This week, Glenn and Daniel once again had a busy week as a Marvel film came out for us to review by itself, and we promise that’s a coincidence. Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao tries to tell a tale as old as time and bring a new superhero team to life. Tune in as we give Eternals more credit for ambition than execution, in that good, Chronicles of Riddick sort of way (49:43).
May contain NSFW language.
FilmWonk rating: 6 out of 10
Show notes:
[01:36] Review: Eternals
[25:53] Review: Eternals
Listen above, or download: Eternals (right-click, save as, or click/tap to play)
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: 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)
On this week’s podcast, Glenn and Daniel return from a familial hiatus to check out The Hummingbird Project, a film about laying a more reliable fiber optic line for faster data transmission to game the stock market, so the irony wasn’t lost on us when Daniel had connectivity issues and was only able to watch the first 20 minutes. But you know Jesse Eisenberg will be involved, even if you’re a bit more prepared in advance for his tragic, greedy, tech-infused salesman to also be a diabolical dick. And then we check out an ensemble military heist film from the team behind The Hurt Locker along with director J.C. Chandor, Triple Frontier, an action film with some surprising moral and character depth that feels a bit too big for Netflix (01:00:50).
May contain NSFW language.
FilmWonk rating (The Hummingbird Project): 7 out of 10 (Glenn)
FilmWonk rating (Triple Frontier): 7.5/10 (Glenn), 6/10 (Daniel)
Show notes:
[00:34] Review: The Hummingbird Project
[06:26] Spoilers: The Hummingbird Project
[28:38] Review: Triple Frontier
[41:46] Spoilers: Triple Frontier
Music for this episode is the tracks “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan, from the soundtrack for Bumblebee, and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica, from the soundtrack to Triple Frontier.
The scene we remembered from The Hurt Locker actually featured Jeremy Renner wandering all over the grocery store, first on the frozen aisle, and ending on the cereal aisle, which seems to be the source of the callback in Triple Frontier.
FilmWonk 