The Long, Lazy Days of Vampires and Crooks

Two beautiful, taciturn young ladies dressed as clowns are captured by a vampire's thralls in Jean Rollin's 1972 film Requiem for a Vampire (Requiem pour un vampire). This is one of the more enjoyable of Rollins' sleepy gothic erotic films.

There's not really a good reason given for why the girls are dressed as clowns or why they're exchanging gunfire with a pursuing vehicle. I assumed they'd committed some kind of robbery but their brief explanation much later in the film is only a vague statement about how they were at a party and got into trouble. But I don't really need an explanation and frankly it's better there isn't one.

It's also not clear why the girls rarely speak to each other. It's almost a silent film before they finally end up at the mysterious chateau where the thralls recruit them. Under a spell that prevents them from leaving the area around the chateau, they're tasked with luring victims to the ruins in the days before they themselves will become vampires.

But when they finally meet the vampire patriarch, he turns out to be a charming, wistful gentleman who says the days of the vampire are coming to a close and his current disciples probably won't even manage to become vampires. Where most vampire movies of the time revel in decadent horror, this one's mostly gentle ennui and sex. There are lots of contemplative shots of the girls wandering the woods. I like this one of the blonde waiting for victims, idly lying on her stomach next to some daisies while the wind sweeps the tall grass about her.

Requiem for a Vampire is available this month on The Criterion Channel as part of a Jean Rollin playlist.

Drew Struzan

Famed movie poster artist Drew Struzan has died. His long and prolific career is most distinguished for his work with Spielberg and Lucas on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. But not only did he do a lot more posters than that, he did more iconic posters.

Okay, I'd argue Back to the Future is really more of a Spielberg movie than credited director Robert Zemekis' movie (I say the same thing about Who Framed Roger Rabbit). But I've always liked the wrong geometry of the Delorian in this poster which you don't see in the posters for the sequels (though they were also painted by Struzan).

He also did posters for John Carpenter movies, including the iconic posters for The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. The latter is one example of many in which Struzan's work kind of exceeds the quality of the film he was promoting.

Kurt Russell looks like he's inviting us on an unabashed decadent pulp adventure which makes it disappointing that he's doing a John Wayne parody in the film itself.

He did several posters for off the wall, '70s sex comedies and horror films. In between, he did a couple of nicely Mucha inspired posters for The Seven Percent Solution and Harry and Walter Go to New York.

He seemed to end up painting Harrison Ford often. Outside of Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, he also did the posters for Blade Runner, The Frisco Kid, and several Indiana Jones video games and collections.

Of his Star Wars posters, I like the ones where he leaned into romance the best, Empire Strikes Back and Attack of the Clones.

With Attack of the Clones, as with Big Trouble in Little China, Struzan's poster is a bit better than the movie itself. At least it has no cgi.

He worked with Guillermo del Toro as well and his poster for Pan's Labyrinth nicely gives us a preview of the film's symbolic production design with a symmetrical composition of Struzan's own devising.

Here's an artist whose work will continue to be in our eyeballs and minds for eternity.

Meryl ex Machina

An effort to find something for Meryl Streep to do on Only Murders in the Building seemed to lead to her doing everything in last night's episode. She's such a good actress, it feels especially odd for her to be dealing with this TV sized dialogue. But, okay, it was a decent episode.

A "ladies night" in the secret casino leads to Loretta (Streep), Mabel, and Detective Williams going undercover. This allows Selena Gomez to show off her newly skinny body with a stunning little gold cocktail dress.

Loretta claims to have psychic ability and I was amused when it turned out she really did, apparently able to see into Renee Zellwegger's mind when conversing with her. Though, in the end, it felt a bit like the inexplicable mind vision scenes in Ant-Man and the Wasp: In Quantumania. Like the writers just couldn't imagine a more logical plot so felt obliged to randomly introduce a supernatural ability.

But Meryl Streep is so good. I really liked her performance in the airport when she was slightly bewildered by her flight delay. She chews the scenery but it's plausible.

Yet, Dianne Wiest steals the episode a little when she unexpectedly joins the group and completely fails to maintain a poker face when talking to Zellwegger.

Only Murders in the Buildingis on Disney+ and/or Hulu.

Nun's the Word

What do you get for the Devil who has everything? The final film of Hammer Studios (before their relaunch decades later) was 1976's To the Devil a Daughter. Its remarkable cast includes a late career Richard Widmark, Nastassja Kinski in her first role, Denholm Elliott, and Christopher Lee. This month, Criterion features the film on a Nunsploitation playlist but I wouldn't call it a Nunsploitation movie as much as a Satanic possession movie in which one character happens to sort of be a nun. It's not an especially bad movie if you can't watch Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist.

I find my opinion of the film has not changed since I reviewed it in 2012. I didn't find it as confusing this time since I remembered the basic plot from my previous viewing but the film's tendency not to let the viewer in on character motives still has the effect of nullifying the suspense.

I didn't remark last time on how much I like the Satanic cult's Ashtaroth crucifix.

It looks silly, yes, but I don't think that was an accident. It's a parody of a proper crucifix. There is something fundamentally satanic about parody. It's a mockery.

It is kind of disappointing having Ashtaroth without it being Astarte, the apocryphal Queen of Heaven. That would've given the film an interesting spin.

Lee and Elliott give the best performances in the film. Widmark seems a bit checked out. Kinski was very young and not the actress she would become in a few years but she comes across as very sweet and of course very pretty.

Still Vigilant

I'm still playing that Vigilant mod for Skyrim. It's vast, it's like a whole other game. I'm amazed how many assets one modder made. The mod's plot is divided into acts, I'm now in the third which is a completely separate hellscape from the main game. It's Coldharbour, a realm that is part of the game lore. It's the realm of Molag Bal, the Elder Scrolls' version of Satan. Well, one of several as there's a pantheon of both good and evil gods. The creator of the Vigilant mod, Vicn, shows a lot of fidelity to the established lore of the series, though many reviewers say the Coldharbour section is strongly reminiscent of Dark Souls.

As I mentioned before, the modder is Japanese and I found myself thinking a lot of Final Fantasy games. It has a similar rambling plot with lots and lots of flashbacks. It occurs to me memory tends to be a more prominent topic in Japanese fantasy fiction than it tends to be in western fantasy. Much of Kimetsu no Yaiba is flashbacks, more than necessary to provide backstories and motivations for the characters. There's a clear pleasure taken in dwelling in memory for a long time. In Vigilant's Coldharbour, you encounter a series of damned knights whose memories of misdeeds you can enter and alter to absolve them. Though whether time is actually altered isn't clear.

The only area in which the modder seems not to have made everything himself is in animations. Many of the monsters reuse animations from vanilla Skyrim enemies--the giant scorpions are clearly using the animations of the vanilla game's giant spiders and so on. But otherwise, it's a herculean effort for one modder. There seems to be no end of the custom made armours and weapons I encounter, all of exceptional quality which is boosted by a texture upgrade mod from another modder. The dungeon maps are pretty good, too, though they tend to feature puzzles, which I tend not to like. Video game puzzles often seem more about trying to figure out the thought process of their creators than actually trying to overcome an obstacle in a realistic manner. For example, sometimes it takes some time for me to figure out that I'm suppose to find some special switch or key rather than simply going around a certain obstacle. I've found that by doing the latter I've gotten to areas of Coldharbour before I'm meant to, which makes things more confusing.

I'm basically using the same character I was using last time I wrote about this mod though technically she died at the end of an effectively creepy haunted house act. At the end of that plotline, you get the choice to either accept Molag Bal's assistance or martyr yourself. I chose martyrdom which sends you back to the Vigilant headquarters and opens the custom character menu--the implication being that you're now a different person following in the footsteps of your previous character. I thought this was a bold choice though the player really has to make an effort to go along with it because you still have all the same gear in your inventory, all the same quests. I decided to play along and left all my gear in a trunk and changed my character's face and name. Most of my followers are gone and I don't know if I'll ever get them back (except for two followers connected to vanilla quests, which highlights a flaw in the implementation of this idea).

If you want to see the mod in all its splendour without playing it yourself, there are several YouTubers with playthroughs. I recommend the one below though I haven't watched it all the way through myself because I don't want spoilers.

X Sonnet 1963

The rusty metal skins patrol the waste.
Undulled are blades they drag across the dust.
The skulls within now lack both smell and taste.
Above there looms a ghastly bovine bust.
A bull beholds a petty, pricking creep.
But one of many hordes who grind the stones.
They carry ore to fill the devil's keep.
Let none now envy gold that laces bones.
Arrayed about the wall are archers primed.
No respite halts their day and nightly watch.
A wayward mortal up the mountain climbed.
A withered sun becomes a bloody blotch.
The grinning guard await your errant sword.
The rotting ship departs with fools aboard.

Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton has died at 79 years of age. One of the most distinctive qualities of this great actress' performances was their vivacity, their sense of effortless nature. She and Laura Dern, I would say, are the two actresses in the history of cinema whose ability to deliver conversational dialogue best and consistently captures a sense of someone genuinely fumbling through words. Despite undoubtedly memorising and rehearsing her lines, Keaton always seemed fresh and real.

She's best known for her work in the Godfather movies as well as a string of Woody Allen's greatest films, most notably as the title character in what's regarded by many as his best film, Annie Hall. Keaton's personality and fashion sense are well known to have influenced the character we see on screen so she is in more than the usual ways (for an actress) responsible for making it a great film.

In her late career, she shifted to solid and appreciable supporting roles in family drama and comedy movies like the Father of the Bride films and The Family Stone. She was also occasionally a director and she directed an episode of my favourite TV series, Twin Peaks, a decent episode in the popularly disliked latter half of the second season.

It's hard to believe an actress of such natural vivacity could be dead. Her movies will certainly live as long as movies do.

The Motives of Our Attending Spirit

Well, here's some more concrete evidence AI isn't perfect. I was watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull again this week and I felt sure the John Milton quote used in the movie was from Comus, a masque Milton wrote in 1634. I decided to double check and googled "Milton Quote in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and the AI gave me this response:

The AI incorrectly states that the quote comes from Paradise Lost. It does not, it comes from Comus, from a soliloquy by the "Attending Spirit", a mysterious omniscient being whose benevolence and identity are fodder for stimulating debate. As when I pointed out the interpretation Google's AI gave to Ian McShane's accent in Pirates of the Caribbean, I find this a strange mistake for an AI to make. I mean, it seems much more like something I'd expect from human error. Paradise Lost is Milton's most famous work so I can see your average human assuming that's where the quote came from. Why should an AI have such a prejudice? I can find the quote in Comus by going to Project Gutenberg and hitting "control F". Surely AI should be able to go through such a process even faster. Wouldn't it be more difficult for it to amalgamate the common assumptions about Milton, digest them, and regurgitate them to provide something that simulates a human error? I guess there is such a thing as trying too hard.

So it seems the AI is basically a pool of internet content with weak discernment for the relative integrity of its sources. Perhaps it's no more sinister than that, though that's plenty sinister.

One of the things that keep me coming back to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull despite its flaws is the interrogation scene where Cate Blanchett's Soviet character talks about her ambition to harness psychic power from the crystal skulls for mind control, "A mind weapon. A new frontier of psychic warfare. That was Stalin's dream." Apparently Stalin really was interested in psychic ability. Blanchett's lines about forcing Americans to believe the Soviet version of history reminds me of Putin's long history lecture in his infamous interview with Tucker Carlsen. With AI spreading misinformation, maybe it'll wind up to be a real crystal skull. If it hasn't already.

How They Cover Their Hands Now

I've been noticing a lot of sock puppet videos on YouTube lately, floating to the top of my particular algorithm soup. For those who don't know, in internet lingo a "sock puppet" is, according to Wikipedia, "a false online identity used for deceptive purposes . . . Sock puppets include online identities created to praise, defend, or support a person or organization, to manipulate public opinion, or to circumvent restrictions such as viewing a social media account that a user is blocked from." Mostly I've been seeing Japanese sock puppets aimed at foreigners, particularly pro-Sanseito sock puppets, like this guy called Shohei Kondo who has a lot of videos about video games and dating that casually slip in messages about how actually Sanseito isn't as crazy as its reputation suggests and they just want what's best for everyone, etc.

Yesterday I came across this guy called Evan Edinger whom I can't say for sure is a sock puppet but his videos somehow generate over a million views despite being extremely bland. The video I watched part of (and linked to) begins with him explaining how he, as an American, grew up in an environment where guns were a fundamental part of life and Britain introduced him to this novel idea that maybe the average person doesn't need to own a gun. His voice and cadence sound so fake (not A.I. fake just phony shill kind of fake) that I assumed he was a sock puppet before I saw his regular view counts. Could so many people really be interested in a sock puppet's content? Maybe he's just a really good sock puppet. So far I'm not seeing it but I never understood Dancing with the Stars either. Anyway, speaking as an American myself, I never experienced that feeling of having to own a gun and I don't know if anyone I knew did. Even people I knew who owned guns gave me the impression that it was their own particular predilection rather than an omnipresent need everyone in the social group feels to own a gun. I'm sure there are people like that but the YouTuber's description of it as just an every day fact of every American's life is ridiculous and feels like anti-American propaganda.

This is all, of course, why I've always said fiction is superior to non-fiction. Non-fiction, by its nature, asserts truth as its province and implicitly sets itself against that metric. Fiction is just ideas with no pretense at being otherwise.

Now that it's starting to feel like autumn I've been listening to more Elvis Costello lately. I don't know why exactly but Elvis Costello is associated with autumn for me.

Just Because X Doesn't Mark a Spot Doesn't Mean It's Irrelevant

Scully and Mulder find their investigation frustrated by lies and surveillance devices in a February 1994 episode of The X-Files called "E.B.E" ("extraterrestrial biological entity", which doesn't roll off the tongue like simply "E.T."). I like how this episode lays a groundwork of uncertainty for everything else.

For one thing, Mulder finds out there's a limit to how far he can trust his mysterious "Deep Throat" source, who in this episode lies and even deliberately gives Mulder false evidence of a U.F.O. in an effort to manipulate him. Meanwhile, Scully finds a listening device hidden in her pen. That's gotta be a small device to fit in a pen but not at all far fetched. Can you imagine how small cameras and listening devices can be now? Ask someone from a country like South Korea or Japan where voyeurism is at epidemic levels.

Back in the U.S. in the '90s, though, surveillance was something the government used against pesky FBI agents. Mulder tears apart his apartment looking for hidden bugs, finally finding one in a power outlet. He Scully then split up and carefully meet up at a convenience store in another state before embarking on their plan to follow a freight truck that may be carrying a crashed alien ship. But whoever's manipulating Mulder is using his own desire to find aliens against him, a plot device I really liked.

This is also the episode that introduces the Lone Gunmen, those lovable crackpots.

It occurs to me that there's been a massive shift in how Americans commonly regard conspiracy theories and exploring ideas of government deception. Now it's Trump's White House staging bogus inquiries into classified U.F.O. intelligence and it all seems like a sad pantomime. Or maybe they took a page from the shadowy characters who sought to use Mulder against himself. Scully has a nice line in the episode, "The truth is out there. But so are lies."

The X-Files is available on Disney+ in Japan.

Only Trophies in the Building

On last night's Only Murders in the Building, the team confronted the three billionaires in a wonderful faux-17th century manor house.

I want to live in this place so bad. It's better than Major Clive Wynne-Candy's house. All those creepy hunting trophies! The weird tusk table!

It was basically a funny episode, too. Oliver wanders off in the woods and Loretta (unseen in this episode) calls in a "silver alert". This paired well with all the lavender Oliver wears in this episode.

It was funny when Charles and Mabel had to answer Broadway trivia questions with Oliver absent. Do these kinds of life or death situations ever actually occur?

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+.

That Old Slasher Magic

A masked man goes around killing people and only one young woman seems to be taking the disappearances seriously. 2004's Toolbox Murders feels like a throwback to slasher movies from twenty to thirty years earlier so it's appropriate that it's directed by one of the masters of that period, Tobe Hooper. It's certainly refreshing.

I found myself thinking of Ginger Rogers' criticism of Saturday Night Fever, that the young people think "they can dance with their faces." Where she and Fred Astaire showed their dancing prowess with full frame long takes, musicals of the '70s and '80s preferred to conjure energy with editing and composition. Similarly, one of the most memorable parts of Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first attack from Leatherface, when a shot that began of a woman standing at a door transforms when he rushes out to grab her. A typical modern slasher would feel compelled to cut quickly between Dutch angles. Somehow Hooper was better able to convey a sense of watching a real nutcase spring from the shadows and inflict gruesome injury.

Toobox Murders is a remake of a '70s movie not directed by Hooper though apparently it shares nothing much in common with its predecessor's plot. In this one, Angela Bettis plays Nell, a young, recently married woman who's moved into a haunted Hollywood apartment building with her husband. When odd absences start to occur, no-one believes her when she insists something weird is happening.

So it's a slasher film with elements of supernatural horror, though it may just be insanity believing it's supernatural. It's good and creepy anyway. Juliet Landau is also in the movie all too briefly.

Toolbox Murders is available on The Criterion Channel.

A May Dismember Romance

A young woman with a lazy eye has a horrific experience with first love in 2002's May. There's also a creepy doll and many references to Frankenstein but this film mostly put me in mind of Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Like that film, it's anchored by an exceptional performance from its lead actress, in this case Angela Bettis.

The doll works as a metaphor for the young woman, May's, sexual repression. Other kids won't talk to her, we see in flashbacks to May's childhood, so her mother gives her the doll, Susie, in compensation. However, she's instructed to keep the doll in its glass case and not to remove it under any circumstances. As May starts to crack up over the course of the film, cracks start to appear in the glass case.

She works as a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital where the secretary, Polly (Anna Faris), doesn't disguise her lusting for May. But May's fixated on her neighbour, Adam (Jeremy Sisto), whose hands she considers beautiful.

Like Repulsion, May does a good job blurring the line between what might be May's derangement and what might be her bad luck in meeting so many assholes. Adam's character is a slightly implausible form of jerk who makes gory, independent horror movies but completely backs out of a relationship with May when she bites his lip during foreplay.

Bettis' performance is a little more over the top than Catherine Deneuve's in Repulsion and I'd say Polanski's is undeniably a superior film. But May is certainly a pleasure.

May is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Road to Space

A young woman finds her deceased husband apparently back from the dead but with the personality of an alien in John Carpenter's 1984 film Starman. Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen give earnest, focused performances that compel similar focus from the viewer. It's a lovely romance, too.

This is one of Carpenter's lone, oddball man against the world movies, like They Live and Escape from New York. Bridges' alien visitor is certainly the most mild-mannered of the lot. Bridges plays the character with a mechanical, clicking cadence but his natural warmth can't help but come through, giving the character a nice nuance.

Karen Allen holds on tight to every line and Carpenter gives her copious closeups, making use of those massive, communicative eyes of hers. I like how she never for a moment believes the alien is her husband. Watching the two fumble their way through odd but undeniable chemistry is really charming. It's also a pleasant road movie as their journey from Denver to Arizona gives a nice context. Carpenter compared it to It Happened One Night, another romantic road movie, though Bridges and Allen aren't nearly as fractious as Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.

Starman is available this month on The Criterion Channel as part of a playlist of John Carpenter movies.

X Sonnet 1963

A half a line was cut from cookie luck.
Remember spuds when singing songs of love.
Potatoes mashed or stewed could woo a buck.
A patron courts a waitress hand and glove.
Entire scrolls of jokes were rolling out.
The comic court was steps from stately elks.
The forest here is choked with faerie clout.
The instrument at hand was Lawrence Welk's.
The scent of garlic bread pervades the air.
Preserving such was past the ken of man.
The tasty bread would sate an angry bear.
But people still from local grizzlies ran.
The loss of leaves has marked the fall of grace.
Abandoned books have robbed the human space.

Robot Woes

I watched 1987's RoboCop over the course of the week. I kept falling asleep during it. Again, that's just a sign of what a sleepy fellow I've become in my 40s, not a reflection on the film's quality. I'd seen it before, of course, but when I was a kid. I found the two parts I remembered best remain my favourite parts of the film; ED-209 coming down the stairs, and one of the thugs falling apart when his body's exposed to some kind of toxic waste.

The animation on ED-209 was worthy of Ray Harryhausen (but it was actually Craig Davies). You can sense it thinking as it stands at the top of the stairs, weighing the wisdom of actually pursuing RoboCop down the stairs. One can't help but interpret it as hubris when it makes the fatal decision to go ahead.

The thug melting in the big action sequence at the end is one of those random details that effectively push an action sequence to another level. I remember on the Godfather Part II commentary or in an interview, Francis Ford Coppola remarking on the scene where Vito kills that crime boss and a light bulb just happens to break. Having some random but plausible surprise in your action sequence really breathes life into it. The melting man in RoboCop adds to a sense of an untethered nightmare symphony. I love it.

The RoboCop movies are currently available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

Dagon and Dagoth

On Wednesday, walking to and from work, I listened to The Shadow Over Innsmouth read by Dagoth Ur. It seemed an appropriate enough way to begin October. Dagoth Ur is the villain with a distinctive voice from the 2002 Elder Scrolls game Morrowind. Someone doing an impression of the voice has been uploading recordings of him saying or reading various things, including a number of HP Lovecraft texts in their entirety. It was funny at first but now I seem to be enjoying it unironically. Dagoth Ur, as a reader, hits a nice medium between performance and straightforward oratory. I like how he gives the colloquial speech of Zadok just a little bit of an accent instead of trying to extrapolate Lovecraft's theoretical, ancient New England dialect.

One of the obvious reasons The Shadow Over Innsmouth hasn't had a film adaptation that captures the novella's power is Lovecraft's ability to conjure mood through suggestion. The best example being the people of Innsmouth and their famous "Innsmouthian look".

He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm.

It would be difficult to show this in film without going too extreme or too subtle. The human mind has a powerful capacity to quickly rationalise the bizarre in real life but is less inclined to do so when watching a film. In prose, the reader can imagine the Innsmouthian look within his or her own conceptions of plausibility, within the realm in which one might reasonably expect a community of human/fish monster hybrids to live relatively undetected in a seaside American town for more than a century. That line is going to be different for everyone so it would be difficult to capture in film in a way that's as satisfying as Lovecraft captured it in prose.

Only Pop Stars in the Building

Meryl Streep returns in this week's new Only Murders in the Building. She and Martin Short continue to have great chemistry though I found her unexpected bonding with Dianne Wiest over an opera stage dagger a little more interesting.

Meanwhile, Mabel's conflict with her former friend and current pop star Althea comes to a head. Althea's fictional popular song sounds suspiciously similar to Sabrina Carpenter to me and I wonder if there's some real life cattiness at play from real life pop star Selena Gomez, who plays Mabel, aimed at Carpenter.

Charles's trouble in this episode revolves around a dating app. Mabel upbraids him for wearing an earring in a scene that really made them seem like a married couple.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+ in Japan and on Hulu elsewhere.

Enjoy Something Fake

This seems to be the only official video on YouTube of the AI actress, Tilly Norwood. There are more short clips on her instagram. But Norwood isn't the only artificial feature of the above video; everyone you see in the video is AI generated. It's written by AI and I assume the voices are AI generated as well. I'm trying to pick out the patterns that indicate AI writing and one thing I can see is that it's very dreamlike. It's like a dream in which everything makes sense while you're in it but if think for a moment you realise things don't add up. For example, when Norwood, in the video, apparently on a red carpet, says, "Three seasons and a podcast." Three seasons of what? What podcast is she talking about? The company behind the video and Norwood have said nothing about a podcast or series.

Naturally, SAG-AFTRA is on its ear about Norwood. I don't foresee AI performers replacing real ones in the near future but I can imagine them becoming a phenomenon unto themselves. Virtual YouTubers are popular throughout Asia and those are real people using artificial images, essentially like puppets. I can easily imagine totally artificial YouTubers cornering a market.

Yet the writing feels disconnected. Like a lot of people, I've been wondering if Disney has been sneaking AI writing into their productions. I was watching Alien: Earth last night, the fourth episode, and there was a decent scene in which Wendy, the protagonist, is in an operating room and we find out she can hear and repeat the language of the aliens. It's basically a reworking of an idea from Alien: Resurrection but it's not so bad. But it's followed by a scene between her and her brother which strongly reminded me of Ahsoka. The performers spend an inordinate amount of time delivering peculiarly flat dialogue. Wendy asks her brother where he was while she was in the hospital and he assures her that he would have come if he'd known where she was. Is there a reason she'd suspect he wouldn't? Is there a reason we linger on him assuring her? It seems like no. Nothing here is to introduce character nuance or depth but to fill time in a sort of theoretical way, like something or someone is focused more on convincingly creating an actual television scene than on creating or expressing something interesting. I'm not sure if this is Disney employing AI or if the screenwriters actually wrote a few interesting scenes and then just had some software fill in the gaps. Or maybe it's just good old fashioned bad writing.

Let's imagine Tilly Norwood becomes a sensation. I think conversation will quickly become about ethical considerations. It would be possible to depict Norwood doing or saying things no human actress would do. The video above even already has a joke about ignoring consent. I certainly don't think Particle6 is going to be able to stop the creation of unauthorised Tilly Norwood porn. I wonder if the conversation will shift to focus on what people compulsively watch. To what new depths of depravity will AI take us?