If you have visited an island like one of the Hawaiian Islands, Tahiti or Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, you may have noticed how small these land masses appear against the vast Pacific Ocean. If you're on Hawaii, the nearest island to you is more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away, and the coast of the continental United States is more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away. To say these islands are secluded is an understatement. For me, watching the movie 'Moana' in 2016 was eye-opening. I knew that Polynesian people traveled between a number of Pacific islands, but seeing Moana set sail on a canoe made me realize exactly how small those boats are compared with what must have seemed like an endless ocean. Yet our fictional hero went on this journey anyway, like the countless real-life Polynesian voyagers upon which she is based. As an astronomer, I have been teaching college students and visitors to our planetarium how to find stars in our sky for more than 20 years. As part of teaching appreciation for the beauty of the sky and the stars, I want to help people understand that if you know the stars well, you can never get lost....
Early in Mufasa: The Lion King, one shot quickly differentiates the new movie from the other CGI-heavy spins on classic Disney cartoons. Just before a cast of familiar characters begins recounting the titular patriarch's origin story, his young granddaughter bounds toward the screen. For a moment, the photorealistic cub aims a warm, open look at the audience'and, instantly, we're reminded that this is a Barry Jenkins production. The prominence of this archetypal Jenkins image, in which a subject directly returns the viewer's gaze, neatly captures the tension of the creative pairing that brought the film to life. Mufasa: The Lion King follows the original Lion King's uncanny 2019 reworking, which had felt like an obvious nostalgia play'the continuation of an ongoing trend in which studios like Disney remake films from their archive and benefit by placing a familiar piece of intellectual property at the box office. So it was a surprising development when Jenkins, an auteur best known for weighty features such as Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, was announced as the director of a new prequel focused on protagonist Simba's father....
Last week, OpenAI launched Advanced Voice Mode with Vision, which feeds real-time video to ChatGPT, allowing the chatbot to 'see' beyond the confines of its app layer. The premise is that by giving ChatGPT greater contextual awareness, that bot can respond in a more natural and intuitive way. It's been nearly a year since OpenAI first demoed Advanced Voice Mode with Vision, which the company pitched as a step toward AI as depicted in the Spike Jonze movie 'Her.' The way OpenAI sold it, Advanced Voice Mode with Vision would grant ChatGPT superpowers ' enabling the bot to solve sketched-out math problems, read emotions, and respond to affectionate letters. At one point, curious to see if Advanced Voice Mode with Vision could help ChatGPT offer fashion pointers, I enabled it and asked ChatGPT to rate an outfit of mine. It happily did so. But while the bot would give opinions on my jeans and olive-colored-shirt combo, it consistently missed the brown jacket I was wearing. When OpenAI president Greg Brockman showed off Advanced Voice Mode with Vision on '60 Minutes' earlier this month, ChatGPT made a mistake on a geometry problem. When calculating the area of a triangle, it misidentified the triangle's height....
Everything, as Charles Peguy said, begins in mysticism and ends in politics. Except if you're Bob Dylan. If you're Bob Dylan, you start political and go mystical. You start as an apprentice hobo scuffing out songs of change; you become, under protest, the ordained and prophetic mouthpiece for a sense of mass disturbance otherwise known as the '60s; and then, after some violent gestures and severances, you withdraw. You dematerialize; you drop it all, and you drift into the recesses of the Self. Where you remain, until they give you a Nobel Prize. James Mangold's A Complete Unknown, like all the best movies about rock stars'Sid and Nancy, Bohemian Rhapsody, Control'is a fairy tale. It takes liberties: Dylanologists will scream. It dramatizes, mythicizes, elides, elasticizes, and tosses twinkling magic showbiz confetti over the period between Dylan's absolutely unheralded arrival in New York in 1961 and his honking, abrasive, ain't-gonna-work-on-Maggie's-farm-no-more headlining appearance, four years later, at the Newport Folk Festival, where his new electric sound drove the old folkies berserk and the crowd (at least in Mangold's movie) bayed for his blood....
