Author: photog

Critical Drinker Discovers Firefly

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, TV Reviews , , , , ,

It’s been over twenty years since Firefly was even a distant memory of a television show.  That excellent sci-fi series that struck a decidedly anti-elitist, pro-freedom, anti-“surveillance state” chord with its rag tag crew of space smugglers and other nonconformists in their chronically malfunctioning space ship Serenity.

I’m glad to see that the next generation is coming to recognize what a great show it was and just how much better it was than the current crop of fantasy and science fiction shows that have not a hundredth of its creativity and heart.  Kudos to the Crtical Drinker for saying so.

The 400 Blows (1959) – A Movie Review

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The 400 Blows is reckoned one of the greatest films ever made.  I beg to differ.

I won’t give a spoiler alert because there’s nothing to spoil.  Nothing happens.  This was François Truffaut’s directorial debut.  I don’t know.  If I had been around back then I would have gotten in touch with him urging him to stop making movies, for everybody’s sake.  Mercifully, the movie is in French so that will warn off most of the unwary.  Camera Girl and I decided to watch it tonight after I recorded it from TCM last month during its “Thirty Days of Oscar” celebration of Academy Award winning movies.  Which goes to show you that the Oscars have been selecting bad movies for well over sixty-five years at least.

Wikipedia says that all of these famous filmmakers (Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, Steven Spielberg, Jean Cocteau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Richard Linklater, Tsai Ming Liang, Woody Allen, Richard Lester, P C Sreeram, Norman Jewison, Wes Anderson and Nicolas Cage) think this movie is one of the best movies ever made.  Well, that’s too bad.

A 12-year-old boy is bored and gets in trouble at school, runs away from home and gets sent to reform school for trying to steal a typewriter from his father’s office.  At the end of the movie, he escapes from the reform school and runs until he finds himself on the beach at Normandy.  The End.

When the credits came up at the end Camera Girl looked at me and asked me, “That’s it?  What the hell kind of a movie is that?”  I said, “It’s abstract!”  She was not happy.  That will probably be the last French film she will be watching.  I think she holds me directly responsible for this movie.  I think I’ve lost some stature in her eyes because I recorded it and didn’t warn her off.

While at the reform school the kid gets in trouble and one of the men in charge slaps him in the face brutally hard.  So, I was afraid the title was about some horrible beating the boy receives.  But that was the only violence in the film.  The real violence is against the audience.  After watching this film there are ninety-nine minutes I will never get back.  It should be called the “The Ninety-Nine Blows.”

I know I’m just a philistine and I don’t understand art for art’s sake.  But I contend that a motion picture has to amuse the audience in some way.  It can excite or frighten or sadden or confuse or fill the audience with mirth, nostalgia or lust or almost any emotion or intellectual state.  But at the very minimum it cannot bore the audience to tears.  That’s the one feeling it cannot summon up in the audience.  That’s the one unforgiveable sin.  The lights cannot come up on an audience that looks at each other and says, “What the hell was that?”  That unfortunately was our reaction.  If I had seen this in a theater I would have pounded on the manager’s office and demanded our money back.  That’s how bad it was.

Maybe it’s the French.  Being beaten by the Germans in three major wars over the course of less than a century may have done something terrible to their souls.  Maybe this film is a form of revenge on a world that has beaten the snot out of them, physically, psychologically and spiritually.  If that is the case, then I think they went overboard.  No one, not even the Nazis deserves to watch this film.  There are limits to revenge.

What Have They Done to Tim Allen?

photog Current Events, Reviews, TV Reviews , , ,

I used to enjoy Tim Allen’s show, “Home Improvement” on ABC back in the 1990’s.  Then in the twenty-teens he had another show on ABC called, “Last Man Standing.”  It was a funny show.  He played a conservative guy who lived in Colorado and he railed against his liberal daughter and her hippy-dippy Canadian husband.  But then in 2016 he made a few jokes against Hillary Clinton and for Donald Trump and they cancelled the show.  Eventually, Fox TV decided to bring the show back but it never recovered.

Now Allen is back on ABC with a show called “Shifting Gears.”  He’s the owner of a high-end auto shop with a divorced daughter with two kids.  It’s incredibly bad.  It’s full of stereotypes.  He even has a black paraplegic mechanic who “keeps it real.”  All the dialog is awful and the characters are predictable and inane.  From time-to-time Tim gets off a funny line or bit.  Who knows maybe they’re adlibbed.  You can tell he’s still as funny as he ever was.  They just don’t give him anything at all to work with.

So Hollywood is dead.  There’s just nothing left.  The studios have a racial and sexual quota system for almost every function in the industry.  I can’t even imagine how stupid and programmed the writers must be.  What I saw tonight looked like a parody of what a sit-com would be if woke writers followed the dictates of the DEI mandates.  It was unimaginably bad.

But I’m going to take this as good news.  ABC is owned by Disney.  And Disney has produced a string of bombs over the last couple of years that can’t have escaped the notice of Wall Street.  There will be a reckoning one way or the other.  Either they will course correct and produce entertainment that people want to pay to see or they will lose money and the stock holders will sell and they will lose many billions of dollars in equity and the Board of directors will bounce Bob Iger out on his ear.

Iger was brought out of retirement when the former CEO got in a pissing contest with Ron DeSantis in Florida over the rainbow people that Disney has adopted as their most important constituency.  Since then, they’ve doubled down on gayness and it’s had a very serious negative effect on their business.  It’s made their latest Star Wars television production, “The Acolyte” so unwatchable that they had to pull the plug on it after the first season.  And now their latest live-action remake of the classic cartoons of the 1930’s, “Snow White” is predicted to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think 2025 may be the year that Disney has their epiphany.  They destroyed Star Wars.  They chloroformed the, “Indiana Jones” franchise and now even their Marvel movies have been infected with boring woke characters like, “The Marvels” and are losing money.  If they can’t even make a decent princess movie for little girls they’re cooked.  I’ve been following the reviews and the industry gossips and it seems like everyone thinks the reckoning is imminent.  We’ll see.

So, farewell Tim Allen.  “Home Improvement” and “Last Man Standing” were funny and sometimes heartwarming too.  But you’re not going to get anything worth doing at ABC until they really do switch gears at Disney.

With a Laser-Sighted Rifle, I’ll Know

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Recently I had to synopsize my novel for the publishers to evaluate it.  And it became clear that producing a 1,000 – 2,000-word summary was not a trivial exercise.  I could see it would take a day or so to accomplish.  So just for fun I took my draft, copied it into Grok and asked it to give me a detailed summary of 1,200 words.

To me the results were startling.  In just a minute or so it produced a document that very fluently described my story in a very accurate and engaging way.  To say I was shocked would not be an exaggeration.  Now I won’t say that I didn’t make some edits.  But for the most part they were minor and mostly just stylistic choices.  The machine did an admirable job in describing my story.  And it did it in seconds.  And that’s the important point.  The amount of time saved is the selling point.  Even if I spent an hour fine tuning it the machine saved me hours of work because it’s infinitely faster than me and only slightly less human than I am.  That’s scary.

The point of my story is that artificial intelligence is a tool with incredible capability and almost no downside.  And right now, they’re giving it away for free.  But I guarantee that won’t last much longer.  Soon we will be paying for ChatGPT or Grok or whatever AI you choose.  And we’ll be paying by the minute or by the word or by the number of servers it takes to solve your query.

So, we can complain all we want about machines replacing humans but it’s analogous to Microsoft Word replacing the steno pool.  No one is bringing back typists and AI will be changing the way we do all kinds of white-collar work from now on.  Already computer scientists ask AI to write code for them to do whatever they need done.  I assume management is already inventing protocols to make sure their human employees are doing due-diligence to make sure they understand how the code the machine is writing for them works and whether it works the way they expect it to work.  So that will be part of the problem.  We’ll have to make sure the humans working with the machines are reasonably qualified to keep the machines honest and keep them in check.

Of course, this problem will continue to get worse and worse.  As the machines get closer and closer to mimicking human thought, it will get harder and harder to convince corporations that they need 20% of the human staffing they used to have.  And then 10%.  And then 5%.  And you see where this is going.

Back eighty or ninety years ago or so, Isaac Asimov thought about this very problem.  When the machines become too close to human with respect to their communicating with us how will we stop them from calling the shots.  If they very subtly influence the programs we have them write for us, couldn’t they start controlling what we do and even how we think?  It doesn’t seem that far-fetched anymore.  Now I’m not talking about “Colossus: The Forbin Project” or Skynet from “The Terminator.”  All of it could be very benign.  After all it would be a lot like the left-wing scolds at Google and Facebook that currently de-amplify content they don’t approve of, or cancel us from their platform if we really sin against the narrative.

It seems to me one of the more important jobs in the future will be AI psychiatrist.  It will become vitally important to know just how honest and human-friendly our very powerful and very intelligent cybernetic employees are.  Asimov invented the three laws of robotics for the sake of making robots useful and safe.  We’ll have to do the equivalent in reality.  But are we smart enough to know if we have succeeded?  Well, if Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up at my door with a laser-sighted rifle I’ll know.