Comments by "William Innes" (@williaminnes6635) on "The Critical Drinker"
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I actually liked the first half of this movie. I don't mind medium-written topical content, which might be more of a statement about the fact that well-written topical content simply doesn't make it onto Netflix. The next third of it I was a bit less enthusiastic about. The ending was uninspired and felt like the writers had been holding in a spiteful taunt for the audience that they didn't quite have the courage fully to express. If I had to grade it, I'd give it an A- for the first half, a C+ for the middle third, and a D- for the ending, for a grade of B overall. However, if they're going to go on doing movies in this franchise, they need to begin to vary the way they play with Agatha Christie type tropes just a bit more. Personally, I think just playing the third one completely straight as caricatures from modern times dropped as supporting characters into a deliberately anachronistic narrative conceit - because they're pretty explicit about it, we don't have gentleman sleuths in modern times, Benoit Blanc is every bit as much a fossil of a dead age as Daniel Craig's Bond, and Craig does in effect the same job of playing perhaps not a man out of time but certainly at least a high-line count caricature of a man from another time - granted I have been told his Louisiana accent is much less than convincing - with just enough perspective-splitting exposition to fill in the audience would work perfectly fine. Tangentially, I seem to recall seeing a few mysteries in the fancy local bookstore of the old neighbourhood within which the conceit was that it was Agatha Christie times but Sherlock Holmes was still alive, still consulting as a detective, still addicted to cocaine, and still as Victorian as a monocle and a beaver hat. Another anecdote, from a separate medium, Tom MacDonald topped the hip hop charts several times over the past few years, sounding almost exactly like a B-grade professional rapper from 2008. I think there is a general mood that modern society, if not modern technology, sort of sucks, which feeds a widespread appetite for anachronism and nostalgia. So from top-down fundamentals, the Knives Out concept is A-grade, even if the execution in both movies has been more of a B. Anyway I should probably actually watch your review.
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Connecting the threads in a mystery does sort of seem like a task for which an AI writing tool would be well suited. To run off on a tangent, I imagine romance novels, as of present day, could be written without any human involvement whatsoever. I know there was a window in there in which would-be romance novelists would read reams of classic Harlequins to try to work out the pattern of the story, what it is that draws in the reader, and then stumble through applying it. Had a buddy whose mom did it with a bit of a genre-bender thing - it would never just be sexy Viking or sexy plantation owner, it had to be sexy spy or sexy space alien - and I personally knew a dude who was clearly training himself to write romance novels who may have written the sexy MAGA supporter one that people were making fun of in memes last year. GPT could handle the romance novel learning process easily. Harlequin could then just have a free paperback club for what it estimated its sales demographic would be, take the most popular AI titles to a full run in convenience stores and pharmacies next to the newspapers and women's magazines - or those shops on the beach for people who don't like Kindles, for instance - then feed sales and extended focus group data back to the computer, and adjust the next iteration, in a similar manner to the cycle of client advice in money management. Frankly they could branch out into men's advice from then, with the AI basically stating what it believed to be the elements of an experience which women found romantic based on massed empirical evidence, and then attempting to apply it to a format men would be well suited, on average, to understand. Arguably of course this is a page straight out of a dystopia - in 1984, Winston's girlfriend's day job at the Ministry of Truth is to operate what Orwell describes as "kaleidoscopes" to write romance novels to distract ordinary people - but that just makes it more likely they will apply the technology which all ready exists this way.
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@SpencerCJ The review seems a bit harsh, but that is sort of the point of this channel. Bad reviews ARE more fun to read or watch than good reviews, after all, and most of the shots this channel took were not as cheap as those of a typical episode of Colbert. Personally I think decent pacing and a strong cast can carry a movie especially one which hesitates between genres sufficiently to demur the expectations of the audience. The example for me is Suicide Squad I, which lagged, heavily, in the middle, and would have been unwatchable without both Will Smith and Margot Robbie. It was still watchable. Not everything is going to be an Oscar winner. We do have to remember that this is a commercial product - the big example of a creator who forgot that would be Don Bluth back in the late 1980s and early 1990s with The Cobbler And The Thief. Unfortunately we can't just throw a Peter the Great or an Alt Fritz out there to sponsor what he thinks is fun art, let the Mozarts and the Michaelangelos do their thing for as long as they need, and then let the peasants in to stare over the fence at it once a year. Well, we could, but our model of Stalinism would need to grow a Stalin at that point, and the accountability-fleeing feminized bureaucracy will not like that idea. This is an era similar to the periods of Chinese history in which power was monopolized by eunuchs. We're just waiting for the yellow turbans to swarm out of the mountains.
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