Because I’m the damn horse. The instant I read this I whispered “good God!” to myself. I was this exact same horse when I was 19, 28, 37 and at one or two other junctures. Amazing.

A couple of days ago Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling did a sit-down with Roadrunner director Morgan Neville. Here’s the whole interview, and below is a clip of the portion in which Neville addresses — calmly, openly, intelligently — the “deepfake” thing.

Three and a half months ago I reviewed a Kino Lorber Bluray of Marty Feldman’s In God We Tru$t (’80), an anti-religion, anti-corporate satire in which Richard Pryor played God. (Or more precisely “G.O.D.”).

An In God We Trust Richard Pryor-with-white-Godbeard T-shirt was subsequently created by Elara.world, a normcore merch line from an outfit run by the crazy Safdies (Josh and Benny) and Sebastian Bear-McClard (i,.e., Emily Ratajkowski’s significant husband).

A few days ago Timothee Chalamet, costar of Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch, wore the whitebeard-Pryor T-shirt during a Cannes Film Festival photo op. And here I am mentioning it. It’s all come full circle.

Posted on 3.21.21: “I just can’t fathom why a rich actor would choose to wear a schlubby normcore T-shirt. He could wear the coolest Calvin Klein or John Varvatos three-button T-shirt…some kind of cooler-than-shit creation with a little style, something he bought in Milan or London or at a tag sale in Marin County.

“What’s the point of a rich guy looking like some average dude from Worcester or Scotch Plains or Clearwater? To what end? To prove to himself that he’s average common too, just like him and the same as you?”

16 days ago a major Time magazine piece, written by Eliana Dockterman, celebrated the coming of Black Widow (Disney, 7.9), and particularly the rugged, progressive, toughed-up de-sexualizing of Scarlett Johansson‘s Natasha Romanoff. And that the movie did. What sector of your ticket-buying audience was revved by this strategy, apart from educated urban progressive women?

There was also the fact that for many of us, Black Widow sucked eggs. Marvel hardcores may have been been into it, but who else? Okay, the Rotten Tomatoes critics score is at 81% (way too kind) and the audience score is at a mystifying 92%. How can this be? Black Widow stinks — I know it does, I saw it at a theatre, I was miserable, etc.

And now, 10 days after opening and at the end of its second weekend, Black Widow has totally plunged at the box-office — down 67% from last weekend.

The first weekend alone told the tale. On Friday, 7.9, Black Widow brought in $39,510,446. On Saturday, 7.10 earnings were down 41% to $23,305,929. On Sunday, 7.11, the tally was $17,549,937 — down another 25%.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro called this weekend’s fall-off “the second steepest ever for a Disney-distributed MCU title…if you want to know what the negative impact is by having a Marvel movie available in homes and in theaters at the same time, here it is.”

Then again the worldwide box-office so far is $264,012,671 — both domestic and international earning $132 million and change. So Black Widow isn’t a wipeout, or (to be fair) even close to one. But that domestic second-weekend plunge can’t be called encouraging.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has addressed the pearl-clutching outrage over Morgan Neville‘s decision to “digitally deepfake” Anthony Bourdain‘s voice in three aural passages in Roadrunner, the just-released doc about the late foodie and CNN travelogue adventurer.

As I pointed out in a 7.15 post titled “Bourdain Deepfake Isn’t A Problem,” Neville’s alleged offense involved the audible creation of sentences (i.e., three) not actually spoken by Bourdain but written by him. Neville created an A.I. replication of Bourdain’s voice, assembled from vowel and consonant splices and fragments of legit Bourdain recordings. And so we hear Bourdain “reading” the passages even though he didn’t actually do that.

Gleiberman believes that Neville should have copped to the fakery somewhere in the film (probably in the closing credits), but otherwise isn’t that rattled. His basic point is that “when it comes to swapping in fake reality, documentaries have been sliding down a slippery slope for years,” especially in the area of reenactments.

“A reenactment and a voice fake actually do different versions of the same thing,” he points out. “Both cement a reality in your mind — the image of something or the sound of something — that didn’t happen, at least not in the way it’s presented.”

Gleiberman also notes that the deepfake Bourdain voice “probably gets closer to reality than most reenactments do,” and that documentaries in which an actor will read a subject’s words, sometimes simulating their tone of voice, “isn’t much of a leap from what Roadrunner does.”

Shorter Gleiberman: “Not much of a hoo-hah here, fellas!”

Best passage: “The manipulation of Bourdain’s voice in Roadrunner seems to open a Pandora’s Box. What happens when unethical filmmakers employ such techniques? But let’s not pretend that we’ve been purists about it. Documentaries have been inching away from unalloyed reality for a long time. And it’s we in the audience who enable it. We’re the ones who like our reality sweetened, heightened, finessed until it looks just like a movie.”