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Hey guys,

Some new things:

1. So what’s special about this edition is it’s got a nifty sponsorship. For every person that clicks The Rundown AI link within 3 days of receiving this email, I get $1! So click it! Then I could buy myself an iced tea and happy meal and maybe even more.
   

2. Here’s the first music vid made with the help of Sora — filmmaker Paul Trillo got early access. Great use. Something that’d be a nightmare to shoot or put together with CG. Lots of breaking reality and happy accidents.
   
   There’s still some misconception here. It’s not a magic wand. It’s an entire new time-consuming job:
   
   “Trillo created the video with prompts that were at least 1,000 words each, and tried endless variations before settling on the final shots.”
   
   Now there’s Veo from Google.
   

3. Here’s the conspiracy. Or maybe it’s just common sense? The two seem to blur nowadays. AI is potentially being pushed and developed at exponential speeds, because the government sees it as an “arms” race. The US is very much on top here, developing a tool to exert commanding influence on the global front. They could then pull the plug on a foreign adversary’s systems just like that… instigate mass uprising… many things… That’s a magic wand.
   

4. Day Trading Attention from Gary Vaynerchuk.
   

5. I have a complicated relationship with “based on a true story” and “inspired by actual events”, and specifically biopics. Our attention perks when we’re told “something like this really happened!” But does that make it better? Not necessarily.
   
   There isn’t enough reason to simply reenact every historical event. There isn’t enough reason to give every important figure a biopic.
   
   There’s enough reason in some cases, but then the question becomes, what’s the actual interesting angle? Bernstein’s sexuality and how it affected his wife Felicia? An extended sequence focusing on Felicia dying? No. Either of those stories could’ve belonged to countless others throughout history.
   
   Bradley Cooper has a sophisticated sense of imagery, but you get the feeling he’s putting the cart before the horse here. No great reason to spend so many minutes replicating Bernstein’s iconic performance, other than to show-off how hard Bradley can work. Ironically, he put himself in the cross hairs by doing this. He’s trying to be dramatic, rather than trying to communicate through conducting.

   
   Biopics are much more successful when they’re a gateway to wrestle with something larger, and without forgetting what makes their subject specific and unique. The story of the Von Erich family is the perfect situation to tackle big topics of fate… curses… parental upbringing… the power of family and the dangers of blindly following it… and The Iron Claw never loses sight of the through-line. 
   

6. At any Oscar ceremony, there’s bound to be one presenter that tells us movies have the power to inspire. They mean it as a positive. But what about the more disturbing influence that art can have?
   
   Case in point: Taxi Driver.

   
   There are works that are actually about this type of absurd power. The brilliant and amusing Breakfast of Champions is about writer Kilgore Trout writing a book that tells the reader he/she is the only real person with free will and everyone else is a robot, and how that unintentionally feeds Dwayne Hoover’s developing insanity.
   
   It’s fascinating to think about how one person can have so much sway over someone else far away he hardly even knows.
   
   There’s also a bigger implication: we’re all programmed by something.
   
   Safe Society touches on this. The great thing about the audio medium was getting to demonstrate the hypnotic repetition of phrases at various points, echoing in our ears — simulating how messages can get lodged into our heads…
   
   American Fiction comes to a somewhat similar point: an author writes trash and somehow this unintentionally becomes a big splash and affects a huge audience. (I wanted to like this film more than I did, but it was too diluted. Could’ve been much more insightful sticking to the satire of the publishing industry and cultural taste gone haywire.)
   
   Influence… we can dig in further… Experiencing the world through headsets can “rewire” our brains. (But don’t our brains always change and rewire from any stimuli?)
   
   And there’s this… The power of social media to spread tourette-like tics - (also touched on by Safe Society.)
   
   But back to fiction. There’s far less of a common ground and singular Movie Industry for us to discuss and refer to as a cultural handbook these days, so what are the other stories that are swaying us, for better or worse? Is there anything recent that has reprogrammed how you operate, or reprogrammed your friends or contacts? Honestly curious. Let me know.

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Chris