If Hollywood wasn’t so woke and scared, they would get a backbone and produce a movie about ICE. Now, obviously, there is a lot of lag time between when something becomes big and when Hollywood gets around to making a movie about it.
And, yet, I don’t know, you’d think someone, somewhere in Hollywood could maybe write a scifi novel that, in metaphor, addressed what is going on with ICE right now.
Maybe it’s being produced as we speak. But Hollywood is supposed to generate catharsis for us on a collective psychological basis, so if it’s being thought up, chop, chop, hurry up.
While it’s really scary to think that Hollywood may be about to implode because of AI, I think actors as a profession should be fine. The transition will be turbulent, but once we reached the AI Hollywood Singularity, all the actors who lose their job because of AI will go into live theatre that will pick up the slack.
I think this will be the biggest change in Hollywood since the advent of the talkies.
So, what will happen is, instead of going to Hollywood, actors will want to go to Broadway. And, as such, the local live theatre will see a huge influx of actors as people want something that is real and live in real life.
That, at least, is the most hopeful outcome.
I suppose that it’s possible that people just want care and the entire Hollywood industry will implode and, lulz, their won’t be any jobs for actors at all. That’s kind of the dystopian outcome.
Oh boy. So, this novel is about a sexbot that, at the inciting incident, presents our hero with a proposal so he can “subscribe” to her. Now, I have only gradually come to realize how dark this particular proposal is.
It was just something I stumble across in the process of thinking about how I, a broke ass writer, might be able to have a replicant-like being in my life at some point in the not too distant future.
My only concern is that the novel is a little too dark for its own good and my hero is going to come across as an asshole for accepting the proposal at all. I can just see the vocal woke cancel culture mob people saying *I* am an asshole for writing the novel at all.
And, yet, the novel isn’t, like Girl With The Dragon Tattoo dark. It’s more One Battle After Another dark. It’s funny enough — or I at least hope and think it is — that some of the darkness will be offset by how surreal and amusing some other elements of the novel are meant to be.
One thing is for sure — there will be no sex work in whatever other, new novel I end up working on going forward. I’m cool to wallow in talking about it with this novel because it gives the novel its point and, best of all, stakes, but I’m growing tired of people thinking my work is trash because I talk about sex work.
If macro, megatrends continue the path they’re on now — Hollywood is totally cooked. To the point that within 10 years, young would-be starlets will go not to Los Angeles and Hollywood, but, instead to New York City and the lights of Broadway.
“Hollywood” as we know it, will be replaced with high quality AI generate media that is indistinguishable from what humans produce today. My go-to scenario is you will be able to come home from work (if those still exist for humans), tell your Knowledge Navigator what you want to see and it will whip up, on the fly, a new Star Wars movie with you as the hero and everything will be only vaguely connected to the broader Star Wars universe.
I’m not being all that original at this point to pontificate on such things, but I do think the only way Hollywood as we current know it exists in 10 to 20 years is specific legal carveouts for humans. That’s it, without carveouts, Hollywood as we know is a sinking ship.
But we live in an era — at the moment — when weak-willed plutocrats run the show in an autocratic social environment, so I have my doubts that even Hollywood could convince, say, Elon Musk, that it is worth saving.
I did not like the movie Marty Supreme. I think my dislike comes from how peripatetic the storytelling was. It was just event after event after event without any time for the beats to properly land.
This is different from a similar movie, One Battle After Another, which was far more of a slow burn. There were major beats, then a little bit of a breather and so forth.
Also, I really did not like the hero. I get that that was part of the point — that he was a snot nose kid making a lot of mistakes and the “hero’s journey” was him sort of spiraling out of control. But I just did not like or care about him.
Yes, he leaves a wake of interesting disasters behind him, but…so what? Why should I care?
I will admit that some of my annoyance with the movie comes from thinking it was going to be a rousing, crowd pleasing tale about ping pong. Sort of a “miracle on ice” only with ping-pong.
Instead, meh. Just meh.
Given how…low stakes…ping pong is, you’d think at least we would be given a likeable hero who, against all odds, won the big championship. I left before the very end, so….maybe in some sense he did? But from what I’ve read on Wikipedia, that does not, in any real sense, seem to be the case.
I just found the whole endeavor grating on my nerves. There was a good to great movie lurking somewhere in the plot of Marty Supreme, but too bad we got what we got instead.
Where to begin with this one. I went into Marty Supreme largely blind. I knew it was a movie about ping-pong and that was about it. Well, jokes on me because it turned out it was more about the disastrous life of a 23-year-old asshole.
I was expecting a rousing, audience pleasing tale of a young man making it big in the world of professional ping-pong. But, lulz, that’s not at all what happened. It just seemed like a succession of poor decisions on the part of the hero.
I didn’t care about the characters. I didn’t care about the sport. So about 90% in I walked out. Maybe the last 10% of the movie gave me what I expected, but I had better things to do, so I don’t know.
Anyway, I struggle to understand why people think Marty Supreme is such a great movie. Every time I think I’ve gotten a handle on it, it slips through my grasp. The ending must have been a lot better than I expected for everyone to love the movie so much.
I just found the experience tiresome and grating on my nerves.
I was impressed with the latest Knives Out mystery. It was a pretty good and it was interesting how the movie threaded the needle when it came to touchstone “woke” issues.
It was able to address “woke” bullshit in a way that did not consume the plot, which was good. There were some light allusions to “woke” stuff, but it was played for comic effect.
Anyway. I really enjoyed the movie. More of that, Hollywood!
I think the Netflix bid to buy Warner Bros Discovery could herald the last stage of Hollywood before AI causes all of showbiz to implode into some sort of AI Singularity, leaving only live theatre behind.
So, it could be that the next wave of consolidation in the near future will be tech companies buying Hollywood studios. And, then that will lead to AI taking over and we all just get IP that is transformed by AI into some sort of content that is personalized for us individually.
Or not.
Who knows. It is a very interesting idea, though. It just seems that tech companies are the ultimate successor to media companies, so, say, Apple might buy Disney and so forth.
I’m a little uneasy that my dream of being a traditional published author just is not possible. It’s may just not be possible because I’m too old, live in the middle of nowhere and am a self-avowed loudmouth crank.
I used to think I had enough “rizz” that “normal” people would at least humor me. But, now, I’m growing concerned that I could write the fucking Bible and the “normal” “serious” liberal white women who probably make up (or at least do in my imagination) most literary agents will take one look at places like this blog and run away from me as fast as possible.
I’m not picking on them. And it’s not really there fault — I just can’t help that I’m a kook. I am who I am and it’s taken me way too long to get where I need to be with this novel.
The key problem with the movie Jay Kelly is it’s a movie devoted to explicating rich people problems. And not in an interesting way. The first half of the movie is just a breezy affair where there’s no there there.
There’s just no conflict.
So, if I were to given the opportunity to “fix” the movie Jay Kelly, here’s what I would do. I would infuse some of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine movie into the plot. I’d figure out some way to have the hero get out of his comfort zone. Confront that not everyone is thrilled with how fucking rich he is.
I’d do this by either having him go to, say, a Thanksgiving celebration where he met his “loser” brother, or maybe put the hero in a situation where he’s on the cusp of losing everything for some reason. Or maybe have Jay Kelly fall in love with a lower middle class woman with some principle and pluck who he can’t woo by just throwing money at the problem.
I’d do something so there were some…stakes. The actual real movie Jay Kelly has little or no stakes. Things just happen. The second half of the movie does have something happen, but it’s still meh in my book.
I think the movie is a prime example of what’s wrong with Hollywood. Because of the fucking massive structural income inequality in the United States’ economy, the rich people who would otherwise make movies that people might want to actually see are either too fucking woke, or woo or oblivious to focus on telling a good story.
Anyway. I would like to thank Claude LLM for listening to me gripe about how bad Jay Kelly was as I watched it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.