She handled this very well, but I was internally screaming when this question was asked. Incredible Q&A otherwise.
If you haven't read a book recently, pick one up. If you've been favoring non-fiction for some time, try a novel. I promise you it will likely be worth your time.
I've never seen more of an effort to sell an imaginary product than with this bullshit. As just demonstrated by the Pitt / Cruise AI fight scene, these models still need large amounts of reference to build even a few seconds of footage (and the end result is of questionable use to professionals!)
Fortunately for Washington Post, the President has never said that Democrats are "crazy" or "destroying the country". Imagine if he'd said something like that less than a week ago during the State of the Union!
Just imagine.
You can get them directly from the payroll company’s site (EP or Cast&Crew)
"The McPherson Tape" is an early (some argue the first) "found footage" film about a rural family's encounter with extraterrestrials. Its shot-on-VHS, rough around the edges quality was so effective at selling the aliens that the tape was sold in many markets as evidence of an encounter.
"Goké, Body Snatcher from Hell" -- you already know if you're interested from that title and the still below. Survivors of a plane crash must deal with alien-possessed vampires on an uncharted island.
Keeping up the camp cannibalism is "Eating Raoul", Paul Bartel's dark comedy about the lengths a repressed couple will go to realize their dream of opening a restaurant. Always love seeing who picks this one in their Criterion closet videos (Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Baker, and Wallace Shawn grabbed it)
"Motel Hell" is what my mother would affectionately call "a drive-in movie." This film stuck in her memory, and I remember her excitement at finding it at the video store. A delightfully strange and campy film about a farmer (Rory Calhoun at his best) famous for his mysterious smoked meats.
It's been a frustrating week with bleak news. Time to recommend some more movies that have fewer than 50k views (or so) on @letterboxd.social.
We're about two months away from RFK Jr. enthusiastically recommending the Grade F Meat from "The Simpsons"
It's incredibly depressing that a studio can come out of a remarkably strong year only to be sold to a company that wouldn't have greenlit many of its biggest critical and commercial hits.
I'll be ready. My legal team includes a highly advanced android that's stymied by Chinese finger traps and contractions. We let him fly the ship sometimes!
I disagree -- making Geordi chief engineer and Worf the head of security finally set clearly defined roles for the main cast. In season one, both characters overlap in responsibilities at either ops or the conn.
It was demolished a little after the show wrapped. I remember driving past it in the first few years I lived in LA and it was in pretty rough shape.
Sacred Heart was demolished and Elliot got pregnant. Both are retconned in the new run.
The Writers Guild Staff Union is on strike, seeking a fair contract. They work tirelessly for us and were a crucial part of our strike; if you can, please donate to their support fund.
The train fight in “From Russia With Love” is such an outlier in those earlier movies. It feels brutal and shockingly contemporary, with little reliance on the awkward judo flip or that two hand hit that was also a go-to move for Captain Kirk.
GPT-5's codename was Strawberry and I'm fairly convinced it was an attempt to make searching "ChatGPT Strawberry" show results hyping their model and not stories about how it is unable to complete a task most grade schoolers could effortlessly handle.
LLMs work by breaking down responses into tokens -- they're taking a guess at what statistically is most likely to follow in an answer. Strawberry breaks down into multiple (usually three) tokens; the error seems to come from counting how many tokens contain an 'r'. Raspberry also causes this error.
The Writers Guild Staff Union is on strike, seeking a fair contract. They work tirelessly for us and were a crucial part of our strike; if you can, please donate to their support fund.
Someone recently uploaded the complete George Lucas’ Super Live Adventure.
And what, you ask, is that? It was a short-lived arena show that combined Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Willow, American Graffiti, and everyone’s favorite Lucas film: Tucker: The Man and His Dreams.
It’s as nuts as it sounds.
Time to start stockpiling Quatloos and leather chest harnesses.
Worf and Jadzia at their wedding.
Congrats to you both!
I have a pitch for your wedding outfits -- have you considered red leather and gold crowns? Think about it.
"Question for the team -- how do remarried widowers poll with voters? ...you know, just in case I have to compete with one."
The darkest recesses of my brain view the pregnancy at the ultimate solution to all of JD's problems -- any complication that removes Usha from the picture makes him more sympathetic to the public while opening a spot for a white Christian woman to step in and raise his kids right.
I am not blind to the ways genAI will encroach into filmmaking. It will change how we do things. To what degree and how beneficial -- or not -- remains to be seen.
But we have to move past this myth of "you'll be able to generate the blockbuster of your personal dreams with a prompt"
Hell, the gulf between 15-seconds and a half-hour episode is immense. It's literally 1% of the runtime of our shortest primetime format.
There's so much more to film / TV than "what's the final idea for the shot?" It's a hundred iterative decisions made daily by a team of creative professionals.
The gulf between a 15 second clip with no meaningful thought behind it other than "what if two A-listers fought in a scene that looks like two dozen movies that'll come out this year alone" and a full-length feature film is much larger than the media or Silicon Valley will ever acknowledge.
Democratic leadership will 100% gladly listen to and not question the integrity of a man who took a $50,000 bribe from undercover FBI agents and suffered zero consequences.
It's crazy the amount of writers -- sometimes big names whose work I admire -- that share links to their Substack with no trace of shame. It's a company knowingly making its money off bigotry and has been for years! Find yourself new hosting that doesn't, it's not like they're the only option.
