Louis Malle’s “My Dinner with Andre” (1981) begins with the line, “The life of a playwright is tough.”

It’s uttered by Wallace Shawn, playing himself, as his narration follows him as he scrambles down a New York street. Shawn is off to meet his friend Andre Gregory, the actor/director who had been gone for some time and is reuniting with Shawn.

The two meet for dinner in a posh restaurant, the chatter begins and we’re off into a movie unlike any other.

Malle’s film steps inside the creative process. Describing the film, which is mostly an extended conversation between two people and has mostly one location, sounds drier than toast. I avoided the film when I was young, discovered it in college and now recognize how special and one-of-a-kind it is.

Shawn, who is now known worldwide for his performances in “The Princess Bride” (1987) and as Rex in the “Toy Story” franchise (1995-present day), was 36 when he made this.

The opening narration fills us in on where these artists stood at this point in their careers (though both have subsequently noted that, despite the reality of who they are/were, the film is based on reality but not a documentary).

From the very first words uttered, their exchanges are not dull.

Shawn’s narration makes it feel less like a cinematic stunt and more like a filmed play. Once the clever narration ceases, we get into their extensive conversation, which takes some wild turns.

It helps that Gregory has a hypnotic voice and that he and Shawn are such a fascinating contrast. Topics like Chappaquiddick, Bulgakov’s “The Master and the Margarita,” fawns, Gregory’s metaphysical experience and theater’s ability to make a difference all come in and out of focus.

This isn’t claustrophobic, as reflective surfaces and reaction shots make us feel like we’re there, up close and fully engaged. Malle’s film is, of course, not for everyone but not a bore fest, either.

By the time Andre and Wallace (yes, the first Pixar short, “The Adventures of Andre and Wally B” in 1984 is named after them) get to dessert, we arrive at the core element of the discussion. A verbal crossroad is met with Shawn’s skepticism in Gregory’s recollections and Gregory’s embrace of wonder, as Shawn’s response hits upon logical vs spiritual, faith vs the scientific.

Rather than either patron resorting to histrionics or feeling a definitive conclusion on the matter must be met, they both allow the possibilities to dance in our subconscious.

As a film, “My Dinner with Andre” is alive, as the performances, cinematography and editing are at a master-class level.

For diehard fans of “The Princess Bride”: At one point, Shawn does utter the word “inconceivable.” Another fun tidbit is that the production services were provided by none other than Troma, Inc.- Thank you, Uncle Lloydie!
When the two friends bring up AI, the talk it inspires sounds relevant to right now, amazing for a film that is now 45-years old.

A decade ago, I was teaching a Films of the 1980s course at University of Colorado Springs (UCCS) and showed Malle’s film. When it ended, the response from the students was divided, with the ones who loved it admitted to appreciating it more than ever, wanting to sit through it again.

The naysayers couldn’t believe they just sat through a movie about people talking. The class shuffled out and one last student, named John, waited to talk to me. I knew that John was in a band and had a hip sense of humor, but I had no idea what he thought of the film and was not expecting what happened next.

John told me that he thought “My Dinner with Andre” was “the best movie I’ve ever seen.” I laughed, because I assumed he was kidding. He assured me the film was about things he had been thinking about, spoke to where he wanted to go in his life and was deeply connected with him.

On the last day of the class, he reminded his classmates and me that the film was still the best he had ever experienced.

Not every word of Andre and Wallace’s conversation will grab you, but the juiciest parts will stay with you. “My Dinner with Andre” is a film in love with language, people and the experience of being human.

The post ‘My Dinner with Andre’ Made Conversation Cinematic appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Harvey Weinstein’s downfall had a profound silver lining.

Two, actually.

One, the mega producer could no longer mistreat starlets in his orbit. Finally.

Two, his case fueled 2017’s MeToo movement. We knew folks like Weinstein weren’t restricted to Tinsel Town. Boorish men were everywhere, and women bravely took a stand against their collective cruelty.

You didn’t have to be progressive to cheer MeToo on, just a decent human being.

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Except the Hollywood portion of the movement helped bring it down. Yes, Hollywood feminists marched until their feet hurt over Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House. And they raged against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, accused of a botched sexual assault with the flimsiest of evidence.

Yet when Democrats appeared to behave badly, these same stars stood down. Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo and Justin Fairfax were innocent, at least according to the celebrity silence that ensued.

(Fairfax took his own life last month after murdering his wife.)

The Cuomo hypocrisy helped bring the Time’s Up legal group to its knees. The organization, part of the MeToo revolution, actually helped the New York Governor dodge accusations that he was inappropriate with multiple women.

And, through it all, the same Hollywood feminists couldn’t stop Time’s Up from beclowning itself or support Tara Reade, the woman who accused Biden of sexual assault.

“Believe All Women” became, “Well, we shouldn’t necessarily believe women who accused Democrats of a crime…”

Biden accuser Tara Reade: ‘If something happens to me, all roads lead to Joe Biden’ https://t.co/R6CGDjVovL

— Just the News (@JustTheNews) May 8, 2023

Now, Cate Blanchett is mourning MeToo’s demise.

The actress said the movement “got killed very quickly” during a Cannes presser, neglecting to call out her peers’ role in that demise.

“There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say this has happened to me, and the so-called average woman on the street is saying #MeToo. Why does that get shut down?” Blanchett asked. “What [the movement] revealed is a systemic layer of abuse, not only in this industry but in all industries, and if you don’t identify a problem, you can’t solve the problem.”

It’s a complicated issue, and the male/female power imbalance means, regrettably, that the issue will never fade to black.

It’d be nice if Blanchett, or the Legacy Media outlets covering her comments, pointed out the role Hollywood played in its collapse.

Why do you think MeToo flamed out as quickly as it did?

The post Cate Blanchett Mourns MeToo’s End, Ignores Hollywood’s Role appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Samantha Cole, writing for 404 Media:

Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can’t trust anything in the paper.” [...]

“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote. Dietterich told me in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule — meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned — but that decisions will be open to appeal.

I see no cognitive dissonance in being pro-AI, in general, but vehemently anti-slop.

Take a quick look at the most consequential graph of the last two decades, below.

But first, the news: the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Change (i.e., the IPCC, the organisation promoting the Climate Scare) has officially withdrawn the warmist scenario known as RCP8.5.

This is roughly what the IPCC's RCP8.5 predicts:

The “8.5” in RCP8.5 refers to the amount of added solar energy the atmosphere will trap by 2100—specifically, 8.5 watts per square meter. That’s very high—likely to bring about a shocking 5 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels.

RCP8.5 was the kind of climate scenario lurking behind Greta Thunberg’s accusation, in her September 2019 speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, that “we are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” It’s the kind of pathway young people in England were thinking about when they decided they needed to launch “Extinction Rebellion.” It’s been a fundraising bonanza for climate activist groups from Adelaide to Zurich, the main player in every single alarmist climate critique you’ve read in the last 15 years.

And it’s been the default setting for literally thousands of climate science papers—Google Scholar lists more than 30,000 published since 2018 alone. It was from this kind of research that we got lurid papers like “Future of the human climate niche,” where respectable Dutch climate scientists claimed that one in three human beings live in regions that will become unlivable in the next 50 years. It was this kind of research that gave rise to countless breathless headlines about how outdoor labor was about to become impossible across much of the tropical world, and alarmist documentaries claiming the ocean was about to end up without any fish. It was RCP8.5 that turned David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth” into the most read story in the history of New York Magazine, and later propelled the book version to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

The story of RCP8.5 is ultimately the story of what goes wrong when people convinced they are defending “The Science” catastrophically misunderstand how science works, and when politicized activists glom onto legitimate scientific tools and insist on ramming the round peg of probabilistic forecasting into the square hole of fundraising emails.

Yesterday, at Vancouver Websummit — a tech conference here in British Columbia featuring a surprisingly large roster of political commentators — I saw Curtis Yarvin speak. Yarvin is this far-right character who has become a bit of a media darling lately, repeatedly profiled in the prestige press and subject to much of the same dark titillation that characterizes how the liberal intelligentsia so often thinks about right-wing celebrities these days. His big, naughty idea is that dictatorship is preferable to democracy, and this apparently has some currency with both tech CEOs and the Vance-ite wing of MAGA.

At Websummit, Yarvin’s talk was structured as a debate between himself and Ramesh Srinivasan, moderated by Cenk Uygur. Srinivasan was not a particularly good advocate for democracy; he seems like a nice guy but was way too deep in a certain pit of lefty malaise to spring to the defense of American institutions. It’s hard to defend democracy when you don’t believe America even is one, as he at one point claimed. Whatever points he tried to make were mushy and unfocused.

You’d think this would give Yarvin, who has such a reputation for being this ferocious character, a clear advantage, but it didn’t. I imagine most of the audience filling the main auditorium of the convention center left thinking they had wasted time on one of the conference’s more mediocre events.

I was taken aback by how dull and uncharismatic Yarvin is, and how shallow and undeveloped his arguments are. Despite his reputation as the “bad boy philosopher,” I found he comes off as neither.

He is a flat speaker with little stage presence. He’s not animated or funny or charming or sassy or wild. He has a slumped posture and very dark eyes that peer from beneath downward-pointing black eyebrows, giving him a fixed expression that’s less menacing than gloomy. Coupled with his curtains of parted dark hair, he has an uncanny resemblance to Snape from the Harry Potter films. He came out wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt for reasons I’m sure he was eager to explain, but never did.

I didn’t think Yarvin’s talents as a speaker or thinker came anywhere close to meeting his obvious desire to be a serious provocateur. His most interesting defense of dictatorship was an observation that there are many well-functioning institutions in American life that are run as dictatorships, even hereditary monarchies — mainly corporations — and no one seems to find fault with those. It was unclear how seriously he believed this, however, for he’d also often cite, in a more sneering way, examples of liberals governing as dictators, including Dr. Fauci and LBJ, who he clearly thought made America worse by virtue of their authoritarian style. When Cenk asked him about checks and balances, he similarly seemed fine with conceding that effective dictators require a cabinet with impeachment power and so forth, which, as my friend SoyPill noted in a video takedown of Yarvin, quickly just winds up reinventing liberal democracy. Overall, he spoke more like a college student making a half-assed defense of a challenging position in debate club than someone who’d thought particularly deeply about his supposed signature issue.

I think people can have bad politics and still be engaging. I wrote a while ago about Slavoj Zizek, whose politics I think are comparably shallow and vague but is undeniably a funny and compelling performer. Many people on the far right, from Ann Coulter to Alex Jones, have a flamboyant stage presence that makes them hard to turn away from. The degree that political commentary has become entertainment is not an uncomplicated good, but charisma is part of the art of effective communication, and can be used to compensate for a lack of weak ideas. Yarvin strikes me as the worst of both worlds; a guy with little to say who doesn’t seem to be having fun saying it.