#21: Has the internet made us all De Niro in Taxi Driver?
Death By Consumption
9/24/24 - 9/30/24
It's really hard to not feel completely insane these days, isn't it? I don't really have anything more insightful than that to say, unfortunately. It's just, the cognitive dissonance of living your daily life while any time you open your phone you're hit with brutal genocide visuals and/or JD Vance's unpleasantly pinched face... we're all fried! No wonder everyone is so wound up that the collective internet seems to have spent most of the weekend fighting about... Bowen Yang's portrayal of a hippo on SNL? We are a nation of maniacs. October is going to be completely bananas, so please be kind to yourself, by which I mostly mean do not watch the new George Clooney/Brad Pitt movie.
Wolfs (2024) — on Apple TV+
I watched this only a few nights ago and have already nearly forgotten it. The movie serves as a vehicle for George Clooney and alleged child abuser Brad Pitt to do the standard thing they do in every movie now, so the plot doesn't matter, though the movie randomly tries to convince you the plot really matters in the final minutes. Things happen, then more things happen, and throughout it all George and Brad are just George and Brad but with guns. Their characters don't even get names, because everyone knows you won't think of them as anyone other than George and Brad.
Unfortunately for George and Brad, though, the target demographic for this is parents, but my mother went to bed when she saw we still had 30 minutes left in the movie. Not a great sign! Save it for a flight, but not a flight where this is the only movie you have time to watch. This was made for like a 13-hour flight to Tokyo, when you're delirious and airplane wine-drunk and just need some sort of moving images to look at.
Taxi Driver (1976) — on Criterion
Watching this for the first time (I know, I know) in 2024 is a funny experience, because I feel like the internet has made most of us into a version of Travis Bickle. Tell me the difference between De Niro in Taxi Driver and the average Chappell Roan stan. You can't! Instead of driving a taxi until morning and obsessing over a 12-year-old Jodie Foster, people now just stay up all night chugging Celsiuses and commenting "kill yourself" on anything Katy Perry posts, but really it's all the same thing.
Blood and Black Lace (1964) — on Criterion
A killer stalking women at a Roman fashion house is a great concept for a horror film, and this movie pays off the theme by delivering gruesome deaths and absolutely beautiful cinematography. The film was a combined effort of Italian, French, and West German productions, so the actors all just end up speaking English, many of them clearly sounding out the words phonetically, which lends an additional strange air to the whole thing. The movie is very much style over substance, but there's such an abundance of style that you never feel the lack of substance.
And after all, you're not here for performances or plot, you're here for the directing and cinematography, which is stunning from beginning to end. The colors are as bright as candy, to the point where I felt like a damn Sesame Street character, getting excited over the mere concept of colors. I was practically pointing at the screen, like: ooh, look at that magenta! Oh wow, beautiful cyan! In our current bleak age, where most movies are flattened and color graded like Teletubbies so they look better on a phone than a screen, watching this just gave me more pretentious reasons to get mad at Netflix. Bring back interesting colors!
Days of Heaven (1978) — on Criterion
There's nothing quite like the "leaving at the end of the month" section on Criterion to make you finally press play on that old masterpiece you've never seen. This truly is peak Terrence Malick, an entire movie shot during magic hour. It's crazy how Terrence can make a young Richard Gere and waving fields of wheat look equally beautiful.
"Industry" season 3 — on MAX or HBO or whatever it's called
I'm so glad I caught up to this show so I could enjoy the finale live, because what the fuck. Season 3 felt like the show was taking everything it had perfected in seasons 1 and 2 and seeing how far they could push it before it all broke down. We're definitely approaching soap opera territory with some of the characters' plots, but so far I think it all still works. It's fun, it's silly, who cares! Honestly, as long as Yasmin Kara-Hanani continues looking unbelievably glamorous while doing horrible things to men, I'll never stop watching.
Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds (2000) — paperback
Sometimes you just need to read a big, fun space opera, and this one came recommended from my brother-in-law, who listened to the audiobook while trying to cling to sanity during the darker moments of our hike from hell a few weeks ago. As with most hard sci-fi, this was a bit of a beast to get into. I didn't feel like I had any sort of stable footing until nearly 200 pages in, but once I had pulled myself together, the story just took off, burning plot at a wild pace.
It's a true page-turner, but only if you're the kind of person not put off by sentences like: "Somehow the weapon created a soliton — a standing-wave — in the geodesic structure of spacetime.” If you can get through stuff like that, you're rewarded by a propulsive story with endless twists and turns, and the kind of futuristic universe that could only be dreamed up by a clearly very intelligent author who has smoked a lot of weed in his life. This book has: galactic warfare that has been waged for millions of years, bloodthirsty alien robots, a freaky psychic space witch who lives sealed in a sarcophagus, 400-year-old female galactic assassins, and a man who somehow transforms into a living spaceship? All of this is, as they say, extremely my shit.
"Drowning In Slop" by Max Read — in NYMag
This article is a great overview of how the garbage that Max Read terms "AI slop" is quickly destroying the internet, choking it with absolutely useless trash. Take it from someone who works in the ad industry: every single company feels a desperate need to do something with AI right now. It doesn't even matter what, or if it makes sense — just give me something with AI so I can tell our shareholders we're using it, please! But you don't need me to tell you that; anyone who uses Google or Spotify or Twitter or Facebook has had AI slop forced on them by now.
But as this article lays out, it's very disheartening to know that we're quickly entering a world where, say, you can buy a book to learn how to deal with fibromyalgia, without ever realizing that the book is totally AI-generated and full of false or even harmful information. (Did you know that if your doctor uses an online messaging portal like MyChart, it's becoming increasingly likely you're actually messaging with AI instead of your doctor? What could go wrong!)
I honestly think this article doesn't even capture the true breadth of AI slop we're inundated with, or how it's starting to leach into the real world. Last year I stayed in an Airbnb in Chicago which was the most minimally-appointed apartment I'd ever been in (almost no furniture, with only 2 plates, 2 cups, and 2 sets of silverware, which felt contemptuous — aren't these things usually sold in sets of 4?), all clear signs that this property was exclusively rented out and not lived in, like a flophouse. I got creeped out by how false it all felt, especially once the "host" started messaging me with weather updates that were clearly out of date (she kept warning me about a major winter storm that had hit Chicago a week earlier). I then reverse image searched her Airbnb profile photo and found it on, like, every stock photo site in existence.
When I noted in my public review of the property that the host appeared to be communicating through AI and didn't actually seem to exist as a real person, Airbnb deleted my review! I've noted in other reviews some serious infractions, like a host in Paris who made my female friends feel uncomfortable, and Airbnb left that one up, but calling out a completely nonexistent host you never actually interact with was something the company felt the need to hide. It felt like an eerie look at the future, where everything of value is hidden behind shell companies, and you spend all your time dealing with clunky AI personalities who insult your intelligence by insisting they're a real person, and everything keeps getting shittier and shittier while the people in charge of it all squeeze every last dime out of everything on this planet.
On an unrelated note, please don't question things when I start charging for this newsletter and the syntax becomes eerily ChatGPT-esque. It's still me, I promise!