As lockdown slowly eases and London descends into a late-winter chill, the most striking film I saw this week came from Russia. Andrei Konchalovsky's Bafta-nominated Soviet drama
Dear Comrades is a viscerally relevant story of profound injustice. It's unmissable. Otherwise, the week's big movie was a very late online screening of the monster mash-up
Godzilla vs Kong, after it had already been released online in the USA, and therefore was already on all the pirate sites. It was an enjoyable action blockbuster, with above-average effects (even on a laptop screen) and a great cast running around pointlessly in the background. Really can't wait to be able to see these kinds of movies on enormous screens where they belong, but there's still around five weeks before cinemas in the UK reopen.
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BEST OUT THIS WEEK:
Palm Springs • The Truffle Hunters
Moffie • Rose: A Love Story
Sequin in a Blue Room
PERHAPS AVOID:
Love, Weddings & Other Disasters
ALL REVIEWS > |
Everything else was tiny by comparison. Christopher Smith's
The Banishing is an above-average horror, with a solid script that deepens characters to make us care, and then to scare us.
Sensation is a rather thinly written British sci-fi thriller about a guy who discovers he has some sort of sense-manipulative powers, although it's never terribly clear. Also a bit tentative, the underpowered British romcom
I'm Not in Love is a well-played look at a key relational turning point. From Argentina,
A Common Crime is a tricky thriller told in an uncanny low-key, often silent style. And the documentary
The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart tells the remarkable story of the Gibb brothers, along with a strikingly relevant look at the music industry over the past half-century, plus of course a lot of great music. I also finally caught up with this documentary, which has been nominated for a Bafta on Sunday...
The Social Dilemma
dir Jeff Orlowski
scr Vickie Curtis, Davis Coombe, Jeff Orlowski
with Skyler Gisondo, Vincent Kartheiser, Jaron Lanier, Tristan Harris, Tim Kendall, Jeff Seibert, Shoshana Zuboff, Bailey Richardson
release US/UK 9.Sep.20
20/US Netflix 1h34 ****Exploring the impact of big tech, this essential documentary opens with a quote from Sophocles: "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse." The filmmakers interview pioneers who built big platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram, who speak of how they're now frightened of the consequences. The central question is why the world seems to be going crazy at the moment, and why tech giants are so resistant to ethical design. And it's shocking to see how much control these companies have over their users.
The issue isn't easy to define, as social media impacts society in such a wide variety of ways, often hard to see. Platforms were deliberately designed to be addictive, and to implant subconscious thoughts users would never have on their own. So the point is that advertisers are clients, and the user's attention is the product that they're buying. Fine details about our lives and habits are fuelling huge profits, because advertisers are desperate for data that predicts our actions. This film lifts the curtain on exactly how all of this works, as well as the unintended consequences of letting this cat out of the bag.
Interviews and clips are framed with a knowing family drama (featuring Gisondo) that acts these things out, accompanied by whizzy, sci-fi effects sequences with Kartheiser as algorithmic puppet-masters. The raw truth is that these companies don't want to make our lives better, and they're not evil either; however, they're exploiting our psychology to make unprecedented profits without regulations or competition. And the impact is clear: anxiety levels have exponentially increased among young people, leading to a marked rise in self-harm and suicide. And since we're only seeing news that targets us, we're believing lies and building an increasingly polarised society.
This lucid, fascinating film outlines all of this clearly, including how these systems were designed to learn and evolve on their own, to the point that even the people who manage them don't know how they work and don't yet have the will to correct them, because capitalism demands increased profits. Which is deeply terrifying as persuasive technology magnifies conspiracy theories and makes people willing to kill for them, literally threatening civilisation. So simply being aware that this isn't a fair fight is a positive step. As is taking steps to break the addiction. More importantly, never get your news from online-only outlets. And watch this film.
12 themes, language, violence • 6.Apr.21
Coming up this next week, I'm planning to watch Dustin Hoffman in Into the Labyrinth, Dakota Fanning in
Effie Gray, Ed Westwick in
Me You Madness, and the docs
Gunda, Steelers, Truman & Tennessee and
Henry Glassie: Fieldwork.
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