is her term for sex, apparently. 

Honestly, this might be why I'm struggling to find a positive in this; essentially this movie is about a guy who creates his own woman from scratch into being a simple bimbo sex toy. I mean, not for him, but obviously for others. That's not the intent, but I guess Ruffalo's character represents that. And the movie does subvert it, eventually, but it's still kinda creepy. It really kinda reminds me of those A.I. porn ads that promote building your own sex doll, it's just-, awkward and creepy. If you don't think of Bella as an experiment to see what happens when you take an infant's brain and put it into a full-bodied human's brain,...- this is creepier when he does it again with a new girl, Felicity (Margaret Qualley). Meanwhile, we mostly follow Bella, who then goes on to explore the world at large. This leads her home eventually, but first, she becomes a Parisian hooker after Duncan falls in love with her and then she blows all his money after giving it away to the poor, once she becomes aware of the poor. BTW, there's some fascinating supporting work by people as wide-ranging as Jerrod Carmichael to Hanna Schygulla, which,- man, I don't know what game of Mad Libs the casting person was playing, but kudos on that. 

"Poor Things" is so bizarre. It starts out like "Frankenstein," although I think of Dafoe's mad scientist, literally named and called, "God" in this film, as more of a Rotwang from "Metropolis" character, albeit a more sympathetic one, complete with body deformities; yeah this movie deserved it's makeup Oscar (And who knows, this film might exist in a "Metropolis" future) but it turns into "An Education"-type film, and then it even evolves into,- I mean,- I can't think of another example here, but this felt like a twisted, post-modern version of "Born Yesterday". You don't normally see this plot, with a main character, that in the text of the film was literally born yesterday, basically, but I don't really know what else to compare this to. Now, I love "Born Yesterday", the original at least, but what a way to go about it. I don't expect to compare that to a film that has a half-dog half-chicken hybrid pet, or for that matter, a sheep with a human brain implanted into it. I haven't even brought up that character-, this movie has a bit of a deus ex machina ending, that-, it's not tacked on, but it's still kinda questionable in it's existence. 

I feel like all these things should add up to something, and maybe it does and I'm just missing the forest through the trees, but I found it more of a curiosity than as an impactful tale of someone's wide-eyed, unknowing approach to a modern sci-fi world, that, sure, I can definitely make some comps to our world, especially how the world must seem to an attractive young female entering the world, but,- I don't know, it feels like a lot of pieces but the whole puzzle's not quite there. It might be an issue with the medium. Unlike his previous film "Poor Things" wasn't written by Lanthimos unlike most of his other films, it's adapted from the fantasy novel by Alasdiar Gray, and written by the great Tony McNamara. I haven't read the book, but it's apparently an epistolary text, which, isn't quite first person,- it's more told through documents like letters, as opposed to a traditional narrative. I always think of Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" with this structure, which is kind of an appropriate comp if you know that story, although this one has a better ending, and I suspect that probably is a better way to tell this story, something probably gets a little lost here since it's difficult to create a piece of art like that and place it into film. Still, I can't deny "Poor Things". It's too inventive and interesting; the visuals in this film are some of the most fascinating I've ever seen. And Emma Stone's performance in particular, like-, even if you're not crazy about the implications or the character, this performance looks and feels daunting. There's so many layers to this character and performance..., like I could analyze her work for days scene-by-scene in this. I wish it had more of an effect on me, and I wonder if the book would've effected me more. 

THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023) Director; Hayao Miyazaki 

⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

Ah, the old master has returned. 

Only the slightest of frames into "The Boy and the Heron" and I knew that I would be in safe, but also that that sense of wonder and imagination and beauty that you just don't get with other filmmakers was in my bounds. Hayao Miyazaki is unquestionably considered the greatest animator of all-time but at this point, that's putting it mildly; you can easily make an argument that he's among the greatest living filmmakers, period. Now, in his eighties, from a distance it seemed like his last retirement announcement might've actually been for real since it's been a decade since "The Wind Rises" his previous last feature film, and only a slight short film "Boro the Caterpillar" in the meantime, where he of all people actually became Studio Ghibli's first director to use CG in a film, had been done in the meantime, but slowly, word had been spreading that he was working on something again. Now, in his eighties, he could only supervise over a few minutes of a film per month though, and with COVID delays, postponed the film even longer than normal, but that's nothing for the master, he would take however long it could to make sure it was right. 

And yeah, this one is pretty spectacular. "The Boy and the Heron", which won Miyazaki his second Oscar for Animated Feature, begins with a moment that might be haunting and similar to those familiar with Studio Ghibli, the firebombing of Tokyo during WWII. A similar scene took place during the late great Isao Takahata's masterpiece "Grave of the Fireflies", and that left me a little bit concerned to be honest. "Grave..." is arguably the saddest of all animated feature, but even in this horror and dread, we begin with a shockingly fantastical image of a young man, Mahito, running through the falling flames, as others are running away, to get to a hospital where his mother was at, and where the bombing landed. This is the first time Mahito sees an image of his mother, Hisako surrounded by flames, reaching out, Mahito believing that it must be for him.

Thankfully, it wasn't worst, and after a few more years of the war, Mahito's father falls in love and marries Natsuko, Hisako's sister, and Mahito first gets acquainted with her as the family moves to his stepmother's family's country estate, in an effort to stay out of the way of purportedly some of the war's more coming destructive years. Also, Natsuko is now pregnant and all this has led Mahito to begin lashing out. At school, he gets in a fight, but then, he self-harm's himself, and seriously at that. This keeps him from school, but he also quietly rejects his home life too. There's seven older women, the most notable one is Kiriko, who tries to help him out and but she also warns about going too far into the forest, especially around a strange tower that's guarded by a giant blue heron that's seems to be seeking out Mahito, ever since he arrived. There's family folklore about that tower and apparently other family members have heard voices and been lost to it. Attempts to board it up have been unsuccessful over the years, and it seems Mahito might be destined to follow the Heron into this strange Neverland that I don't even know if I want to describe this world. 

First of all, I couldn't do it justice even if I did try, you'd just have to see it, but even more than that, it's not a narrative that's gonna be benefitted by describing the events, or the images-, it's way too complicated. In fact, this in some ways feels like a more adult "Spirited Away", in terms of it's plot, and also, it is more adult, the movie got a PG-13 rating for how dark a lot of this was, and that wasn't just the U.S. MPAA being out-of-touch, other places found it dark as well. But, unlike how "Spirited Away", was essentially a story of a young girl, dealing with the simple change of moving to a new place and having the understanding and empathy of growing up and needing to appreciate the trials and tribulations of adulthood, this movie is more of an emotional journey through the perils of life, death and grief and how to make sure processing any of that doesn't overcome you or burden others even as the world around you seems to be crumbling headfirst towards it's own self-destruction, like a high-flying bird diving right towards you during a hunt. If "Spirited Away" is Miyazaki's "Alice in Wonderland" than "The Boy and the Heron" is his reflective note towards, Dante's "The Divine Comedy" essentially, at least in the literal narrative, but emotionally it's a tour-de-force of the complexities of every possible personal emotion. You're growing up, you experience tragedy, you experience change, you have the moments your in, the moments of the past that lead to you being there, the desire to get out, the realization that the pains you're feeling and nothing compared to others, and that it's better to experience and survive the worst than to never have had them before. 

The movie's Japanese title, translates to "How Do You Live" and I'm not entirely sure whether that's a question pondered to Mahito or to us, the audience. I'm also not sure where to rank "The Boy and the Heron" among Miyazaki's greatest films; Miyazaki's incapable of a bad film but he can certainly make some odd ones occasionally. Even still one tier below his best, is still so much better than almost everyone else's on their best day that even considering the question seems like the kind of pointless naval-gazing activity that Miyazaki wouldn't approve of people doing with their time. "The Boy and the Heron" is another brilliant addition to the great master's work, and if it is the last word from him, he goes out with a great last reflection on life, art, and himself, even if selfishly, I and nearly every cinephile alive, hope it isn't. 

SING SING (2024) Director: Greg Kwedar 

⭐⭐⭐

This is a weird one for me. Like, I can appreciate this film, but man was this a struggle to get through, and I'm not really sure why? For a while, I figured it was just me, but,- eh, no, something's off. It took me awhile, but I think I figured it out what my issue was. "Sing Sing" has been in development for awhile, basically it's kind of an autobiography of John Whitfield, aka Divine G (Oscar nominee Colman Domingo) an innocent man who spent years in jail at Sing Sing before getting his release. In the meantime, he started the "Rehabilitation Through the Arts" or RTA program in the prison. The program is highlighted in the film as Divine G helps lead the program, and even recruits new people in, as they put on plays in and outside of the population. Even while in jail, he's become a well-known novelist and playwright who's won awards for his work. The movie is actually filled with people who were apart of the program but later got released, and the acting is particularly great.

The movie basically shows us their process of putting on play, even recruiting people into the group, most notably Clarence Maclin who got a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, basically playing the new guy character, who's reluctant and skeptical of some of the techniques and ideas in the system at first, and I would argue for awhile, before finally coming around and accepting and appreciating it. He's good and it says he's playing a version of himself, which I believed, he's really good, but I think he can definitely do much more. A lot of these actors could do a lot in fact. That's the biggest takeaway from this, and frankly I just think there should be more. Which,- I guess I'm recommending the film because that was the objective of the film, but that's also just kind of the problem. 

Like, the movie's here to showcase both John Whitfield, through Colman Domingo's performance, but really it's about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program. And-, it's a success. It's already long been a success when we get into this film. Like,- okay, I kinda, at first got why they started us this late, because I don't think showing the beginnings and origins of this program, would be the best writing idea. Like-, okay, there's a movie that I think I'm the only one who still kinda admits to liking, called "Renaissance Man". Penny Marshall directed it, Danny Devito starred in it, and basically, it's pretty stupid. Devito's character, through a plot contrivance, has to teach English at an Army military academy and it's a group of misfits from the Academy that he ends up teaching "Hamlet" too. If you think about it for half-a-second, even the movie knows how dumb it is, 'cause they don't even need to taken the final exam in order to pass, but they all take it anyway.... It's one of those movie plots that you'd see being made fun of as like a movie role that's like designed to earn an Oscar nomination, but like, the so-obnoxious and absurd kind that's you'd expect it in a fake trailer at the beginning of "Tropic Thunder" or something. I bring it up though, 'cause, if you did tell the story of the RTA program like that, the movie could've come out as absurd as "Renaissance Man", so I get that. What I don't get is the story they actually told. 

It feels like there's a story coming, Divine Eye, Maclin's character, he is recruited to join the RTA, and yet, he's very reluctant and unsure about doing this whole acting thing. They end doing, something like his idea for a play, which is a comedy, but like, a comedy, where everything's coming together in like this manic hodgepodge of time periods, styles, characters,-, basically it doesn't sound all that different from "Hamlet 2", which is also weird, because despite wanting to make a comedy originally, Divine Eye wants to and is tasked with playing Hamlet, which is also apart of this story. The one dramatic lead in the role that's basically in no way really funny,- like it's this weird thing where it's like, were not sure whether he doesn't really get it, or he's trolling everybody and it's like a long con to just laugh at everybody. Eventually, he gets it and appreciates it, but it feels like, it's not enough. Like, there is something interesting in that idea, where somebody's stuck in jail, decides to join this theater program in the jail, and then, you know, just doesn't get it and doesn't fully relate to it, and that conflict,- like there's something to that idea. And, you add on, the idea of being behind bars, and knowing, that you might not get out, and now you're just dressing up on stage and looking ridiculous,- like, they touch on these things a little, but like, all those conflicts, they don't like, ever come up to a boil, in ways that you'd expect, at least for dramatic effect. 

You could argue that well, that's kind of the point of the program and the life behind bars for these people, but I don't know, it feels a little too flimsy on the page. It's like they didn't want to actually show just how difficult and challenging this whole thing could be, and they just kinda wanted to showcase the program. Like, there is one, real blowup, and that's when Divine G, is rejected for parole, again, despite evidence that he's innocent and his success with the program and he snaps during rehearsals going badly, and that's good. Like, he's the main guy and the big runner of the program, and even he of all people, has a breaking point, like that's good. That's great drama, that's character, that's great inner conflict. It's just,- there's so much more room for conflict, and the movie kinda tries to avoid it at all costs. 

The film was directed by Greg Kwedar, it's only his second feature, I don't know his work. His only other feature was a film called "Transpecos", a crime drama, it looks like it's about border patrol agents? It sounds a little interesting, but doesn't tell me much in regards to "Sing Sing", but that film was almost a decade ago and apparently he's been working on "Sing Sing" ever since. I guess it's a labor of love, but in terms of an actual film, I feel like this film lacks. I mean, you kinda get so excited for the stage production they're making that you wondered why didn't they just show that instead, a la, say-eh, Denys Arcand's great film "Jesus of Montreal". We do see clips of all the actors in the troupe performing when they were imprisoned as apart of the RTA program. If I'm watching a movie about these two characters, Divine G and Divine Eye, as their friendship continues to grow and evolve through the program, than I feel like the script let them down and there's not enough here, despite the great performance, and if this was a movie that just promoted and advertised the RTA program, than, I'm fairly satisfied with it, although kinda wish I could see the productions proper. In that way the movie does feel like the play they're putting on, it's trying to do too much, tell too many different and conflicting stories and satisfy everybody. I'm torn, but I'll recommend it for what's good about it. 

CHALLENGERS (2024) Director: Luca Guadagnino

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

   

Tennis anyone? 

(Slight chuckle)

I was gonna say that I wasn't exactly sure of the exact origin of that phrase, but I then decided to look it up, and apparently some people credit it to Humphrey Bogart, believe it or not, although he did deny it, but no matter the beliefs of the exact origin, I don't think even at the time, that that meant somebody was asking simply, for a game of "tennis," although I do highly suspect that it didn't exactly have the innuendo that I'm insinuating it has in regards to "Challengers". It's rare that a film just utterly fascinates me, but I watched "Challengers" well over a week ago and have been blown away by it ever since. It's one of those movie that's actually a little difficult to discuss the plot of, but yet, you struggle to come up with the proper adjectives how great the experience of watching it is. Sexy, is an easy one. Enchanting, hypnotic, mind-blowing, I guess, absurd...- this movie, well- maybe it's not exactly as absurd as the film likes to think it is, but eh, the more you actually "Know" about tennis, I think the more you'll enjoy it, and I think those who don't are equally gonna be sucked in. 

You see, I actually do love tennis; I think it's a very underrated and underappreciated sport, but I also grew up with the sport before the Williams Sisters took over, and like, okay, that was huge, and Serena is the best female player and their accomplishments by taking a country club sport and being African-Americans from the lower-end of the class ladder to dominate it, akin to say Tiger Woods's dominance of golf at his peak, is admirable and great, but while they're both country club sports, so hugely played and popular by the uber-rich and obnoxious people, like, they also kinda took the fun out of it. You see, golf is where the real old money schlubs who wanted to slice up their own little corners of the world amongst themselves played. Tennis, was the sport where, the odd, rebellious, renegades from those families drifted to. There were nice goody two-shoes players back in the day, some who even dominated, but there was also just so many personalities across the sport. The people who the family were not proud, went to tennis, like, whoever the Kieran Culkin character from "Succession" in their family was, they drifted to tennis, so you ended up with some, rich oddballs, and you bring some of these people together for a match, you saw some fun outcomes, mens and womens, and since they did tour a lot together, these, young, hormonal rich, rebellious athletes, some of them may not entirely be legally of age,- let's just say, I've heard a story or two that I'm not gonna share here, but knowing that kind of profile of some of these elite athletes, at least they were like that back in the day...-. (Prolonged insinuating grin) Nowadays everybody at the top of the tennis world either is, or at least seems like a goody two-shoes. 

Note, I said, "at the top" of the tennis world, 'cause it's still a little crazy underneath.

For instance, this movie, essentially is about a match between two tennis players during a "Challengers" tournament. What's a challengers tournament? Oh boy, the intricacies of competitive tennis are a little tricky, but essentially it's a year-round sport and there are several big tournament at the top levels, but in order to qualify for those tournaments, in particular the four major tournaments in tennis, you have to be highly ranked. How do you get ranked...? Oh boy,- don't ask me, even I don't understand all the specifics of tennis's ranking system, but the point is, if you're not ranked highly enough, you can earn a high ranking by participating in lower level tournaments and doing well there, and some of them in particular, called Challenger tournaments, winning one of those can potentially get you a wild card entry into those majors. 

This tournament, is where two tennis players playing each other in the finals, Art (Mike Faist), a former champion tennis star, who's starting to slip a bit and hasn't been doing well after some injuries, who's playing the challenger as a tune-up/way to earn a backdoor entry into the U.S. Open, the one major he's never won, and his former friend and doubles partner Patrick (Josh O'Connor), who is one of those spoiled rich kids from old money, but who's rebelled to the point of sleeping in his car, stiffing on bills and using his charms to couch-surf his way through these events, hoping beyond hope to one day make a "comeback" in the tennis world. But it's more than just a match. You see, Art is married to Tashi (Zendaya) who once upon a time was an on-the-rise top female young star, but who's career ended in college and has since become Art's coach and husband. Describing Tashi, is even more complicated. She's a physical fuck on the court and a mindfuck in the bedroom, and the intricacies of this love triangle,- I mean,- on the one hand, it's incredibly layered. It's the game within the game, within the game, all three of these people are playing it. And if I'm being honest, I don't even know if what actually happens makes any real logical sense....

"Challengers" is one of those films that stumps me and yet fascinates me. I don't know how seriously to take it, but it's one of the most fun movies I've seen in a while. It's fun, sexy, seductive, entrancing. Weirdly, the movie it reminds me the most of, and this is strange cause nothing usually reminds me of this film is Tom Tykwer's "Run, Lola, Run". It's weird, the driving techno score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross helps with this feeling, as well as the editing that uses almost every trick, starting with the classic tennis trope of the audience turning their heads and one person not, to the strange jumps in time and just the cuts themselves in the editing; this movie is a constant stream of elevated emotion, even often ending, like Lola, and like most tennis players, in a scream. 

The film is the latest from Italian director Luca Guadagnino who's made some wonderful films over the years like "A Bigger Splash", "I Am Love" and "Call Me By Your Name". He does seem to have a sense for romance, especially among the many varietals of the rich and upper class, and it is tough to use that as a backdrop and make it both enchanting and appealing. Really it's just a matter of understanding drama being raised up and how the ebbs and flows of relationship dynamics work. This might be my favorite film of his so far honestly, and that's mostly a personal thing 'cause this film just hits my emotional points the most. It's a movie that's not afraid to be out there or outrageous and it even twists the ideas in normal sports dramas as well.

My Uncle Billy had a saying that, "They're either fucking with us, or they're fucking with us." In the same mode "Challengers" motto could be, "We're either playing tennis, or we're playing tennis."

HOPE (2021) Director: Maria Sodahl 

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Oh boy, this is gonna be a bit of a tough one for me, so I'm gonna suspect it might be a tough one for some of you as well. The main character in, the somewhat ironically titled Norwegian film "Hope", is Anja (Andrea Bræin Hovig) and is suffering from cancer, which may or may not have started in the lungs, but it has progressed to her brain. She's a workaholic choreographer with several of varying ages, some from her longtime boyfriend Tomas's (Stellan Skaarsgărd) first marriage, some they had together. Both are artists, both are otherwise living togeth,- hmm, it's hard-to-describe honestly. 

The whole movie takes place, essentially within a week or so timespan, during Christmas and New Years, and Anja's finding out how sick she is, and honestly, it seems like she's a ticking time bomb, I'm half-expecting her to just suddenly drop dead before anything happens, which is, exactly how you feel when you find out something like that about someone, suddenly. Half the time, while picking up prescriptions which she's told by the pharmacist that she should take now, before she leaves, she and Tomas are trying to figure out exactly how to tell the kids. It's Christmas week, and in-between sneaking around for doctor's appointments, you're trying to figure out, do you tell them now, or wait 'til after Christmas? And how do you tell them that you don't have long to live. And now these pills are making me stay up late and I can't sleep, and have to eat! 

Also, maybe it's time that we get married, which, actually is a thing by the way; people do try to get married before dying a lot more often than you'd think, and this causes some fights as well. Tomas is kind of a,- um,... well, he's not exactly a natural caretaker. It's hard to describe the relationship between these two, which is weird because it's basically the crux of the movie. These are two workaholic artists who've kinda stumbled their way into having spent their lives together, and they're not even entirely sure they love each other, and now one of them is dying, and might be dying quickly. And this brings up a lot of baggage between them. How their relationship's been, how it started, how it's going now. There's one sex scene in the film and it's kind of an interesting scene, because, it's quite possibly the last time they're having sex, and they're both aware of it. Also, their workaholic tendencies mean there's a distant both from their kids and each other, especially Tomas as Anja is the main caretaker as Tomas is a little more aloof in his family life, including with Anja. And now, when she's dying and suddenly he's starting to be more involved, it pisses her off even more, and I get it! 

"Hope" is a complex look at what it means to be dying, and having to suddenly deal with everything because you don't have the time to do it like you thought you did. Most movies with that plot, it's about getting to do the things that you always wanted to do and frankly that's fun, but it's also kinda simplistic; this movie is about having to unload all the emotional turmoil that you have to go through when that happens, and it eventually leads to, one of the more uncomfortable wedding sequences I've ever seen in a movie, and that's saying something. 

"Hope" is the first big breakout film internationally for it's director Maria Sødahl, who's mostly worked in short films, over-the-years, and this was first feature since 2010's "Limbo", which was a bigger hit in her native Norway than "Hope", but I get why this film has resonated. It dares to explore and show just how complex dying can really be, literally and emotionally are yourself and everyone else around you. This film brought back some painful emotions and recollections to me, hopefully some of you will never have to go through those, but for those who did, it might not be the easiest watch, but it's nice to see somebody get these moments on film right.