SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER
Steve Zaillian is mostly known as a screenwriter. Famous for winning an Oscar for Schindler's List. He adapted The Irishman for Scorsese, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo for Fincher, Moneyball for Bennett Miller. He wrote American Gangster for Ridley Scott. All of his works an couched in realism.
He has directed three features and the pilot episode of The Night Of which I raved about here before. I haven't heard anything good about All the King's Men so it's not a must watch anytime soon. This leaves his two pictures I can safely say are A level material: A Civil Action and Searching For Bobby Fischer. Both underrated to the point of tears. Both sorely missing any physical media release outside of a bare bones DVD.
In the case of Searching For Bobby Fischer, I'd heard about it years ago when first seeing A Civil Action and wanting to find more of Zaillian's directorial work. For one reason or another, it slipped through my fingers. Until now.
The film addresses a number of themes. The weight a boy wonder has to carry, if the parents are in this for their kid or to capture another chance at glory due to missing their opportunity previously, speed chess vs. methodical chess i.e. not overthinking your moves vs. analyzing your and your opponent's moves. I know little about chess but the way it is shown in the movie keeps it exciting.
The relationships of the characters are so finely sketched that it manages to be a father/son movie, a mentor/student movie, mentor vs. mentor, and finally you have the moral compass of the mother. All portrayed by a stunning cast: Joe Mantegna, Joan Allen, Laurence Fishburne, Ben Kingsley with scenes of Laura Linney, Dan Hedaya, William H. Macy, Tony Shalhoub and Austin Pendleton. The movie could have been even better with more Fishburne's character.
I can only see this movie climbing in esteem.
THE MANIAC BY BENJAMIN LABATUT
While we are on the topic of genius, let's talk about The Maniac. AI is seeping into the entertainment world. The Writers and Actors Strikes went on for months because of this. The Maniac hit for me at just the right time. I read it during the writers strike Swirling around in my head around the same time was Oppenheimer and the book it was based on, American Prometheus.
The Maniac is told in a triptych structure. The first part is about John Von Neumann. A mathematical genius whom Einstein considered his equal. Like Oppenheimer, he is one of the minds who worked on the atomic bomb. The idea of the greatest minds working on a project with the capability of destroying the planet is fascinating albeit obsidian dark. Labatut chooses to focus on how these minds, in this case Von Neumann's descend into madness. When do mathematics and science go to far?
The book then leaps into the 21st century and centers on Lee Sedol, the champion of Go. This is the section that has chilled me to the bone. First off, the game of Go is monumentally more intricate than chess. The amount of possible positions in a game of Go is 300 times more than chess and more than the total number of atoms in the known universe. Lee Sedol is considered one of the greatest Go players of all time. In 2016, Lee accepted a challenge from Google's Deep Mind Lab to play against their AI program for $1 million. More than 100 million people tuned in for the match up. He eventually lost the tournament 4 games to 1.
It started with a training set of recorded games that contained over 30 million moves made by expert Go players and logged ino the 'convolutional neural network.' The network learned how tho predict the next move and learned to predict the outcome from different arrangements on the board.
Now the breathtaking part. In the second game of the tourney, the AI makes a move that stops Sedol in his tracks.
As Labatut put it: "When future historians look back at our time and try to pin down the first glimmer of true artificial intelligence, they may well find it in a single move during the second game between Lee Sedol and Alpha Go, played on the tenth of March 2016: Move 37." The AI's intuition was both different and better than human intuition. It offered a glimpse of what intelligence looks like. It thinks differently but it very much adept at accomplishing tasks.
I immediately watched the documentary Alpha Go after finishing the book because of how riveted I was about Lee Sedol's story.
The move Alpha Go played against Lee Sedol was a one in 10,000 type move. This sets a scary precedent. How far will we see the utilization AI go in our lifetimes? We've seen AI used not just in this way but through the film industry and military. The former taking away jobs from creatives.
The way it is being used through the military obscures accountability from decision making and moves it away from individuals and into a system.
The Maniac is a book whose ideas are still blooming on a consisent basis in my mind and, like the ending of Oppenheimer, form the basis for truly terrifying possibilties.
AMERICAN CONSPIRACY: THE OCTOPUS MURDERS
When journalist Danny Casolaro was found dead in a bathtub in a hotel, police ruled it a suicide. Colleagues believe he was murdered for investigating stolen government spy software, major political scandals and a string of unsolved murders. It gets deeper and deeper.
There's a high people get when chasing conspiracies. This high can even be felt when watching this. I wasn't able to stop watching until I got through all 4 episodes.
There are figures who are called web spinners. People who have kernels of truth but spin lies around it. These figures turn out to be instrumental to government organizations because of their unreliable nature. They do hold truths, but these truths are encased in falsehoods to the point where when they do come forward, people throw out everything they say as false. Thus creating perfect foibles.
I'm starting to sound like Jim Garrison here, but the recent news of John Barnett, a Boeing whistleblower who was set to testify against them and winding up being found dead from an apparent suicide is startlingly similair to the documentary.
GENERAL SMEDLEY BUTLER
Smedley Butler is a historical figure who begs for a film to be made about him. Paradoxically, the biopic is the subgenre I would consider the most boring. Only a handful are riveting- Ed Wood, Mishima: A Life In Chapters, Amadeus, Born On the Fourth of July.
In the case of Born On the Fourth of July, the film follows Ron Kovic. A patriot who volunteers to defend his country only to find himself disillusioned with the Vietnam War after his experience in it. It's the basic rule of characters in storytelling. By the end of the story, the character goes on a journey and arrives at a different place from where he was in the beginning. This trajectory is similair to Butler.
Butler won the Medal of Honor. Twice. In two seperate conflicts. This quote eloquently summarizes his experiences on war.
"I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. Their record of racketeering is long. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. We marines operated on three continents. I spent 33 years in the marines, most of my years being a high class muscle man for big business for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism."
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