Style transfer

Frank Liu developed a technique he calls “style transfer” in which he renders an image in the style of another. 

Bhautik Joshi riffed off of that for video, resulting in experiments like this rendering of clips from Blade Runner in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night. 

Here’s a few short clips from the 1982 scifi classic Blade Runner rendered in the style of Starry Night by Van Gogh (1853-90). I’m in love with the world that Syd Mead and Doug Trumbull created for the movie, and I think it’s strange but satisfying seeing some of the special effects rendered using brush-strokes. To create these I used a hacked-up version of Style Transfer by the indestructible Frank Liu. The technique is an implementation of A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style which uses Deep Neural Networks to copy the artistic rendering from one image to another. Feel free to ping me with any questions here or @bhautikj on twitter. I’ve got a few more of these coming :] (c) Bhautik Joshi 2016

Prisma has capitalized on this technique by taking it mobile. I've enjoyed using the app to render some photos in my camera roll in a variety of styles. I had previously found expensive apps and plugins on the desktop that could do something like this, but now it's available in a free mobile app. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a free app on your phone, eventually.

I'm looking forward to when Prisma can handle video, it's only a matter of time before style transfer videos like the one above are flooding your social media feeds.

A market opportunity for human ingenuity remains, however, for those who can actually transfer not just the visual style but the entire cinematic grammar of one artist to another. What if Werner Herzog directed Toy Story? What if Stanley Kubrick directed Star Wars? Who wants to see Terrence Malick's take on Captain America?

I draw much too much pleasure from style transfer in prose, like imitations of Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and the such. James Wood once wrote of McCarthy:

To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration: a good day is so mysteriously followed by a bad one. McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape. He is also one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.

The Witch

[MODERATE SPOILER ALERT: No major plot spoilers for The Witch below, but if you're a purist about these things, as I can be, feel free to skip this entry]

Early contender for most feminist movie I'll see all year is Robert Eggers The Witch. It's been mis-marketed a bit as a horror film, and given the huge box office returns of horror sensations like Paranormal Activity, it's not surprising that studios might try to run that playbook. The movie is less a pure horror film than one of oppressive dread, and those are far more disturbing.

A jump-scare-filled horror movie is heart-pounding for the time you're watching it in the theater, then is quickly forgotten. But a movie like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, one of my all-time favorites, laden with a feeling of inescapable doom, has been lodged in the deep recesses of my memory ever since I saw it, like a splinter that burrowed under my defensive psychic membrane. What is despair but the absence of hope? A movie of dread builds a world in which you see all the characters stumbling towards the cliff and it feels both believable and inevitable. The Witch is less a horror film than a tragedy.

The false advertising of The Witch is less worrisome as an aesthetic misrepresentation than it is as a marketing blunder. It may chase away people who don't like horror movies and disappoint those who come in expecting to be grasping popcorn by the sweaty palmful to soothe their nerves. It's no romantic comedy, some of the images are disturbing, but it's more of an arthouse horror film than you'd suspect from the trailer.

As with the most profound horror movies, The Witch locates true horror in ourselves, in Christianity and the deep-seated guilt it plants in every member of this family banished to live on the edge of a forest. A mother who doesn't feel like she is a supportive wife or adequate caretaker for her children. A father who, well-versed in the Bible but not with a hunting rifle, doesn't feel he can provide for his family. A son who feels shame whenever he glances at his sister's bosom with the first longings of puberty. And a daughter, played with remarkable emotional precision by Anya Taylor-Joy, who chafes against the limited options available for women in 1600's Puritan society.

The movie can be read many ways. It's also a story of a family evicted from the human construct of society but ill-equipped to conquer and tame nature, represented here in all its destructive power by the fairy tale trope of the dark forest and the titular witch who dwells there (played, in one scene, by Victoria's Secret super model Sarah Stephens, which we discovered much to our amusement from a look at IMDb).

The ending is controversial, and I have yet to decide where I come down on it. My initial reaction was that it was too much, that the movie should have ended earlier. I might have left it as an alternate ending for the DVD.

Still, one can understand why Eggers might want to take the movie all the way there, just to stir up some sympathy for the devil.

Bret Easton Ellis interviews Tarantino (unedited)

Tarantino hasn’t been to many new movies in the last year while working on his opus The Hateful Eight, but he offers, along with the wine, snapshot reactions about one or two recent films and a few auteurs. The last current movie he saw was Guy Ritchie’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E: “The first half was really funny and terrific but in the whole second half I’m like ‘Oh wait a minute, we were supposed to care about the bomb? What the fuck is going on here? I was supposed to pay attention to the stupid story?’ Henry Cavill was fantastic but I didn’t like the girl at all.” (He notes fairly that he hasn’t seen Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina where a very different actress is on display.) Pixar’s Inside Out? “Haven’t seen it yet but Toy Story 3 is a masterpiece and was my favorite movie of that year.” David Fincher? “I’m excited to go see every movie David Fincher does. Even when I don’t like them I walk around thinking about them for a week or so.” Wes Anderson? “I loved Bottle Rocket but I never thought Rushmore was as funny as everybody else did because I didn’t like Max. The Grand Budapest Hotel is not really the thing I would think I’d love but I kind of loved it. The fact that I wasn’t a diehard Anderson fan before made me even more happy that I could finally embrace him.” Judd Apatow? “His audience is getting smaller and smaller but I think he’s getting better and better.” On Godard now: “He gave me rock-star excitement and he took me to so many places I needed to go but I feel I’ve outgrown him drastically. I’ve outgrown everything I thought was so sexy about his work.” On Hitchcock: “I’m not the biggest Hitchcock fan and I actually don’t like Vertigo and his 1950s movies—they have the stink of the 50s which is similar to the stink of the 80s. People discover North by Northwest at 22 and think it’s wonderful when actually it’s a very mediocre movie. I’ve always felt that Hitchcock’s acolytes took his cinematic and story ideas further. I love Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock movies. I love Richard Franklin’s and Curtis Hanson’s Hitchcock meditations. I prefer those to actual Hitchcock.” And Tarantino also prefers—passionately defends—Gus Van Sant’s meta art-manque shot-by-shot remake of Psycho over the original Hitchcock film.

The unedited version of Bret Easton Ellis's piece on Quentin Tarantino from the NYTimes Style Magazine a while back is online.

What makes Tarantino such a refreshing figure is his unvarnished honesty in speaking about other movies. Generally it's considered unseemly to criticize the work of your peers, and so you don't hear much of it. Not publicly, at least.

That goes for more than just the arts world. It's understandable, but the conversations behind closed doors, over beers, or off the record is usually more useful. What do people say when you're not in the room? That's the damn truth. People who don't hold that back, like Steve Jobs, can attain some shaman-like power, but it's something more people could exercise if not for the strictures of decorum.

Tarantino genuinely doesn't give a damn, and given he can always find enough collaborators to make his movies, it really doesn't matter too much to his career.

I can't wait to see The Hateful Eight tomorrow, err, today?

Carol

The grain in “Carol” matters because Haynes and Lachman force 16-mm. film stock to reveal the extreme range of its expressive possibilities. The viewing of the film becomes a sort of extreme experience, all the more so for its concentration of the movie’s central dramatic elements in its performances and in the composition of its images.
 

Sitting far back, I saw the artifice in the actresses’ glacial, theatrical precision. Up close, their performances deliver a tremulous, tensile control, a precision that shivers with the passions straining to break out just below the surface—the surface of behavior, the surface of decorum, the surface of the skin. I don’t think that the subcutaneous frissons result from the actors’ performances but, rather, from Haynes’s performance-capture by means of Lachman’s grainy images. They’re not effects of the actors’ skin but of its appearance on the second skin of the film stock (the French word for “film” is “pellicule,” meaning little skin), which lends the actors’ theatricalized immobility an illusion of shivers.
 

Richard Brody on Carol. What a beautiful observation on the grain of the 16mm film stock on Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara's skin as symbolic of the irrepressible (if socially forbidden) passion beneath the surface. I once heard a director once refer to 16mm film grain as looking like golf balls copulating furiously, though I could not have predicted that metaphor tumbling out of my memory during a movie about a lesbian romance in mid-century America.

I was concerned going into Carol that the trio of director Todd Haynes and actresses Blanchett and Mara would be a menage a trots executed with such calculated precision that all passion would be suffocated. Blanchett is so technically gifted an actor it seems she can control the fluttering of each individual eyelid, and Mara has a certain stillness of gaze that always renders her face a mystery.

I was pleasantly surprised. It's not that the movie isn't recognizably Haynes'. There may always be an element of his work that is cool to the touch. But here he channels Wong Kar-Wai at times to turn the physical world, in particular its surfaces and barriers, into the inner surfaces of his actors. In that, what is 16mm film if not just one more layer on the canvas?

Another 2015 movie, Hou Hsiao Hsien's Assassin, came to mind. It, too, was replete with shots filmed through surfaces like gauzy fabric to remind us how emotions cloud our perceptions of another person.

Two moments in Carol, in particular, grabbed my heart and squeezed. One is a speech in an office, with divorce attorneys present. I know some find Blanchett's technical mastery a bit distancing, but this is one of the most moving moments I can remember from her. The other is a walk across a restaurant. Little happens, but everything does. I held my breath. 

The movie doesn't try too hard to explain their attraction for each other. Love can be like that. It comes in an instant, almost like a whim, and then can linger forever.

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Since it's Christmas, I'm going with Rooney Mara in a Santa hat.

Fan theories

On Reddit, user Lumpawarroo grabbed a ton of attention for posting this crazy Star Wars theory: Jar Jar Binks was a trained Force user, knowing Sith collaborator, and will play a central role in The Force Awakens.

Here's George Lucas (from a documentary) talking about Yoda:
 

"Yoda really comes from a tradition in mythological storytelling- fairy tales- of the hero finding a little creature on the side of the road that seems very insignificant and not very important, but who turns out to be the master wizard, or the master thing..."
 

As we all know, one of Lucas' big deals with the prequels was that they were intended to "rhyme" and mirror the original trilogy in terms of general narrative themes. So there should have been a seemingly innocent creature found on the side of the road that later reveals itself as a major player. We do have a creature that this seems to describe precisely... Jar Jar... but of course he never develops into a "master" anything.
 

Here's what I think happened: I think that Jar Jar was initially intended to be the prequel (and Dark Side) equivalent of Yoda. Just as Yoda has his "big reveal" when we learn that his tottering, geriatric goofball persona is just a mask, Jar Jar was intended to have a big reveal in Episode II or III where we learn that he's not really a naive dope, but rather a master puppeteer Sith in league with (or perhaps in charge of) Palpatine. 
 

However, GL chickened out. The fan reaction to Jar Jar was so vitriolic that this aspect of the trilogy was abandoned. Just too risky... if Jar Jar is truly that off-putting, it's potentially ruinous to the Star Wars legacy to imply that he's the ultimate bad guy of the entire saga. So pretend he was just a failed attempt at comic relief instead.
 

If you are into fan theories about movies, or just into Star Wars, it's worth a read. I feel like I've written about fan theories and movies before, but now I can't find any posts on the topic. Maybe it was just a Twitter conversation.

Anyhow, here's the thing about fan theories about movies: they are almost always completely wrong. I'm trying to remember one time when one of them was right, and maybe one of my readers can help me out here, but none come to mind. Sure, folks predicted that Benedict Cumberbatch would play Khan, but that wasn't much of a theory, it was just a casting guess.

Think about the Pixar Theory, Room 237, the Owen Grady theory about Jurassic Park/World, or any of the countless theories that claim that someone was dead all along. They are all fun, cleverly articulated, and completely wrong. I've talked to people who've worked on movies who can't help but laugh and shake their heads at some of the wacky theories their works have inspired. People at Pixar roll their eyes at the Pixar Theory.

If you have too much time on your hand and an overactive pattern seeking protocol, you'll start seeing things. Like dead people. It's a fine line separating conspiracy theorists from loons, and maybe the line isn't separating them but circling them.

We should get another test case shortly. Many believe Luke Skywalker hasn't featured prominently in the movie trailers or posters because he is actually Kylo Ren, having turned to the dark side. Let's ignore the fact that this would be J.J. Abrams and crew taking Luke's entire heroic journey in Episodes IV-VI and the collective happy memories of hundreds of millions of viewers and flushing it down the toilet. At their heart, fan conspiracy theories aren't really about the movies, they're all about the fans who come up with them.