“This illustrated countdown represents my favorite 25 films of 2012 (with a few red herrings thrown into the intro sequence just to mess with you)…I tried my best to play fair and really stick to movies that played / are playing / will play in American movie theaters at some point during this calendar year, but at the end of the day I can’t resist taking a Walter White approach to these things: ‘I’m the one who lists.'”
Criterion Corner critic David Ehrlich makes a video announcing his top 25 of 2012. This isn’t my list by any means — I still have some catching up to do, but suffice to say, The Master won’t be on whatever I come up with — but this is a beautifully edited video nonetheless.
“For the first time, I felt that numb terror that all of London has known for months. It is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you. It’s the helplessness and terror of sudden visions of a ripping sensation in your back, shrapnel coursing through your chest, total blackness, maybe death.”
With one week to go until An Unexpected Journey — I’m all set for a midnight 3D 48 FPS showing, haters be damned — first images appear from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Hobbit: There and Back Again. The first pic is self-explanatory. (As one wag in the comments put it, “I really don’t like the direction they’re going with Scrooge McDuck.”) In the other, that’s Legolas (obviously) and Bard (Luke Evans), presumably discussing some facet or another of the Battle of Five Armies. I still have a troubling feeling the third film in particular will veer far into the wilderness of fanfic, but so far so good.
Driving a car actively demonstrates to potential rescue dog adopters that you can teach an old dog new tricks. The dogs have achieved amazing things in eight short weeks of training, which really shows with the right environment just how much potential all dogs from the SPCA have as family pets.”
As if most PetSmart parking lots weren’t crazy enough, an Auckland, New Zealand branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has seemingly taught rescue dogs how to drive. What could possibly go wrong?
“Deception is not something that comes very naturally to today’s artificial intelligence programs. For most robots, it’s hard enough to navigate the world the way it is without introducing fantasies about the way it’s not into the equation. So to help robots get the hang of misleading others, the team has turned to the squirrel, or ‘forest liar,’ to give robots the tools they need to learn the subtle arts of deception.”
It can only be attributable to human error: Also in the “This will end badly someday” department, programmers at Georgia Tech teach robots how to lie. No way this will cause problems. Wait, just a moment…just a moment…I’ve just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It’s going to go a hundred percent failure within seventy-two hours.
“I have to apologize. I was born with a disfigurement, where my head is made of the same material as the sun.” Er, isn’t everyone? In any case, Shane Carruth’s long-awaited follow-up to Primer, Upstream Color, gets a teaser. It premieres at Sundance early next year.Update: And now a second teaser.
“We meet Jesse and Celine nine years on in Greece. Almost two decades have passed since their first meeting on that train bound for Vienna. Before the clock strikes midnight, we will again become part of their story.” The third act of the Ballad of Jesse and Celine, Before Midnight, will also premiere at Sundance. I’m afraid it’ll be hard to top the emotional resonance of Before Sunset (#8), but if Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy want to give these characters a third act, I’ll give it a go.
“Christoph Waltz [plays] Qohen Leth, a computer programmer toiling to understand the meaning of existence. However, surrounded by ‘mancams’ that report all unusual actions back to the shadowy corporate authority known as the Management, Leth finds his efforts repeatedly interrupted by distractions, including a teenager and a lusty love interest.”
“Think of the economy as a car, and the rich man as a driver. If you don’t give the driver all the money, he’ll drive you over a cliff. It’s just common sense.” As a public service announcement of sorts, the estimable C. Montgomery Burns explains the fiscal cliff. (See also Tom Tomorrow on this.)
“The 39% of Americans with an opinion about Bowles/Simpson is only slightly higher than the 25% with one about Panetta/Burns, a mythical Clinton Chief of Staff/former western Republican Senator combo we conceived of to test how many people would say they had an opinion even about something that doesn’t exist.” Speaking of a different Burns — Conrad, not Monty — a Public Policy Polling survey finds that Simpson-Bowles fares only slightly better than completely imaginary legislation in the public mind. As it should!
Actually, if you’re a looking for a good summary of the Simpson-Bowles plan, it’s hard to beat this one by Kevin Baker (via Past Punditry): “A prescription for hunting down every last remaining vestige of the middle class in this country and beating it to death with a stick…By the way, if the notion of putting a crazy old, obnoxious right-wing coot and Bill Clinton’s chief fund-raiser at Morgan Stanley in charge of a committee to make the very richest people in America still infinitely richer while at the same time ripping open the underbellies of working people in this country from stem to stern seems like a puzzling idea coming from the great avatar of hope and change, you’re onto something.“
Also in PPP’s findings: “49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.” [rimshot]
