Month: July 2021

From the comment thread about last night’s “Bourdain Deepfake Isn’t A Problem“:

PartTimeHero: “Jesus Christ…people are actually upset about this? They were Anthony Bourdain‘s own verified words. Let’s not get too ‘woke’ on documentary filmmakers or you are going to have to accept the equal and opposite: that a documentary in theory is not far off from the makers of Jersey Shore or Survivor cobbling together their own storylines from footage.”

Mr. F.: “All they had to do was say it wasn’t an actual recording of Bourdain and they would have been fine. I just don’t understand the need to make it “his” voice. It’s the aural equivalent of putting a deepfake into a documentary, yet I suspect that would cross a line for you.”

Jeffrey Wells to Mr. F.: “Putting a visual deepfake into a documentary? Yes, that would be unacceptable. But there’s nothing wrong with what Neville did. Nothing whatsoever. I agree that he should have copped to it in the closing credits.”

Mr. F. to Jeffrey Wells: “But it’s exactly the same thing. Say you want to include a scene in a documentary that the subject has described in a book, interview, whatever — but there was never a video recording. You have the technology to shoot an actor doing what the subject says they did, then deepfake the footage to put the subject’s face on the actor’s body. While one is a visual recreation and the other an audio recreation: they are the same thing.”

Jeffrey Wells to Mr. F.: “Wrong. The key situation facing Neville was how to best aurally represent what Bourdain had written.

“Documentarians never resort to just showing passages that have been written — they ALWAYS have somebody read them. So the question was should Neville have (a) hired an actor to imitate Bourdain, or (b) read the passages himself (like Scorsese did in his Dylan doc) or (c) digitally replicate Bourdain’s voice?

“The key thing was representing Bourdain’s thoughts accurately and scrupulously. HOW they were read is a secondary issue. I have no problem with a deepfake Bourdain voice reading them, and why should you? Nobody’s lying or misrepresenting. It was simply a matter of what kind of voice would read Bourdain’s thoughts — the voice of an imitator, the voice of a neutral party (like Neville’s) or the simulated voice of Bourdain.

“If a Bourdain-imitating actor had read the passages in question, nobody would have said boo.

“Yes, there should have been a closing credit acknowledgment of this strategy, but otherwise it was obviously no biggie.”

The Blue Bayou trailer lays it right on the line — racism is very bad. Right away you detect the tone of social-justice instruction and an unsubtle replay of the anti-racism current that was explored 64 years ago in Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57), in which an inter-racial couple (Red Buttons, Miyoshi Umeki) struggled against repressive racial attitudes.

This time an adopted, Korean-born New Orleans family man (Justin Chon, who also directed and wrote the screenplay) and his pretty Anglo-Saxon American wife (Alicia Vikander) are up against shit-for-brains ICE guys who insist on treating him like a Korean immigrant with a criminal record and want to kick him out blah blah.

Variety‘s Guy Lodge calls this “an emotional pile-driver of a film [in which] sob-disrupted dialogue and background strings [compete] for our eardrums.” Obviously punishment for characters and audience members alike. Sanctimonious preaching to the woke choir.

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw insists that Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s Memoria “is a beautiful and mysterious movie, slow cinema that decelerates your heartbeat.

“In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, Weerasethakul” — a.k.a. Joe Weisenheimer — “really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.

“All admirers of this director, with his enigmatic realist-mystic masterpieces such as Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives will know broadly what to expect. But he is still capable of astonishing you, all over again. I’m not being facetious when I say that watching this film reminded me of when I was 17, hearing ‘Revolution 9’ on The White Album for the first time. It left a residue of happiness in my heart.”

A few years ago I wrote that spelling and pronouncing the name of the celebrated Thailand director (Mekong Hotel, Cemetery of Splendor) has always been a challenge for me. His Wiki bio says that “cinephiles affectionately refer to him as ‘Joe’ Weerasethakul — a nickname that he, like many with similarly long Thai names, has adopted out of convenience.”

The last name, of course, is much more difficult to handle than the first. In my mind he’s always been Apichatpong J. Weisenheimer or, more simply, “Joe Weisenheimer.”

The film is basically about hearing or at least believing that you’re hearing (or vaguely sensing) sound vibrations that may be connected to something more meaningful than mere ound vibrations. I know all about that.

Friendo: “I heard it was a total joke. Unwatchable, except for the minimalist crowd. I would NEVER sit thru another of this guy’s movies ever again.”

From Todd McCarthy’s Deadline review:

During the summer of ’20 I happened to notice a minor Facebook thing — a long-distance photo of an odd-shaped cloud that looked like Godzilla from, like, a distance of six or seven miles. Since that time literally hundreds of thousands (or it is millions?) of idiots have decided that this cloud had some kind of religious significance. That thread is still going today, and if you ask me it’s a metaphor for how stunningly stupid and delusional religious people can be when they put their minds to it. In a way, the fact that so many saw Jesus in a Godzilla cloud shape explains why Donald Trump is still an influential figure. Among the mouth-breathers, I mean.

“This life’s hard, man, but it’s even harder if you’re stupid.” — Steven Keats‘ “Jackie Brown” character in Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73).

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We’re no longer allowed to use the words “foxy” or “fetching” these days (or even think in those terms), but this Hejira image is perfect…easily the effiest of Joni Mitchell ever beheld. The outdoor Hejira photos were taken by Joel Bernstein at Lake Mendota, in Madison, Wisconsin; the indoor studio shots (of which this is obviously one) were taken by Norman Seeff.

Speaking as a central Jersey, Wes Anderson-type of guy (Union County, southwest of Newark, not far from Route 22) this seems like a reasonably honest capturing or delineation of the four stratas of New Jersey culture. I know that I always regarded South Jersey (Timothee Chalamet or Bruce Springsteen-ville) as a somewhat coarser, less cultured region…punky, scrappier. At the same time I don’t relate to the North Jersey Tilda Swinton thing either. (Not that I mind the projecting of greater wealth — I just can’t emotionally find myself in that realm.)

“…because you could dream in it.”

This obviously first-rate, professional-grade short was produced by A24 marketing to promote J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year (2015). It’s not pushing fiction — Manhattan, Brooklyn (I never even visited Williamsburg until sometime in the mid ’90s) and Queens were unquestionably rougher, scrappier, grimmer and less hygenic 40 years ago.

Not to me and my semi-struggling journalist-photographer friends and the neighborhoods in which we lived (West Village, Soho, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, Upper West and East Sides, Murray Hill) but certainly to people living in the marginalized areas and shittier nabes.

This is a tired, soggy cliche, of course, but Manhattan was a much richer, livelier and more flavorful place in ’81, certainly from a cultural standpoint. The Manhattan of Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City was a real, actual thing back then. Repertory cinemas were plentiful and doing okay. A degraded but half-alluring version of Studio 54 was still in business. Cafe Central (my home-away-from-home in late ’81 and ’82) was the greatest actor-hangout bar in the world; and Nishi was the greatest Japanese restaurant of all time. The greedy ’80s were just beginning (Ronald Reagan had recently taken a bullet), but the storied Pearl Paint, which gave up the ghost in ’14, was thriving. I would have that time again.

Today’s Manhattan is cleaner, tidier and safer but unaffordable unless you earn a mid six-figure income or better. And millionaires fare all the better.

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I had mostly bailed on HBO’s Westworld by the end of season #1 and certainly by the middle of season #2. The endless puzzleboxing was infuriating. I was amazed that the producers had the chutzpah to launch a third season (eight episodes, 3.15.20 to 5.3.20), but that they did. I refused to watch. I was done.

A fourth season was announced in April 2020, and they’ve been shooting it over the last several weeks, or so I understand. A couple of months ago a certain Reddit guy posted that the old western village of Sweetwater would be used again for the new season, and has been moved forward in time to the 1920s.

Posted on 2.20.20: Westworld‘s third season is nearly upon us. An eight-episode endurance test that begins on 3.15.20, it will presumably deliver the same infuriating mixture of bullshit brain-teasing, dick-diddling, plotzing and puzzleboxing.

Last summer showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy told Entertainment Weekly that season 3 would have a more comprehensible story line…really? “Season 3 is a little less of a guessing game and more of an experience with the hosts finally getting to meet their makers,” Nolan said.

Posted on 4.27.18: “That feeling of being fiddled and diddled without end, of several storylines unfolding, expanding and loop-dee-looping for no purpose than to keep unfolding, expanding and loop-dee-looping…is such that I’m determined to hate all further permutations of Westworld without watching it. I don’t care how that sounds or what it implies. Come hell or high water, I will not go there.”

From a 4.20.18 review by CNN’s Brian Lowry: “The first half of [season #2] repeats the show’s more impenetrable drawbacks — playing three-dimensional chess, while spending too much time sadistically blowing away pawns. The result is a show that’s easier to admire than consistently like.

“The push and pull of Westworld is that it grapples with deep intellectual conundrums while reveling in a kind of numbing pageant of death and destruction. Where the latter is organic to the world of HBO’s other huge genre hit, Game of Thrones, it doesn’t always feel integral to the story here, but rather a means of killing (and killing and killing) time.”