Obfuscation, oblivescence, obnubilation, obscurantism...

---

Call it what you will. But Remember Remember the 5th of November...no Ows input, just a bunch of great quotes from V for Vendetta: 

"Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse." 

"Where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission." 

"How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense." 

"Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it." 

"Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining." 

"No. This is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means 'without leaders', not 'without order'. With anarchy comes an age or ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order... this age of ordung will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course... This is not anarchy, Eve. This is chaos."

Update: early hours (before 2 a.m. on 6th November in UK...but I'm not there, still 5th November here. not telling you where, but been in 4 LatAm countries in the past 3 weeks: age-old readers of Owsblog, [all 3 or 4 or you hahaha] will know that hasn't changed for 20 odd years). Anyhoo, by complete coincidence A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR, who writes the Substack 'The Forgotten Side of Medicine' posted today that [he] Would Like To Take This Day To Honor A Masterpiece, yes, the aforementioned megamovie V for Vendetta: "How my favorite movie foreshadowed the beginning and end of COVID-19" [sic: yank spelling not typos]. 

And this should be the first quote; just fill in the blank re 'this country'...

And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?

Omnifarious opportunities or Overlord: OpenAI

---

Skynet took just 25 days* to become self-aware...

Who knows. Last week Spartacus had a talk with ChatGPT : We've Come a Long Way [LINK]. This is Open AI's Generative Pretrained Transformer (ChatGTP...you'll have to wait now because it got to over a million users in about a day, with almost zero media coverage!). 

Have a read, the chat is very complicated, we're way beyond Delphi and Sophia. 

Despite the reservations and limitations that Spartacus mentions in the conclusions, it sounds mind-blowingly good. 

"Also, with how fast these deep learning neural networks are improving, and their potential for sudden and hugely disruptive innovation across a wide variety of industries, all I can say is, buckle up. Things are about to get very, very weird." 

More at Epoch Times from Hans Mahncke [LINK] who was 'blown away' by it. 

By the way...Artificial Intelligence in fiction has been around for about 150 years! Funnily enough on the Wiki page (yeah, yeah, I know) on the 'Implausibility'..."Engineers and scientists have taken an interest in the way AI is presented in fiction. In films like the 2014 Ex Machina or 2015 Chappie, a single isolated genius becomes the first to successfully build an artificial general intelligence; scientists in the real world deem this to be unlikely."...erm, Open AI is Elon Musk's baby [late edit: Link added]

[Apologies: sign-up or £$€ may be required for some of the links.]

* Very later edit: this was in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

Offensive Oscar outrage or odious objicients II...

---

Indeed, the II in the blog-post title is because this is the second time. The second time on this particular subject but far from only the second time Oscar organisation is in the news. In 2019 I wrote "Another 'backlash', another hoo-ha; would anyone - apart from from those taking part and their guests - actually remember the Oscars was on if there wasn't this annual pre-event outrage at something?". Well, did you know/remember? Do you care? *

In 2016: the first time, I wrote "Once again the natives are getting restless. Oops, can I say that? Another whitewash; another blackout..." but not literally this time because two of my favourite actors are nominated. Not my favourite black actors, just favourite actors (by the way, they're not white). But like then, I again say look at the graph in the image (as always, click to enlarge); admittedly this is a few years ago now but it shows black actors (you know I mean male AND female when I say that, right?) are OVER represented in the winners**. 

What say YOU to that Mr. Frederick Gooding Jr. and Dr. Ronald E. Moore?  'The Oscars Are Still So White' [FFS]. And lucky the Latino, Asian and 'Other' ethnicities aren't so weak and paranoid as to want 'equality'. You'd hope so BUT the further we go down the woke rabbit hole the more you know the winners will probably not be there on merit. So sad, so stupid, so racist!

Bearing in mind that since 2020 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is bending over backwards (no word of a lie I read that linked site as 'Virtue' the first time I read it) to make sure it ticks as many boxes as possible. What happens with hot [update: ***] star talent like Ariana DeBose, do they get to tick three boxes? 

* Sadly, and the first time I can recall it being this bad, of the 12 films represented in the four 'bill-topping' categories (best actor, best supporting, best actress, best supporting) I have only heard of TWO of them!

**  Heaven forbid - maybe they deserved it! 

*** Very hot. Congrats

Oscar organisation...

---

Another 'backlash', another hoo-ha; would anyone - apart from from those taking part and their guests - actually remember the Oscars was on if there wasn't this annual pre-event outrage at something? "The organisers of the Oscars have reversed an earlier decision to hand out four awards during ad breaks after facing a major backlash." [BBC]



Anyhooo, these two have a point:

In the history of CINEMA, masterpieces have existed without sound, without color, without a story, without actors and without music. No one single film has ever existed without CINEMAtography and without editing.

— Alfonso Cuaron (@alfonsocuaron) February 12, 2019

"[Cinematography & Editing] are not inherited from a theatrical or literary tradition: they are cinema itself." Guillermo del Toro, also on Twitter.



Anyway, on the subject of films and actors: sad news that Iffland-Ring holder Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in the 2004 film Downfall, has died aged 77. The bunker scene must be the most played segment of a film ever having been a meme for years (my favourites were about Gordon Brown e.g. get me my ginger wig)

.

Oscar organisation...

---

Another 'backlash', another hoo-ha; would anyone - apart from from those taking part and their guests - actually remember the Oscars was on if there wasn't this annual pre-event outrage at something? "The organisers of the Oscars have reversed an earlier decision to hand out four awards during ad breaks after facing a major backlash." [BBC]

Anyhooo, these two have a point:

In the history of CINEMA, masterpieces have existed without sound, without color, without a story, without actors and without music. No one single film has ever existed without CINEMAtography and without editing.

— Alfonso Cuaron (@alfonsocuaron) February 12, 2019

"[Cinematography & Editing] are not inherited from a theatrical or literary tradition: they are cinema itself." Guillermo del Toro, also on Twitter.

Anyway, on the subject of films and actors: sad news that Iffland-Ring holder Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler in the 2004 film Downfall, has died aged 77. The bunker scene must be the most played segment of a film ever having been a meme for years (my favourites were about Gordon Brown e.g. get me my ginger wig)
.

Offensive Oscar outrage or odious objicients...

---

Once again the natives are getting restless. Oops, can I say that? Another whitewash; another blackout (literally!). The lack of black faces for the 2016 Oscar nominations is again causing the racists to shout racist. Looking at the graph (left: click to enlarge) it seems to me that black actors are OVER represented in the award winners - maybe they were the best actors those years? The article for the graph - from The Economist - says "FOR the 20 actors nominated for an Oscar all to be white could at best be seen as a surprise. For that to be true two years running is, to many, a scandal." What? Why a surprise? And why 2 years a scandal? WTF? Looking at film roles the split is spot on and the Oscar win: Oscar nomination ratio is higher for black Americans; being 12.6% of the US population and 'only' 10% of Oscar nominations - presumably the only real thing any reasonable person possible complain about - is no reason to whinge although the racist race hustlers will always whinge.



HOWEVER, it's the Latinos etc who may have a case if they were so inclined to bitch about it. The Academy Awards host Chris Rock (being hounded to boycott) gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter last year (when the same thing happened) and he said some interesting things: "But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough? You're in L.A, you've got to try not to hire Mexicans."  He has a point. However he also says a load more things that aren't so easy to agree with: "[Hollywood is] a white industry. Just as the NBA is a black industry. I'm not even saying it's a bad thing. It just is." This is wrong: he may be right about the make-up of the industry grandees: of the Academy’s voting members, 94% are white (this reflects exactly the 'Behind the Camera Diversity' of the directors e.g. only 6.5% are black in this study: PDF); this does not mean they're racist SOBs who only vote for white actors; maybe it just means the black actors didn't deserve a nomination this year! FFS. Apparent 'nice-guy' Will Smith is boycotting but more sinister is the black-power racism oozing out of his wife's video message. I'm with Janet Hubert on this:

"I find it ironic that somebody who has made their living and has made millions and millions of dollars from the very people that you're talking about boycotting just because you didn't get a nomination, just because you didn't win?"...[**]  ..."That's not the way life works, baby." ...And y'all need to get over yourselves. You have a huge production company that you only produce your friends and family and yourself. So you are a part of Hollywood, you are part of the system that is unfair to other actors. So get real."

Anyway, all this fuss reminds me, I must write to the International Olympic Committee to do something about the outrageous and offensive over-representation of black runners in the 100m final.



** that first quoted sentence reminded me of the black-power, racists and hypocritical social justice warriors trying to change/erase history).

Offensive Oscar outrage or odious objicients...

---

Once again the natives are getting restless. Oops, can I say that? Another whitewash; another blackout (literally!). The lack of black faces for the 2016 Oscar nominations is again causing the racists to shout racist. Looking at the graph (left: click to enlarge) it seems to me that black actors are OVER represented in the award winners - maybe they were the best actors those years? The article for the graph - from The Economist - says "FOR the 20 actors nominated for an Oscar all to be white could at best be seen as a surprise. For that to be true two years running is, to many, a scandal." What? Why a surprise? And why 2 years a scandal? WTF? Looking at film roles the split is spot on and the Oscar win: Oscar nomination ratio is higher for black Americans; being 12.6% of the US population and 'only' 10% of Oscar nominations - presumably the only real thing any reasonable person possible complain about - is no reason to whinge although the racist race hustlers will always whinge.

HOWEVER, it's the Latinos etc who may have a case if they were so inclined to bitch about it. The Academy Awards host Chris Rock (being hounded to boycott) gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter last year (when the same thing happened) and he said some interesting things: "But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough? You're in L.A, you've got to try not to hire Mexicans."  He has a point. However he also says a load more things that aren't so easy to agree with: "[Hollywood is] a white industry. Just as the NBA is a black industry. I'm not even saying it's a bad thing. It just is." This is wrong: he may be right about the make-up of the industry grandees: of the Academy’s voting members, 94% are white (this reflects exactly the 'Behind the Camera Diversity' of the directors e.g. only 6.5% are black in this study: PDF); this does not mean they're racist SOBs who only vote for white actors; maybe it just means the black actors didn't deserve a nomination this year! FFS. Apparent 'nice-guy' Will Smith is boycotting but more sinister is the black-power racism oozing out of his wife's video message. I'm with Janet Hubert on this:

"I find it ironic that somebody who has made their living and has made millions and millions of dollars from the very people that you're talking about boycotting just because you didn't get a nomination, just because you didn't win?"...[**]  ..."That's not the way life works, baby." ...And y'all need to get over yourselves. You have a huge production company that you only produce your friends and family and yourself. So you are a part of Hollywood, you are part of the system that is unfair to other actors. So get real."

Anyway, all this fuss reminds me, I must write to the International Olympic Committee to do something about the outrageous and offensive over-representation of black runners in the 100m final.

** that first quoted sentence reminded me of the black-power, racists and hypocritical social justice warriors trying to change/erase history).

Omnibus oldies...

---

London 1927, a video posted by Tim Sparke on Vimeo. "Incredible colour footage of 1920s London shot by an early British pioneer of film named Claude Frisse-Greene, who made a series of travelogues using the colour process his father William - a noted cinematographer - was experimenting with. It's like a beautifully dusty old postcard you'd find in a junk store, but moving." (hat-tip Mice Height on BBBC).  Just made my day and it's only 8 a.m.

Omnibus oldies...

---

London 1927, a video posted by Tim Sparke on Vimeo. "Incredible colour footage of 1920s London shot by an early British pioneer of film named Claude Frisse-Greene, who made a series of travelogues using the colour process his father William - a noted cinematographer - was experimenting with. It's like a beautifully dusty old postcard you'd find in a junk store, but moving." (hat-tip Mice Height on BBBC).  Just made my day and it's only 8 a.m.

Odeon options...

---

Having got back into the swing of life back in England I decided to push the boat out: now I have two direct debits: my cinema card arrived and I popped into town to the local moving-picture theatre. Three choices attracted my attention:

(i) Lincoln: an American historical drama already received with widespread critical acclaim and a dead cert for Oscars (although some historical facts are missing) The film covers the last four months of Lincoln's life and his efforts exactly 148 years ago to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution passed. No doubt a political and historical Spielberg masterpiece highlighting how close the Amendment came to failure and only a white lie (did I say white?) assuring the passage: had an end to hostilities in the Civil War peace been seen as a possibility without the outlawing of slavery and involuntary servitude (and it was a very real possibility) the Amendment would have failed.




(ii) Les Miserables: another contender for Oscars; sumptuous moving musical and film version of the extraordinarily successful stage show of the 1862 novel by Victor Hugo. The book, like the stage show, began with largely negative reviews only to overcome the bad vibes and become immensely popular (the stage show being a global phenomenon). This film seem set on the same path -except the reviews are very positive! Set in France after Napoleon has fallen (for the second time) up until the June Rebellion of 1832. Rather than bore you with the history, the Daily Beast sets the scene.



(iii) The Last Stand: Arnie doing what he does best; this time as a small Mexican-border town Sheriff .'You fucked up my day off.' An entertainingly unpretentious, old-school cops-and-drug-barons action movie (hat-tip for those words to Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian): Weekend escapism and worth it just for Genesis Rodriguez's pout.



Guess which one I went to see...no contest, right?

Odeon options...

---

Having got back into the swing of life back in England I decided to push the boat out: now I have two direct debits: my cinema card arrived and I popped into town to the local moving-picture theatre. Three choices attracted my attention:
(i) Lincoln: an American historical drama already received with widespread critical acclaim and a dead cert for Oscars (although some historical facts are missing) The film covers the last four months of Lincoln's life and his efforts exactly 148 years ago to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution passed. No doubt a political and historical Spielberg masterpiece highlighting how close the Amendment came to failure and only a white lie (did I say white?) assuring the passage: had an end to hostilities in the Civil War peace been seen as a possibility without the outlawing of slavery and involuntary servitude (and it was a very real possibility) the Amendment would have failed.

(ii) Les Miserables: another contender for Oscars; sumptuous moving musical and film version of the extraordinarily successful stage show of the 1862 novel by Victor Hugo. The book, like the stage show, began with largely negative reviews only to overcome the bad vibes and become immensely popular (the stage show being a global phenomenon). This film seem set on the same path -except the reviews are very positive! Set in France after Napoleon has fallen (for the second time) up until the June Rebellion of 1832. Rather than bore you with the history, the Daily Beast sets the scene.

(iii) The Last Stand: Arnie doing what he does best; this time as a small Mexican-border town Sheriff .'You fucked up my day off.' An entertainingly unpretentious, old-school cops-and-drug-barons action movie (hat-tip for those words to Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian): Weekend escapism and worth it just for Genesis Rodriguez's pout.

Guess which one I went to see...no contest, right?

Oosperm oblectation...

---

On my travels again and I thought what a nice coincidence: bored but impressed on my first ride in this I noticed a foreign film called Starbuck and after all the furore in the UK and my previous post I decided it was clearly a message. Well, IMHO it was superb and to combine one or two reviews I have read today: 'Starbuck' is a hilarious, witty and heart-warming and what is surprising that no one has thought about this very real possibility before (already a Bollywood and US version are on the cards). The premise is original, developed with humour and tenderness and certainly a feel-good movie. More on Ken Scott's French-Canadian comedy HERE: "David, a delivery man for his family's butcher shop who learns that his lucrative late-'80s stint as a sperm donor has resulted in a staggering 533 successful pregnancies. Over a hundred of those now-twentysomethings, having learned they share the same biological father, are suing the fertility clinic to reveal the identity of the prolific donor code-named Starbuck." Well, well worth seeing, mainly due to the performances of Patrick Huard as Starbuck and Antoine Bertrand as his lawyer friend.

Oosperm oblectation...

---

On my travels again and I thought what a nice coincidence: bored but impressed on my first ride in this I noticed a foreign film called Starbuck and after all the furore in the UK and my previous post I decided it was clearly a message. Well, IMHO it was superb and to combine one or two reviews I have read today: 'Starbuck' is a hilarious, witty and heart-warming and what is surprising that no one has thought about this very real possibility before (already a Bollywood and US version are on the cards). The premise is original, developed with humour and tenderness and certainly a feel-good movie. More on Ken Scott's French-Canadian comedy HERE: "David, a delivery man for his family's butcher shop who learns that his lucrative late-'80s stint as a sperm donor has resulted in a staggering 533 successful pregnancies. Over a hundred of those now-twentysomethings, having learned they share the same biological father, are suing the fertility clinic to reveal the identity of the prolific donor code-named Starbuck." Well, well worth seeing, mainly due to the performances of Patrick Huard as Starbuck and Antoine Bertrand as his lawyer friend.

Orson ousted...

---

A large number of distributors, critics and academics of The British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine (846 to be exact), for the first time in my life-time, have opted for a change: after 50 years of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane being top pick they have chosen Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as 'the greatest of all time' [BBC]. "There is so much in Vertigo, that a single showing barely opens the door to its understanding" (Magill's Survey of Cinema).



Commendable indeed but haven't these people ever seen Jaws, Alien, Predator, Rambo, Silence of the Lambs, The Matrix, etc? :-)

Orson ousted...

---

A large number of distributors, critics and academics of The British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine (846 to be exact), for the first time in my life-time, have opted for a change: after 50 years of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane being top pick they have chosen Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as 'the greatest of all time' [BBC]. "There is so much in Vertigo, that a single showing barely opens the door to its understanding" (Magill's Survey of Cinema).

Commendable indeed but haven't these people ever seen Jaws, Alien, Predator, Rambo, Silence of the Lambs, The Matrix, etc? :-)

Ocean's 'ogre'...

---

"That's a twenty footer." "Twenty-five." replied Quint. 'They're going to need a bigger boat'. In 1975 the first film to have a real effect on a young Ows was Jaws. I liked to fish and liked the sea and I had read the book long before the highest-grossing film in history at the time came to town on a wave of 'hysterical' media stories of it literally keeping people out of the water (I also have a very personal link to Jaws 2...something I've mentioned before [that post that will give you a hint as to my opinion of a 'death order' for any shark, ogre or not]). The superb and ominous soundtrack helped Jaws become 'one of the greatest films of all time'. And now it's being remade and produced by Robert Rodriquez, that tells you what it will be like ...bloody brilliant (see what I did there?).



The sad irony is that Jaws is being played out for real in Western Australia: with Ben Linden the fifth person killed by a shark off WA's coast in less than a year: the latest victim of Brutus; "If something is in the four to five metre vicinity and it's a white shark - which is the description we've got from witnesses - you make the assumption that it could be the same shark."

Ocean's 'ogre'...

---

"That's a twenty footer." "Twenty-five." replied Quint. 'They're going to need a bigger boat'. In 1975 the first film to have a real effect on a young Ows was Jaws. I liked to fish and liked the sea and I had read the book long before the highest-grossing film in history at the time came to town on a wave of 'hysterical' media stories of it literally keeping people out of the water (I also have a very personal link to Jaws 2...something I've mentioned before [that post that will give you a hint as to my opinion of a 'death order' for any shark, ogre or not]). The superb and ominous soundtrack helped Jaws become 'one of the greatest films of all time'. And now it's being remade and produced by Robert Rodriquez, that tells you what it will be like ...bloody brilliant (see what I did there?).

The sad irony is that Jaws is being played out for real in Western Australia: with Ben Linden the fifth person killed by a shark off WA's coast in less than a year: the latest victim of Brutus; "If something is in the four to five metre vicinity and it's a white shark - which is the description we've got from witnesses - you make the assumption that it could be the same shark."