Tag: Burn Hollywood Burn

How James Cameron Could Have For Sure Made His $2 Billion With Avatar 2 — The Way Of Water

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Overall, Avatar 2 — The Way Of Water was….good. Maybe not great, but it was definitely good. Though I have to admit that it took a lot of willpower not to leave after I had used its distraction to figure out some issues with the development of the novel I continue to be obsessed with.

If Cameron had really wanted to reach his $2 billion haul, he should have really leaned into making the Red State “Star People” a bit more nuanced and complex. Give them more moral justification for what they were doing other than “Earth is dying.” Make them more human in a way that there were a few red meat dog whistles for MAGA Nazis. Had he done that, the politics of the movie would have been a lot more even handed — at least in the eyes of MAGA Nazis — and they probably would have driven the movie’s success into the $2 billion range.

But here are my complains about the actual story, rather than any political quibbles.

It’s Too Long
This movie is just way too long. I understand that it’s supposed to evoke awe in the audience with all its high-tech image shit, but yawn. Too long. It got really, really slow at times. I did a lot of eye rolling and watch checking. Repeatedly. Again and again. I would much rather it be a tight two hours than a three hour self-indulgent trip through James Cameron psche. There was a really good movie floating around in all that way of water bullshit, but Cameron was just too obsessed with being a show off to let it be seen.

It Draws Too Much From The Cameronverse
Over and over again there were call backs to previous James Cameron movies in this movie. A conspicuous amount. Some of it, it seemed, was an effort to show that he could top himself by doing really difficult shit in water. When I first started noticing all the callbacks, I thought it was fun. Then it became distracting because it was happening so much. There were call backs to The Abyss, Aliens, Terminator 2 and Titanic strone across the three hours of the movie. Give it a rest, Jimmy!

Could A Chatbot Win An Oscar?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

We are rushing towards a day when humanity may be faced with the issue of the innate monetary value of human created art as opposed to that generated by non-human actors. If most (bad) art pretty much just uses a formula, then that formula could be fed into a chatbot or eventually an AGI and….then what? If art generated by an chatbot or an AI equal to a bad human generated movie…does that require than we collectively give more monetary value to good art created by humans?

While the verdict is definitely still out on that question, my hunch is that the arts may be about to have a significant disruption. Within a few years (2029?) the vast majority of middling art, be it TV shows, novels or movies, could be generated simply by prompting a chatbot or AGI to created it. So, your average airport bookstore potboiler will be written by a chatbot or AGI, not a human. But your more literary works might (?) remain the exclusive domain of human creators.

As and aside — we definitely need a catchy names to distinguish between art created by AGIs and that created by humans. I suppose “artisanal” art might be something to used to delineate the two. But the “disruption” I fear to the arts is going to have a lot of consequences as it’s taking place — we’re just not going to know what’s going to happen at first. There will be no value, no narrative to the revolution and it will only be given one after the fact — just like all history.

It could be really scary to your typical starving (human) artist as all of this being shaken out. There will be a lot of talk about how it’s the end of human created art…and then we’re probably going to pull back from that particular abyss and some sort of middle ground will be established.

At least, I hope so.

Given how dumb and lazy humans are collectively, human generated art could endup something akin to vinyl records before you know it. It will exist, but just as a narrow sliver of what the average media consumer watches or reads. That sounds rather dystopian, I know, but usually we gravitate towards the lowest common denominator.

That’s why the Oscars usually nominate art house films that no one actually watches in the real world. In fact, the Oscars might even be used, one day, as a way to point out exclusively human-generated movies. That would definitely be one way for The Academy to live long and prosper.

The ‘Purple’ Politics Of Blue People: James Cameron’s ‘Avatar — The Way Of Water’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

My New Year’s Resolution / change as I turn 50 is that I’m going to stop walking out of movies so quickly. As such, I watched the entirety of Avatar — The Way Of Water even though I was very unhappy to be there for much of the time. Not that it was a bad movie, it’s just the moment I understood what was going on I found the whole thing very boring from my own personal storytelling metrics. And maybe it wasn’t even that it was “boring” per se, so much as there was no need for that movie to be as long as it was.

You could have easily made that movie 2 hours and it would have been a much, much better movie. There was just too much self-indulgent padding in it for my liking.

But that’s not what this post is about — it’s about the native politics of the movie. Is the movie “woke?” That is a very good question that is not as easy to answer as you might think. Cameron uses my favorite storytelling tool — subtext — to tell a pretty New Age-ie type story about the Gaia theory set on a different planet. And there’s a lot of “noble savage” floating around in the movie as well.

And, yet, there is also a lot of hoo-rah military porn in there Red State people. Just its presence is enough for jarheads who go see the movie with their girlfriends to get off on it — even if it’s presented in a negative light. I don’t think, however, that Reds would process it as “being bad.” They would just root for the “star people” to win the battle with the blue “noble savages.” In fact, if anything, the fact that “star people” get their comeuppance in the end is the thing that will make Reds the most upset about the movie and suspect that Cameron is being “woke.”

But I think some of some of it is Cameron isn’t “woke” so much as he has a pretty good sense of the expectations of modern audiences and, as such, he felt he couldn’t go totally in the direction of either Reds or Blues.

I liked the movie…I guess? I just thought it was way, way, way too long. I do find it interesting that Cameron found a way to placate both sides of the political debate — in a way.

Burn Hollywood Burn: Death By AGI Logline

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The conventional wisdom is that there is going to be a massive Hollywood writers’ strike in 2023 because of the rise of the popularity of streaming. If the leaders of that strike had some foresight they would add something else to their list of demands: a ban on the use of AGI to develop and write movies and TV.

Because if they don’t do something about the use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its successors producing media, the very notion of what it means to be a showbiz writer might be revolutionized — and not in a good way. Instead of hiring potentially hundreds of people to develop, write and produce movies, movie studios will simply get an exec to sit down in front a computer and write a logline.

A few moments later, an entire two hour computer generated movie pops out.

I know this sounds extremely hysterical, but it’s better to get such a ban now instead of waiting when the transformation has already begun and Hollywood writers will lack any leverage to get their will.

But no one listens to me. I’m just an aspiring novelist in the middle of nowhere. It will be interesting to see, however, what comes of Hollywood when the only person who is needed is someone to walk the Red Carpet.

The Rise Of AI Hacks

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

This is all very speculative, of course, but what if the very thing we think is exclusively human — the arts — is the first thing that is “disrupted” by hard AI? How long is it before we watch a movie written by an AI, using AI generated actors and using an AI generated musical score?

I’m not saying any of that would be all that great, but then, the vast majority of screenplays and music are kind of hackish.

I guess what I’m wondering is, will there be anything left that is uniquely enough human that an AI can’t do it if not better, then at least formulaically? A lot of younger people in Hollywood have to struggle making bad movies for years before they can produce something really good.

What if the vast majority of “good enough” art of any sort is generated by a hard AI that simply knows the tried and true formula? Will audiences even care if the latest MCU movie is completely AI generated? Of course, the legal implications of who owns an AI generated actor would be huge, but not insurmountable.

I think there will be a lot of gnashing of teeth the moment hard AI can generate screenplays. That is going to make a lot of very well paid creative types in Hollywood scream bloody murder to the point where they may attempt, neo-Luddite style to ban the practice altogether. I don’t see that working, however. The moment it’s possible, the Hollywood studios will abuse it like crazy because they can save a lot of money.

But, to be honest, I struggle to think of ANYTHING that some combination of hard AI and robotics won’t be able to do better than a human at some point. We need to start asking how we’re going to address that possibility now, instead of letting MAGA somehow use it to turn us in to fascist state.

We’re Overdue For A Culture ‘Vibe Shift’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It feels like on a certain level that American pop culture is stuck on the morning of Sept 12, 2001. There have been gradual “vibe shifts” now and again over the last 20 years, but for some reason the last two decades have been rather meh on the pop culture front.

As I’ve written before, the 80s were so rambunctious that the early 80s were very, very different from the late 80s. But in real terms, American pop culture is still in a hazy-post 9/11 world. Superhero movies are huge. There really hasn’t been an technological advancement since the advent of the iPhone. And, for all intents and purposes, pop culture is rather bland.

Now, I don’t know how much of that is just I’m old and grumpy and how much of that is real. But it definitely feels as though American pop culture is ripe for a dramatic shift of some sort.

Of course, it’s possible that all of this will be very moot starting 2025 when we we either have a civil war or slip peacefully into autocracy. That’s something we really have to keep in the back of our minds going forward. But it is possible that between now and then popular tastes will change.

And the way we’ll know it’s happened is when a comedy or a war movie or whatever that was released without any fanfare becomes huge out of the blue and Hollywood (and pop culture) turns on a dime and embraces the new the cultural zeitgeist.

But, like I said, it could be that I’m just old. It could be that pop tastes have changed for good and this is just the new normal we have to live in.

Of ‘The Slap,’ Zoe Kravitz & The Mainstream Zeitgeist


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now, let me be clear — I’m trying to pick my words very carefully so I give maximum empathy to the African American community as a middle aged CIS white male. And, honestly, in an ideal world, I wouldn’t even touch this subject, but The Slap has now officially transcended pop culture to enter the mainstream zeitgeist.

As such, it’s a subject that is both very touchy and something that we need to talk about.

Ok, here’s what I believe is happening with The Slap. From what I can tell, the African American community wants to handle this event themselves. They want to process what happened in their own way and at their own speed. And, yet, at the same time a lot of white people are using The Slap to make points, some of them racist. This aggravates and antagonizes the African American community that is still in shock and doesn’t need the help of white people to figure out what it all means.

So, in a sense, I know The Slap may now have legs because a similar dynamic to the OJ Trial has begun to swirl around The Slap. The white community’s take on what happened and the African American community’s take on what happened are now beginning to diverge greatly.

While not all of the white outrage as to what happened is racist, a lot of it is. What’s more, a lot of fucking racist MAGA New Right assholes believe they can get away with using their outrage over The Slap for a blanket indictment of not just the African American community, but the white liberals of Hollywood, too.

Another sign that we’ve entered a new phase in the discourse around The Slap is people like Zoe Kravitz have come out in support of Chris Rock and Black Twitter has attacked her, pointing out her perceived hypocrisy on assault. I think it has something to do with Alexander Wang.

Zoe Kravitz

The nuance of Black Twitter’s anger towards Kravitz is something I continue to struggle with. Or, put another way, there’s something going on that I as a white CIS male don’t really have the right to root around in.

But, unfortunately for everyone in envolved, now that we’re in a new phase of Slap discourse, things are going to get more and more corrosive and divisive because white America is beginning to see what happened in a totally different way than African American community and people like Ms. Kravitz are stuck in the middle.

Or something. What do I know.

Anyway, I think The Slap is now going to simmer on the pop culture front and the law of unintended consequences is going to kick in. It will be interesting to see what the ultimate endgame for The Slap will be.

I Believe The Zendaya – Tom Holland Relationship Is A Lie

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have no inside information, but the so-called “relationship” between Zendaya and Tom Holland seems like a bullshit PR stunt. I’m sure they like each other as friends and co-starts, but I just don’t see Zendaya dating someone like Holland. It doesn’t fit her vibe.

He’s just too nice.

Seems like Zendaya would want an older bad boy with a little bit more edge. And, as I understand it all the Spidermen in the franchise have “dated” their co-stars, so, lulz.

But I could be wrong. I usually am. It just seems like this relationship is a little too pat and convenient for everyone involved.

Movie Pitch: A Romcom Based On Digital Telepathy


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have too much on my plate creatively to do anything with this, but here’s a fragment of a movie idea that someone, somewhere should do something with. The idea has a touch of magical realism to in a vein similar to The Enteral Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Same same, but different.

The idea is that there’s an app that not only can read your mind, but also manipulate you. So, what happens is our hero keeps seeing a woman who is perfect for him, the love of his life, on his For You Page, but she lives in NYC. But he knows if he ever met her in person, they would fall in love — or at least he would.

So, the plot is something like, he studies the young woman, travels to NYC and they meet. He uses what he’s seen from her videos to strike up a relationship with her.

Now, this is the point where I don’t know what happens. I like the idea that the couple realizes that the app (a Tik-Tok clone) really is reading their minds and they have some sort of adventure together to prove this to the rest of the world.

Or something. Something like that.

Back to mulling my five thriller novels.

Mulling Jon Hamm’s Reboot Of Fletch



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One of my favorite easy read novels growing up was the Fletch series of mysteries. They’re a lot of fun and funny. So, I’m keenly interested in what Jon Hamm’s take on the character will be.

Image by EW Magazine

Apparently, he’s working on a new Fletch movie, “Confess, Fletch.” There are a lot of really great novels in the series. My personal favorite is “Fletch And The Man Who.” But all the novels are great because they’re so short you can finish them virtually in one setting and they’ve got a very wry sense of humor to them.

Of all the actors out there, I think Hamm is one of the better suited. But I think in an ideal world, a Fletch movie would be done by someone like Greta Gerwig. The movies have been a little too broad in their humor for my tastes and don’t really reflect the tone of the novels.

Anyway. I’m looking forward to it.