Yeah, I don’t think that’s really played out in the extended universe of the post-ST shows. There seem to be a lot of Jedi who survived the Purge, and a lot of dark side guys, though only two Sith, many of whom appear to have survived the fall of the Empire.

We made a lot of Gandalf references. Ahsoka the Grey… And at the end of Rebels, you get to see her in white.

Kinda funny because Busey played essentially the same character in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.

I think Death Becomes Her was kind of the beginning of the end. After that, he was like, “Wow, digital effects can do anything!” and his movies became increasingly hermetic and devoid anything resembling human affairs. 

Except replace Rachel Weisz.

Just to clarify, “DC” was not making superhero movies back in the ‘70s. The first three Reeve Superman movies weren’t even Warner Bros. movies. They were independent productions made by the Salkind brothers, who licensed the property directly from DC Comics/National Publications; Warner Bros. distributed the movies.…

It’s gonna get even easier, as the AIs scrub more and more imagery created by other AIs rather than human artists. Cannibal slurry.

THIS is the thing that will level the playing field and allow THEM to be the artist, which is unnecessary because artists are useless and should get used to not having jobs... or something.

The old Universal and Hammer movies are straight-up horror. There are hardly any action-adventure elements. The 1999 Mummy and its sequel* owe more to ‘80s movies like Raiders and Ghostbusters.

A true classic, especially if you were middle-school age me around 1985 or so.

Crazy how Zemeckis was one of the great American directors of the ‘80s and then he became obsessed with his CGI wax museums.

As I said: you’re ascribing special value onto otherwise arbitrary neural processes just because they come from a human.

Of course, Bond being the same person from Dr. No to Die Another Day doesn’t make much sense because the geopolitics of his world keeps evolving, which means time has to pass, so Bond should be retired or dead by now . But clearly audiences didn’t mind - they have a flexible enough idea of “continuity” that allows for…

The funny thing is that Casino Royale ‘06 is the only official reboot in the 007 canon; every other Broccoli movie was supposed to be set in the same continuity. Pierce Brosnan was playing the exact same character as Connery in Dr. No, which is reinforced by the fact that the movies never recast any of the supporting…

I wouldn’t describe my attitude as remotely “romantic.” It’s entirely pragmatic. You’re the one who’s looking at generic images of robots and architecture and saying there’s a ghost in the machine doing creative work. Machines are generative or additive but I have yet to see one that is “creative.” Or has produced…

If the shoe fits. 

You’re talking about prompts. I’m talking about subjects or influences that the creators have a deep personal stake in, whether emotional, psychological, or intellectual. The AI is simply producing the result it has been programmed to generate. It’s like the ChatGPT programs being asked to “write” scientific papers…

Obviously they fed it direct prompts (like Samuel Jackson’s face) and there was probably a lot of tweaking to make it look consistent. But it doesn’t really look designed the way most title sequences do. Pixar uses a lot of automation for particles and other textures like hair and fibers, but there are people who do…

The tech writer Ed Zitron has suggested that Silicon Valley culture (which also means venture capital culture) has stagnated over the last decade and can no longer create services or products that people actually enjoy using, like iPods or search engines that show you the results you actually want. Tech bros can no…

Yeah, but if a writer chooses to allude to someone else’s work in a story, it’s because that source material meant something to them. And the writer is assuming that their readers might recognize the allusion, and if it meant something to them it will deepen the connection with the writer.