Category: Film
*You Can See Everything* (no spoilers)
An excellent and also original movie, you all should see it. There are different interpretations, but I read it as a story between two autistic people, and the bond they have but also the great difficulties they have in understanding each other, because they are so very different. I am not saying that is what the moviemakers intended, but I feel it is what they ended up putting on the screen.
The movie keeps on getting better, and you will appreciate it all the more if you catch the indirect references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and also to the Iranian movies Close-Up and Certified Copy, both by Kiarostami.
Of course Holmes should not be in jail (house arrest?), and this movie cements the view I already held. I come away from this movie with a consistent sense of her, rather than with the feeling we can never know a person.
On Bergman’s *Persona*
I first saw Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, his stone-cold classic of 1965, as a teenager, and God knows how many times I have seen it since. It has the greatest opening sequence in cinema: a percussive, rapid-fire montage that can never be wholly accommodated or understood. The film’s story is, however, a simple one (even if its Jungian resonances are deep and complex). A celebrated actress, Elisabeth Vogler (one of Liv Ullmann’s defining roles), is struck dumb, having dried up in the middle of a performance of Electra. Three months later, still speechless, she is granted a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), who, fearing silence, cannot stop talking to and at her patient. Elisabeth becomes the audience, Alma the performer, and the two personalities intertwine against a biblical monochrome landscape of sand, rock and water. More than 60 years on, it remains inexhaustible, never to be entirely absorbed, intimate, stark and utterly compelling.
Here is more from Paul Lay.
A Normal Debate?
Computer scientists Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor wrote AI as Normal Technology
The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future.
AI has responded in video format.
that led Kapoor to create his own diss track:
I had way too much fun using Claude to create a reply video.
– Extremely fun to be able to convert scattered thoughts and ideas into a song + video
– Creating this took <1 hour of my time (in occasionally steering the model in between other things)
– But it took ~10 hours of… https://t.co/7sVmKxhzy6 pic.twitter.com/FmJXpQ0QbX
— Sayash Kapoor (@sayashk) October 1, 2026
Both of these are good, great even, but the sneering in the first video is sublime. Keep in mind that this is almost entirely AI, the script, the music, the lyrics everything. It seems like just yesterday when people said AI could never be creative.
Doesn’t seem like a normal debate to me, regardless of which side you think won.
Bundesrepublik Deutschland
At times we forget what an amazing wonder the Bundesrepublik Deutschland was. At the end of the World War II, Germany was one of the sickest and cruelest human societies in history, ever. Not too many years later, it was one of the best and most successful societies ever.
By the 1980s, living standards had caught up to the United States, with the provision of public goods sometimes superior. The country was fully democratic, pro-Western, and largely pro-American.
Their rail system and postal service were amongst the best ever created.
For thinkers of note there were Hans Blumenberg, Habermas, Peter Weiss, Gadamer, late Heidegger and late Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck, the underrated Klaus Theweleit, Niklas Luhmann, and perhaps you value some of the other members of the Frankfurt School.
The visual arts were very strong, with Richter, Polke, Baselitz, Beuys, Penck, Palermo, and much more.
Music produced Stockhausen, Henze, Lachenmann, Rihm, Zimmerman, Kraftwerk, Can, and all of Krautrock, later techno, though right at the time of unification rather than during the BRD per se. The list of vocalists, instrumentalists, and conductors is strong. Was there anywhere better for hearing opera?
Perhaps I prefer the fiction from Austria and Switzerland, but at the very least Germany provided a major market for those authors and it was an extraordinarily literate country with amazing bookstores. For domestic authors there were Böll, Patrick Süskind, Siegfried Lenz, Wolfgang Koeppen, can I count Uwe Johnson?, and Arno Schmidt maybe? I do not like Grass, but it seems wrong not to list him.
The food could be very good, especially in the southwest. There were Michelin star restaurants all over the country (still are, to be clear on this point). So many well-functioning cities, with many of the world’s best transit systems. Lots of nuclear power and a strong industrial base. West Berlin was an exciting city with an air of mystery. Some might say no speed limit on the Autobahn, though I am less sure that was a virtue. Plenty of beautiful women and reasonable attitudes toward sex.
If you had to choose, what was the worst thing about the country? No shopping on Sundays? Workplace and shopping hours discrimination against women? Too much smoking? Obsession with Waldsterben?
Are there features of post-unification Germany that can compare to this earlier era? So much seems not to work well. So many policy mistakes have been made. So much leadership lost in the areas mentioned above. So much pessimism, sadly a lot of it seems to be justified.
Where did all the good performance go? And why did it leave? Lack of a communist enemy? Absorption of East Germany? The simple accretion of distance from pre-WWII German creativity?
The wonder that was the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Johannes, we hardly knew ye.
China fact of the day
Chinese actors and online influencers have a new rival: cost-effective advanced AI video generation programmes that are threatening millions of jobs in a once-vibrant area of China’s gig economy.
The release of powerful new AI-powered video software, such as tech group ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 model, has allowed digital actors to replace humans, enabling the production of higher-quality original videos more quickly.
The digital takeover intensified after this year’s release of Seedance 2.0, said Greg Wollner, a short-drama actor and producer in Beijing. Before its release, he was shooting three different productions a week. “And after that, everything just went.”
Many of Wollner’s friends “had to quit doing what they love and change to something else”, he said. In May, 89 of the top 100 animated dramas on Douyin, ByteDance’s domestic Chinese version of TikTok, were AI productions according to DataEye, a marketing analytics company.
Here is more from Joe Leahy and Isaac Castella-McDonald in the FT.
What should I ask Yiyang Zhuge (诸葛一杨), also known as Zhong Shu (仲树)?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is best known to Western audiences for her interview with Christopher Nolan, but she has numerous other achievements:
Yiyang Zhuge is a political theorist, political columnist, and a translator of German and Greek philosophical texts. She is an instructor at Brandeis University, and a PhD Candidate at Boston College.
Yiyang is a major translator of Hannah Arendt into Chinese. She has translated The Human Condition, Life of the Mind, Men in Dark Times, collected poetry, Die verborgene Tradition, and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. She has given numerous lectures and published numerous public-facing articles on Arendt.
Yiyang published the first Greek-to-Chinese translation of Plutarch’s Moralia, a best-selling philosophy book in 2025.
She runs Princeton University Press’s Political Philosophy Book Club, where she interviews important Western academics for the Chinese audience.
Yiyang is a public intellectual in China. She reports on American higher ed monthly at print magazine Caixin Weekly. She is a political commenter on Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV (here and here). She hosts great books programs on vistopia and has contributed essays on Machiavelli, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Arendt at vistopia. She hosts the most popular Mandarin political philosophy podcast “Monologues of a Committed Observer” with 1m+ subscribers.
So what should I ask her?
Indian documentary covers EV winners
A new short documentary (22 mins) film called The 22nd Century Indian by Shaurya Sinha offers an optimistic take on India, and also covers five (!) Emergent Ventures winners. Congratulations to them, and to Shruti too.
EV India winners featured: Naman Pushp https://x.com/therealnamzoo?s=11
Khushi Mittal: https://khushimittal.com
Shreeporna Rao: https://x.com/shreepoorna365?s=11
Samay Sanghvi: https://www.thealmanac.ai/article/samaysanghvii
Angad Daryani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angaddaryani?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_ios
Impedimenta Developerum!
NME: Harry Potter fans have succeeded in moving a construction project that would have originally gone through the “grave” of the character Dobby.
The 125-mile Greenlink power connector, which costs £430million, is intended to link power between the UK’s National Grid and Ireland, running between County Wexford and Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire.
However, the latter site is known to Potter fans as the site of house elf Dobby’s grave in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and contains a pile of stones with the words “here lies Dobby” that many flock to…
All I can say is that Voldemort would never have put up with this shit.
The Odyssey
Worth seeing, and I enjoyed it — but a few observations I haven’t seen elsewhere.
For all the praise of IMAX and 70mm’s supposed clarity, several scenes are out of focus on the actor. Pulling focus is harder with a large-format negative. The problem is compounded by Nolan’s fondness for darkness: too many scenes are dark enough to squander much of what the format offers. The sound was earth-shaking in the way we have come to expect from Nolan but there is no song.
The “woke casting” controversy is a non-issue — barely noticeable in practice. The film is obviously conservative in temperament. Helen gets some of the best lines, and Nolan’s slight disfigurement of her traditional arc is exactly right. The Circe scene is the best in the film.
Tyler is entirely wrong about Calypso. Odysseus’s seven years with her were among his most enjoyable. I have no doubt about this.
The deeper flaws are structural. Nolan loves to play with time, and the resulting flashbacks and memories ironically shortchange the odyssey itself — making the journey feel shorter and less arduous than it should. This is very much in the mode of Interstellar: a sequence of set-piece locations strung together. One planet/one monster/one scene–on to the next. But Odysseus as a character on an odyssey never quite coheres.
We are told repeatedly that Odysseus is smart but we shouldn’t need to be reminded. Odysseus is both beloved and resented by gods, a man whose men will follow him to the ends of the earth and then betray him but Mat Damon just doesn’t bring it. Things happen to him; he responds stoically. What we needed was the equivalent of Kirk defeating the Kobayashi Maru — a moment that makes the audience understand, viscerally, that this man bends the rules and contends with the gods by the sheer force of his wit and will. Of courses the Trojan horse is this but Nolan treats this as something of which Odysseus is ashamed and the other clever bits are downplayed. Damon never gets his Kobayashi Meru. The odyssey is a slog, rather than an adventure. Could have used a bit more Sinbad, a bit less Dark Knight. The dialogue, as Tyler noted, is lame.
Not Nolan’s best film but still better than most films and for scale, ambition, and grand themes well worth the 3-hour investment.
Whit Stillman’s *Metropolitan* (that was then, this is now)
It is fun to watch/rewatch this 1990 movie circa 2026. It is about New York City debutantes (CT and the Hamptons too), and how they interact with each other. The movie is set a bit earlier in time, perhaps in the mid-1980s, though some scenes hearken back to the 1970s. Of course there is no social media and no cell phones. So the characters do look at each other, and talk to each other, the whole time. People dress up, and social smoking is “a thing.” There is no hook-up culture, as even casual sex has some sort of social implication. Women are seen as vulnerable, and the men occasionally punch each other. People drink. Throughout various scenes, characters debate Jane Austen, Lionel Trilling, and Buñuel (it was not yet recognized that Mansfield Park is an excellent novel). But do they read actual novels, or just the literary criticism? Women can be branded as “sluts.” Nerds had not yet taken over the world, and there is no Jane Street, though toward the end there is one odd scene where the neon lights rather obviously spell out “ELON” in the upper right side of the screen. Coincidence rather than time travel, I am sure. There are no Asians in the group, it seems no Jews, and if anyone is gay he or she remains in the closet. People of modest income had big apartments, and the so-called wealthy were not very rich at all, though they could afford black tie and white tie attire.
Was everyone happier and better off back then? Did they have deeper understandings of the world? Did they treat each other like heartless beasts? Would you eschew one of their parties and stay at home and scroll Twitter? You can watch this film and ponder those questions to your heart’s content. Alternatively, you could go to a debutante ball, which it turns out still exists. Which of those has been your choice?
Markets in everything?
Peter Brook‘s five-hour-plus film adaptation of “The Mahabharata” is set for a BFI Blu-ray release on Aug. 10, presented in high definition from a new 4K restoration of the 1989 production.
The release centres on the triptych version of the film, running 332 minutes, which sits between Brook’s three-hour cinema cut and the six-hour television version he shot concurrently. Based on the ancient Hindu epic, the film was originally produced by Brook with screenwriters Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne, and features an international cast drawn from 16 nationalities.
Here is the Variety article, but will there be a version suitable for U.S. players? The work is highly recommended, real genius. For the pointer I thank Sam Mendelsohn.
Cross-ethnic casting
I complained about the casting of The Odyssey per se (the blind beggar was best), but in general I do not mind cross-ethnic casting. I am glad Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra, Dev Patel played David Copperfield, Denzel Washington played Macbeth, black and Latino actors play white parts in Hamilton, and that Morgan Freeman can play God well (God himself would not be “white,” but God as black is nonetheless a conscious choice), and there was Jessye Norman (among others) singing and playing many traditionally white roles on the opera stage.
Recently in a private conversation I suggested that Nabeel Qureshi be cast as the next James Bond. He has a British accent, was born in (northern!) England, is tall and is good-looking. He does not remind anyone of Roger Moore. He is old enough where you could believe he has some experience as a spy, and at the baccarat table, but young enough where he could do those stunts without it seeming ridiculous.
I recall the talk of a black Bond, a notion which likely would end up dull and cliched. But a Bond of Pakistani ethnic origin? Now that would occasion some debate.
I am not saying it always works. I likely would object to a remake of Zulu with an all-Chinese cast. Or there can be major cultural mistakes which are not cross-ethnic, such as casting a Liverpudlian in the role of a London elite. Everyone in The Sopranos should at least be pretending to fit their roles, and indeed Tony himself grew up in New Jersey. I would have done fine in a cameo role.
*The Odyssey*, the movie (no real spoilers)
I can’t say I loved it. The Circe scene was excellent, Cyclops was good, and the battles in Troy were well done. But most of the roles were miscast. I like Matt Damon, but he is too “Good Will Hunting” to play Odysseus. The character did not cohere. (Compare to Ralph Fiennes in the superior The Return.) Zendaya’s role was superfluous. Worst of all was Calypso, who reminded me of the kind of chick you might meet at a Tupperware party in the Hamptons. At least half of the dialogue was lame and contrary to the spirit of the Mycenaean world. Some of the sea and boat footage was good. I strongly disliked the changes made to the ending.
There is enough energy, effort, and money put into the thing to make it eminently watchable on the big screen. And if this were a new director, you would think he had great promise. But relative to both the reviews and where most expectations were placed, this has to count as a disappointment.
Redux of my Homer’s Odyssey essay
On EconLib, you will find all three parts here, in reverse order.
What to Watch and Not
Spider Noir (Prime): I’ve had enough of the Marvel multiverse so I was worried about Spider-Noir. The writers, however, have written an excellent noir in the style of Raymond Chandler with Nicholas Cage channeling Humphrey Bogart. The Spiderman stuff is all there but it is appropriately embedded. There are some excellent lines. Most notably an inversion of the Spiderman motto that I won’t give here but you will know it when you hear it. Also many sharp one-liners:
- Reilly: I don’t like surprises.
- Cat: I’ll remember that when your birthday rolls around.
Nicholas Cage does some Nicholas Cagey spidery things which I enjoyed. Watch it in black and white.
Project Hail Mary (Prime): I waited until this was streaming and I’m glad I did because it was disappointing.
The core problem is Ryan Gosling. He plays Ryland Grace, the genius scientist-hero but genius is something we are told, never shown. Indeed, the character with the best ideas in the film is Carl, Grace’s bodyguard/minder (played by Lionel Boyce)—they should have sent him to save the planet. Gosling has no intensity, and every choice he makes is to lighten and humorize. It’s a small thing, but it annoyed me to watch a scientist toss his instruments disdainfully. Andy Weir is a master at showing smart people grinding through hard problems—in the novel, Grace spends months learning to communicate with an alien. In the movie, Gosling dances.
This isn’t just miscasting. The whole adaptation is built to soften the book. The film cuts the desperation of the world, undercuts the ruthlessness of Stratt and instead adds a karaoke number and a trip to Home Depot (ha, ha, duct tape can solve everything!) Every change is away from high stakes intensity and toward charm and humor, a Disneyfied version of Weir. I have nothing against Gosling but we have lots of charming movies and I would like some competence porn.
The main virtue of PHM, in the end, is that it shows what a miracle The Martian was. Matt Damon knows how to play smart and intense, and he brought both to what I called the most Ayn Rand film in decades. There’s an old story—probably apocryphal—that Chuck Yeager was once asked what he’d do if his engine flamed out and he had sixty seconds before hitting the ground. He replied, “I’d spend the first fifty-nine seconds working on the engine.” Chuck Yeager had the right stuff. Matt Damon in The Martian has the right stuff. Ryan Gosling does not have the right stuff.
The Sheep Detectives (Prime): A delightful surprise! A flock of sheep solve a murder-mystery in a quaint English town; featuring Hugh Jackman and voices from Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart and others. Babe meets Knives Out. A family film but, as the best family films are, with some deep themes.