Hunger Games original trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay Part 1, Mockingjay Part 2) – justly-celebrated high-quality realisations of the young adult sequence, skilfully working through the contrasts and contradictions between the young adult and the adult worlds. Jennifer Lawrence, together with her designer, director and cinematographer, does an astonishing job of making Caitness seem at some times very mature, especially when she is with her peers, and at other times very gauche and naive, especially when she is with the proper grown-ups. Running through the films is the theme of how her image is manipulated – first by the broadcasters of the Hunger Games, to create appealing television, and then by the rebel leaders, to create a figurehead for their uprising against the Capitol – and the moral, political or perhaps simply human question of how one acts under such circumstances.
Oppenheimer – a disappointment to those like me who were expecting a film about America’s Manhatten Project to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis, which Oppenheimer led. And the scientific technical endeavour is in there, somewhere, but the film is mainly about American politics: the post-bomb drive towards Cold War with the USSR (despite Oppenheimer’s efforts to establish bi-lateral nuclear understanding) and the anti-Communist witch hunts which saw Oppenheimer stripped of his security clearance on the strength of his pre-war Communist sympathies and associations. Oppenheimer’s unhappy wife is very well and painfully played by Emily Blunt, but I’m not sure what that had to do with anything else – except that it was part of Oppenheimer’s life. Well, “Oppenheimer” was the film we were promised, so I suppose I can’t really complain.
Red Eye, season 2; Curfew; The Capture – multi-part TV thrillers, which I find ideal for taking my mind off things after a day's work. All of them have plotlines in which security systems turn out to be unreliable, to the point that they can't believe what the cameras and access records are telling them – a sign of the digital degeneration of our times, when even the cops and the spooks don't know what's going on. Of the three female protagonists, my favourite is Hana Li in Red Shift, as basically the most normal and grounded: an ordinary police detective dropped into extraordinary situations, but surviving by basically being quicker, sharper and bolder than everyone else. She's still in the closed environment, this time the American Embassy under lockdown; it's her good friend the head of MI5 who's trapped on a plane with a bomb. Curfew, as well as the powerful presence of Sarah Parish, had an interesting premise in its night-time curfew for men, to protect the safety of women and girls (the mystery is a murder, apparently committed by a man, but with no sign of curfew violation) – unfortunately quite incredible politically even when it was made, and certainly now. (And as Lucy Mangan points out in The Guardian: are we to believe men's violence against women happens only at night?) The Capture is the most ambitious, attempting to anticipate the implications of AI for policing and counter-terrorism, and more widely security and justice – so successfully that the third season had to go a bit over the top, real events catching up with the first two. Holliday Grainger is a police detective who discovers that security camera footage of an assault has been faked in real time, casting doubt on a counter-terrorism conviction of her own, and drawing her into the murky world of "correction" or the manufacture of images which represent what its creators believe (they would say "know") to have happened because they are more convincing to juries and the general public. This is like the Instagram user slogan "pix, or it didn't happen", though the storylines rapidly move into "pix, and it didn't happen". Very exciting, with continual jolts, best of which (in Season 2) is the Home Secretary, transported to a safe house for protection, catching sight of (supposedly) himself giving an interview on live television.
The Skeptic’s Guide to the Future, by Steven Novella – a frustrating and annoying book for me. I got it because it promised to survey the futuristic dreams and visions of the early and later 20th century: interesting for what they reveal about people, even though scientifically and technically far of the mark. Novella does a bit of this… but most of the book is his predictions about the technologies which might actually be developed, across several different timeframes and degrees of probability. (Quantum computing, brain-machine interfaces, controlled nuclear fusion, synthetic life, and so on) The real problem (especially when discussing AI) is that, for him, people are just an obstacle and a blocker: resisting or refusing to accept obviously progressive technologies. It’s not quite as blinkered as what comes out of the mouths of the West Coast tech bros, but from the same gene pool. The problem stems seeing issues of technology only in cognitive and technical terms, and disregarding issues of implementation as trivial or uninteresting. It’s those issues of implementation which will kybosh or divert his predictions. For a “skeptic’s guide”, he should have been more sceptical.
A good corrective I also read at about this time came, surprisingly, from Francis Fukuyama, on the particular difficulties with clean water supply, which he’d heard a tech bro promise would soon be solved by AI. "The reason [that water supply in the developing world is a problem] isn’t that we don’t know what an efficient water system looks like, or lack the technology to build it. Nor is it a simple lack of resources: multilateral development institutions have been willing to fund water projects for years. The obstacles are different, and are entirely political, social, and cultural. Residents of these cities have the capacity to pay more for their water, but they don’t trust their governments not to waste resources on corruption or incompetent management. Businesses don’t want the disruption of pervasive infrastructure construction, and many cities host 'water mafias' that buy cheap water and resell it at extortionate prices to poor people. These mafias are armed and ready to use violence against anyone challenging their monopolies. The state is too weak to control them, or to enforce the very good laws they already have on their books. It is hard to see how even the most superintelligent AI is going to help solve these problems."
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King – a fun and witty account of his early years trying to make it as a writer, plus some sound and common-sensical advice of the craft of writing. I didn’t feel there was anything stupendously unusual or revelatory, though, which I had been sort of expecting, given the celebrity of this book and its multiple editions. So I had a fun time but I was slightly disappointed.
REM + Sherlock Jr – I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to see Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr in the cinema, even though I was unsure about the wisdom of giving it a soundtrack with music by the rock band REM. Well. As one reviewer commented, at least the music didn’t NOT fit or get in the way. For my money, the best soundtracks to the old silent comedies were the trad jazz soundtracks created for ‘Golden Silents’: Michael Bentine’s 1969 clip shows for BBC TV, which was where I first met and loved the comedians of the silent films, of whom I still regard Keaton as the master.
Small Prophets – lovely gentle affectionate slow comedy, from Mackenzie Crook the creator of Detectorists, with Pearce Quigley as a Christ-like man living at right-angles to the world, troubled by the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend on Christmas Eve seven years previously, who learns from his father, played beautifully by Michael Palin, the secret of growing homunculi – which he follows through, because they are supposed to be compelled to answer truthfully any question put to them. The final episode leaves the door open for a second series, but I’m very content with this one; why try to extend what’s perfect? (See Guardian review.)
AI Confidential with Hannah Fry – this time she's in serious mode; after gleefully disassembling popular gadgets to show how they work, now she investigates the stories behind some of AI's greatest scandals: the young man who broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow after his chatbot encouraged him to kill the Queen, the non-driver in a driverless car which killed a pedestrian, the man who shot the CEO of an American health insurance company which was using algorithms to minimise payouts by denying claims. In each case she proves herself to be a sensitive interviewer, as well as a great explainer of the technology. Good work.
Resurrection – very strange film from Chinese director Bi Gan, which I travelled to London to see on the strength of Peter Bradshaw's enthusiastic review. It was certainly an experience, parts of which I slept through (being tired), which somehow seemed appropriate for its languid pace and I don't think diminished my appreciation (such as it was) at all. There's beautiful and skilful filming, but the overall framework is high concept: five episodes, in five time periods from the early 20th century to New Year's Eve 1999, each being made in a film style of the time. (So the first has really bad camera work, far too far back, and includes an homage to L'arroseur arrosé, and the last is one apparently continuous shot, like 1917.) I'm glad to have seen it, but I think this is more one for the film buffs. Just as memorable was the Garden Cinema where it was shown, decked out like an art deco night club.
Singapore 1942: End of Empire – very good two-part BBC documentary, which I would probably have passed over had I not had a family connection: my mother was there, growing up in her Chinese family, aged sixteen at the time of the fall of Singapore. Even told almost exclusively from the British and Singaporean perspective, the story is dramatic enough, as the British colony anxiously watched the Japanese army fight its way down the Malayan peninsula towards the island which Imperial leaders confidently announced would stand firm and never fall. But fall it did, and what the programme persuasively argues is that this marked the start of the end of the British Empire. Although British rule was restored after the defeat of Japan in World War II, what the fall of Singapore had shown was that Britain – admittedly distracted by war in Europe and itself resisting invasion – would not or could not devote the miliary forces to secure its far Eastern possessions, thus emboldening pre-existing independence movements and giving even Empire loyalists reason to doubt how much benefit there was in loyalty to Britain. In this narrative, it was Singapore in 1942 not India in 1947 which was the first of the dominos to fall.
A good corrective I also read at about this time came, surprisingly, from Francis Fukuyama, on the particular difficulties with clean water supply, which he’d heard a tech bro promise would soon be solved by AI. "The reason [that water supply in the developing world is a problem] isn’t that we don’t know what an efficient water system looks like, or lack the technology to build it. Nor is it a simple lack of resources: multilateral development institutions have been willing to fund water projects for years. The obstacles are different, and are entirely political, social, and cultural. Residents of these cities have the capacity to pay more for their water, but they don’t trust their governments not to waste resources on corruption or incompetent management. Businesses don’t want the disruption of pervasive infrastructure construction, and many cities host 'water mafias' that buy cheap water and resell it at extortionate prices to poor people. These mafias are armed and ready to use violence against anyone challenging their monopolies. The state is too weak to control them, or to enforce the very good laws they already have on their books. It is hard to see how even the most superintelligent AI is going to help solve these problems."
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King – a fun and witty account of his early years trying to make it as a writer, plus some sound and common-sensical advice of the craft of writing. I didn’t feel there was anything stupendously unusual or revelatory, though, which I had been sort of expecting, given the celebrity of this book and its multiple editions. So I had a fun time but I was slightly disappointed.
REM + Sherlock Jr – I wasn’t going to pass up a chance to see Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr in the cinema, even though I was unsure about the wisdom of giving it a soundtrack with music by the rock band REM. Well. As one reviewer commented, at least the music didn’t NOT fit or get in the way. For my money, the best soundtracks to the old silent comedies were the trad jazz soundtracks created for ‘Golden Silents’: Michael Bentine’s 1969 clip shows for BBC TV, which was where I first met and loved the comedians of the silent films, of whom I still regard Keaton as the master.
Small Prophets – lovely gentle affectionate slow comedy, from Mackenzie Crook the creator of Detectorists, with Pearce Quigley as a Christ-like man living at right-angles to the world, troubled by the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend on Christmas Eve seven years previously, who learns from his father, played beautifully by Michael Palin, the secret of growing homunculi – which he follows through, because they are supposed to be compelled to answer truthfully any question put to them. The final episode leaves the door open for a second series, but I’m very content with this one; why try to extend what’s perfect? (See Guardian review.)
AI Confidential with Hannah Fry – this time she's in serious mode; after gleefully disassembling popular gadgets to show how they work, now she investigates the stories behind some of AI's greatest scandals: the young man who broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow after his chatbot encouraged him to kill the Queen, the non-driver in a driverless car which killed a pedestrian, the man who shot the CEO of an American health insurance company which was using algorithms to minimise payouts by denying claims. In each case she proves herself to be a sensitive interviewer, as well as a great explainer of the technology. Good work.
Resurrection – very strange film from Chinese director Bi Gan, which I travelled to London to see on the strength of Peter Bradshaw's enthusiastic review. It was certainly an experience, parts of which I slept through (being tired), which somehow seemed appropriate for its languid pace and I don't think diminished my appreciation (such as it was) at all. There's beautiful and skilful filming, but the overall framework is high concept: five episodes, in five time periods from the early 20th century to New Year's Eve 1999, each being made in a film style of the time. (So the first has really bad camera work, far too far back, and includes an homage to L'arroseur arrosé, and the last is one apparently continuous shot, like 1917.) I'm glad to have seen it, but I think this is more one for the film buffs. Just as memorable was the Garden Cinema where it was shown, decked out like an art deco night club.
Singapore 1942: End of Empire – very good two-part BBC documentary, which I would probably have passed over had I not had a family connection: my mother was there, growing up in her Chinese family, aged sixteen at the time of the fall of Singapore. Even told almost exclusively from the British and Singaporean perspective, the story is dramatic enough, as the British colony anxiously watched the Japanese army fight its way down the Malayan peninsula towards the island which Imperial leaders confidently announced would stand firm and never fall. But fall it did, and what the programme persuasively argues is that this marked the start of the end of the British Empire. Although British rule was restored after the defeat of Japan in World War II, what the fall of Singapore had shown was that Britain – admittedly distracted by war in Europe and itself resisting invasion – would not or could not devote the miliary forces to secure its far Eastern possessions, thus emboldening pre-existing independence movements and giving even Empire loyalists reason to doubt how much benefit there was in loyalty to Britain. In this narrative, it was Singapore in 1942 not India in 1947 which was the first of the dominos to fall.
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