Any Other Business: Part LXXXVII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Artwork by AI

We’re now four months into 2024, and this blog’s grand experiment with AI art. It has already fooled one regular theatre cohort of the blog into thinking an AI image was an official stylised poster. Success! But on a serious note it has been nice to have bespoke imagery about the place. Nobody else will get the exact same results from the AI behind Night Cafe even if they used the exact same prompts. And nobody else will use the exact same prompts derived from idiosyncratic interests. It gives a vague New Yorker or Wall Street Journal feel to a mere blog to have charcoal sketches hovering over pieces. And it has been interesting watching the development of the technology. Originally just goofing around it with it for such important artistic endeavours as Keanu Reeves v Cocaine Bear, taking it seriously allows for checking in on the progression of the AI’s skills. This image was a Cezanne pastiche last year.

It was a reasonable attempt for a supercomputer. The colours were in the right places. The subject was as requested. And the style was primitively correct. To paraphrase from Brideshead Revisited, it was as if an Aztec had attempted a Cezanne painting. And now the exact same prompt produces the image beneath. Which is clearly a Cezanne pastiche of a much higher order. Yes, asking it to do pictures that could be considered characteristic subjects in the style of the various painters I request (Hodler, Van Gogh, Hopper, Klimt, Van Gogh, Lichtenstein, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Schiele, Botticelli, Hockney, Michaelangelo, Whistler, Warhol) is helping to train it, which means effectively working for free for a corporation.

But in the age of surveillance capitalism a good chunk of all our lives seems to be spent doing that anyway. At least this way some beauty gets brought into the world, in the most curious way imaginable. ChatGPT! What is beauty? (Don’t you dare quote or reference Keats in your reply)

And like that, it’s gone

I wondered why it was so late opening on a Sunday the other week, then thought I might have got muddled about its hours. But when I saw another branch clearly closed for business I got suspicious. And yes, it really has abruptly closed. The entirety of Mao and Dante’s Pizza has been shuttered. It makes very little sense that a chain which was doing well enough to have a tie-in with Leinster rugby, and didn’t seem to be lacking in customers, couldn’t find someone to take over the lease. But that’s how it is. It will leave quite a hole in the takeaway options, and explode some rituals. No more will Bank Holidays be marked with the treat of a Nasi Goreng in the specially elongated box to accommodate the chicken skewer underneath the fried egg, with a pack of prawn crackers to round out the dish. No more will the Inaugural speech of the latest POTUS be listened to while wolfing down Ho Chi’s chicken wings, chips, and egg fried rice. No more will I idly pop in while returning home from the NCH to get an egg fried rice just before they close. And there will be no more idle flitting between Mongolian beef and Singapore noodles as options for an impulsive treat. I remember the oddity of the first Mao restaurant appearing, complete with its massive Warhol portrait of the Chairman, right across from the College of Music in Chatham Row. And after being followed, as it felt, around all my haunts for decades, suddenly it’s gone. Goodbye Mao, thanks for the food and the memories.

What Does Elon Musk Do All Day?

Work? Where? This is a deadly serious question. The other week I saw Andrew Ross Sorkin getting annoyed two days in a row on CNBC when his guests seemed to question whether Elon Musk should be paid 56 billion dollars by Tesla. The man is listed as CEO of Tesla, CEO of SpaceX, and CTO of Twitter; yet he has criticised people working from home for not really working because they are less productive than in the office. In his case, which office? Elon Musk is, as so many thin-skinned billionaires are, a raging hypocrite. But how on earth can he expect a 56 billion dollar package from Tesla to keep him interested in doing his job? As they have said is the purpose of such renumeration. Fire him. That, not paying them 56 billion dollars is the usual response to a worker checking out of their job. 56. Billion. Dollars. That amount of money is obscene.

War for the Planet of the Apes 3-D

Andy Serkis, via motion capture, returns one last time for more monkey business as Caesar, the Moses of intelligent apes.

Caesar is in the woods, with his apes, and just wants to be left alone; to brood over his murder of rival Koba (Toby Kebbell), and raise his new young son. But not only have Koba’s followers started to collaborate with the humans against Caesar in order to avenge his death, the humans have also become menacingly organised under a new leader, the Colonel (Woody Harrelson). An early bloody skirmish is followed by a night raid with the Colonel himself attempting to terminate Caesar’s command, with extreme prejudice. Caesar abdicates his duties as leader, vowing revenge. While the apes set out for the promised land beyond the desert, Caesar, with trusted lieutenant Maurice the orangutan (Karin Konoval), and two gorilla bodyguards, sets out to assassinate the Colonel. But matters are complicated by a new mutation of the virus assailing humanity.

War for the Planet of the Apes would be more accurately titled Commando Raids for the Planet of the Apes. Indeed a large portion of the movie is Prison Break for the Planet of the Apes, cycling back to the pivotal sequence of 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes where super-intelligent Caesar was incarcerated with regular chimpanzees – because he chewed off a man’s fingers for being rude. Blake Snyder’s ‘Save the Cat’ does not advocate having your hero chew off a man’s fingers for being rude to elicit audience sympathy, quite the opposite really. Yet we are expected to automatically root for Caesar through three films progressively less interested in human characters. If one could call the ciphers in this franchise human. This is surely the worst written trilogy this decade, and logically so; if an audience accepts ciphers, why bother sweating writing characters? If an audience accepts Gary Oldman’s noble sacrifice to save humanity resulting in nothing, why bother even setting up protagonist and antagonist humans? Woody Harrelson’s Colonel McCullough is the only articulate human, and even Harrelson can’t excel with this straw man antagonist. Hard to credit this franchise was spawned by Rod Serling’s mischievous screenplay.

Rupert Wyatt in Rise, and Matt Reeves in Dawn, both threw in striking sequences of directorial bravura to try and paper over the poor scripting. But here, there is nothing going on in that department, which is a tremendous surprise given that Reeves returns as director. Where are his visual trademarks – the lengthy tracking shots following chaos exploding into frame, the fixed-position sequences, the Hitchcockian visual suspense? This is all the more surprising given the unsubtle references to the visually extravagant Apocalypse Now: slogans daubed everywhere, a shaven-headed Colonel expounding on history, culture and morality, a mission to exterminate (‘The only good Kong is a dead Kong’), Jimi Hendrix, and, just in case you didn’t get it, ‘Ape-pocalypse Now’ graffiti. It’s as if Reeves has just given up, going through the motions in a permanently 3-D darkened landscape of snow and concrete that renders things verily sepia-vision. Steve Zahn as a nebbish ape is a highlight, mostly because, when dressed akin to Bob Balaban’s Moonrise Kingdom narrator, he appears to have wandered in from Wes Anderson’s Planet of the Apes; the idea of which is more entertaining than this tedious movie, dragged out by its insistence on ape sign language.

The powerful and emotive finale is unintentionally hilarious when you realise just how literal the Caesar as Moses motif is being taken, but it’s just one final plodding mis-step. Caesar blows up the Colonel’s base and yet escapes the fiery blastwave because it is all-encompassing but apparently all to one side just to avoid enveloping him, Caesar’s final confrontation with the Colonel sees him extend a character redeeming mercy that looks uncannily like the height of cruelty, and the new mutation of the virus, which reduces humans to mute amiable simpletons, leads us seamlessly into the world of the Charlton Heston classic. So, we are required to cheer for the devolution of the human race into mute amiable simpletons, and yet that isn’t presented as a somewhat challenging proposition when even 2008’s disastrous The Invasion noted the paradox of rooting for free will at the cost of world peace. To reference another 1979 film that’s been in the air this summer Caesar’s story involves us losing the ability to produce another Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Louis Armstrong, Ingmar Bergman, Gustave Flaubert, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Paul Cezanne or even understand who they were or appreciate what they did. Hail, Caesar?

0.5/5