Category: Film
Cinematic markets in everything
AMC Theatres is changing the way it charges for seats.
America’s largest movie chain announced that the prices of a ticket will now be based on seat location, meaning seats in the front will be cheaper while more desirable seats in the middle will now cost more. The ticket pricing initiative, called Sightline at AMC, will roll out at all of its roughly 1,000 movie theaters by the end of the year.
Three pricing tiers will soon be offered. For example, the highest-end “Preferred” tier are in the middle of the theaters and will be priced at a “slight premium” compared to its “Standard” tier, which the theater chains says will remain the most common choice and will be sold for the “traditional cost of a ticket.” The third tier is called “Value,” which are seats in the front row of theaters and will cost less than than its “Standard” tier.
Broadway and music concerts do this, so why not movie theaters? Here is the full story, via Natasha.
Text-to-4D dynamic scene generation
Find it here, via Ryan Watkins. Further improvement is required, but the pace of current breakthroughs is remarkable.
Rewatching *A.I* (minor spoilers)
Yes, the 2001 Spielberg movie. Some parts drag, but mostly it has held up very well. I was struck by how Girardian it is. A few points struck me:
1. The robots will be Girardian, whether we like it or not.
2. To the extent we can solve the alignment problem, we do so by torturing the A.I.’s and placing them in situations where they cannot possibly be content.
3. The robots work effectively, but the ChatGPT equivalent in the movie is quite buggy.
4. People are morally superficial, and they love others for what they do for them, not for their own sake. It is the robots who engage with the human beings for sex who learn this truth.
5. The hardest thing to predict is what the A.I.’s will learn from us, and that will make some of them unique and also difficult to manage.
Best movies of 2022
The Lost Daughter, TV but still good, a movie of sorts, based on Ferrante.
Belle, spectacular Japanese anime.
Licorice Pizza, a good normal movie, captured California well.
Compartment Number Six, with a new meaning after the war of course.
Petit Maman, French, short, plays mind games with you, profound.
The Quiet Girl (Irish)
Vesper, Lithuanian, dreamy, Tarkovsky influence but faster-paced, an underrated movie this year.
Tár, really quite good and interesting.
Decision to Leave, Korean crime drama with Hitchcockian twists and inspirations.
The Fabelmans, Ignore the cloying preview.
Saint Omer, French-Senegalese courtroom drama.
Clytaemnestra, Korean movie, one hour long.
EO, Polish movie about a donkey, better than you think.
Overall an abysmal year for Hollywood, a pretty good year for the movies. I haven’t yet seen Oppenheimer or Bardo, so their absence on the list should not be taken as a negative signal.
*Avatar: The Way of Water*
Eh. The sequence of the last hour is quite good, but there is not enough “movie” packed into what came before. The villains are cartoonish, and the protagonists feel like “generic aliens.” Dramatic tension is weak throughout. Cinematic references include to The Poseidon Adventure, Titanic, Frankenstein vs. the Wolf Man, Waterworld, Return of the Jedi, Whale Rider (do the Maori feel ripped off at all?), and other films.
Did I mention that the main plot line concerns doxxing? You can sit around and debate which of the characters would have been suspended from Twitter or not.
The theater was perhaps one-third full on a Friday evening, and most of the tickets seem to have been sold two days earlier when I first booked and reserved the seats.
How many more of these are coming down the pike?
My Conversation with John Adams
Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the episode summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss why architects have it easier than opera composers, what drew him to the story of Antony and Cleopatra, why he prefers great popular music to the classical tradition, the “memory spaces” he uses to compose, the role of Christianity in his work, the anxiety of influence, the unusual life of Charles Ives, the relationship between the availability and appreciation of music, how contemporary music got a bad rap, his favorite Bob Dylan album, why he doesn’t think San Francisco was crucial to his success, why he doesn’t believe classical music is dead or even dying, his fascination with Oppenheimer, the problem with film composing, his letter to Leonard Bernstein, what he’s doing next, and more.
And here is an excerpt:
COWEN: How do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence?
ADAMS: Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley, and especially on Shakespeare, were very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined, the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic, but he intuited that we creators, whether we’re painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers — that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us.
If you’re a poet, you’ve got all this great literature behind you, whether it’s Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I’ve got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven, in Bach, in Mahler, in Stravinsky. Maybe that’s what he meant, just the anxiety of, is what I do even comparable with this great art? Another thing is, if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? Those are the neurotic aspects of my life, but I’m no different than anybody else. We just have to deal with those concerns.
COWEN: Are you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives?
ADAMS: [laughs] I’m not afraid of either of them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart more than Charles Ives. Charles Ives is a very, very unusual figure. He was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known — Bernstein brought him to the public notice, and he coined this idea that Charles Ives was the Abraham Lincoln of music. Of course, Americans love something they can grasp onto like, “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. He’s the Abraham Lincoln of music.”
Charles Ives was a hermit. He worked during the day in an insurance firm, at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. His work is very sentimental, also very avant-garde for its time. I’ve conducted quite a few of his pieces. They are not, I have to admit, 100 percent satisfying, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Ives never heard these pieces, or hardly ever heard them.
When you’re composing, you have to hear something and then realize, “Oh, that works and that doesn’t.” I think the fact that Ives — maybe he was just born before his time. He was born in Connecticut in the 1870s, and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.
COWEN: You seem to understand everything in music, from Indian ragas to popular songs, classical music, jazz. Do you ever worry that you have too many influences?
Recommended.
*The Fabelmans*
From the preview I feared it might be unwatchable, but it far exceeded expectations. This story of Spielberg’s own childhood life (a risky premise for a sentimentalist!) is one of the best Spielberg movies, one of the best movies about America “back then,” and one of the best movies about the power of cinema itself.
It shows the corniness and earnestness of the 1950s and 1960s, and how that awfulness also fed into a uniquely American form of creativity and productivity. (It also supports my notion that “no one back then really was funny.”) It is a very good movie about families. And a very good movie about different parts of America, namely New Jersey, Arizona, and California.
It is fun to look for all the visual references to other Spielberg films, such as the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, which by the way is one of his finest achievements.
The performances and cinematography are excellent, even for a Spielberg movie.
The worst Spielberg movies are the big grossers, such as E.T., Jurassic Park, and the Indiana Jones Temple of Doom take. Jaws is here an exception. The best Spielberg movies are the oddball nutters, such as A.I., Duel, Sugarland Express, Minority Report, and the Director’s Cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Spielberg is now close to commercially irrelevant, and I am pleased to see he is using that to his advantage. Recommended.
My Conversation with Ken Burns
Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is part of the episode summary:
Ken joined Tyler to discuss how facial expressions in photos have changed over time, where in the American past he’d like to visit most, the courage of staying in place, how he feels about intellectual property law, the ethical considerations of displaying violent imagery, why women were so prominent in the early history of American photography, the mysteries in his quilt collection, the most underrated American painter, why crossword puzzles are akin to a cup of coffee, why baseball won’t die out, the future of documentary-making, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Why are women so prominent in the early history of American photography — compared, say, to painting or sculpture?
BURNS: It’s interesting, I think, because at the beginning we’re recording ourselves, our families. The first one is a self-portrait. (Of course, being an American it would be a self-portrait.) But families are involved.
There’s so many ways in which we transcend — the Declaration of Independence did not apply to any women. It’s 144 years after the Declaration that women get the right to vote: basic thing. When the Declaration and the Constitution were there, they had no rights. But they were part of the landscape.
They are a majority of the population, and have been. What you have is the beginning of photographs being a much more democratic and accessible medium, that is going to be populated by the people who actually exist. I think it’s that that’s helpful to break down.
As you see in this book, there are lots of images of women from the earliest time involved in things like abolition, involved in things like slavery unions, involved in things like women’s suffrage, involved in just playing, having a good time on the beach in Massachusetts in your bloomer swimming suits dancing, or three gals stealing a cigarette in the early part of the 19th century.
This film is about darkness and light, about black and white — both in the photographic process but in the American dynamic: there are many Native Americans, there’s lots of landscapes of the beauty of the country. There’s lots of horrible signs of discrimination and war and death and suffering and grief.
And that’s us. That’s the story of us. I’ve been trying to tell that complicated history with my films, and this was an opportunity to stop and allow the viewer this time to be the director. That is to say, in most performance art, as film is, I set the time that you get to look at that photograph and you see what you’re able to see in that. If you want to spend an hour with one photograph in this book, you’re welcome to.
If you want to go through this over-amount of time, these photographs, and then hold your thumb in the back matter and go back and forth between the full page of the photograph, that might say “Gettysburg, 1863,” and then the description of people reading the list of the dead outside a newspaper in New York City just after the Battle of Gettysburg in July of ’63 — you can learn a lot more about the photograph, but in a different way. I first wanted the photographs to speak for themselves, un- . . . diminished — I guess, is the word — by words.
There is much more at the link. And I liked Ken’s new book Our America: A Photographic History.
*Love and Let Die*
The author is John Higgs, and the subtitle is Bond, the Beatles and the British Psyche. I loved this book, and reading it induced me to order the author’s other books, the ultimate compliment. It is not for everyone, nor is it easy to describe, but imagine the stories of The Beatles and James Bond films told as “parallel careers.” After all, “Love Me Do” and Dr. No were released on the same day in 1962.
It is striking that they have been making James Bond films for sixty years now, and every single one of them has made money. We are still talking about the Beatles too. Will anything from current Britain have such staying power?
From the book here is one excerpt:
Had Paul not then finally found success outside the band, it is possible they may have agreed to a reunion. The success of ‘Live and Let Die’, followed by the album Band on the Run, made Paul McCartney and Wings a going concern at exactly the point when a Beatles reunion looked most plausible. Bond didn’t kill the Beatles, but it is a strange irony that once they had split , he kept them dead.
I hadn’t known that the Soviet edition of the Band on the Run album replaced the title track with “Silly Love Songs” as the lead song, as the lyrics to the “Band on the Run” song were considered too subversive. There is for instance talk of a prison break in the song. And when Paul much later performed a short solo concert for Vladimir Putin, he chose to play “Let It Be.”
The book excels in its portraits of George Harrison, especially in his solo career. I enjoyed this tidbit about the Harrison family:
In 1978, George married Olivia Arias and in the same year they had a son, Dhani. Dhani only discovered his father’s past when he was at school. ‘I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing “Yellow Submarine”, and I didn’t understand why,’ he has said. ‘It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me? I came home and freaked out to my dad: “Why didn’t you tell me you were in the Beatles?” And he said: “Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.” It’s impossible to imagine, John, Paul or Ringo neglecting to mention they were in the Beatles to their children.
Recommended, for me at least.
China, Coppola
What should I ask Ken Burns?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, here is the beginning of his rather formidable Wikipedia entry:
Kenneth Lauren Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.
His widely known documentary series include The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), and Country Music (2019). He was also executive producer of both The West (1996), and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015). Burns’s documentaries have earned two Academy Award nominations (for 1981’s Brooklyn Bridge and 1985’s The Statue of Liberty) and have won several Emmy Awards, among other honors.
His forthcoming book is the lovely Our America: A Photographic History. So what should I ask?
On the Internet Nobody Knows You Are a Dog
Bitcoin.com: A set of hackers managed to impersonate Binance chief communications officer (CCO) Patrick Hillmann in a series of video calls with several representatives of cryptocurrency projects. The attackers used what Hillman described as an AI hologram, a deepfake of his image for this objective, and managed to fool some representatives of these projects, making them think Hillmann was helping them get listed on the exchange.
It’s wild how good fake and synthetic video are becoming. Synthesia, for example, uses synthetic AI video instead of actors for training videos and similar–see the example below. Tyler and I could write econ scripts and then use AIs to create video–much cheaper and less time consuming than hiring a video director. Presumably, we could even create synthetic AIs in our own image.
Notice also that Synthesia reads text but could presumably also repeat text that it hears. Thus, the future of Zoom meetings is avatars. Fake faces on fake backgrounds. Choose your race, gender, age, species and so forth. No discrimination possible! Some people won’t be happy.
What to Watch
The Rehearsal (HBO): The new Nathan Fielder show has a strange premise. Fielder helps a real person rehearse an upcoming event that they are worried about. In the first episode, Kor has told a friend he has a MA when in fact he has a BA. The fib has tormented him for years. For the rehearsal, Fielder builds a life-sized replica of Kor’s favorite bar where the confession will take place and he stocks it with actors. The 
confession is run through multiple times, ala Groundhog Day. The rehearsal probably cost five hundred thousand or more. The enormous difference between the scale of the rehearsal and the fib is part of the point. Kor is an expert on the trivial. Fielder himself rehearses the rehearsal. It’s ridiculous but why don’t we do this more often? How about rehearsing a pandemic?
I confess that on first watching I missed that the ending was a rehearsal (like missing the gorrilla on the basketball court). Very meta. Strange but recommended. Tyler would like it and I don’t normally say that kind of thing.
The Old Man (HULU/FX): Jeff Bridges seems miscast as an action hero, even an aging action hero. Yet, the writers turn that to their advantage and make the action scenes slower, more realistic, and more brutal than is typical. The Old Man builds as it slows. Excellent performances from Bridges, John Lithgow and especially Amy Brenneman. A reverse Stockholm effect. The underlying story in which an Afghan warlord seems to control the US government at the very highest level is a bit absurd and there is an entirely unnecessary substory with another old man but the ending is superb, logical, meaningful, and deepening and changing everything that came before.
The Alpinist on Netflix. Recommend to me after I recommended 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible but I could only handle 10 minutes. Too scary. Too nuts. Like watching Roman gladiators battling to the death, it just felt wrong to watch. When I came to write this review, I was not surprised to find that Leclerc had perished.
Westworld S4 (HBO): Season One was one of the best seasons of television ever. S2-S4 are a waste of time. S4 I found incomprehensible.
My excellent Conversation with Matthew Ball
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Ball joined Tyler to discuss the eventual widespan transition of the population to the metaverse, the exciting implications of this interconnected network of 3D worlds for education, how the metaverse will improve dating and its impacts on sex, the happiness and career satisfaction of professional gamers, his predictions for Tyler’s most frequent uses of the metaverse, his favorite type of entrepreneur, why he has thousands of tabs open on his computer at any given moment, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: As I read your book, The Metaverse, which again, I’ll recommend highly, I have the impression you’re pretty optimistic about interoperability within the metaverse and an ultimate lack of market power. Now, if I look around the internet — I mean, most obviously, the Apple Store but also a lot of gaming platforms — you see 30 percent fees, or something in that neighborhood, all over the place. Will the metaverse have the equivalent of a 30 percent fee? Or is it a truly competitive market where everything gets competed down to marginal cost?
BALL: I think neither/nor. I wouldn’t say that market power diffuses. There’s currently this ethos, especially in the Web3 community, that decentralization needs to win and that decentralization can win.
It’s a question of where on the spectrum are we? The early internet was obviously held back by heavy decentralization. This is one of the reasons why AOL was, for so many people, the primary onboarding experience. It was easy, cohesive, visual, vertically integrated down to the software, the browser experience, and so forth. But we believe that the last 15 years has been too centralized.
At the end of the day, no matter how decentralized the underlying protocols of the metaverse are, no matter how popular blockchains are, there are multiple forms of centralization. Habit is powerful. Brand is powerful — the associated trust, intellectual property, the fundamental feedback loops of revenue and scale that drive better product investment for more engineers.
So I struggle to imagine the future isn’t some form of today, a handful of varyingly horizontal-vertical software and hardware-based platforms that have disproportionate share and even more influence. But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be as powerful as today.
The 30 percent fee is definitely going to come by the wayside. We see this in the EU, whose legislation dropped yesterday. I have absolute certainty that that is going to go away. The question is the timeline. A lawyer joked yesterday, Apple is going to fight the EU until the heat death of the universe, and that’s probably likely. But Apple will find other ways to control and extract, as is their profit motive.
COWEN: Where is the most likely place for that partial market power or centralization to show up? Is it in the IP rights, in the payment system, the hardware provider, a cross-platform engine, somewhere else? What’s the most likely choke point?
BALL: There seem to be two different answers to that. Number one is software distribution. This is your classic discovery and distribution of virtual experiences. Steam does that. Roblox does that. Google does that, frankly, the search engine. That gateway to virtual experiences typically affords you the opportunity to be the dominant identity system, the dominant payment system, and so on and so forth.
The other option is hardware. We can think of the metaverse as a persistent network of experiences, but as with the internet, it may exist literally and in abstraction, but you can only access it through a device. Those device operators have an ever-growing network of APIs, experiences, technologies, technical requirements, and controls through which they can shape it.
Recommended, interesting throughout.
Peter Brook has passed away at age 97
Here is a NYT obituary, here is a Guardian appreciation. Here is Brook’s Wikipedia page. He was one of the very greatest talents of our time. He was most of all a theatre director, and so most of his output I have never seen. I can report that his filmed Mahabharata (5.5 hours on YouTube) is one of the great creations. He and his co-workers spent eight years on the project. I also give his King Lear, again on film, an A+. At Lincoln Center I once saw his staging of The Magic Flute (in French!), again an A+.
RIP.