let’s just grant that someday, the tech will be mature enough that this is possible, and let’s even say it goes beyond videogames to movies, to visual art, to graphic design, to writing, etc. Let’s say that AI gets to a place where any joe blow can put in a prompt, and get a competent, and even let’s be generous and say good product out of it. A solid 8/10. So… who the hell is going to buy it? Because videogames as an industry is already entirely saturated with products that range a whole spectrum from utter dogshit to amazing works of technical expertise, writing, design, etc. There are over 70,000 games on Steam alone now, with 9,000 added in the last 9 months. If this tech actually got to this place, there will be exponentially more games, because all you have to do is tell an AI what you want to play.

And you can take that further: Movies are also highly saturated as an industry, especially as larger studios move ever further into less making “movies” or “series” and just making “content” endlessly remixing their intellectual properties. So now, all of those companies (and all the people who like their stuff) can now just make their own Iron Man movie? Their own Wandavision? Just endlessly making and remaking and remaking, as though tons of people aren’t already sick to death of all the television programs and movies that are being made?

And again, you can just keep extending this to any media: print, music, art… we have more of everything now than we ever have before and the goal of companies like Adobe, like OpenAI, etc. is to put even more powerful creative tools into even more hands, broadening the group of people who can create stuff but like… even if you take it as granted that this can be done…

Who the hell is watching all of this stuff? Who is playing all of these games? And why in the world would you pay to watch someone else’s AI movie when you can pay to generate your own with whatever you want in it? Why would you ever buy a game off Steam again if you can just ask your game making AI to make you the exact game you want, even just copying the damn description out of steam?

All I see this doing is potentially killing off dozens of creative industries and funneling shit tons of creative control and platform-style power to a handful of massive corporations, running warehouses full of fucking graphics cards, to generate the same games, the same movies, the same music, over, and over, and over, to suit everyone’s personal taste, and absolutely destroying entire rainforest’s worth of electricity to accomplish it. And like… why do we want that?

This is a great point. When something becomes common it loses all value. The great Tulip deflation. Critical mass was reached.

When one can design movies in less time than it takes to write a review, it means there will be millions of movies created every day instead of thousands every year. You might watch your close friends’ designer movies, the same way the pre-Great War intelligentsia used to read our best friends’ poetry.

Here’s a few quick portraits from opening night.

Hard at work looking after guests and looking great, as ever, Director of Guest Relations Natalia Klenovska

Festival videographer Daniel Dluhý is a keen analogue photographer with over twenty vintage cameras including medium format which he uses to create Ansel Adams like black and white prints of his native Kezmarok.

This happy gentleman has visited four film festivals this year. The life of Reilly.

Well-dressed festival director and producer Tomas Klenovsky opens another wonderful year of Cinematik.

VSMU lecturer (aesthetics of film) Dr. Juraj Oniščenko is the longtime Director of Protocol at Cinematik.

Guests Dominik and Frederique in front of the 2022 Cinematik banner in Dom Umenie. Dominik distributes films in Slovakia and Czech Republic, while Frederique dances in a Slovak folk dance ensemble when not teaching or enjoying cinema.

Slovak film director Juraj Lehotský is finishing a new film Plastic Symphony about materialism and sacrifice. His last feature Nina (2017) is about divorce from a child’s perspective.

The ever cheerful bar staff at the Cinematik night bar pulling delicious beers on tap

Imagine being a world famous artist. Imagine designing national monuments. Imagine thinking that you are invulnerable to repression. Imagine speaking out against human rights abuses at your country’s Olympics (Olympics for which you designed stadiums). Imagine being warned to shut your fat trap. Imagine you keep talking. Imagine that a few months later they come to arrest you and lock you away for 81 days. Imagine you come back with the strict warning that if you continue to make an international media spectacle damaging to the regime which is buttering your bread, you will go away not for three months but forever.

If your imagination is rich, you will have just lived the three years of artist Ai Weiwei’s life who for many years had a blessed position as Lear’s fool in Beijing. His nonsense answers and ironic commentary on the regime probably even amused the higher party bosses. A useful fool.

Ai Weiwei is indeed a very amusing fellow. Roly-poly and self-deprecating, he’s the original class clown. He looks like the punchline of a Chinese joke with his straggly beard and round paunch. His art work is quite stimulating but at the end of the day he is an entertainer, a natural improviser. And apparently even a professional level blackjack player. Weiwei has not lost his passion for gambling, but now the stakes are considerably higher: his wealth and his freedom.

Naked ai weiwei: The caption (草泥马挡中央, “grass mud horse covering the middle”) to Ai’s self-portrait sounds almost the same in Chinese as 肏你妈党中央, “Fuck your mother, the Communist party central committee”.[Wikipedia]

Alison Klayman’s film captures Ai Weiwei at his best.

So when they do take him away we are very, very sorry. Even now I’m sorry.

1280px Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei Tate Modern Turbine Hall

Thank heavens they bring him back. The Chinese are awfully clever. They thought about what we do in The West to people we wish to silence. We whack them economically. Everyone is guilty of some economic crimes. Willingly I pay tens of thousands of euros in taxes every month but I’m sure that a clever tax investigator could find bones in my books. Anyone in any kind of business or who has a home business, somewhere is guilty of something.

The penalties on the books are heavy. They are not often not enforced. Like in the Soviet Union, these penalties are there just in case. If you shoot off your mouth too much, economic shut down. It’s what the US did to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, via Paypal, Visa,  Mastercard and the banks. While pornographers spend up a storm on Visa (and even Paypal as long as they are not receiving payment), Wikileaks’s accounts were shut down and hence most of their operation.

So back to China, the clever Chinese and Ai Weiwei. When they let the big old clown back out on the streets, they hit him with tax fraud and confiscate one of his studios. They also demaind $2.5 million in cash. Ai Weiwei friends helped him raise the cash. The amusing thing is that Weiwei probably did owe the money. I don’t imagine a walled free standing compound in Beijing comes cheap. On top of that he regularly sells art abroad very expensively. No doubt he owes some additional taxes somewhere, just out of carelessness if not guile.

Birds Nest at Night

Apparently Weiwei keeps talking but he certainly seemed considerably more restrained after his detention and his fines than before. Measuring his words. Thinking before speaking.

Moral of the story: Chinese repression is awful but just a pale shadow of what we are up to in the West. True freedom does not exist inside empires. There are always interests greater than men.

Opening film at the Jeden Svet – One World Festival in Bratislava. Kudos to the director Nora Beňáková for choosing such a thought provoking opening gig. Slovensky Sporitelna Bank is general sponsor of Jeden Svet: glad someone in the financial world is interested in the free flow of information and the investigation of corruption. Jeden Svet is organised by Pontis Foundation who are in turn founded by The Foundation for a Civil Society who are curiously very active in Iran now. The world is a complicated and interwoven place.

Alicia Liu has expressed a very cogent American Chinese perspective on the Ai Weiwei’s life and Alison Klayman’s film.

TIgre v Meste cast

The main story follows a hotshot young prosecutor in Bratislava, Rudolf Jazvec. This gentleman at the age of thirty has not lost his virginity, much to the amusement of his randy bon vivant zoo keeper friend Hyena who has been boffing Rudolf’s oversexed younger sister and fitness instructor Jane for the last five years. Rudolf is in love with a radio host on Bratislava’s culture channel, Marina Kuznikova.

Kristina Tothova and Diana Morova in an intimate moment,
no it’s not a lesbian love story: Tóthová plays a man

Unknown to anyone except the viewer, Marina’s Russian husband Ivan (the boxing instructor of Jane) has been brought in by Marina’s mafioso brother to eliminate a troublesome state prosecutor. Rudolf.

I’ll stop here before giving away much of the complicated plot, as some people insist on not know anything about a movie’s story before seeing it. Plot really doesn’t matter in Tigers in the City, how it happens is far more important than what happens. There is drunkeness, there are failed hits, there is mistaken identity, there are endless zoo animals, there is a waitress who dreams of being a stewardess, there are water bicycles and speedboats, there are homing pigeons, there is happy gay love. The invention never stops.

But perhaps most extraordinary is that Rudolf is played by a very slight and very young actress, Kristína Tóthová. Her voice is dubbed over with a peculiarly resonant and gruff mail voice (Tomas Mastalir). But when she’s standing around in her undershirt, you can clearly see Tothova’s small but shapely breasts. There is no attempt to bandage wrap them to her chest.

The trailer gives a taste of strangeness of Tigre v Meste

There are a few other anachronisms. Without being a corrupt prosecutor, there is no way Rudolf at thirty years of age would be living in the 120 m2 palatial renovated apartment in the center of Bratislava s/he enjoys in Tigers in the City. On the other hand, even Truffaut and Rohmer gave their petit bourgeous better digs than are likely. Why not give life a bit of glamour?

On the side of realism, we really do get inside the upside down pyramid of Slovak radio and have a good look at the grubby smoke filled offices and endless corridors. I’ve never seen the zoo in Bratislava and am tempted to visit now (do we really have so many white tigers?). It’s quite delightful how filmmaker Juraj Krasnohorsky took the trouble to show us so much of Bratislava. We visit the river, we visit the ponds, we visit the center, we even see the then brand new Eurovea. All of it dynamically shot by French cinemotographer André Bonzel. For those of us who like our little city on the Danube, Bonzel reminds us why.

delightful Ivica Slavikova as tough fitness instructor

Though walking us through a morality play, Krasnohorsky does not neglect any opportunity to delight our eyes and inspire the curiousity of visitors.

The only film with which I can compare Tigers in the City is Jean Piere Jeunet’s Amélie. Both films share the same kind of narration and a quality of not being of this world but in it. Amélie is the superior film but that sophomere director Krasnohorsky can get close is a great achievement anywhere, all the more so in Bratislava’s straitened film circumstances.

I did wonder throughout the film what the point of casting a woman as a man was. That is the point: it keeps you wondering and off-balance, aware that you are watching a construct. I think Krasnohorsky and screenwriter Lucia Siposova wanted to avoid letting people off the hook to sit back and zone out to a crime thriller or a love drama. Watching Tóthová fake being a man constantly reminds you to pay attention and that things are not always what they seem. It’s a very clever cinematic variant on Berthold Brecht’s alienation effect.

The less exciting alternative would be that it’s just a very eighties look at androgyny (David Bowie, Liquid Sky): it’s not your sexual organs that matter but your soul. Actually sorry guys/girls – as those who tried to cross those boundaries back then could tell you – yes the plumbing does matter. Love is about two thirds chemistry and one third soul.

Milan Ondrik Zuzana Sebova as zoo odd couple

Quite a bit of care went into the details. The hit man is played by international Czech star Karel Dobry, which gives Tigers in the City some star quality and probably opened some doors. Dobry puts in a decent effort as the reluctant assassin. None of the other actors offends through incompetence and many impress, from the peculiar Tothová through Diana Mórová who plays the melodramatic radio host. By the end of the film, you are really convinced she is a completely superficial airhead. Lubo Bukovy as the homosexual friend infatuated with his straight celibate friend even manages to come off as more touching than creepy. Milan Ondrik as Hyena lets down the ensemble a bit with occasional clumsy overacting.

Ivica Slavikova probing uncertain sexuality of Lubo Burkovy

Pretty Ivica Slávikova steals her scenes as the tough talking, sex kitten fitness instructor sister. Not only is she first class eye candy, but she has a physical charisma relatively uncommon here, vibrant as an Italian or a Russian film star. This is her first real role. Look out for her next films.

If you would like to see Bratislava from the inside and/or amuse yourself with a delectable modern morality play, Tigers in the City is light, yet filling entertainment. All but the most dour and least imaginative will leave the theater with a smile on the face and questions in the heart.

Love poster Jakub Kroner

Here we have three typical student girls living in the main dormitories at Mlynskina Dolina. They sneak boys in and out of their rooms and dream of having punky guys turn up with pear spirits in their underpants. After drinking the bottle straight, some of them have sex with the said punky guys. The next week Sandra cries that Tomas doesn’t call her anymore. So far so good. The same maudlin story which French étudiantes might live through, albeit with better rooms and better liquor.

Meanwhile one of them Veronika, the cutest, is flunking out of her Management courses (which are supposed to be at the Economics University, target of some well earned and pointed jokes about the empty headed and pretty girls who attend that institution – but then Veronika’s exam turns out to be Comenius University which has no particular problem with its management program). Apparently one of her classmates gets straight A’s by blowing the professor in the afternoon.

All of this is just fine if a little depressing. Not the best image of Slovakia but perhaps something in common with grim reality.

Michal Nemtuda, Jakub Gogal and Samuel Spisak
smoke a bong in vile apartment

Where we go downhill is with the guys. Our twenty two year old protagonists Mato and Tomas are best friends from childhood. When they are not circulating among the city’s brothels or trashing Bratislava’s nightclubs, they have a little hobby nicking cars for Boris. Boris is a great guy. If you don’t bring him the car he orders he drills a hole in your hand. As Mato and Tomas are very good at what they do, they don’t have problems with Boris.

Dusan Cinkota as Boris Love

Our two guys swear and bitch and have contests to see who can steal the most gear from parked cars in a lot. Then they smoke up or drink beer. They never clean their vile apartment.

The problem with Lóve becomes apparent. These empty-headed car thieves without morals are put up on the big screen as almost our only image of youth. The heavy advertising campaign meant that as large a young film public as exists saw Mato, Veronika, Tomas and Sandra as their big screen counterparts. While serial killer Jason Bourne is hardly the ideal image, international espionage beats petty larceny and is at least far enough removed from life as to not be aspirational.

Jakub Kroner, we need better images of ourselves. There’s enough petty toughs and trashy floozies in Bratislava without glamorising them at the center of the few films we have.

While Kroner’s script meanders at points (he could use some tighter script editing), despite the best efforts of cinematographer Mario Ondris and editor Otakar Senovsky, there are some pretty moments, particularly at the top of one of the buildings of Bratislava with Mato and Veronika and even the car chase.

Still it’s not all blackness.

Kristina Svarovska film Love Bratislava

Mato and Veronika fall in love and Mato starts to aspire to something better and cleaner. When Veronika is kicked out of her exam he gets caught out in his lie of working reception at the Sheraton. Mato turns up and pays the real concierge €400 for his jacket. The misunderstandings between Mato, a woman with a lapdog, the manager and the original concierge verge on classic comedy. A pity we didn’t have more of this dark comedy.

Love Jakub Kroner Bratislava car chase in the rain Apollo Bridge

Michal Nemtuda as Mato carries his role quite well. He’s no Vincent Cassel (who ironically enough started in a similar role in La Haine) but avoids most of the melodramatic bearpits the script puts in his path. As Veronika, Kristina Svarinská would be the revelation among the actors: she’s beautiful and compellingly intense. Abandoned by her mother at birth, growing up in an orphanage, somehow it seems unlikely Veronika would come through so unscarred, but if producers can get away with overly glamourous actresses in Hollywood why not Bratislava?

Though Samuel Spisák acts more of a caricature than a character as film’s happy go lucky drug dealer, Spisák does not lack charisma. He might shine in the right title role. Ironically and tragically enough the very talented Dusan Cinkota who shines in the role of tough guy Boris is in real life prison for eight years for drug use (pervitin). Cinkota lost his appeal in December 2012 against the case from 2007.

Still I’m wondering why we couldn’t have seen one of the many successful students whom I know with some progress made in life and without a prison term.

These hard working young people could open a restaurant or start a clothing store or sell cars (and not steal them). I know people with complicated love lives doing all of the above. I hope Jakub Kroner makes some new friends before he makes his next film and gives us something to aspire to, something to admire about ourselves on those rare occasions we get to see ourselves in the cinematic mirror.

Marfa Girl Adam Mediano with lovely Inez Mercedes Maxwell

Homo sapiens are a brutal and savage species, probably responsible for the elimination of Neanderthal man and since then we have sent thousands of species into extinction, from mammoths, to bison, to the dodo. If there’s a bad animal around, we’re it.

Clark like Golding is busy with representing the what is, ripping off of your rose-coloured glasses and then stomping on them to boot. Yes, your girlfriend in high school betrayed you. Deliberately. And your son’s girlfriend is probably betraying him now too. It’s just what people do. Your wife probably cheated on you at least once or twice too. Go and read Jane Goodall’s study of chimpanzees: how they mate and how they stalk their neighbours and kill.

Anyway back to Marfa Girl: it’s the same unlikeable group of teenagers smoking up and screwing as we’ve seen in other Clark movies. This time it’s on the US/Mexican border. There are some very dislikable adult border patrol officers and some slightly less dislikable promiscuous kids. It’s a film about ideas and loyalties. There are some extended Socratian dialogues between kids and cops, cops and cops.

Marfa Girl Jimmy Gonzales as Hispanic border officer Oscar

Marfa Girl Jeremy St James as border and customs officer  Tom

Marfa Girl’s eponymous Drake Burnette

Those ideas are played out through the bodies and lives of the Clark’s kids. Unlike in a Rohmer film, ideas are not apart from human existence. Ideas have a real human price.

Performances are convincing all round from mothers to daughters to cops. I really didn’t like either Adam (Adam Mediano) or Marfa Girl (Drake Burnette). But that’s not their job to make me like them. Their responsibility is to play their role convincingly and that they did.

If you are looking to be uplifted or dream of a brighter tomorrow, no Larry Clark film is for you. If you are looking to take a cold hard look at today’s passage from childhood to adulthood, Larry Clark is your man.

Marfa Girl’s Adam Mediano with Inez Mercedes Maxwell: joy of teenage love

I’m not sure I liked Marfa Girl, but I respect the craft. Anyone concerned with border issues will find a lot to think about. There’s a tall pile of DVD’s of films waiting more important to me than Marfa Girl. While I respect Larry Clark’s craft (I was lucky enough to see a premiere of Bully at TIFF with Clark in attendance in 2001), one of the reasons I am among the first to watch and buy is its direct online distribution. Direct digital distribution is the only future for independent film. Larry Clark is both wise and brave to choose exclusively online digital distribution with no cut to iTunes or any other of the conglomerates.

It’s an experiment worth supporting. If works the quality and the honesty of Marfa Girl are what direct distribution brings us, the future of independent film looks brighter than it has in over ten years.

If you are on the fence, please give Larry Clark your support to send a clear signal to both independent film makers and to Hollywood. Give us something better than the sequels and focus grouped rubbish which commercial filmmaking has become and we’ll pay for it.

The online viewing experience was very easy. You pay via Paypal with no extended offer nonsense or other advertising and you get a login key which lets you see Marfa Girl in very good quality HD right away. Absolutely no problem playing it in the browser.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus chooses to take up the same questions of alien visitation but in fictional form.

origin of life on earth disintegrating engineer in prometheus

Scott would seem to be the ideal visionary director to take us to other planets and to the future. Scott’s Blade Runner has long been my favorite film, competing strangely with Rohmer and Truffaut New Wave confections but certainly uncontested in the sci-fi and epic genre. The heart rending performance of Sean Young and enigma of Harrison Ford echo through time.

No one was a caricature. Even the replicants were living beings. Rutger Hauer etched himself into our collective consciousness with his dangerous edge as an orphaned replicant seeking a life extension. Joe Turkel as Eldon Tyrell fit well into a long line of billionaire tycoons going back to Citizen Kane seeking to control lives and life with their money.

Prometheus attempts these deep waters again. The difference between man and machine. The billionaire Tycoon. The meaning of life.

Ridley Scott has lost none of his visual touch. Prometheus is a gorgeous work, carved even in 3D. Starting as an advertising director, Scott has always adopted the latest toys with a master’s touch. Scott even had the good sense to shoot as much as possible live, which means the CGI artists have a much more solid core to built out on and the human eye is convincingly tricked, which just doesn’t happen with straight CGI. Do not underestimate the mastery and generalship involved in creating an epic like Prometheus, it’s more than a year of straight work on script, art direction, shooting, editing and effects requiring thousands of artists and technicians. Scott is one of the few directors who can pull of a project like this so efficiently (it takes James Cameron or Peter Jackson about three to five times as long to finish a project of the scope of Prometheus).

Of the big themes, the one most successfully broached is the difference between man and machine: can a machine have a soul? In Prometheus, Scott’s answer is yes. Michael Fassbender as David strives to carry on existing just like any man or woman would. Indeed, the robot servant David is the most interesting character. His anodyne subservience has its model in Shakespear’s Iago, when he poisons scientist Elizabeth Shaw’s fiancé with a biological weapon. Machines may smile and smile and still be villains.

On the other themes, Damon Lindenhof’s script lets us down for a hard fall. The opening sequence reveals a strange white giant astride a volcanic waterfall (Iceland if you’re wondering) who drinks a strange cocktail which kills him and disintegrates him. This is the beginning of life on earth. The suggestion falls apart scientifically. If aliens came to earth why would they poison themselves to start life and as they share the same DNS with humans what happened to the development of all the in between forms? And where on earth are the dinosaurs then?

It’s a nice image to start a film but it puts us firmly on the path of senselessness which carries on when the spacecraft arrives on the target planet after four years of space travel. Two thousand years ago, giant warriors died here while fleeing something. It turns out this planet is a giant biological weapons depot for the aliens who started life on earth. More a thought on the level of Transformers than Blade Runner.

When the remaining alien is awakened from stasis, he picks up and starts his spaceship to go and destroy life on earth. Well in that case what was he waiting for two thousand years? There is a scene where robot David addresses him in the ancient tongue (sounds something like Georgian). The alien appears to understand but kills them all immediately. Surely the alien would seek to gather some intelligence first before dispatching the intruder.

Roy Batty from Blade Runner

But coming up with some kind of meaningful interaction here would mean working hard on the script. Much easier to set off a huge set of fireworks and special effects instead. Returning to Blade Runner, Roy Batty tells us before his death:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.

There is none of this depth in Prometheus’s script. The closest it comes is the panic the previously sterile Shaw experiences when she realises she is pregnant with an alien life form and performs a cesarian on herself with the help of an operating capsule. It’s not that the actors aren’t up for the day: there is scant little for them to work with.

Scott’s aliens are just oversized versions of the same brutes running drone actions and dropping atomic bombs on recalcitrant subject nations. Anglo-Saxons with an albino problem. This is such a weak thesis, it’s not worthy of Scott or the original Chariots of the Gods.

There is no reason to suspect that aliens would be as small-minded, petty and vengeful as ourselves. It’s a fundamentally anthropocentric view. There is no reason to think aliens would be a close physical match to ourselves. Star Trek had better science with all kinds of different alien races including some which were truly different.

Watching Prometheus is like going to bed with a beautiful hooker. Everything is perfect but there is neither love nor feeling nor sense in the motions.  Back to Blade Runner.