Giants and Toys @ Metrograph, 8:00 1/23
This week I’ll be seeing Giants and Toys at the Metrograph! I’ll be going to the 8pm show on Thursday. The movie should finish by 9:45pm. There’s assigned seating so if you want a ticket let me know and I’ll secure you a (discounted) ticket next to me! 🤩 The sooner the better as it’ll likely sell out.
Originally I was planning to go to the Film Forum’s screening of AI Artificial Intelligence, a film originally worked on by Kubrick and eventually taken over by Spielberg. Two great minds surely must make for a great movie! But I don’t really want my life to be so dominated by AI that even my hobbies are based on it.
So instead we’re seeing Giants and Toys! Giants and Toys is a 1958 Japanese satirical comedy film about three candy manufacturers trying to corner the caramel market through any-means-necessary corporate warfare. It sounds like the kind of niche film I’ve been craving since I got back to New York.
Now notes on the previous films this month. First, a meta note: I think my notes tend to be less ‘reviews’ and more ‘what was striking to me about this movie when I saw it’. I’m going to try to lean into that moving forward.
As I’ve seen Eyes Wide Shut SO many times, I didn’t really find anything particularly striking this time except that seeing it in theater the audio quality was significantly better than I’ve heard before. That was a lot of fun for me, especially with its iconic diegetic score in the mansion scene.
I’d seen Ex Machina before, but not since the rise of large language models. What really struck me was that both hardware and software were shown as equally advanced in the robot. I think this tends to be the case in a lot of science fiction works, that the writers don’t differentiate between rates of advancement for software and hardware. However, we are currently seeing software that is FAR more human than any hardware we can create. I think it’ll be a very long time before we can build hardware that can move as a person does, but software that can think like a person does not appear too far off.