As my remarks here going back to January indicate (and as was reaffirmed by more recent comment), I expected that Oppenheimer would claim Best Picture, and so it has. After all, as a highly stylized three-hour mid-century-set biopic the movie appears to be "natural" Oscar material--with the movie helped by how so many of its rivals could appear too "lightweight" (as with Alexander Payne's The Holdovers), too little-seen (almost all of them save for Greta Gerwig's Barbie), too foreign (as with Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall) for the Academy's taste. It also had on its side Christopher Nolan's powerful cheering section and the readiness of many in and out of it to see him as unjustly denied recognition in the past, adding the "his turn" element to the mix--with all this seemingly reaffirmed by the movie's progressing from one victory to another at the season's various awards ceremonies.
Still, if the film's taking Best Picture (and Best Director, and much else) could seem predictable given what we saw these past few months, I had previously thought Barbie the more likely winner given the Academy's greater openness to its themes (the kind of thing the Academy loves to honor) than those of Oppenheimer (the kind of thing that in so many recent years scared off the Academy).* The result is that there is still an element of upset here, affirmed by how not Gerwig's Barbie but Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things came in second, taking four statues home (including a second Best Actress win for Emma Stone, and Best Adapted Screenplay), as Barbie not only lost out on Best Director and Best Actress at even the nomination stage of things, and in the "major" categories in which it was nominated (Picture, Supporting Actor and Actress, Screenplay), but ended up with only one win (for "Best Original Song").
It does seem possible to take this as a sign of change, perhaps in multiple, era-changing ways. Scarcely a few days ago critic Bernd Reinhardt remarked Mati Diop's film Dahomey taking the Golden Bear at the year's Berlin Film Festival, suggested that it was "an indication that the dominant influence of identity politics in the cultural sector is losing ground."
Perhaps this turn of events at the Oscars is similarly indicative of the trend. Still, even if this is so we may feel ourselves in only a very, very, early stage of such a process.
* The film won a total of seven Oscars. Besides Best Picture and Best Director there were two acting prizes (Best Actor for Cillian Murphy and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr.), as well as prizes for Original Score (Ludwig Göransson), Cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema) and Film Editing (Jennifer Lame) in what, if not a sweep, is not too far off from it either.
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Thursday, March 7, 2024
The 96th Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees' Chances: A Few Thoughts
Last summer, in the wake of the rapturous critical reception of Barbie, I thought it was certain to get Best Picture--but then Oppenheimer surprised me by winning over some very tough critics, and in the months since, dominating one awards ceremony after another. The result is that my intuitive guess has for some time been that it will win the Big Prize on Sunday night.
Still, that is far from a full consideration of the chances of the nominees (there are eight other movies to be thought about, after all), and so I found myself thinking about how they all stack up when considered in terms of factors more or less indicative of their chances (while, once again, setting aside any pretense that this is about "quality," so keep in mind I am not saying that any one movie here is better than another).
A Measure of Popular Success Goes a Long Way These Days
While box office performance has little-to-nothing to do with the actual quality of a film, the Academy (and other comparable institutions, one of which has gone so far as to produce the equivalent of a Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence) are concerned with popularity for the sake of keeping up public interest in the goings-on. As it happens of the ten films only two broke the now relatively modest $100 million barrier the extraordinarily weak box office year of 2023 (Barbie and Oppenheimer), only three the $50 million barrier (Killers of the Flower Moon also squeezed over the line to take in $67 million), and six have made $20 million or less (all of the rest except for Poor Things, which managed to take in half of what Killers of the Flower Moon did, with The Zone of Interest taking in $7 million, The Anatomy of a Fall taking in under $5 million to date and Maestro apparently enjoying only whatever minimum necessary to qualify).
Putting it another way, the issue is not just how much money Oppenheimer, and Barbie, made, but also how very little the rest made, that leaves Barbie and Oppenheimer with a considerable edge here over the rest.
A Best Director Nod isn't Essential--But it is a Favorable Sign
As I remarked in a prior post regarding Greta Gerwig's not getting a nomination for Best Director did not necessarily doom the chances of Barbie for winning Best Picture, other films having had that honor in spite of a lack of such recognition for the helmer (especially these days, one suspects, given the political pressure to spread the accolades around). Still, it is relatively rare. Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture only five have Best Director nods--namely Oppenheimer's Christopher Nolan, Killers of the Flower Moon's Martin Scorsese, Poor Things Yorgos Lanthimos, The Zone of Interest's Jonathan Glazer, and Anatomy's Justine Triet. This counts in those films' favor.
The "Lifetime Achievement" or "Making it Up to You" Element
Of the five directors who have been nominated, three have had prior nominations--namely Nolan, Scorsese and Lanthimos. Scorsese, of course, has ten nominations--but already has one win for his remake of the Hong Kong cinema classic Infernal Affairs (the wildly overblown yet inferior The Departed), and even if that was almost two decades no there is that much less reason for any rush to recognize him (especially because Killers of the Flower Moon has no "This is the one he will be remembered for" buzz). This means that this is more likely to work in favor of Nolan and Lanthimos--while the pressure would seem stronger in Nolan's case given that so many think him to have been so under-recognized in the past (because of his making Batman films and science fiction like Inception and Interstellar), while it might be added that he has a considerable popular cheering section in his corner such as, I think, Lanthimos does not (and so far as I know, Glazer and Triet do not, else we would have seen more people show up to their movies) . . ..
I am sure one can think of other factors than these, but you have probably noticed a pattern by now, namely that Oppenheimer again and again displays the advantage in the stakes, with its popular success, and the recognition accorded to a director whom some will see as entitled to "his turn," all as the competition is disadvantaged by the same factors (because "no one saw them," because of a lack of recognition of directorial achievement or pressure to reward them "this time")--all while Oppenheimer, as a lengthy period biopic with capital I Important themes and an ostentatious visual style is a natural for the prize in a way that much of the competition is not (because it is a brightly colored movie "about a toy," for example, or too light in tone in that "safe," familiar, Alexander Payne way, or disadvantaged simply by being "foreign" like Triet's Anatomy and Celine Song's Past Lives, etc., etc.).
The result of this little exercise is that Oppenheimer looks to me like even more of a lock for Best Picture than it was before--though of course the last act of Naked Gun 33 1/3rd--though of course, that particular ceremony had help from Lieutenant Frank Drebin of Police Squad and his colleagues.
Still, that is far from a full consideration of the chances of the nominees (there are eight other movies to be thought about, after all), and so I found myself thinking about how they all stack up when considered in terms of factors more or less indicative of their chances (while, once again, setting aside any pretense that this is about "quality," so keep in mind I am not saying that any one movie here is better than another).
A Measure of Popular Success Goes a Long Way These Days
While box office performance has little-to-nothing to do with the actual quality of a film, the Academy (and other comparable institutions, one of which has gone so far as to produce the equivalent of a Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence) are concerned with popularity for the sake of keeping up public interest in the goings-on. As it happens of the ten films only two broke the now relatively modest $100 million barrier the extraordinarily weak box office year of 2023 (Barbie and Oppenheimer), only three the $50 million barrier (Killers of the Flower Moon also squeezed over the line to take in $67 million), and six have made $20 million or less (all of the rest except for Poor Things, which managed to take in half of what Killers of the Flower Moon did, with The Zone of Interest taking in $7 million, The Anatomy of a Fall taking in under $5 million to date and Maestro apparently enjoying only whatever minimum necessary to qualify).
Putting it another way, the issue is not just how much money Oppenheimer, and Barbie, made, but also how very little the rest made, that leaves Barbie and Oppenheimer with a considerable edge here over the rest.
A Best Director Nod isn't Essential--But it is a Favorable Sign
As I remarked in a prior post regarding Greta Gerwig's not getting a nomination for Best Director did not necessarily doom the chances of Barbie for winning Best Picture, other films having had that honor in spite of a lack of such recognition for the helmer (especially these days, one suspects, given the political pressure to spread the accolades around). Still, it is relatively rare. Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture only five have Best Director nods--namely Oppenheimer's Christopher Nolan, Killers of the Flower Moon's Martin Scorsese, Poor Things Yorgos Lanthimos, The Zone of Interest's Jonathan Glazer, and Anatomy's Justine Triet. This counts in those films' favor.
The "Lifetime Achievement" or "Making it Up to You" Element
Of the five directors who have been nominated, three have had prior nominations--namely Nolan, Scorsese and Lanthimos. Scorsese, of course, has ten nominations--but already has one win for his remake of the Hong Kong cinema classic Infernal Affairs (the wildly overblown yet inferior The Departed), and even if that was almost two decades no there is that much less reason for any rush to recognize him (especially because Killers of the Flower Moon has no "This is the one he will be remembered for" buzz). This means that this is more likely to work in favor of Nolan and Lanthimos--while the pressure would seem stronger in Nolan's case given that so many think him to have been so under-recognized in the past (because of his making Batman films and science fiction like Inception and Interstellar), while it might be added that he has a considerable popular cheering section in his corner such as, I think, Lanthimos does not (and so far as I know, Glazer and Triet do not, else we would have seen more people show up to their movies) . . ..
I am sure one can think of other factors than these, but you have probably noticed a pattern by now, namely that Oppenheimer again and again displays the advantage in the stakes, with its popular success, and the recognition accorded to a director whom some will see as entitled to "his turn," all as the competition is disadvantaged by the same factors (because "no one saw them," because of a lack of recognition of directorial achievement or pressure to reward them "this time")--all while Oppenheimer, as a lengthy period biopic with capital I Important themes and an ostentatious visual style is a natural for the prize in a way that much of the competition is not (because it is a brightly colored movie "about a toy," for example, or too light in tone in that "safe," familiar, Alexander Payne way, or disadvantaged simply by being "foreign" like Triet's Anatomy and Celine Song's Past Lives, etc., etc.).
The result of this little exercise is that Oppenheimer looks to me like even more of a lock for Best Picture than it was before--though of course the last act of Naked Gun 33 1/3rd--though of course, that particular ceremony had help from Lieutenant Frank Drebin of Police Squad and his colleagues.
The Claqueurs of the Entertainment Press and the Post-Pandemic Standard for Box Office Success
As my prior posts have made clear, 2023 box office closed on a very low note indeed, and thus far 2024 has confirmed those who thought the year showed every sign of being an even weaker one for the film industry. Of course, box office watchers had high hopes for the release of the second part of Denis Villeneuve's Dune saga, and the film seems to have lived up to their expectations that way, taking in $81.5 million domestically and another $97 million internationally.
It is a very respectable gross indeed--by the standards of 2024, which more than two years after the normalization of the box office seemed to be getting underway (with such successes as Venom 2, the Bond film No Time to Die, and of course, the near $2 billion phenomenon that was Spider-Man: No Way Home) the standard remains depressed, not least for what big sci-fi franchise spectacles like that one are expected to bring in. Just a few years ago an $80 million opening would not have been thought reason for the makers of a near $200 million-budgeted sequel of this type to crow like this, let alone declare an end to a box office drought (even before the massive inflationary shock of recent years that has produced a full-blown cost-of-living crisis forcing many to reckon with thelong-threadbare quality of their pretensions to being "middle class").
This was underlined for me by a recent Deadline piece on Anyone But You. The article's title promises that it will explain how the film became a "global box office phenom" that once again demonstrates the continued viability of a genre so many have written off, but again it is only a "phenom" according to a much reduced standard. The movie has barely crossed the $200 million mark globally, in part because it is far short of $100 million domestically, thus far taking in a $88 million. (For comparison purposes, just consider what these films made domestically, and at yesteryear's far lower ticket prices.)
The reader and watcher of the entertainment press now has to keep such things in mind as the claqueurs go on claquing, even when there is not much to claque about.
This was underlined for me by a recent Deadline piece on Anyone But You. The article's title promises that it will explain how the film became a "global box office phenom" that once again demonstrates the continued viability of a genre so many have written off, but again it is only a "phenom" according to a much reduced standard. The movie has barely crossed the $200 million mark globally, in part because it is far short of $100 million domestically, thus far taking in a $88 million. (For comparison purposes, just consider what these films made domestically, and at yesteryear's far lower ticket prices.)
The reader and watcher of the entertainment press now has to keep such things in mind as the claqueurs go on claquing, even when there is not much to claque about.
"When Can I Stop Rewriting?"
"Everyone knows" that rewriting is an essential part of writing--but as is often the case with what "everyone knows" we very rarely discuss it in an honest, helpful, way.
Consider, for instance, the matter of when it is that we ought to stop rewriting. Per the low expectations weary and cynical instructors tend to have of students the stress is on exhorting the rewriter to greater effort--rather than helping them make useful judgments about the very important matter of whether they have reached or even surpassed the point at which "more effort" is useless, or even counterproductive.
For my part I find that a point comes in my own writing when, as I reread and revise my work, I am no longer making "global" revisions, and the changes are all occurring at lower and lower levels--restructuring a paragraph here, later just restructuring sentences, later just tinkering with word choices.
All of this tends to reflect the fact that I am no longer revising what I say, but rather how I say it, and, with due regard for the importance of subtleties, smaller and smaller aspects of that. Indeed, rather than meaning I may by that point be thinking about niceties of form--the adjustments about switching something written in passive voice to active voice, or providing parallelism where it had been absent.
And while I am at it many of the changes may feel optional rather than strictly necessary--such that I find myself changing something, then rereading it, and deciding that it was better before.
Alternatively if I am still thinking about substantive changes late in the process it is likely that they suggest not a revision of the piece but a whole other piece than the one that I have written--one I might as well go ahead and write from scratch rather than going through the less efficient, more wasteful process of tearing up something that may be perfectly fine as is to produce something else out of the parts.
I think it safe to say that when you get to either of these points--the point at which the changes are increasingly minute, stylistic, optional; or at which the changes are not so much revision of what exists as writing something else (and again, this better done from scratch)--that you can take it as a good sign that you are getting near the end of the process.
Consider, for instance, the matter of when it is that we ought to stop rewriting. Per the low expectations weary and cynical instructors tend to have of students the stress is on exhorting the rewriter to greater effort--rather than helping them make useful judgments about the very important matter of whether they have reached or even surpassed the point at which "more effort" is useless, or even counterproductive.
For my part I find that a point comes in my own writing when, as I reread and revise my work, I am no longer making "global" revisions, and the changes are all occurring at lower and lower levels--restructuring a paragraph here, later just restructuring sentences, later just tinkering with word choices.
All of this tends to reflect the fact that I am no longer revising what I say, but rather how I say it, and, with due regard for the importance of subtleties, smaller and smaller aspects of that. Indeed, rather than meaning I may by that point be thinking about niceties of form--the adjustments about switching something written in passive voice to active voice, or providing parallelism where it had been absent.
And while I am at it many of the changes may feel optional rather than strictly necessary--such that I find myself changing something, then rereading it, and deciding that it was better before.
Alternatively if I am still thinking about substantive changes late in the process it is likely that they suggest not a revision of the piece but a whole other piece than the one that I have written--one I might as well go ahead and write from scratch rather than going through the less efficient, more wasteful process of tearing up something that may be perfectly fine as is to produce something else out of the parts.
I think it safe to say that when you get to either of these points--the point at which the changes are increasingly minute, stylistic, optional; or at which the changes are not so much revision of what exists as writing something else (and again, this better done from scratch)--that you can take it as a good sign that you are getting near the end of the process.
Friday, March 1, 2024
The 2024 Box Office: Notes on the First Two Months
After an ultimately disappointing 2023, and its especially disappointing last third when no Barbie or Oppenheimer or Super Mario Bros. made up for the way the sorts of franchise films usually counted on to have blockbuster grosses kept flopping, hopes for 2024 were low--the more in as the studios bumped so many of what were supposed to be the year's big releases past December 31, 2024 in the wake of the Hollywood double-strike. (Exemplary of this is how this whole year will see just one Marvel release, Deadpool 3.)
This past January was entirely consistent with the grim prediction, the box office gross of January 2024 down 18 percent from that of January 2023, reflecting both the tepid performance of the holiday period releases normally carrying the box office in that month (like Aquaman 2), and the releases in January itself (like the disappointing Mean Girls remake).* February was worse still, the gross in February 2024 down more like 30 percent--a testament to how, much as there was disappointment over Ant-Man 3's gross, it towered over anything out so far this year, the backers of the year's Valentine's Day superhero release Madame Web only able to dream of their film making that kind of money.**
All of that leaves the box office take for 2024 thus far down about a fifth from what it was at the same point the preceding year (somewhere around $860 million as against the $1.08 billion taken in last year, before adjustment for inflation). Of course, at this point there are hopes for March seeing stronger ticket sales, with great hopes (apparently with some substantiation in advance ticket sales and the like) held out for Part Two of Denis Villenueve's well-received Dune remake. Where the first film made just $400 million in those months when the box office was scarcely starting its recovery from the initial shock of the pandemic, those bullish on the movie hope that Part Two will get to be the full-blown blockbuster that the first lost its chance to become, with the movie expected to take in $80 million in its opening weekend.
Still, such excitement over the prospect of a mere $80 million weekend tells us just how much the standard has changed these past few years (even before we start calculating for inflation, $80 million falls short of the 100 biggest weekends on record), while even if the film achieves that, and displays reasonable legs, it will probably end up not much above $200 million domestically. The result is that, assuming they too do as well as reasonably hoped, even with help from Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and the next Godzilla, March 2024 may end up not really improving on March 2023 much or even at all--and therefore not do much to close the gap, still leaving the first quarter of 2024 significantly down from its counterpart in none-too-prepossessing 2023.
* The January 2024 gross was $495 million, versus $584 million the year earlier ($602 million when adjusted for inflation).
** As of February 28 the box office gross for February was in the vicinity of $356 million, implying a finish in the vicinity of $360 million, versus $500 million in February 2023 ($513 million in January 2024 dollars).
This past January was entirely consistent with the grim prediction, the box office gross of January 2024 down 18 percent from that of January 2023, reflecting both the tepid performance of the holiday period releases normally carrying the box office in that month (like Aquaman 2), and the releases in January itself (like the disappointing Mean Girls remake).* February was worse still, the gross in February 2024 down more like 30 percent--a testament to how, much as there was disappointment over Ant-Man 3's gross, it towered over anything out so far this year, the backers of the year's Valentine's Day superhero release Madame Web only able to dream of their film making that kind of money.**
All of that leaves the box office take for 2024 thus far down about a fifth from what it was at the same point the preceding year (somewhere around $860 million as against the $1.08 billion taken in last year, before adjustment for inflation). Of course, at this point there are hopes for March seeing stronger ticket sales, with great hopes (apparently with some substantiation in advance ticket sales and the like) held out for Part Two of Denis Villenueve's well-received Dune remake. Where the first film made just $400 million in those months when the box office was scarcely starting its recovery from the initial shock of the pandemic, those bullish on the movie hope that Part Two will get to be the full-blown blockbuster that the first lost its chance to become, with the movie expected to take in $80 million in its opening weekend.
Still, such excitement over the prospect of a mere $80 million weekend tells us just how much the standard has changed these past few years (even before we start calculating for inflation, $80 million falls short of the 100 biggest weekends on record), while even if the film achieves that, and displays reasonable legs, it will probably end up not much above $200 million domestically. The result is that, assuming they too do as well as reasonably hoped, even with help from Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and the next Godzilla, March 2024 may end up not really improving on March 2023 much or even at all--and therefore not do much to close the gap, still leaving the first quarter of 2024 significantly down from its counterpart in none-too-prepossessing 2023.
* The January 2024 gross was $495 million, versus $584 million the year earlier ($602 million when adjusted for inflation).
** As of February 28 the box office gross for February was in the vicinity of $356 million, implying a finish in the vicinity of $360 million, versus $500 million in February 2023 ($513 million in January 2024 dollars).
David Walsh on Christopher Nolan on Nuclear War
Recently writing again about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer David Walsh reiterated his praises for the film, and especially what he thought most worthwhile in it--while paying special attention to both Nolan's address of the theme of nuclear war (drawing heavily on Nolan's surprising frankness, and boldness, about his views), and the media's comment about the force of the audience's response, especially the "astonishment" of "empty-headed commentators."
So far as Walsh is concerned the film "demonstrates once again there is a genuine, abiding, growing hunger for more substantial film work" that "appeal[s] to the viewer's mental powers," as against the "noisy, empty blockbusters that insult or benumb the intelligence," with the movie's themes precisely what drew the audience to it.
Alas, I have to admit that, in some degree, I remain among the astonished. I have long taken the view that when it comes to "the market," in contrast with the conventional wisdom about the consumer being king business generally decides what it is most profitable for it to have the consumer buy, presents them that take-it-or-leave-it , and they usually have little choice but to take it, be in the area housing, cars, consumer electronics, or anything else, because the alternative is to go without a practical necessity, even though they would prefer something else, and have that option if markets really worked the way the conventional wisdom insists they do (for instance, having the choice of cheaper, more durable goods rather than more expensive ones with features they find irrelevant or even destructive of value, as with so much of Silicon Valley's recent vile stupidities).
Yet I have tended to incline to the view that there is a good deal more congruence between what the consumer is offered in the world of pop culture and what they want. The consumer may take trash because they have been poorly educated, exhausted, stultified--enjoy a "pastime for helots" because they have been reduced to the condition of helots--but the point is that the unambitious, lowest common denominator character of the work meaningfully reflects what they can handle intellectually or emotionally. (As Steven Soderbergh put it a while back "There's a very good argument to be made that only somebody who has it really good would want to make a movie that makes you feel really bad," and fewer people have been having it "really good.") Indeed, I have been prone to accept that, if at times in the past challenging movies have more frequently been successes, there were special reasons for that, which did not last long--that, for example, a movie like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up became a hit mainly because it promised a then-groundbreaking bit of nudity and sex (of the kind that an appreciable audience actually wanted to see), that if the New Hollywood's decline was a matter of many different factors audience's appetite for such material was also finite relative to its openness to the splashy high concept then in the ascendant and dominant ever since.
Still, Oppenheimer's American gross was not simply a matter of suckering in audiences on the opening weekend, but sustained success as it displayed remarkable legs, grossing four times its opening weekend take in a feat few movies accomplish, while the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a truly fresh 91 percent. And of course the movie tripled its massive domestic gross globally, performing well in market after market. (Indeed Walsh, who rarely pays much attention to box office grosses, spends quite a bit of time parsing the numbers in demonstrating that, yes, people really did get interested, really did go for it.) As a result there is far, far too much evidence here of audiences responding to what they saw for one to blithely dismiss it as a matter of Midcult-devouring middlebrows claiming to like what they think they are supposed to say they like. And in fact it has me rethinking my position. I am far from convinced that we will see the multiplexes packed with serious adult dramas, even of more conventional character, anytime soon--but it may well be that there is a good deal more openness to such drama than those of us who pore over box office data have been given reason to suspect in a long time; and that, as Walsh also suggests, it may be a matter of the dark times the global public is living through forcing some hard rethinking about life, the universe, and everything.
So far as Walsh is concerned the film "demonstrates once again there is a genuine, abiding, growing hunger for more substantial film work" that "appeal[s] to the viewer's mental powers," as against the "noisy, empty blockbusters that insult or benumb the intelligence," with the movie's themes precisely what drew the audience to it.
Alas, I have to admit that, in some degree, I remain among the astonished. I have long taken the view that when it comes to "the market," in contrast with the conventional wisdom about the consumer being king business generally decides what it is most profitable for it to have the consumer buy, presents them that take-it-or-leave-it , and they usually have little choice but to take it, be in the area housing, cars, consumer electronics, or anything else, because the alternative is to go without a practical necessity, even though they would prefer something else, and have that option if markets really worked the way the conventional wisdom insists they do (for instance, having the choice of cheaper, more durable goods rather than more expensive ones with features they find irrelevant or even destructive of value, as with so much of Silicon Valley's recent vile stupidities).
Yet I have tended to incline to the view that there is a good deal more congruence between what the consumer is offered in the world of pop culture and what they want. The consumer may take trash because they have been poorly educated, exhausted, stultified--enjoy a "pastime for helots" because they have been reduced to the condition of helots--but the point is that the unambitious, lowest common denominator character of the work meaningfully reflects what they can handle intellectually or emotionally. (As Steven Soderbergh put it a while back "There's a very good argument to be made that only somebody who has it really good would want to make a movie that makes you feel really bad," and fewer people have been having it "really good.") Indeed, I have been prone to accept that, if at times in the past challenging movies have more frequently been successes, there were special reasons for that, which did not last long--that, for example, a movie like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up became a hit mainly because it promised a then-groundbreaking bit of nudity and sex (of the kind that an appreciable audience actually wanted to see), that if the New Hollywood's decline was a matter of many different factors audience's appetite for such material was also finite relative to its openness to the splashy high concept then in the ascendant and dominant ever since.
Still, Oppenheimer's American gross was not simply a matter of suckering in audiences on the opening weekend, but sustained success as it displayed remarkable legs, grossing four times its opening weekend take in a feat few movies accomplish, while the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a truly fresh 91 percent. And of course the movie tripled its massive domestic gross globally, performing well in market after market. (Indeed Walsh, who rarely pays much attention to box office grosses, spends quite a bit of time parsing the numbers in demonstrating that, yes, people really did get interested, really did go for it.) As a result there is far, far too much evidence here of audiences responding to what they saw for one to blithely dismiss it as a matter of Midcult-devouring middlebrows claiming to like what they think they are supposed to say they like. And in fact it has me rethinking my position. I am far from convinced that we will see the multiplexes packed with serious adult dramas, even of more conventional character, anytime soon--but it may well be that there is a good deal more openness to such drama than those of us who pore over box office data have been given reason to suspect in a long time; and that, as Walsh also suggests, it may be a matter of the dark times the global public is living through forcing some hard rethinking about life, the universe, and everything.
Christopher Nolan on Nuclear War
Still, if they preferred to ignore the nuclear theme and fixate on their morbid Terminator fantasies (overlooking how it was nuclear weapons that actually enabled AI destroy humanity in that 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger B-movie so many treat as a philosophical treatise on the subject), Christopher Nolan, who often in the past had been evasive about his politics in interviews (lamely telling Rolling Stone that The Dark Knight wasn't political), discussed his views on the subject with an interviewer from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in quite frank fashion before Oppenheimer's release. In the course of said interview Nolan discussed growing up in England in the 1980s, amid what is today remembered as the "Euromissile crisis" and the Second Cold War, and the prominence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as how it pervaded pop culture at the time (Nolan recalling first learning of Robert Oppenheimer from the lyrics of the Sting song "Russians"). Nolan was also forthright--indeed, brave--in pointing to his film's relevance to the present, and not least the war in Ukraine, and how what he hears "not just from Putin" but "from both sides of the political spectrum" frightens him, leaving him "feel[ing] we're in a world now where people are starting to once again talk about those things as some acceptable possibility for our world," with "normalizing . . . atomic weapons" likely to lead to "to larger- and larger-scale conflict that will ultimately destroy the planet" (in a way that few others have pointed out).
Given how much coverage the film has received it is surprising how (relative to it) little coverage these comments of Nolan's have got, the commentariat (at the very least) simply not interested. Still, for his part film critic David Walsh has taken the view that the broader public that made of the movie a near-billion dollar hit--a Batman-like success, especially if one grades it on the post-pandemic curve so many others so readily apply to more conventional blockbusters like Marvel films--has not missed the movie's relevance. Arguing that it has indeed come out for this demanding, dense, idiosyncratically structured and shot, three-hour R-rated biopic in large part because that relevance struck a chord with them, as seen in his latest piece on the subject of the movie's reception a scarce week and a half before Hollywood's Biggest Night, and this movie's likely capturing the Biggest of that night's prizes.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Does Sora Represent the Beginning of the End for Film and TV Production as We Know It?
Back during the Hollywood strikes of last year the rights of writers and actors with regard to the usage of their work to train the artificial intelligence (AI) that many anticipate replacing some or all of what they do were a key point of contention.
This was an entirely legitimate concern for the writers and actors to have, given that even a slight chance of artificial intelligence doing just that justified their attempting to protect themselves (certainly in the wake of their experience of the streaming boom). Still, as one less bullish than most on the relevant technologies I have been skeptical that the day when AI really could do all that the actors and writers fear (and the executives doubtless hope). After all, consider how in the 1990s we were made to expect that the stars of today would soon be seen interacting with the stars of yesteryear on screen as a matter of course; and just a little while after, that the day had come in which fully computer-generated backgrounds would replace traditional sets. In both cases the technology was oversold--and the fact proved again and again over the years (as when Rogue One presented Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarquin).
However, the chatter surrounding Open AI's Sora is making me wonder if the moment when the technology does start to really matter in the ways they talked about might not actually be so far away. Granted, it is months away from being usable by the public, and thus far produces only short videos with significant imperfections--but it is easy to picture a more developed, more robust, version, backed by human clean-up efforts, enabling a film studio (as against some casual online user) to deliver the equivalent of today's megabudgeted blockbuster fare at considerably lower cost, enough so that they will find it cost-effective to make parts of movies this way, and eventually whole films. The result is that the writers and actors who fought to secure rights within this particular contract battle may have been not only prudent, but prescient, in their stance--and their defeat in that battle potentially catastrophic for their professions.
This was an entirely legitimate concern for the writers and actors to have, given that even a slight chance of artificial intelligence doing just that justified their attempting to protect themselves (certainly in the wake of their experience of the streaming boom). Still, as one less bullish than most on the relevant technologies I have been skeptical that the day when AI really could do all that the actors and writers fear (and the executives doubtless hope). After all, consider how in the 1990s we were made to expect that the stars of today would soon be seen interacting with the stars of yesteryear on screen as a matter of course; and just a little while after, that the day had come in which fully computer-generated backgrounds would replace traditional sets. In both cases the technology was oversold--and the fact proved again and again over the years (as when Rogue One presented Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarquin).
However, the chatter surrounding Open AI's Sora is making me wonder if the moment when the technology does start to really matter in the ways they talked about might not actually be so far away. Granted, it is months away from being usable by the public, and thus far produces only short videos with significant imperfections--but it is easy to picture a more developed, more robust, version, backed by human clean-up efforts, enabling a film studio (as against some casual online user) to deliver the equivalent of today's megabudgeted blockbuster fare at considerably lower cost, enough so that they will find it cost-effective to make parts of movies this way, and eventually whole films. The result is that the writers and actors who fought to secure rights within this particular contract battle may have been not only prudent, but prescient, in their stance--and their defeat in that battle potentially catastrophic for their professions.
David Walsh, His Colleagues, and the Nominees Honored by the 96th Academy Awards
As I have remarked many a time in the past I have consistently found David Walsh and his colleagues the most worthwhile team of film critics publishing in English today. Still, it has seemed to me that for a long time the amount of film reviewing they do has been falling off--especially where major U.S. theatrical releases are concerned. Where maybe a decade ago you would find one new review of such a film every week or so, now one can go for months without seeing a really widely released American film presented here. (Almost three months passed between the reviews of Wes Anderson Asteroid City and Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.) Reviews of the kinds of movies that can be expected to sell very many tickets, the typical blockbusters (admittedly, not often the occasion of their best work, even if they do now and then present something interesting, as with Walsh's review of Suicide Squad) are especially rare here these days (Avatar: The Way of Water the last such film I noticed getting that attention--over a year ago in January 2023).
All but crowded off the site, with this likely encouraged this year by the attention they have given to both increasing censorship in a time of ascendant "extremism" and increasing conflict, and the historic double-strike by actors and writers in Hollywood this past year, Walsh and his colleagues remain attentive to the "critics' darling" sorts of productions, and continue to do plenty of what they do best in regard to it--exposing the artistic, intellectual and political limitations that leave so much of it just so much Midcult junk, always pretentious and very often truly noxious, churned out by, of and for a very privileged "social layer." This past year they have reviewed all ten of the nominees for Best Picture at this year's Oscars, which not incidentally account for 29 of the 35 nominations in those more prestigious categories recognizing direction, writing and acting--Cord Jefferson's American Fiction, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, Greta Gerwig's Barbie, Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Celine Song's Past Lives, Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things and Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest (getting several of them in very recently, I suppose, to have the whole list covered before the Big Night). While all up to par qualitatively, with the reviews of Triet's Anatomy of a Fall and Glazer's The Zone of Interest especially telling of the state of what passes for intellectual and cultural life these days, the reviews of Nolan's Oppenheimer and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things strike me as especially meriting note because in each case a director of whose work they had been very critical in the past managed to win a positive review from them--the only really positive reviews to be found in this lot. (That's right--just two of the ten movies up for Best Picture really deserving of any honors in their books, and a good many of the other eight better discussed as cultural artifacts testifying to the profound derangement of politics, social thought, culture and art in our time than as cinema.)
Will the Academy judge as these critics judged? The Academy's sensibility is very different from this group's--as Walsh never fails to remind his readers in his incisive coverage of the ceremony every year. Still, at last check Oppenheimer had the momentum behind it--and if most of the media seems to find virtues in that film other than those which impressed Walsh (interestingly they seem to think that this movie literally about nuclear war, which the director himself says is about nuclear war, has nothing to do with nuclear war in our time, but rather artificial intelligence) it could at least look like a case of the broken clock striking the right time twice a day--and Walsh's remarks about that should be interesting.
NOTE: This post has been revised and significantly updated twice since its initial February 27, 2024 posting.
All but crowded off the site, with this likely encouraged this year by the attention they have given to both increasing censorship in a time of ascendant "extremism" and increasing conflict, and the historic double-strike by actors and writers in Hollywood this past year, Walsh and his colleagues remain attentive to the "critics' darling" sorts of productions, and continue to do plenty of what they do best in regard to it--exposing the artistic, intellectual and political limitations that leave so much of it just so much Midcult junk, always pretentious and very often truly noxious, churned out by, of and for a very privileged "social layer." This past year they have reviewed all ten of the nominees for Best Picture at this year's Oscars, which not incidentally account for 29 of the 35 nominations in those more prestigious categories recognizing direction, writing and acting--Cord Jefferson's American Fiction, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, Greta Gerwig's Barbie, Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Celine Song's Past Lives, Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things and Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest (getting several of them in very recently, I suppose, to have the whole list covered before the Big Night). While all up to par qualitatively, with the reviews of Triet's Anatomy of a Fall and Glazer's The Zone of Interest especially telling of the state of what passes for intellectual and cultural life these days, the reviews of Nolan's Oppenheimer and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things strike me as especially meriting note because in each case a director of whose work they had been very critical in the past managed to win a positive review from them--the only really positive reviews to be found in this lot. (That's right--just two of the ten movies up for Best Picture really deserving of any honors in their books, and a good many of the other eight better discussed as cultural artifacts testifying to the profound derangement of politics, social thought, culture and art in our time than as cinema.)
Will the Academy judge as these critics judged? The Academy's sensibility is very different from this group's--as Walsh never fails to remind his readers in his incisive coverage of the ceremony every year. Still, at last check Oppenheimer had the momentum behind it--and if most of the media seems to find virtues in that film other than those which impressed Walsh (interestingly they seem to think that this movie literally about nuclear war, which the director himself says is about nuclear war, has nothing to do with nuclear war in our time, but rather artificial intelligence) it could at least look like a case of the broken clock striking the right time twice a day--and Walsh's remarks about that should be interesting.
NOTE: This post has been revised and significantly updated twice since its initial February 27, 2024 posting.
The One True X-Men
The live-action X-Men movies Bryan Singer launched with the first film back in 2000 have been an important part of the twenty-first century pop cultural landscape. They have not been the genre's biggest hits in an era in which billion-dollar hits seemed routine for many years. Excluding the affiliated Deadpool movies, the biggest hit the franchise produced was probably 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past, the $746 million of which falls just short of a billion even in today's inflation-adjusted terms.
Still, the 2000 film helped kickstart the boom in such movies with its then-respectable gross ($157 million domestic and $296 million global, working out to $282 and $528 million, respectively, in January 2024 dollars) two years before the colossal event that was Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man.
Moreover, while the films have not always met the expectations of fans, critics or audiences (there were complaints about Last Stand in 2006, and Wolverine in 2009, and 2019's Dark Phoenix was definitely disappointing, for a start), on the whole the X-Men movies have been well-received, with it saying something of that reception that Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine for a quarter of a century now.
Still, I have to admit that all these years later for me the one "true" X-Men adaptation remains the '90s-era (1992-1997) animated series, and it seems natural that it should be so. After all, what can be more natural than that a comic book be rendered through drawn images rather than a live-action adaptation in which much that works in a comic book panel does not work at all?
It is certainly something to think about as the Hollywood studios, unwilling to let go of the revenue stream that superhero films have been until the catastrophes of 2023, and perhaps not wholly unmindful of the success of the recent animated Spider-Man movie (the one real bright spot in the commercial picture genre-wise, not that it seems to get the press one would expect from the fact), may turn in this direction to keep the hits coming in the years ahead.
Still, the 2000 film helped kickstart the boom in such movies with its then-respectable gross ($157 million domestic and $296 million global, working out to $282 and $528 million, respectively, in January 2024 dollars) two years before the colossal event that was Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man.
Moreover, while the films have not always met the expectations of fans, critics or audiences (there were complaints about Last Stand in 2006, and Wolverine in 2009, and 2019's Dark Phoenix was definitely disappointing, for a start), on the whole the X-Men movies have been well-received, with it saying something of that reception that Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine for a quarter of a century now.
Still, I have to admit that all these years later for me the one "true" X-Men adaptation remains the '90s-era (1992-1997) animated series, and it seems natural that it should be so. After all, what can be more natural than that a comic book be rendered through drawn images rather than a live-action adaptation in which much that works in a comic book panel does not work at all?
It is certainly something to think about as the Hollywood studios, unwilling to let go of the revenue stream that superhero films have been until the catastrophes of 2023, and perhaps not wholly unmindful of the success of the recent animated Spider-Man movie (the one real bright spot in the commercial picture genre-wise, not that it seems to get the press one would expect from the fact), may turn in this direction to keep the hits coming in the years ahead.
25 Years of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine
Seeing Wolverine's shadow loom over Deadpool in the trailer for their new film I found myself thinking of how this movie marks a quarter of a century of Jackman playing the character on the big screen. Starting with 2000's X-Men, he reprised the role in the subsequent two films that produced that trilogy (2003, 2006), a trio of Wolverine movies (2009, 2013, 2017), and the rebooted X-Men trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), prior to this movie--ten films in all over twenty-five years.
It really is an extraordinary run--twice as long as Daniel Craig (or Roger Moore's) run as James Bond, for example. It testifies to how well-received Jackman's portrayal of the character has been--but also how, despite what some foolish contrarians insist, big commercial films and the careers they make have been about franchises, rather than stars, and sticking with a successful actor-character combination (like Jackman as Wolverine) what makes for a Big Name.
Cory Doctorow's Latest at Pluralistic
I have long found Cory Doctorow a breath of fresh air in a dialogue where discussion of his areas of concentration are dominated by copyright Nazis and Silicon Valley hype-mongerers. And I am pleased to say that in spite of standing by positions anathema to the prejudices of the mainstream media he has now and then managed to secure a platform there from time to time. (I was recently surprised to find his writing on the "enshittification of everything" in the Financial Times.) Still, one would see only very little of what he produces in such places--Doctorow writing prolifically at his own site, Pluralistic, where I consistently find his posts worth not a mere skim, but a proper, word-for-word read.
Of course, having said that some of the pieces are more impressive than others. Last month I was most impressed with his posting on the artificial intelligence bubble, which seems to me even more timely now than it was amid the skyrocketing price of NVIDIA stock).
This month is not quite over at the time of this writing, but I think it safe to say that for me the winner is Doctorow's piece on the demise of Vice, which Doctorow very ably connects with, contrary to the idiot lies peddled by market populism-singing snake oil salesmen for Big Tech back in the absolutely deranged and deranging 1990s, the sewer of predatory practice that the Internet became--inevitably, given that the hard realities of power simply do not cease to operate at the edge of cyberspace.
Of course, having said that some of the pieces are more impressive than others. Last month I was most impressed with his posting on the artificial intelligence bubble, which seems to me even more timely now than it was amid the skyrocketing price of NVIDIA stock).
This month is not quite over at the time of this writing, but I think it safe to say that for me the winner is Doctorow's piece on the demise of Vice, which Doctorow very ably connects with, contrary to the idiot lies peddled by market populism-singing snake oil salesmen for Big Tech back in the absolutely deranged and deranging 1990s, the sewer of predatory practice that the Internet became--inevitably, given that the hard realities of power simply do not cease to operate at the edge of cyberspace.
Madame Web's Second Weekend
Following its underwhelming Valentine's Day debut Boxoffice Pro predicted a 59 percent drop in box office gross for Madame Web from its first weekend to its second, leaving it with about $6.3 million collected and a total of $35.5 million in the till after twelve days.
This was pretty close to what happened, the movie dropping 61 percent and taking in $6 million--rather than surprising the pessimists with a strong hold as it went on to redeem itself Elemental-style, or a dramatically worse-than-expected hold driving home the sense of catastrophic failure, instead simply living down to the low expectations for a film already deemed a franchise-ending flop.
Interestingly this is all as the box office shows signs of life, with the Bob Marley musical biopic the strongest earner 2024 has produced so far--while once again Japanese imports, particularly of the animated kind, score according to their more modest standard, the new Demon Slayer release living up to expectations with a gross of almost $12 million. Still, for the time being it seems unlikely that February 2024 will come close to matching the box office gross of February 2023, testifying to the generally depressed condition of the market, a significant part of the story of which is the extreme difference between Madame Web (12 days on, still a long way from the $50 million mark) and Ant-Man 3--which, for all the grumbling at the time, was a $200 million+ hit of the kind Disney-Marvel and everyone else only wish they had now. (What a difference a year makes.)
This was pretty close to what happened, the movie dropping 61 percent and taking in $6 million--rather than surprising the pessimists with a strong hold as it went on to redeem itself Elemental-style, or a dramatically worse-than-expected hold driving home the sense of catastrophic failure, instead simply living down to the low expectations for a film already deemed a franchise-ending flop.
Interestingly this is all as the box office shows signs of life, with the Bob Marley musical biopic the strongest earner 2024 has produced so far--while once again Japanese imports, particularly of the animated kind, score according to their more modest standard, the new Demon Slayer release living up to expectations with a gross of almost $12 million. Still, for the time being it seems unlikely that February 2024 will come close to matching the box office gross of February 2023, testifying to the generally depressed condition of the market, a significant part of the story of which is the extreme difference between Madame Web (12 days on, still a long way from the $50 million mark) and Ant-Man 3--which, for all the grumbling at the time, was a $200 million+ hit of the kind Disney-Marvel and everyone else only wish they had now. (What a difference a year makes.)
Just How Much Do Streaming Shows Get Watched After Their Run?
Last year Kimiko Glenn's sharing her residual check for her work on the hit Netflix show Orange is the New Black during the actors' (and writer's) strike on TikTok got a lot of attention.
The document she presented showed that for her 44 episodes of work on the show that quarter she got . . . $27.30 cents.
This was, of course, reflective of just how tough those within that profession have it--even those who may seem as if they have "made it" (such as one would assume to be the case with someone appearing in so much of a hit series).
Yet, especially given the comparative novelty and obscurity of the process by which success in streaming is evaluated (it is a lot harder to judge this than, for instance, box office gross or Nielsen ratings), it has also occurred to me that it may reflect the changing dynamics of "content" transmission.
Again, there was a time when reruns of hit shows (and even not-so-hit shows) were a much more significant part of the viewing and pop cultural diet of the public. This was why we all knew that a beard like Mr. Spock has in "Mirror, Mirror" indicates the evil version of such a character; why wherever we go people still reference Seinfeld and the "golden age" of The Simpsons; why making feature films out of, for example, The Addams Family or Mission: Impossible seemed like a plausible basis for a hit.
It was all part of a less crowded, less fragmented, media world than the one we now live in--where people watched the same shows over and over again, the contents became a part of their frame of reference, and that in turn kept people looking at them, especially insofar as they still had a limited range of options (fewer channels, carrying less original new material, and so filling their hours with a good deal of old content). By contrast the way content made for premium streaming especially is fenced off from all but the subscribing audience (in contrast with old sitcoms that you might just run into on multiple channels) makes it less accessible to begin with; the hyper-abundance of options at all times that always includes a veritable onslaught of new choices; and perhaps the slighter "rewatch" value of what we get in an age which seems to have forgotten all about, or rejected, old-fashioned easy viewing and its pleasures; makes it harder and harder for anything to entrench itself "in the zeitgeist," either on a first airing or through being seen over and over again.
The result is that while I do not doubt for a moment the exploitative character of contemporary production, Ms. Glenn's check may also, in its way, hint that just a few years on that show millions were watching is being looked at it comparatively little, certainly in comparison with those old staples of prime time TV that became staples of non-prime TV in time.
The document she presented showed that for her 44 episodes of work on the show that quarter she got . . . $27.30 cents.
This was, of course, reflective of just how tough those within that profession have it--even those who may seem as if they have "made it" (such as one would assume to be the case with someone appearing in so much of a hit series).
Yet, especially given the comparative novelty and obscurity of the process by which success in streaming is evaluated (it is a lot harder to judge this than, for instance, box office gross or Nielsen ratings), it has also occurred to me that it may reflect the changing dynamics of "content" transmission.
Again, there was a time when reruns of hit shows (and even not-so-hit shows) were a much more significant part of the viewing and pop cultural diet of the public. This was why we all knew that a beard like Mr. Spock has in "Mirror, Mirror" indicates the evil version of such a character; why wherever we go people still reference Seinfeld and the "golden age" of The Simpsons; why making feature films out of, for example, The Addams Family or Mission: Impossible seemed like a plausible basis for a hit.
It was all part of a less crowded, less fragmented, media world than the one we now live in--where people watched the same shows over and over again, the contents became a part of their frame of reference, and that in turn kept people looking at them, especially insofar as they still had a limited range of options (fewer channels, carrying less original new material, and so filling their hours with a good deal of old content). By contrast the way content made for premium streaming especially is fenced off from all but the subscribing audience (in contrast with old sitcoms that you might just run into on multiple channels) makes it less accessible to begin with; the hyper-abundance of options at all times that always includes a veritable onslaught of new choices; and perhaps the slighter "rewatch" value of what we get in an age which seems to have forgotten all about, or rejected, old-fashioned easy viewing and its pleasures; makes it harder and harder for anything to entrench itself "in the zeitgeist," either on a first airing or through being seen over and over again.
The result is that while I do not doubt for a moment the exploitative character of contemporary production, Ms. Glenn's check may also, in its way, hint that just a few years on that show millions were watching is being looked at it comparatively little, certainly in comparison with those old staples of prime time TV that became staples of non-prime TV in time.
Wall Street is Acting Like the Singularity is Here (Again)
A couple of years ago, considering in hindsight the way that the capitalization of the stock market exploded in 1994-1999 (growing 20 percent a year), it seemed to me that in its "irrational exuberance" Wall Street was acting as if the Singularity had arrived.
So does it seem to me now as the price of NVIDIA's stock soars.
Where its share price was $50-$60 at the end of 2019, and amid the ups and downs of the subsequent pandemic (which had its share of financial insanity as the Federal Reserve turned on the monetary spigot--remember the Gamestop stock foolishness?) topped out at about $300 before dropping into the $100-$200 range in late 2022, has surged from that point to stand at $788 now, more than ten times its late 2019 value even after adjustment for inflation.
The story goes that this is all because NVIDIA's prominence as a maker of AI (Artificial Intelligence) chips.
It is probable that very, very few of those involved in these machinations have any idea what AI chips actually are, but they are excited because they know they have something to do with artificial intelligence, hype about which has gone through the roof and beyond since Open AI's release of Chat-GPT amid a frenzy of media claquing (with even the "awful warning" stuff of the credulous Ezra Klein variety playing its part), and that is good enough for them.
For now.
For my part, I remain, as I was last year, less impressed with the technology and its possibilities, Cory Doctorow summing up the situation all too succinctly when he observe[s] that "we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job," as you are likely reminded every time you call customer service, get a phone tree, and then beg to talk to a human.
So does it seem to me now as the price of NVIDIA's stock soars.
Where its share price was $50-$60 at the end of 2019, and amid the ups and downs of the subsequent pandemic (which had its share of financial insanity as the Federal Reserve turned on the monetary spigot--remember the Gamestop stock foolishness?) topped out at about $300 before dropping into the $100-$200 range in late 2022, has surged from that point to stand at $788 now, more than ten times its late 2019 value even after adjustment for inflation.
The story goes that this is all because NVIDIA's prominence as a maker of AI (Artificial Intelligence) chips.
It is probable that very, very few of those involved in these machinations have any idea what AI chips actually are, but they are excited because they know they have something to do with artificial intelligence, hype about which has gone through the roof and beyond since Open AI's release of Chat-GPT amid a frenzy of media claquing (with even the "awful warning" stuff of the credulous Ezra Klein variety playing its part), and that is good enough for them.
For now.
For my part, I remain, as I was last year, less impressed with the technology and its possibilities, Cory Doctorow summing up the situation all too succinctly when he observe[s] that "we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job," as you are likely reminded every time you call customer service, get a phone tree, and then beg to talk to a human.
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