Ex Machina @ Film Forum, 8:30 Wednesday 1/8
WE’RE BACK
I had some personal stuff going on which caused me to flee to my parents’ place in Arizona for a bit. I also stopped answering calls and texts. Off the grid!
Which meant no movies newsletter.
But now WE’RE BACK! And likely to see movies at a higher frequency moving forward!
Anyway.
This week I’m seeing Ex Machina at the Film Forum! I’m going to the 8:30 Wednesday showing. The movie should let out by 10:30.
I saw this movie many years ago on a first date and ended up so engrossed that I paid absolutely no attention to the person I was seeing it with. I felt at the time that seeing a great movie on a first date was not a good move because I just didn’t end up paying much attention to them, but now I feel that a first date shouldn’t be a movie at all, but if it has to be, it might as well be really good.
Ex Machina is part of the Film Forum’s timely series on AI. A computer programmer is summoned to help his reclusive boss with a sort of Turing test with a robot the boss had created in secret. Really fun and I think it’ll be fun to rewatch it in the context of today’s AI.
The last film I talked about with this newsletter was Hundreds of Beavers. I think it’s too long ago for me to make a real review of it, but I will say that I had a lot of fun in the showing, both because the movie was really special but also because it has such a cult following that I felt like I was engaging with a real community just by being in the room. There was a Q&A with some of the people who made the film, and some of the audience members were even wearing hand-made beaver or raccoon costumes! Great experience.