This week, Glenn and Daniel escape the doldrums of 2020 with a mind-bending, reality-warping thriller from I Origins director Mike Cahill, Bliss, now available on Amazon Prime. And then we gaze across the world at India, a country currently engaged in the largest protest in human history, through the eyes of a Booker Prize-winning novel adapted by director Ramin Bahrani, The White Tiger. This film, which we described as having “a chip on its shoulder and a swagger in its step,” is now available on Netflix. (01:02:57).

May contain NSFW language.

FilmWonk rating (Bliss): 8 out of 10
FilmWonk rating (The White Tiger): 8 out of 10

Show notes:

• [01:25] Review: Bliss
• [12:33] Spoilers: Bliss
• [25:10] Review: The White Tiger
• [45:53] Spoilers: The White Tiger
• The “Thought Visualizer” depicted in Bliss is just barely still science-fiction, but the technology that could power such a device in the future does exist today. Check out the OpenAI Multimodal Research frameworks, including DALL-E, a neural network which can create images based on a text description, and CLIP, which can generate a text description from a photo (and these networks were, in turn, used to train and validate each other). I’d suggest you start with the DALL-E demo, especially if you’re eager to see what a giraffe/walrus hybrid, or a cat made of fried chicken, or a pig made of cucumbers looks like.
• Check out Rohan Naahar‘s review of The White Tiger in the Hindustan Times for one Indian critic’s take on the film, which obviously picked up on some details we missed. NPR also interviewed a number of regular people who have experienced poverty in India for their takes on the film, which are expectedly wide-ranging. The /Filmcast (with David Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Jeff Cannata) had an excellent discussion as well.
• CORRECTION: We referred to the 2016 Indian banknote demonetization, which – as you might expect, we oversimplified a bit. Same goes for the Citizenship Amendment of 2019.
• CORRECTION: While the caste system is deliberately simplified in The White Tiger, the Halwai caste (which Balram was born into) is briefly defined in the film – it was traditionally associated with confectionery and sweet-making.

Listen above, or download: Bliss, The White Tiger (right-click, save as, or click/tap to play)