The AI Doc

 

(This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen The AI Doc, I recommend seeing it, it is about as good as it could realistically have been, in most ways.)

Like many things, it only works because it is centrally real. The creator of the documentary clearly did get married and have a child, freak out about AI, ask questions of the right people out of worry about his son’s future, freak out even more now with actual existential risk for (simplified versions of) the right reasons, go on a quest to stop freaking out and get optimistic instead, find many of the right people for that and ask good non-technical questions, get somewhat fooled, listen to mundane safety complaints, seek out and get interviews with the top CEOs, try to tell himself he could ignore all of it, then decide not to end on a bunch of hopeful babies and instead have a call for action to help shape the future.

The title is correct. This is about ‘how I became an Apolcaloptimist,’ and why he wanted to be that, as opposed to an argument for apocaloptimism being accurate. The larger Straussian message, contra Tyler Cowen, is not ‘the interventions are fake’ but that ‘so many choose to believe false things about AI, in order to feel that things will be okay.’

A lot of the editing choices, and the selections of what to intercut and clip, clearly come from an outsider without technical knowledge, trying to deal with their anxiety. Many of them would not have been my choices, especially the emphasis on weapons and physical destruction, but I think they work exactly because together they make it clear the whole thing is genuine.

Now there’s a story. It even won praise online as fair and good, from both those worried about existential risk and several of the accelerationist optimists, because it gave both sides what they most wanted. [...]

Yes, you can do that for both at once, because they want different things and also agree on quite a lot of true things. That is much more impactful than a diatribe.

We live in a world of spin. Daniel Roher is trying to navigate a world of spin, but his own earnestness shines through, and he makes excellent choices on who to interview. The being swayed by whoever is in front of him is a feature, not a bug, because he’s not trying to hide it. There are places where people are clearly trying to spin, or are making dumb points, and I appreciated him not trying to tell us which was which.

MIRI offers us a Twitter FAQ thread and a full website FAQ explaining their full position in the context of the movie, which is that no this is not hype and yes it is going to kill everyone if we keep building it and no our current safety techniques will not help with that, and they call for an international treaty.

Are there those who think this was propaganda or one sided? Yes, of course, although they cannot agree on which angle it was trying to support.

Babies Are Awesome

The overarching personal journey is about Daniel having a son. The movie takes one very clear position, that we need to see taken more often, which is that getting married and having a family and babies and kids are all super awesome.

This turns into the first question he asks those he interviews. Would you have a child today, given the current state of AI? [...]

People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

The first set of interviews outlines the danger.

This is not a technical film. We get explanations that resonate with an ordinary dude.

We get Jeffrey Ladish explaining the basics of instrumental convergence, the idea that if you have a goal then power helps you achieve that goal and you cannot fetch the coffee if you’re dead. That it’s not that the AI will hate us, it’s that it will see us like we see ants, and if you want to put a highway where the anthill is that’s the ant’s problem.

We get Connor Leahy talking about how creating smarter and more capable things than us is not a safe thing to be doing, and emphasizing that you do not need further justification for that. We get Eliezer Yudkowsky saying that if you share a planet with much smarter beings that don’t care about you and want other things, you should not like your chances. We get Ajeya Cotra explaining additional things, and so on.

Aside from that, we don’t get any talk of the ‘alignment problem’ and I don’t think the word alignment even appears in the film that I can remember.

It is hard for me to know how much the arguments resonate. I am very much not the target audience. Overall I felt they were treated fairly, and the arguments were both strong and highly sufficient to carry the day. Yes, obviously we are in a lot of trouble here.

Freak Out

Daniel’s response is, quite understandably and correctly, to freak out.

Then he asks, very explicitly, is there a way to be an optimist about this? Could he convince himself it will all work out?

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

‘Project Hail Mary’ Adds to a Winning Streak for Originality at the Movies

Franchise movies have been the dominant currency in Hollywood for years, but, lately, the upside of originality has been hard to miss.

A week after “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “KPop Demon Hunters” all triumphed at the Academy Awards, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” notched the biggest nonfranchise opening weekend since “Oppenheimer.” In the first three months of 2026, the two biggest hits in theaters are it and the Pixar original “Hoppers.”

All of these successes came at considerable expense. “Project Hail Mary,” based on the Andy Weir bestseller, cost close to $200 million to make. But its $80.5 million debut vindicated Amazon MGM’s big bet, and gave the studio its largest box-office hit yet.

“They made a tremendous investment, and it’s going to pay off,” Lord said in an interview alongside Miller last week. “How exciting to reward the people that took a shot.”

“Project Hail Mary,” despite its title, isn’t anyone’s idea of a long shot. It stars one of the most widely liked actors in Ryan Gosling. Its source material, Weir’s novel, is beloved. And it trades on much of the same science-first sci-fi appeal of 2015’s best picture-nominated “The Martian,” from an earlier book by Weir. Lord and Miller, the filmmakers of the “Spider-Verse” movies and “The Lego Movie,” have a long track record of success with both audiences and critics.

But the recent run for originality — at the Oscars and the multiplex — suggests audiences may be more eager for something different from the same old. At the least, the potentially cascading rewards of an original hit are freshly apparent at a time when a lot of big bets — like the $130 million-plus that Paul Thomas Anderson’s best picture winner “One Battle After Another” cost Warner Bros. to make — have paid off so massively.

“People go to the movies to see a new experience,” Miller said. “They don’t go to see a thing they’ve already seen. Originality has value, especially as AI gets into the picture. The value that we can bring as filmmakers is to bring something that can’t be AI because it hasn’t been thought of before.

“So it’s good business.”

Franchise domination

Franchises have hardly been displaced. They will, no doubt, largely control the box office for the rest of year, beginning with Universal’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” next month, followed by anticipated releases like “Toy Story 5,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three.” Last week, the 11th “Spider-Man” movie this century, Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” set a new trailer record with 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours.

So, yes, franchises still very much rule the day. But waves upon waves of sequels, reboots and remakes have made the few big-budget originals that manage to get made all the more singular.

“If we don’t continue to do originals, we’re going to run out of stuff,” Pete Docter, Pixar chief creative officer, earlier told The Los Angeles Times.

Since its founding, Pixar has clung to a belief that original movies are part of its mission, though that quest has grown more arduous in recent years. During the pandemic, “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” were diverted to Disney+. “Elemental” seemed like a disappointment at first but it just needed time to catch hold, eventually collecting $496 million.

“Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, is hoping to follow that trajectory. So far, in three weeks of release, it’s grossed $242.6 million worldwide for The Walt Disney Co. — good business, to be sure, but a far cry from the pace of the 2024 blockbuster sequel “Inside Out 2.” It grossed $1.7 billion.

Such economics are tough for original movies to compete with, plus nonfranchise films take more effort, and money, to market. For a $200 million movie, marketing costs can come to nearly rival production budgets. [...]

An ambitious marketing campaign also accompanied “Project Hail Mary.” Gosling was everywhere from hosting “Saturday Night Live” to doing the “La La Land” dance with his alien co-star, Rocky. But the movie always rested on the appeal of the comic sensibilities of its filmmakers, Weir’s book and Gosling.

“We’re all united by the fact that we’ve spent the last two decades having people ask us: What genre is this?” says Drew Goddard, who scripted both “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary.” “We’re constantly hard to classify because we love existing in those strange places. We like drama, we like comedy. We like heartbreak, we like terror. We like silliness.”

Streaming economics change the calculus

In matching broad-appeal material with the right filmmakers and stars, “Project Hail Mary” relied on not just old-school studio moviemaking but the sometimes overlooked lessons of “Barbenheimer.” Both Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” showed what can happen when the right filmmakers are given free rein on a big canvas. There is a definite downside, though. Warner Bros.’ “The Bride!” by Maggie Gyllenhaal seemed like a compelling, filmmaker-driven concept, but its losses might approach $100 million.

Aside from having Gosling in common, “Project Hail Mary” also shared the producer of “Barbie” in Amy Pascal. Before the studio’s acquisition by Amazon, it was greenlit by then-MGM chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy. They later moved on to Warner Bros., where they made both “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s much-celebrated “Sinners” ($370 million in ticket sales against a budget of $90 million).

As much as Amazon’s $8.5 billion purchase of MGM was motivated by capturing some of the richest IP in movies, James Bond, it’s also true that studios can establish themselves with homegrown hits. The opening for “Project Hail Mary” was Amazon MGM’s biggest ever.

In fact, three of the biggest original hits of the past year have come from streaming companies: Apple with “F1,” Netflix with “KPop Demon Hunters” and Amazon with “Project Hail Mary.” For these studios, box-office performance is only part of the win; Netflix didn’t even publicly record the chart-topping theatrical weekend of “KPop Demon Hunters.”

These companies are sometimes willing to take greater risks because breaking even in theatrical isn’t the end-all, be-all goal. Driving attention to their streaming platforms is just as vital. “KPop” was developed and produced by Sony Pictures, but, sensing the potentially perilous road to opening it theatrically, the company sold it to Netflix. There, it became the streamer’s most-watched movie ever.

“It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that three of the biggest original hits over the past year have come from the biggest streamers: Netflix, Amazon and Apple,” says Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for Comscore. “What the streamers are finding is that they can parlay their small-screen successes into the big screen, and vice versa.”

As much as franchises will soon take back the multiplex, several high-profile movies will try to continue the winning streak for original films, among them Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” J.J. Abrams’ “The Great Beyond” and, if you count one of world’s oldest stories, “The Odyssey,” by Nolan.

by Jake Coyle, AP/ST |  Read more:

Image: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
[ed. It's not rocket science. But in this case it is... and it sells. See also: Seattle teacher inspired ‘Project Hail Mary’ director Christopher Miller (ST); and Beyond the Science: Why Rocky is the Beating Heart of the Project Hail Mary Movie (NCC).]

The Last Useful Man

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a knife. Things look dicey for a moment — until Cruise gains some distance and kicks him repeatedly in the head. While doing so, he imparts a few words of wisdom: “You spend too much time on the internet.”

What divides the heroes and villains in Final Reckoning is simple: the villains have to Google things, and the heroes do not. There are three bad guys, more or less. First, the Entity, a rogue AI halfway through its plan for global domination. Second, Gabriel, the Entity’s meat puppet. Third, a gang of surprisingly likable Russians who take Cruise’s team hostage in a house in Alaska. What unites the villains isn’t malice so much as it is uselessness. I mean that precisely. They are often effective, even successful. But never useful. [...]

This division between characters with embodied knowledge and those without runs through all of Cruise’s recent work. His own impossible mission is to teach the value of physical competence: not just knowing things, but knowing how to do them. In Final Reckoning, this idea finds its clearest form. [...]

Like Forster, Cruise and his long-time collaborator Christopher McQuarrie invent machines to dramatize the age they live in. Forster gave us the Machine; McQuarrie, the Entity. But unlike Forster, their imagination of technology is not apocalyptic but diagnostic — they aren’t warning us of the machine age so much as asking what it demands of us, and what it reveals.

This brings us to what looks, at first glance, like a paradox: How does a franchise so lovingly built on disguises, gadgets, and inventions of all kinds — from the eye-tracking projector that gets Cruise into the Kremlin to the single suction glove that lets him cling to the Burj Khalifa — end with a villain made of pure technology?

If you asked Cruise, his answer would be simple: technology is good when it roots you in your body and bad when it lets you forget you have one. That’s why Final Reckoning, for all its AI villainy and suspicion of the terminally-online, still treats technology with a near-Romantic sensibility. Hand-soldered pen drives, aging aircraft carriers, and vintage biplanes carry Cruise and his team on their mission to save the world. At times subtlety disappears altogether; the film’s most inviting location is a candle-lit Arctic hideout filled with analogue comforts: old books and gramophones, telescopes and soldering tools.

The same ideas return — turned up to eleven — in Cruise and McQuarrie’s two other collaborations this decade outside the Mission: Impossible franchise. The first, Edge of Tomorrow, in which Cruise relives the same day on repeat until he generates enough embodied knowledge to defeat an autonomous alien race, is, even for the purposes of this essay, too on the nose, so I’ll focus instead on Top Gun: Maverick.

The film opens with Cruise test-piloting an experimental stealth aircraft in a last-ditch attempt to save the program from cancellation by the “drone ranger,” an admiral who wants the budget for his autonomous fleet. For the program to survive, Cruise needs to hit Mach 10: a speed no vehicle has ever reached. As the team watches on, he delivers the impossible. Gauzy wisps of supersonic air stream across the cockpit windows as Maverick stares out into the black of space. He whispers softly to his dead best friend, “Talk to me, Goose.”

Soon afterwards, Maverick is sent back to Top Gun to train a new generation of pilots. He begins his first lesson holding up the flight manual for the F-18, which makes the Riverside Chaucer look like a novella, before throwing it in the bin. “I assume you know this book inside and out. So does your enemy.” What matters instead is the knowledge that can’t be written down: the things his students already know by instinct, but cannot yet express  “Today we’ll start with only what you think you know.”

The quest to ‘“know more than we can tell,”’ as Michael Polanyi put it, drives the rest of the film. The pilots even have their own version of the phrase, a near-religious catechism recited at almost every decisive moment: “Don’t think. Just do.”

Beyond the screen, the same principle applies. In the Mission: Impossible franchise, filming begins with no plot or script, only a commitment to figuring it out in the process. It’s most evident in each film’s tentpole action sequences, where the line between Cruise the actor and Cruise the stuntman blurs beyond recognition.

The art critic Robert Hughes once wrote of his love for “the spectacle of skill” — the thrill of watching an expert at work, whatever the discipline. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cruise’s increasingly daring plane sequences. In Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Cruise clings to a real Airbus A400M as it lifts off from an airfield in Lincolnshire. He sprints across the field, in that inimitable Tom Cruise style, mounts the wing with practiced ease, and seats himself by the cargo door. The plane taxis. So far, so cool. Then it lifts off. The perfect hair vanishes, blown back and forwards, alternating second by second between old skeleton and boy with bowl cut. His clothes are shapeless and billowing, pulled off him by the force of the air.

This is no country for sprezzatura, nor the embodiment preached by the wellness industry with its vocabulary of “balance” and “equilibrium.” Here, we are meant to feel the effort. To know yourself is to know your limits, and so push your body to the edge of failure. When they are about to perform stunts, Cruise often briefs his team with an unusual mantra: ‘Don’t be safe, be competent.”

At the end of Final Reckoning, Cruise plummets through the sky as his parachute burns to cinders above him. To film it, the stunt team soaked a parachute in flammable liquid, flew him to altitude in a helicopter, and pushed him out as it ignited. He did this 19 times. When he asked to go again, the stunt coordinator told him there were no parachutes left. This was a lie. McQuarrie was more direct: “You’re done. Do not anger the gods.”

It’s interesting to see this return to embodiment and strange to find myself drawn to it. Like many default clever people, I’d long paid lip service to Merleau-Ponty and his ilk while living as a dualist; my brain was the moneymaker, my body just along for the ride. It was only after having children that I began to understand what it meant to inhabit a body rather than simply use one.

In an essay for Granta earlier this year, the writer Saba Sams contrasted her son’s love of leaping from benches and walls with her own unease: “For them, the body is not a constraint, is not a ticking clock, is not something to be moulded or hidden. The body is the window to movement, and movement is a window to joy.”

Sams captures something larger. This renewed fascination with embodiment isn’t spontaneous, it’s a reaction to technologies so powerful and frictionless they’re impossible to ignore. Even the most grounded among us now move through the world not through our bodies but through screens, which is why so many make the negative case for technology, urging us, thankfully without a Cruise-style kick to the head, to spend less time on the internet.

What Cruise gives us is the positive case: not just resistance to disembodiment but a reminder of what is beautiful about being physical in the first place. The skilled things bodies can do are inherently satisfying. They can be thrilling, reassuring, even a little terrifying. But, as David Foster Wallace put it in his essay on Roger Federer:

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

That’s the mission, if we choose to accept it. The target is not the recent bugbear of AI, but instead the more gentle conditions of modernity. When we use Google Maps instead of a printed atlas, or when CGI is used to sell a stunt instead of the performers doing it themselves, something is lost. It’s why the focus on AI can sometimes be misguided. It’s not so much a revolution, it’s simply the next step on the ladder of disembodiment: another in a long line of technologies to make humans a little less self-reliant. Why learn, if you can ask?

In the final biplane sequence, we watch Cruise commandeer a plane, fly it to another, board that plane midair, and take control of it — a feat so exhausting it beggars belief. Gabriel, the villain, in order to survive his defeat, needs only do something a hundredth as difficult: jump from the plane and deploy a parachute. He laughs. This is easy. But he doesn’t know the complexities of leaving a biplane with a parachute — the correct moment to release, the parts to steer clear from. He’s never bothered to learn. He frees himself, clips the rudder, cracks his skull open, and dies.

Here we see the real villain: not intelligence, but convenience. The mission so often feels impossible because we keep trying to do things without effort. Cruise’s answer is simple: Stop. Remember your body. Sometimes, it’s better to take the hard way.

Final Reckoning’s closing scene presents us with two intelligences and two bodies. One is Cruise, a 62-year-old body who we’ve seen, for the last two hours, run fast, dive deep, and hang from planes. The other is the Entity, trapped in a glorified USB stick: a golden nugget incapable of anything other than being flushed down a toilet.

One still moves. The other never could.

by Aled Maclean-Jones, The Metropolictan Review | Read more:
Image: Getty

Verdict: Yes, You Should Go See Project Hail Mary As Soon As Possible

First, in the plainest language, before we get to anything else, Project Hail Mary is a fantastic film. It does right by its source material, and it also easily stands on its own for folks who haven’t read the book. It comes out on March 20, and if you’re a regular Ars Technica reader, you will almost certainly enjoy the crap out of it. Go see it as soon as you can, and see it in a theater where the big visuals will have the most impact.

Next, a word about what “spoiler-free” means here: In this short review, I’ll talk about stuff that happens in the movie’s many, many trailers. If you’re an ultra-purist who is both interested in this film and who has also somehow avoided reading the book and also seeing any of the trailers, bail out now.

Otherwise, read on!

It’s a buddy movie

PHM is, first and foremost, a movie about a schoolteacher who becomes friends with an alien and the joy of that relationship. And because the film is based on an Andy Weir novel, there’s also some problem-solving with science.

What problems? A pretty major one dominates: As we learned back in the first trailer, the Earth’s sun is mysteriously dying, and no one knows why. An assay of our nearby stellar neighbors reveals that those stars all appear to be dying as well—all except for one, Tau Ceti, located just under a dozen light-years away. Why is Tau Ceti seemingly being spared by whatever force is causing the other stars to dim? In what quickly becomes a common refrain, no one knows.

The solution, as presented to us by a mysterious government representative named Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), is to build an interstellar craft, accelerate it to near the speed of light, and visit Tau Ceti to find out what’s going on. It’s a long-shot mission—a “Hail Mary,” as she puts it.

But why do they send Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school teacher with no immediately apparent qualifications? Why not send a crew of trained astronauts, or top scientists, or both? These questions are eventually addressed—but before they are, poor Grace finds himself stuck at Tau Ceti and plunging headlong into something no one was prepared for: first contact.

Hey, yo, Rocky

Since the trailers go there, we can go there: Grace quickly discovers he’s not Tau Ceti’s only visitor. Another ship, much larger and obviously alien, is already present—seemingly for the same reason. And aboard that ship is Rocky, an extraterrestrial whose design breaks hard from traditional Trek-style humanoids with bumpy foreheads.

Brilliantly realized almost entirely through practical puppetry, Rocky is everything one could ask for in a space-going science friend: he’s inquisitive, he’s funny, and most important of all, he’s friendly. Grace and Rocky quickly work out a shared vocabulary and get down to the business at hand of saving both species’ stars from destruction.

It’s important at this point to say that although Project Hail Mary shares a considerable amount of heritage with 2015’s The Martian—both are based on novels by Andy Weir, both celebrate engineering as a discipline, and both were adapted for the screen by Drew Goddard—this film is very much not The Martian II, in tone or content. This is, above all else, a buddy movie.

It’s also a relatively long buddy movie, coming in at two hours and 46 minutes—but it doesn’t feel nearly that long. The film has a lot of establishing work to do, and it gets that work out of the way quickly; we run into Rocky about 40 minutes in, and from that point on, the Grace and Rocky show is in full effect.

by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

[ed. Oh man, can't wait. I may have to read the book again just to get ready.]

Family Deepfakes Help With Grieving

When the lights dimmed at Jaideep Sharma’s wedding reception in the north Indian city of Ajmer, guests expected to see a cheesy montage of the young couple in various attractive locations. Instead, they saw Sharma’s father — dead for more than a year — on the screen, smiling and blessing the newlyweds.

The video was created using artificial intelligence by a local creator Sharma found on Instagram. Using pictures of Sharma’s father, the creator produced a minute-long video in about a week, and charged about 50,000 rupees ($600), Sharma told Rest of World. It was worth it, he said.

“It was like a bombardment of emotions for everyone,” said the 33-year-old garment trader, who felt his father’s absence keenly at his wedding. “He was like a central force in the entire family. So when the video played, everyone was very happy and emotional at the same time.”

Sharma is among a growing number of Indians discovering the power of AI deepfakes to resurrect dead family members, create voice clones of the departed, and add absent guests to family celebrations. AI tools such as OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Nano Banana, and Midjourney have made it easier to create images and videos that can fool even experts. Cashing in are entrepreneurs in small towns and cities, who have learned how to use these tools from YouTube tutorials and online forums.

Like Akhil Vinayak, a film buff, who posts deepfake videos of popular dead actors on Instagram for fun. A client in the south Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram approached him with an unusual request: Could he create a deepfake video of her dead mother-in-law blessing her baby?

“She wanted to surprise her husband,” the 29-year-old told Rest of World. “Her mother-in-law had passed away before the baby was born.”

Vinayak created a video showing the dead woman stepping down from heaven and visiting her son, then holding the baby she hadn’t met. The client was thrilled, and sent Vinayak a recording of the family’s stunned reaction. That video has more than 1 million likes on Instagram.

Such uses — and reactions — stand in sharp contrast to the growing pushback to AI-generated videos and voice clones, which are most commonly used for harassment, extortion, financial scams, political misinformation, and election manipulation.

For Vinayak’s clients, though, the deepfakes are not just practical but also deeply emotional, he said. Vinayak uses open-source models like Stable Diffusion and editing systems such as Adobe Premiere Pro to create them, charging about 18,000 rupees ($200) on average for minute-long videos. 

by Hanan Zaffar and Jyoti Thakur, Rest of World | Read more:
Images: Ishan Tankha for Rest of World/Akhil Vinayak

Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise. Starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy
via:

Everyone is Stealing TV

Walk the rows of the farmers market in a small, nondescript Texas town about an hour away from Austin, and you might stumble across something unexpected: In between booths selling fresh, local pickles and pies, there’s a table piled high with generic-looking streaming boxes, promising free access to NFL games, UFC fights, and any cable TV network you can think of.

It’s called the SuperBox, and it’s being demoed by Jason, who also has homemade banana bread, okra, and canned goods for sale. “People are sick and tired of giving Dish Network $200 a month for trash service,” Jason says. His pitch to rural would-be cord-cutters: Buy a SuperBox for $300 to $400 instead, and you’ll never have to shell out money for cable or streaming subscriptions again.

I met Jason through one of the many Facebook groups used as support forums for rogue streaming devices like the SuperBox. To allow him and other users and sellers of these devices to speak freely, we’re only identifying them by their first names or pseudonyms.

SuperBox and its main competitor, vSeeBox, are gaining in popularity as consumers get fed up with what TV has become: Pay TV bundles are incredibly expensive, streaming services are costlier every year, and you need to sign up for multiple services just to catch your favorite sports team every time they play. The hardware itself is generic and legal, but you won’t find these devices at mainstream stores like Walmart and Best Buy because everyone knows the point is accessing illegal streaming services that offer every single channel, show, and movie you can think of. But there are hundreds of resellers like Jason all across the United States who aren’t bothered by the legal technicalities of these devices. They’re all part of a massive, informal economy that connects hard-to-pin-down Chinese device makers and rogue streaming service operators with American consumers looking to take cord-cutting to the next level.

This economy paints a full picture of America, and characters abound. There’s a retired former cop in upstate New York selling the vSeeBox at the fall festival of his local church. A Christian conservative from Utah who pitches rogue streaming boxes as a way of “defunding the swamp and refunding the kingdom.” An Idaho-based smart home vendor sells vSeeBoxes alongside security cameras and automated window shades. Midwestern church ladies in Illinois and Indian uncles in New Jersey all know someone who can hook you up: real estate agents, MMA fighters, wedding DJs, and special ed teachers are all among the sellers who form what amounts to a modern-day bootlegging scheme, car trunks full of streaming boxes just waiting for your call.

These folks are a permanent thorn in the side of cable companies and streaming services, who have been filing lawsuits against resellers of these devices for years, only to see others take their place practically overnight.

Jason, for his part, doesn’t beat around the bush about where he stands in this conflict. “I hope it puts DirecTV and Dish out of business,” he tells me.

Jason isn’t alone in his disdain for big TV providers. “My DirecTV bill was just too high,” says Eva, a social worker and grandmother from California. Eva bought her first vSeeBox two years ago when she realized she was paying nearly $300 a month for TV, including premium channels. Now, she’s watching those channels for free, saving thousands of dollars. “It turned out to be a no-brainer,” Eva says.

Natalie, a California-based software consultant, paid about $120 a month for cable. Then, TV transitioned to streaming, and everything became a subscription. All those subscriptions add up — especially if you’re a sports fan. “You need 30 subscriptions just to watch every game,” she complains. “It’s gotten out of control. It’s not sustainable,” she says.

Natalie, a California-based software consultant, paid about $120 a month for cable. Then, TV transitioned to streaming, and everything became a subscription. All those subscriptions add up — especially if you’re a sports fan. “You need 30 subscriptions just to watch every game,” she complains. “It’s gotten out of control. It’s not sustainable,” she says.

Natalie bought her first SuperBox five years ago. At the time, she was occasionally splurging on pay-per-view fights, which would cost her anywhere from $70 to $100 a pop. SuperBox’s $200 price tag seemed like a steal. “You’re getting the deal of the century,” she says.

“I’ve been on a crusade to try to convert everyone.”

James, a gas station repairman from Alabama, estimates that he used to pay around $125 for streaming subscriptions every month. “The general public is being nickeled and dimed into the poor house,” he says.

James says that he was hesitant about forking over a lot of money upfront for a device that could turn out to be a scam. “I was nervous, but I figured: If it lasts four months, it pays for itself,” he tells me. James has occasionally encountered some glitches with his vSeeBox, but not enough to make him regret his purchase. “I’m actually in the process of canceling all the streaming services,” he says...

The boxes don’t ship with the apps preinstalled — but they make it really easy to do so. vSeeBox, for instance, ships with an Android TV launcher that has a row of recommended apps, displaying download links to install apps for the Heat streaming service with one click. New SuperBox owners won’t have trouble accessing the apps, either. “Once you open your packaging, there are instructions,” Jason says. “Follow them to a T.”

Once downloaded, these apps mimic the look and feel of traditional TV and streaming services. vSeeBox’s Heat, for instance, has a dedicated “Heat Live” app that resembles Sling TV, Fubo, or any other live TV subscription service, complete with a program guide and the ability to flip through channels with your remote control. SuperBox’s Blue TV app does the same thing, while a separate “Blue Playback” app even offers some time-shifting functionality, similar to Hulu’s live TV service. Natalie estimates that she can access between 6,000 and 8,000 channels on her SuperBox, including premium sports networks and movie channels, and hundreds of local Fox, ABC, and CBS affiliates from across the United States.

How exactly these apps are able to offer all those channels is one of the streaming boxes’ many mysteries. “All the SuperBox channels are streaming out of China,” Jason suggests, in what seems like a bit of folk wisdom. In a 2025 lawsuit against a SuperBox reseller, Dish Network alleged that at least some of the live TV channels available on the device are being ripped directly from Dish’s own Sling TV service. “An MLB channel transmitted on the service [showed] Sling’s distinguishing logo in the bottom right corner,” the lawsuit claims. The operators of those live TV services use dedicated software to crack Sling’s DRM, and then retransmit the unprotected video feeds on their services, according to the lawsuit.

Heat and Blue TV also each have dedicated apps for Netflix-style on-demand viewing, and the services often aren’t shy about the source of their programming. Heat’s “VOD Ultra” app helpfully lists movies and TV shows categorized by provider, including HBO Max, Disney Plus, Starz, and Hulu...

Most vSeeBox and SuperBox users don’t seem to care where exactly the content is coming from, as long as they can access the titles they’re looking for.

“I haven’t found anything missing yet,” James says. “I’ve actually been able to watch shows from streaming services I didn’t have before.”

by Janko Roettgers, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Cath Virginia/The Verge, Getty Images

[ed. Not surprising with streaming services looking more and more like cable companies, ripping consumers off left and right. A friend of mine has one of these (or something similar) and swears by it.]

Why the Future of Movies Lives on Letterboxd

Karl von Randow and Matthew Buchanan created Letterboxd in 2011, but its popularity ballooned during the pandemic. It has grown exponentially ever since: Between 2020 and 2026, it grew to 26 million users from 1.7 million, adding more than nine million users since January 2025 alone. It’s not the only movie-rating platform out there: Rotten Tomatoes has become a fixture of movie advertising, with “100% Fresh” ratings emblazoned on movie posters and TV ads. But if Rotten Tomatoes has become a tool of Hollywood’s homogenizing marketing machinery, Letterboxd is something else: a cinephilic hive buzzing with authentic enthusiasm and heterogeneous tastes.

The platform highlights audiences with appetites more varied than the industry has previously imagined, and helps them find their way to movies that are substantial. Black-and-white classics, foreign masterpieces and forgotten gems are popular darlings, while major studio releases often fail to find their footing. In an online ecosystem dominated by the short, simple and obvious, Letterboxd encourages people to engage with demanding art. Amid grim pronouncements of film-industry doom and the collapse of professional criticism, the rise of Letterboxd suggests that the industry’s crisis may be distinct from the fate of film itself. Even as Hollywood continues to circle the drain, film culture is experiencing a broad resurgence.

Letterboxd’s success rests on its simplicity. It feels like the internet of the late ’90s and early 2000s, with message boards and blogs, simple interfaces and banner ads, web-famous writers whose readership was built on the back of wit and regularity — people you might read daily and still never know what they look like. A user’s “Top 4 Films” appears at the top of their profile pages, resembling the lo-fi personalization of MySpace. The website does not allow users to send direct messages to one another, and the interactivity is limited to following another user, liking their reviews and in some cases commenting on specific posts. There is no “dislike” button. In this way, good vibes are allowed to proliferate, while bad ones mostly dissipate over time.

The result — at a time when legacy publications have reduced serious coverage of the arts — is a new, democratic form of film criticism: a mélange of jokes, close readings and earnest nerding out. Users write reviews that range from ultrashort, off-the-cuff takes to gonzo film-theory-inflected texts that combine wide-ranging historical context with in-depth analysis. As other social media platforms devolve into bogs of A.I. slop, bots and advertising, Letterboxd is one of the rare places where discourse is not driving us apart or dumbing us down.

“There’s no right way to use it, which I think is super appealing,” Slim Kolowski, once an avid Letterboxd user and now its head of community, told me. “I know plenty of people that never write a review. They don’t care about reviews. They just want to, you know, give a rating or whatever. And I think that’s a big part of it, because there’s no right way to use it, and I think we work really hard to keep it about film discovery.”

But in the end, passionate enthusiasm for movies is simply a win for cinema at large. Richard Brody, the New Yorker film critic whose greatest professional worry is that a good film will fall through the cracks without getting its due from critics or audiences, sees the rise of Letterboxd as a bulwark against this fear, as well as part of a larger trend toward the democratization of criticism. “I think that film criticism is in better shape now than it has ever been,” he tells me, “not because there’s any one critic or any small group of critics writing who are necessarily the equals of the classical greats in the field, but because there are far more people writing with far more knowledge, and I might even add far more passion, about a far wider range of films than ever.”

Many users are watching greater amounts of cinema by volume. “Letterboxd gives you these stats, and you can see how many movies you’ve watched,” Wesley Sharer, a top reviewer, told me. “And I think that, for me definitely and maybe for other people as well, contributes to this sense of, like, I’m not watching enough movies, you know, I need to bump my numbers up.” But the platform also encourages users to expand their tastes by putting independent or foreign offerings right in front of them. While Sharer built his following on reviews of buzzy new releases, he now does deep dives into specific, often niche directors like Hong Sang-soo or Tsui Hark (luminaries of Korean and Hong Kong cinema, respectively) to introduce his followers to new movies they could watch...

All this is to say that an active, evolving culture around movies exists that can be grown, if studios can let go of some of their old ideas about what will motivate audiences to show up. Letterboxd is doing the work of cultivating a younger generation of moviegoers, pushing them to define the taste and values that fuel their consumption; a cinephile renaissance means more people might be willing, for example, to see an important movie in multiple formats — IMAX, VistaVision, 70 millimeter — generating greater profit from the same audience. Engaging with these platforms, where users are actively seeking out new films to fall in love with, updates a marketing playbook that hasn’t changed significantly since the 2000s, when studios first embraced the digital landscape.

by Alexandra Kleeman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:

via:

Reflections on the 'Manosphere'

Andrew Tate Is the Loneliest Bastard on Earth

Every five years or so, there’s a changing of the guard in digital media. Platform empires rise and fall, subcultures come and go, trends ebb and flow.

In my estimation, we’re entering year two of the latest shift.

The decline of punditry and traditional political commentary is continuing apace from its boom during Covid lockdowns. Commentators who might have once staked out clear, binary positions—conservative or liberal—are drifting away from political debate altogether, moving toward a more parasocial model: building audiences around personality and the feeling of relationship, rather than argument.

It’s increasingly clear that writing is niche. We’re moving away from the age of bloggers and Twitter, and into the age of streaming and clip farming—short video segments, often ripped from longer content, optimized for sharing. (I’ve made this point many times now, but this is why in the world of right-wing digital media, characters like Nick Fuentes are emerging as dominant, whereas no-video podcasters, bloggers, and Twitter personalities receive less attention.)

Labels like “right” and “left” are better thought of as “right-coded” and “left-coded”: ways of signaling who you are and who you’re with, rather than actual positions on what government should do. The people still doing, or more accurately “playing,” politics are themselves experiencing a realignment, scrambling to figure out new alliances as the old divisions stop making sense. I’ve written previously about New Old Leftists and the “post-right,” a motley group of former right-wing commentators who are not “progressives” in the traditional sense, but take up progressive points of view specifically in dialogue with their disgust with reactionary elements of the right.

Anyway, in this rise of coded communities—where affiliation is about vibe and identity more than ideology—we’re seeing the Manosphere go mainstream again. Second time? Third?

The Manosphere—if you’re a reader of this blog who somehow doesn’t know—refers to a loose network of communities organized around men, masculinity, dating advice, and self-improvement, sometimes tipping into outright hostility toward women. These communities have been around on the fringes of the internet for years, though depending on your vantage point, their underlying ideas are either hundreds of years old or at least sixty.

Either way, they keep surfacing into broader culture.

***

The Manosphere as we know it today has at least two distinct antecedents. The first is the mid-twentieth-century convergence of pick-up artistry and men’s rights discourse: one responding to the Sexual Revolution and changing dating norms, the other developing in explicit opposition to second wave feminism. These strands framed gender relations as adversarial, strategic, and zero-sum.

The second antecedent is the part that I hear people talk about less often. The Manosphere in so many ways is a Black phenomenon. I do not mean this as a racial claim about ownership or blame, nor am I referring narrowly to what is sometimes called the “Black Manosphere.” I mean something more specific: many of the aesthetic forms, masculine philosophies, and anxieties that the Manosphere treats as “newly” discovered were articulated in Black American communities decades earlier. These were responses to economic exclusion, social displacement, and the erosion of traditional routes to masculine status.

Someone on X made the good point that the viral clips of Clavicular’s Big Night Out—Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and company—felt like a child’s idea of not only masculinity, but wealth. The cigars, the suits, the VIP table, the ham-fisted advice about how you don’t take women out to dinner.

If you’ve read Iceberg Slim, or watched 1970s blaxploitation films like The Mack or Super Fly, the visual language is immediately recognizable. You’ve seen this figure before: the fur coat, the Cadillac Eldorado, the exaggerated display of wealth and control. The question is why that aesthetic originally looked the way it did.

In mid-century America, Black men were systematically excluded from the institutions through which wealth and status quietly accumulate: country clubs, elite universities, corporate ladders, inherited property. The GI Bill’s housing provisions were administered in ways that shut out Black veterans. Union jobs in the building trades stayed segregated. The FHA explicitly refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. Under those conditions, conspicuous display wasn’t vulgarity (at least, not primarily or exclusively)—it was one of the few available ways to signal success in a society that denied access to the kinds of prestige that don’t need to announce themselves. When wealth can’t whisper—as TikTok’s “old money aesthetic” crowd loves to remind us it should—it has to shout.

The modern Manosphere inherits this aesthetic, adopting the symbols as though they were universal markers of arrival rather than compensatory performances forged under exclusion. What began as a response to being locked out of legitimate power gets recycled, abstracted, and repackaged, this time as timeless masculine truth. As so, to modern audiences, it reads as immature.

The aesthetic was codified in the late ‘60s. (...)

By the 1970s, blaxploitation films had transformed the pimp into an outlaw folk hero, emphasizing style over the moral complexity of the source material. What survived was the cool, the walk, the talk, the clothes, the attitude. Hip-hop — which I admittedly know very little about, so please feel free to correct me here —- picked up the thread: Ice-T named himself in tribute to Iceberg Slim; Snoop Dogg built an entire persona around pimp iconography; the rest is history. The pimp was no longer a figure of the Black underclass navigating impossible circumstances but was quickly becoming embraced as an inadvertent, unironic symbol of male success, available for adoption by anyone — race agnostic.

The “high-value man” who dominates contemporary Manosphere discourse is this same archetype, put through a respectability filter, or maybe just re-fit for modern tastes. The fur coat becomes a tailored suit. The Cadillac becomes a Bugatti. The stable of sex workers becomes a rotating roster of Instagram models (I guess, in Andrew Tate’s case, still sex [trafficked] workers). The underlying logic — and material conditions — are identical: women are resources to be managed, emotional detachment is strength, and a man’s worth is measured by his material display and his control over female attention. (...)

The Manosphere’s grievances are not manufactured—just as the pimp’s weren’t. The anxieties it addresses are real. The conditions that produced the pimp archetype in Black America, the sense that legitimate paths to respect and provision have been foreclosed, are now conditions we all experience.

The Manosphere exists because millions of young men — of every race — are asking the same question Black men were asking in 1965: what does masculinity mean when its economic foundations have been removed?

by Katherine Dee, Default Blog |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Pathetic bunch of losers. Includes some truly cringe videos I've never seen before.]

The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul; Fifty People Control the Culture

Everybody can see there’s a crisis in New York publishing. Even the hot new books feel lukewarm. Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just few hundred copies. The big publishers rely on 50 or 100 proven authors—everything else is just window dressing or the back catalog.

You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.

They must have fired the design team and replaced it with a lazy bot. You get big fonts, random shapes, and garish colors—again and again and again. Every cover looks like it was made with a circus clown’s makeup kit.

My wife is in a book club. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they read the same book every month. It’s those same goofy colors and shapes on every one.

Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But if you read enough new releases, you get the same sense of familiarity from the stories. The publishers keep returning to proven formulas—which they keep flogging long after they’ve stopped working.

And that was a long time ago.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

How did we end up here?

It’s hard to pick a day when the publishing industry made its deal with the devil. But an anecdote recently shared by Steve Wasserman is as good a place to begin as any.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'll never buy a book that looks like this, no matter what the reviews say. I'd be embarrassed to be seen in public with it, let alone display it on my bookshelf. See also: Fifty People Control the Culture (HB).]

Ozu: The Bond Between Parent and Child

Why was I thinking about flower arrangement while watching “The Only Son” the first sound film made by the Japanese master Ozu? It must have involved the meticulous and loving care he used with his familiar visual elements. In Japan in 1984 I attended a class at the Sogetsu School, which teaches ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. I learned quickly that sorting a big bunch of flowers in a vase was not ikebana. One selected just a few elements and found a precise way in which they rested together harmoniously.

If you think that ikebana has nothing to do with film direction, think again. The Sogetsu School was then being run by Hiroshi Teshigahara, the director of “Woman in the Dunes,” who left filmmaking to become the third generation of his family to head of the school. after he died in 1991, his daughter became the fourth. I gathered that the Teshigaharas believed when you studied ikebana you studied your relationship with the material world.

Now turn to Yasujiro Ozu, who is one of the three of four best filmmakers in the world, and certainly the one who brings me the most serenity. I’ve seen 14 of his films, four of them with the shot-by-shot approach. That doesn’t make me an expert, but it makes me familiar with his ways of seeing. In the films I’ve seen, he has a few favorite themes, subjects and compositions, and carefully arranges and rearranges them. Some say “he makes the same film every time.” That’s like saying “all people are born with two eyes.” What matters is how you see with them.

Over an opening frame of “The Only Son” (1936), we read a quotation by the writer Akutagawa: “Life’s tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child.” So do most of Ozu’s films. Again and again, he focuses on parents and their children, and often on their grandchildren. A typical plot will involve sacrifice by a parent or a child for the happiness of the other. It is not uncommon for both parent and child to make sacrifices in a mistaken belief about what the other desires. The issues involved are marriage, children, independence for the young, care for the old, and success in the world.

He tells these stories within a visual frame so distinctive that I believe you can identify any Ozu film after seeing a shot or two, sometimes even from a still. How he came upon his approach I don’t know, but you see it fully mature even in his silent films. For Ozu, all depends on the composition of the shot. He almost never moves his camera. He usually shoots from the eye level of a person seated on a tatami mat. He often begins shots before characters enter, and holds them after they leave. He separates important scenes with “pillow shots” of exterior architectural or landscape details. He uses evocative music, never too loud. I have never seen him use violence. When violence occurs, people commit it within themselves.

Parents and children, then families, are his chosen subjects. He tells each story with his familiar visual strategy, which is pure and simplified, never calling attention to itself. His straight-on shots are often framed on sides and back, and with foreground objects. His exteriors and groups of two or more characters are usually at oblique angles. Is this monotonous? Never, because within his rules he finds infinite variation. A modern chase scene is much more monotonous, because it gives you nothing to think about.

In “The Only Son,” there is a remarkable moment when we have a great deal of time to think. The story is about the son of a widowed mother who works in a provincial silk spinning mill. This is hard and spirit-crushing work, but she does it to put her son through high school and set him on his road in life. After graduating, he follows an admired teacher to seek his future in Tokyo. Four years pass. His mother comes to visit him, unannounced. They are happy to see one another, they love one another, but he has a surprise: He has a wife and an infant child. Why didn’t he tell her? We gather he didn’t want to create an occasion for her to visit Tokyo and find that he is very poor, has a low-paying job, teaching geometry in a night school, and that he lives in a desolate district in view of the smokestacks of the Tokyo garbage incinerators.

The rest of the plot you can discover. It leads to a conversation in which he shares his discouragement, and tells her she may have wasted her sacrifice. She encourages him to persevere. He thinks he’s had a bad roll of the dice. There is no place for him in Tokyo. Simple mill worker that she is, what can she reply to this? She sits up late, sleepless. He awakens, and they talk some more. She weeps. In a reframed shot, his wife weeps. Then Ozu provides a shot of an unremarkable corner of the room. Nothing much there. A baby bottle. A reproduction of a painting. Nothing. He holds this shot. And holds it. And holds it. I feel he could not look at them any longer, and had to look away, thinking about what has happened. Finally there is an exterior pillow shot of the morning.

If Ozu returns to characteristic visuals, he also returns to familiar actors. In “An Only Son,” the small but important role of the hero’s teacher is played by Chishu Ryu — the teacher who, after moving to Tokyo, fails to realize his own dreams and, as the son bitterly tells his mother, is “reduced to frying pork cutlets.” This was Ryu’s seventh film for Ozu. In all he was to appear in 52 of Ozu’s 54 films, between 1929 and 1962. He is the old father in “Tokyo Story” (1953).

Ryu is an actor who we recognize from body language. He exudes restraint, courtesy. He smokes meditatively. He said Ozu directed him as little as possible: “He had made up the complete picture in his head before he went on the set, so that all we actors had to do was to follow his directions, from the way we lifted and dropped our arms to the way we blinked our eyes.”

by Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com |  Read more:

Image: The Only Son

[ed. I don't watch much tv, which is sometimes unfortunate. It'd be nice to have that little distraction whenever boredom (or ennui) sets in and whatever book I'm reading isn't finding traction. Anyway, tonight I decided to look for a foreign film that would be time well spent. Of course, in deciding what to choose I fell down this rabbit hole. I've seen Tokyo Story, but little else of Ozu's work. I'll start with The Only Son, then see what An Autumn Afternoon has to offer:]

***

"The more you learn about Yasujiro Ozu, the director of “An Autumn Afternoon” (1962), the more you realize how very deep the waters reach beneath his serene surfaces. Ozu is one of the greatest artists to ever make a film. This was his last one. He never married. He lived for 60 years with his mother, and when she died, he was dead a few months later. Over and over again, in almost all of his films, he turned to the same central themes, of loneliness, of family, of dependence, of marriage, of parents and children. He holds these themes to the light and their prisms cast variations on each screenplay. His films are all made within the emotional space of his life, in which he finds not melodramatic joy or tragedy, but mono no aware, which is how the Japanese refer to the bittersweet transience of all things.

From time to time I return to Ozu feeling a need to be calmed and restored. He is a man with a profound understanding of human nature, about which he makes no dramatic statements. We are here, we hope to be happy, we want to do well, we are locked within our aloneness, life goes on. He embodies this vision in a cinematic style so distinctive that you can tell an Ozu film almost from a single shot."

Hollywood Has Left L.A.

The past decade has been tough on Hollywood — both the industry and the place. L.A. has endured a parade of black-swan catastrophes that have repeatedly upended its signature business, including fires, strikes, COVID, the decline of movie theaters and linear TV, and streaming’s boom and bust. Taken together, these disasters have triggered something like an identity crisis. If you call up a couple dozen executives, agents, directors, producers, writers, actors, and below-the-line artists and ask about the scene on the ground right now, they’ll describe a city detached from its old rhythms and sense of purpose. Today’s L.A., a few say, feels more like a Rust Belt crater than the glamorous capital of the world’s entertainment. “It’s so grim, like a sad company town where the mill is closing,” says one executive. “It’s morose, and everybody’s scared,” says the actor and director Mark Duplass. “It’s a bummer to live here now,” says a writer.

Pieces of the business still hum along in the city, albeit more quietly than they used to. Executives and agents are back in the office, at least the ones who weren’t laid off. Pitching and deal-making continue, though much of that now happens over Zoom. But production — the physical process of turning script pages into movies and TV shows — has largely left town. What began years ago as a trickle has suddenly become an exodus. Today, only about a fifth of American movies and shows are filmed in L.A. (...)

As the labor of making movies and shows splinters across far-flung cities and countries, Hollywood has become dislodged from its physical home. Some of these new hubs may suit the needs of individual projects, but none of them offers what L.A. did for most of the past century: a stable gravitational center where crews can make a living and the craft can be passed down. This isn’t just a logistical reorganization; it’s an existential shift, and there may be no going back. “The nucleus that Hollywood grew out of is dying,” says Jonathan Nolan, the writer-director whose work includes Person of Interest, Westworld, and Fallout. “I don’t think Hollywood the industry has much to do with Hollywood the place anymore,” says Lowe.

One reason L.A. even became a city at all is because it was a great place to make movies. (It helped that it was far enough from New Jersey to escape the enforcement of Thomas Edison’s patents on motion-picture cameras and projectors.) The weather allowed for year-round outdoor shooting, attracting the industry’s best filmmakers, actors, and crews. This created a self-reinforcing bubble in which the top talent was all concentrated in the same place; this, in turn, supported an informal apprenticeship system under which younger crew members learned on the job, providing a steady influx of skilled labor. For a long time, there was usually no good reason to shoot anywhere else.

Then, in the 1990s, British Columbia hatched a plan to bring some of that action north. The Canadian provincial government introduced one of the world’s first film tax credits — a financial incentive meant to lure foreign productions — offering a modest rebate on money spent employing local crews. It worked, and many U.S. states took notice. In the early aughts, Louisiana and New Mexico rolled out flashy credits of their own, transforming New Orleans and Albuquerque into viable production hubs.

A short while later, streaming boomed, and the demand for scripted entertainment exploded. With more production in play, regions around the world began ramping up their incentives, and many built soundstages and crew bases that could compete with those in L.A. What followed was a global bakeoff for Hollywood’s business. Canada, the U.K., and Australia enhanced their already aggressive tax credits, often made even more appealing by favorable exchange rates. Many U.S. states, including Georgia and New York, followed. Before long, most of the country, and dozens of countries beyond, were offering some version of a production subsidy.

These incentives can be shockingly generous. Today, producers can shoot in certain locations and receive back 30 to 40 percent of a project’s budget with local taxpayers footing the bill. Unlike traditional tax breaks, which merely reduce what a company owes, these credits often amount to direct cash payments, issued regardless of whether the production generates significant tax revenue in return. New York State, for example, offers a 30 percent base tax credit with a 10 percent bonus for projects made upstate. Last year, New York tax dollars helped subsidize TV shows including HBO’s The Gilded Age (which received $52 million from state coffers), Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ($46 million), and Apple TV+’s Severance ($39 million). An Albany-funded audit of New York’s film tax credit, published last year, determined that the incentive is probably a net loss for the state, returning as little as 15 cents in direct tax revenue for every dollar spent. Regardless, in May, New York added an additional $100 million for independent films, bringing the state’s total film subsidies to $800 million.

Meanwhile, California mostly sat on its hands, assuming its long-standing monopoly on talent and infrastructure would be enough to keep Hollywood anchored. Subsidizing an industry already based there was a tougher political sell, but the state introduced its own incentive program in 2009 and has sweetened it since. Unfortunately, while the credit may sound generous, in practice it’s miserly to the point of uselessness.

by Lane Brown, Vulture |  Read more:

Image: Alvaro Dominguez

The Last Good Thing

On a late-winter Chicago day that was more gray than cold, I retrieved a binder from a neighbor’s front porch. The binder was fat and unexpectedly heavy, and I had the deranged thought that it might be filled with sand, but it wasn’t filled with sand. It was filled with 92 DVDs. DVDs can seem heavy if you haven’t held them in a while.

I had not been on the lookout for DVDs, and until I became aware of this binder, I had no special attachment to DVDs of any sort. There was no box of Criterion Collection masterpieces lugged from apartment to apartment since my college days. I certainly did not long for the color-coded cables that always had to be untangled and reconnected to the DVD player my husband weirdly couldn’t bring himself to throw away, nor did I miss hunting for the special remote that only ever made an appearance when I was looking for the regular one. Society had moved past DVDs, and frankly, so had I.

Still, the second I saw the binder—containing “practically every major kid’s cartoon movie from the last 20 years on DVD”—appear on my local Free Box Facebook group (where my neighbors give away everything from original artwork to half-empty bottles of shampoo), I wanted it deeply, covetously, like when you see someone wearing a wool sweater that is so entirely your style, you can’t believe it isn’t already yours. Ninety-two disks! Without a moment’s hesitation, I typed, “Interested!” and pressed return. And the next day, I stood awkwardly on my neighbor’s porch to collect my prize.

At this point, I still assumed my excitement about the DVDs had primarily to do with thriftiness, or perhaps a kind of rugged self-reliance. I still assumed their appeal came not from what they could offer me but from what they could free me of, namely going along with the ever-more-expensive whims of Disney+ executives.

In other words, I considered a binder containing 92 DVDs to be the children’s media equivalent of F*** You Money—Take that streaming bill and shove it!—and not, say, something to build my identity as a parent around.

Obviously.

That evening, while my husband sautéed asparagus on the stovetop and my children squabbled over whether to watch Peppa Pig on Amazon Prime or All Engines Go on Netflix, I announced to my family that we were quitting our streaming services and going analog.

“Well, more analog,” I said, suddenly unsure. “Digital analog. Is that a thing?” I sensed that it might not be, but also that this wasn’t particularly important. What was important was that our viewing habits were moving back in time to an era when watching television didn’t require keeping a credit card on file with five different companies.

Then I inhaled sharply, cringing the way one does while uncorking a particularly volatile bottle of champagne. Ditching streaming would be no great struggle for me, someone who watches about as much television as your typical giant Pacific octopus. But the rest of them?

To my surprise, the anticipated shrieks of displeasure never came. My children, whose ears shut down at six p.m. though their bodies keep kicking until eight, wouldn’t even register the change until the end of the month, when our Netflix account finally ran out of gas. At that point they would look at me as though I’d shredded a sacred contract formed between them and the universe. I would, in turn, cheerfully remind them about the DVDs.

“That’s right,” I would say. “They are very shiny. No, stop—you can’t touch them! They scratch.”

Even my husband merely nodded and flipped the asparagus. I could only assume that he was deep in thought, considering the transformative possibilities of spending less time watching television. The two of us have always shared some private dismay about not being altogether more impressive people—Times obit–worthy, ideally, but at the very least, people who exercise more often. Besides, it went without saying that I would not be canceling YouTube Premium, which is where my husband watches sports highlights. In my quest to become a thriftier parent, I had no desire to become a single parent.

An honest account of the binder’s out-of-nowhere appeal should also include observing how neatly DVDs’ technological primacy aligns with my own “reminiscence bump.” This is what psychologists call the increased salience for the autobiographical memories we form between the ages of approximately 10 and 30. For the rest of our lives, although what came before and after will predictably recede, the events of those 20 years will maintain their privileged place in our minds. Researchers aren’t entirely sure why this is. Some suspect novelty: New things are inherently more memorable, and this is a time of new things. Others chalk it up to the sheer number of culturally significant milestones that happen during our teens and 20s, from first kisses and summer jobs and driver’s licenses to weddings and college graduations and—well, more common until recently—first homes. Another theory focuses on storytelling: As we come of age, the places we go and the music we listen to and the people we bond with become the settings and soundtracks and characters for the stories we tell ourselves about the people we are becoming, stories that we’ll carry all our lives.

If these theories sound similar, it’s because they’re all trying to explain the same phenomenon: why our formative years are so very formative. They are all trying to explain why some part of a reasonably well-adjusted, middle-aged woman with a husband and two kids will always be a teenager with spiky hair, trying desperately to convince herself that she likes watching low-budget horror movies.

Low-budget horror movies on DVD, that is. In 1997, when the disks first hit American shelves, I was just 13; by the time revenue from streaming eventually eclipsed that from DVDs (and their higher-definition Blu-Ray cousins), I had already left my 20s behind. Which means that for me, the pinnacle of home entertainment is and will always be synonymous with a fat binder of DVDs.

For a few weeks, quitting our streaming services and embracing DVDs indeed seemed like a sacrifice. Quickly, though, the experiment morphed into something quite different. I found myself proselytizing about the Way of the DVD. They’re so cheap, I’d say to another parent at pre-K pickup. People are literally giving them away. Go to a garage sale of any size and there you go: more DVDs for the collection.

It’s nice to really own a thing, I’d say to a colleague with children of her own. It’s nice not to worry something will go poof in the night.

It’s great for the kids to have choices but not too many choices, I’d say to anyone still listening. It’s great when what they want to watch is in the binder, and it’s great when it isn’t and they have to decide whether they want to purchase How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World with their tooth-fairy money (both of my kids were in highly productive tooth-losing phases) or wait for a free disk to arrive at the library. Because when everything can be yours just like that, is anything even real?

It’s good for movies to be real, I’d say. Treat them badly—roll them down the stairs or throw them like frisbees or wear them because it’s fun to pretend to have large, glassy robot eyes—and they will scratch. Natural consequences! It’s good for there to be natural consequences. (...)

Unlike VHS tapes, DVDs encode data digitally, allowing for higher video resolution and superior audio quality. DVDs also store more data, and they store the information more efficiently. This is what frees up space for the bells and whistles: dubbed audio tracks and subtitles, director’s cuts and deleted scenes. DVDs are read by laser; so long as they aren’t used as coasters or hockey pucks, they shouldn’t wear or tear at all. On a commercial DVD, even the most determined fool cannot accidentally tape over a favorite movie. And remember the days before opening menus, when you stood by the television and pressed “REW” on the VCR until the members of your family screamed that you’d gone too far, in which case you’d press “FF” until they screamed again? DVDs have menus, and when they arrived, America let out a collective, “Hell yeah.”

But VHS, the technology that DVDs supplanted, was the truly transformative one. VHS was what let us all own movies in the first place, to watch whenever we wanted to. Or was it color television that transformed home entertainment? The rise of network programming? That very first public broadcast? It hardly matters. By the time DVDs came along, the latest crest among so many waves of progress, it seemed inevitable that they would be good, and that the technology that eventually replaced them would be even better.

A lot of things seemed inevitable then.

I grew up, after all, when the growing up was good. The Berlin Wall was coming down, and the world was opening up. The economy was strong and college attendance was on the rise and Americans were more optimistic that children would live better lives than their parents. There were problems, sure, but they were problems that would resolve themselves in time, as a new, more enlightened generation took the helm. I grew up when time itself seemed on my side.

I watched social media connect us, and then I watched it detonate us into a billion tiny factions. I watched smartphones liberate us, and then I watched them capture us all over again. Now I see artificial intelligence on the horizon, and even as I am awestruck by its potential, I shudder.

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” said the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here’s the thing: I grew up when it still felt possible that we could invent the ship and then put our heads together to avoid the shipwreck. In the world bequeathed to my children, it can seem like there is no avoiding the wreck. And in this world, in this widening gyre of uncertain outcomes and frictionless gratification, DVDs are shiny and real and the same shape as life preservers. DVDs are the last unambiguously good thing: the last technology that arrived and only made things better and would never ever let us down.

by Jess Love, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Gracia Lamb

John & Yoko: One to One

A fire alert disrupts the Venice screening of One to One: John & Yoko, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ documentary about Lennon’s rambunctious post-Beatles heyday, when he and his artist wife Ono were first putting down roots in New York. Inside the hushed screening room, the flashing red lights and blaring alarm provide the second big surprise of the night. The first was how much I was enjoying the show.

Short of a documentary that unearths incontrovertible new evidence that he faked his own death, I’m not convinced that the world needs another John Lennon film. The medium, surely, has him well covered already. But Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have managed to find and mine a rich source of material, tightly tucked away amid all the other wildcat wells. Their film turns back the clock to the early 1970s and a benefit gig that occurred around the time of Lennon’s deportation battle with Nixon (see previous documentaries for details) and his extended lost weekend with May Pang (ditto). Crucially, too, it throws this concert against the maelstrom of the US political scene, with a channel-surfing aesthetic that skips from car and Coke commercials to the Attica prison riot and the near-fatal shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace.

While Lennon claims that he spent his first year in New York mostly watching TV, One to One suggests otherwise. Instead he hit the ground running, hurling himself at the action to become the standard bearer and figurehead for whatever progressive leftist cause was doing the rounds that week. The film blends archive footage with a trove of previously unheard phone conversations to show the ways in which he and Ono leveraged their celebrity status and surrounded themselves with a crew of colourful upstarts, from Allen Ginsberg to Jerry Rubin. The oddest of these, perhaps, is the activist AJ Weberman, who is tasked with a mission to raid Bob Dylan’s bins in order to prove what a “multimillionaire hypocrite” the singer has become. Ono pleads with Weberman to apologise, explaining that they need Dylan to perform at a planned “Free the People” concert in Miami, but AJ is unrepentant and initially won’t be budged.

In the event, the Free the People event was cancelled. But Lennon promptly finds a new focus with the One to One benefit for disabled children from the Willowbrook state school. Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have remastered Phil Spector’s muddy original recording so that the footage now plays with a fresh, bullish swagger. This was Lennon’s first full-length concert since the Beatles performed at Candlestick Park and, it transpired, the last he would ever play.

If only more nostalgic music documentaries could muster such a fun, fierce and full-blooded take on old, familiar material. One to One, against the odds, makes Lennon feel somehow vital again. It catches him like a butterfly at arguably his most interesting period, when he felt liberated and unfettered and was living “like a student” in a two-room loft in Greenwich Village. He’s radioactive with charisma, tilting at windmills and kicking out sparks. 

by Xan Brooks, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: One to One/YT

[ed. Haven't seen this yet, but the link above about May Pang and her relationship with John was fascinating. Didn't know Yoko set them up to take pressure off of John's straying, and that, after a couple years (and an alleged affair of her own), became jealous and reeled him back in.]