93. A splendid flaw
I.
In the film Conclave, the Pope has died, so a new one must be elected. Over a hundred cardinals from all corners of the globe enter the conclave. They are locked away in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City with no contact with the outside world to prevent any influence, and remain there until a new pope has been elected. And then: white smoke.
My colleague (and film buff) Jeroen Kraan called Conclave in his Letterboxd review “top-notch nonsense”. I couldn’t agree more. Just like Jeroen, I thoroughly enjoyed this nonsensical plot. Because Ralph Fiennes gives such a brilliant performance, the film looks stunning, and because the conclave lends itself perfectly to a political thriller in which cardinals play off against one another.
Of course, this vote is political too; the parallel with all sorts of other elections is easy to draw. “Is this what we’re left with?” says a cardinal in the film. “That we have to vote for the least bad option?” The Pope may have divine authority, but he is not perfect. “We are mortals who dedicate ourselves to an ideal,” says another. “We cannot always be ideal.”
There is a twist at the end that you can see coming a mile off, and yet, in a way, you can’t. I won’t give anything away, but it makes or breaks the film.
---II.
I’ve been playing around with the AI image generator Sora this week. It’s by no means the first tool to generate videos based on lines of text, but given that it’s made by OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT), expectations are high. When the first examples appeared in February, it sparked yet another ‘wow’ moment for generative AI.
In a demo, you can see how, without too much effort, it creates realistic images of a herd of giraffes running across a snowy plain. The giraffes don’t exist, nor does the snowy plain, let alone have they been filmed. Yet it looks lifelike.
Sora has recently become available in the first few countries. The Netherlands isn’t among them, but that’s what VPNs are for. And so I started experimenting with my video colleague Bas Scharwachter, driven by the question of how easy it would be to create fake images – and thus fake news. I was a bit disappointed by how difficult it was to create convincing images. But after quite a few hours (and euros) of trying, we had a reasonable explosion on the canals in Amsterdam. You can see the result on NU.nl.
PS.
Bruh. That’s the children’s word of the year according to a poll by NOS Jeugdjournaal. “Many children say they use the word when they think something is stupid or silly,” writes Jeugdjournaal alongside the results. In short: a perfect response to the debacle surrounding Van Dale’s Word of the Year poll.
PRINT has listed a hundred beautiful book covers from the past year. Because sometimes you really can judge books by their covers. There are some real gems among them.
I read a presentation by Stephen Fry on artificial intelligence. It contains (does this surprise you?) some sensible points. Some sharp ones too. “Who do we turn to for answers? Zuckerberg and Musk? Such a thought can only make us vomit with laughter. They are the worst polluters in human history. Worse than any chemical plant ever. You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of the human world.”
Meanwhile, he is making a point of no longer writing about AI, but about Ai, so that readers of texts in sans serif (such as my blog) do not confuse AI with al. I join this minority of supporters, but I don’t stick to it myself.
Good point from Cory Doctorow. We have emergency exits everywhere in case of fire, but fires are constantly raging on social media and yet we have nowhere to go. “The more you love and need the people on the site, the harder it is for you to leave, and the shittier the service can make things for you. How cursed is that?”
I always think it’s a lovely idea that Superman of all people, an alien who owes nothing to Earth, is the one who sees a life of dignity in every human being. Those in power in real life sometimes tend to forget that. At the same time, it’s sci-fi pulp, and you don’t have to make that dark and realistic at all, director James Gunn (of Guardians of the Galaxy) must have thought. Next year he’s bringing out a new Superman film. In the teaser trailer, you hear John Williams’ old Superman theme given an epic new twist (that had me hooked already), you see a gigantic kaiju and… Krypto the superdog!
Hang in there, folks. The shortest day of the year is behind us once again. Enjoy the Christmas holidays, read De Avonden by Gerard Reve, and next week you can read my highlights of 2024 here.
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