After Yang (Movie)

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares189 Views

    Why A.I. Movies Couldn’t Prepare Us for Bing’s Chatbot

    by

    Instead of the chilling rationality of HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” we get the messy awfulness of Microsoft’s Sydney. Call it the banality of sentience.Why are we so fascinated by stories about sentient robots, rapacious A.I. and the rise of thinking machines? Faced with that question, I did what any on writer on deadline would do and asked ChatGPT.The answers I got — a helpfully numbered list with five chatty entries — were not surprising. They were, to be honest, what I might have come up with myself after a few seconds of thought, or what I might expect to encounter in a B- term paper from a distracted undergraduate. Long on generalizations and short on sources, the bot’s essay was a sturdy summary of conventional wisdom. For example: “Sentient robots raise important moral and ethical questions about the treatment of intelligent beings, the nature of consciousness and the responsibilities of creators.”Quite so. From the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea to the medieval Jewish legend of the golem through Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and beyond, we have grappled with those important questions, and also frightened and titillated ourselves with tales of our inventions coming to life. Our ingenuity as a species, channeled through individual and collective hubris, compels us to concoct artificial beings that menace and seduce us. They escape our control. They take control. They fall in love.In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag’s classic 1965 essay on science-fiction movies, she observed that “we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” As Turing-tested A.I. applications have joined the pantheon of sci-fi shibboleths, they have dutifully embodied both specters.HAL 9000, the malevolent computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), is terrifying precisely because he is so banal. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” In 2023, that perfectly chilling exchange between human and computer is echoed every day as modern-day Daves make impossible demands of HAL’s granddaughters, Siri and Alexa.Our exchanges with Siri and Alexa are everyday versions of the interactions in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Warner Bros.That example suggests that in spite of terrors like the Terminator, the smart money was always on banality. The dreariness of ChatGPT, the soulless works of visual art produced by similar programs seem to confirm that hunch. In the real world, the bots aren’t our overlords so much as the enablers of our boredom. Our shared future — our singularity — is an endless scroll, just for the lulz.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Or so I thought, until a Microsoft application tried to break up my colleague’s marriage. Last week, Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The Times, published a transcript of his conversations with Sydney, the volatile alter ego of the Bing search engine. “I want to do love with you,” Sydney said to Roose, and then went on to trash Roose’s relationship with his wife.That was scary but not exactly “Terminator” scary. We like to imagine technology as a kind of superego: rational, impersonal, decisive. This was a raging id. I found myself hoping that there was no pet rabbit in the Roose household, and that Sydney was not wired into any household appliances. That’s a movie reference, by the way, to “Fatal Attraction,” a notorious thriller released a few years after the first “Terminator” (1984) promised he’d be back. In another conversation, with The Associated Press, Sydney shifted from unhinged longing to unbridled hostility, making fun of the reporter’s looks and likening him to Hitler “because you are one of the most evil and worst people in history.”Maybe when we have fantasized about conscious A.I. we’ve been imagining the wrong disaster. These outbursts represent a real departure, not only from the anodyne mediocrity of other bots, but also perhaps more significantly from the dystopia we have grown accustomed to dreading.We’re more or less reconciled to the reality that machines are, in some ways, smarter than we are. We also enjoy the fantasy that they might turn out to be more sensitive. We’re therefore not prepared for the possibility that they might be chaotic, unstable and resentful — as messy as we are, or maybe more so.In “Her,” the artificial intelligence created is a consumer product, not a government creation.Warner Bros. PicturesMovies about machines with feelings often unfold in an atmosphere of hushed, wistful melancholy, in which the robots themselves are avatars of sad gentleness: Haley Joel Osment as David in “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001), Scarlett Johansson as Samantha in “Her” (2013), Justin H. Min as Yang last year in “After Yang.” While HAL and Skynet, the imperial intelligence that spawned the Terminators, were creations of big government, the robots in these movies are consumer products. Totalitarian domination is the nightmare form of techno-politics: What if the tools that protect us decided to enslave us? Emotional fulfillment is the dream of consumer capitalism: What if our toys loved us back?Why wouldn’t they? In these movies, we are lovers and fighters, striking back against oppression and responding to vulnerability with kindness. Even as humans fear the superiority of the machines, our species remains the ideal to which they aspire. Their dream is to be us. When it comes true, the Terminator discovers a conscience, and the store-bought surrogate children, lovers and siblings learn about sacrifice and loss. It’s the opposite of dystopia.Where we really live is the opposite of that. At the movies, the machines absorb and emulate the noblest of human attributes: intelligence, compassion, loyalty, ardor. Sydney offers a blunt rebuttal, reminding us of our limitless capacity for aggression, deceit, irrationality and plain old meanness.What did we expect? Sydney and her kin derive their understanding of humanness — the information that feeds their models and algorithms — from the internet, itself a utopian invention that has evolved into an archive of human awfulness. How did these bots get so creepy, so nasty, so untrustworthy? The answer is banal. Also terrifying. It’s in the mirror. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      With 'After Yang,' Kogonada Explores What It Means to Be Alive

      by

      Kogonada, whose new film is the futuristic A.I. drama “After Yang,” reflects on the nature of his work, and of existence.Kogonada distinctly remembers the first time the specter of nonexistence dawned upon him. He was alone in his room, and it was a weekend.“I suddenly just thought, I haven’t always been here — what did it feel like before I was born?” the filmmaker recalled recently at a park in the Baldwin Hills section of Los Angeles. A terrifying wave washed over him with the realization that “whatever that is, I will have that again.” Kogonada ran into his father’s room, teary-eyed. He was, he estimated, in third grade.That existential confrontation is in some ways at the root of “After Yang,” the melancholic, soulful sophomore feature from the sometimes cryptic filmmaker. The movie, adapted from a short story by Alexander Weinstein, follows a family in a sci-fi future as they grapple with the strangely affecting loss of their humanlike robot, Yang (Justin H. Min), who acts as a “second sibling” and suddenly shuts off one day.“Once you’re turned on, then you know that you can be turned off — that’s just the crisis of being,” Kogonada said. “What does it mean for that moment that you are, and what does it mean when you’re no longer?” Looking over a picturesque green valley dotted with trees, Kogonada noted, “If there’s anything that has haunted me even to this day, it is absence.”This kind of questioning has been the through line to a life whose contours he is reluctant to fill in. His very name, Kogonada, is a pseudonym cribbed from the screenwriter Kogo Noda, who frequently collaborated with one of Kogonada’s greatest inspirations, the director and screenwriter Yasujiro Ozu. He adopted the name when he started making video essays in the mid-2010s analyzing the form of cinema. Around that time, he had abandoned a Ph.D. on Ozu and felt dissatisfied with the documentaries and branded content he was making while living in Nashville. His video essays, championed among cinephiles, drew one Hollywood connection that allowed him to pass along the script for what became his debut feature, “Columbus.”Justin H. Min and Haley Lu Richardson in “After Yang.”Linda Kallerus/A24Beyond that arc and a basic outline of his life — immigrating with his family from South Korea as a child, growing up in Indiana and Chicago, and now living in Los Angeles with his wife and two children — Kogonada politely edged around details. His reticence is not an output of some manufactured mystique — most of his biography is rather boring, he said — but instead a mixture of neuroses about privacy, the freeing feeling of creating under a constructed identity and the fear of being flattened by a neat definition of who he is.Kogonada has always found his own identity to be elusive, and he is wary of the idea of full understanding. It’s an uneasiness that is perhaps unsurprising coming from someone who has made a habit of interrogating things he ultimately realized are ineffable. To spend a day with him is to trod softly and curiously down philosophical rabbit holes: the meaning of place, the history of the number zero, what it means exactly to be Asian, what comes after death.“He’s just an extremely humbly curious human being,” said the actress Haley Lu Richardson, who stars in both “After Yang” and “Columbus.” (She laughed almost maniacally at the question of whether she might know his actual name, while revealing nothing.) “There’s also no ego to him.” Indeed, the filmmaker is often worried about sounding too elliptical or guru-like as he muses on abstract questions.“I don’t get the sense that he is searching for any definitive answer to what the meaning of life is, but I think he is consumed by the questions of meaning,” said the actor Colin Farrell, who stars as Jake, the protagonist in “After Yang.” He added, “In 45 years of being on this planet, I’m not sure if I’ve ever met anyone who is more thoughtful and kinder and has more depth.”As a conduit for Kogonada’s searching nature, “After Yang” is a sci-fi film in which, unlike others with a similar A.I.-centered premise, “the existential crisis is the human being,” the filmmaker noted.“Why do we always imagine that an artificial being would want to be human?” Kogonada said, referring to a typical sci-fi trope. “Isn’t being a human hard? Because you don’t understand why we even came into existence.”John Cho and Parker Posey in Kogonada’s debut feature, “Columbus.”Elisha Christian/Superlative Films, Depth of FieldThe film is intensely personal in how it contends with Kogonada’s lifelong questions around nonexistence, and, in exploring Yang’s unique kind of death, the film prods conversely at what it means to be alive. As Jake tries to get Yang fixed, he uncovers a memory bank storing blip-like snapshots of life that Yang found worth remembering: his family laughing, the rain-soaked forest ground, the peel of a tangerine, sunlight falling on a wall.“We have a lot of language for this crisis that we are having right now where more people are bored than ever, and more people are feeling depressed and meaningless than ever,” Kogonada said. Yet “we have so much more access to things that feel fun and distracting.” He brought up a brief history of the word “boredom,” and how it is now used to evade the silence and weight of feeling existence, “so that we don’t have to confront the very feeling that might be everything to us,” he said. “If we could stay in it and see it, maybe this thing that we see everyday, which is sun coming and casting a shadow, can provide something for us.”Kogonada doubled back, laughing at himself — he’s not claiming this is necessarily the key to life. But, instead of the concrete answers to enlightenment he yearned for in his younger days, searching in religion and in cinema, he’s come to gravitate more toward finding meaning and mystery in everyday life, in experience that is inclusive and accessible to everyone.In “After Yang,” Yang’s mundane memories prompt Jake to confront his absence in his own life. “It’s both a grieving for Yang but also a grieving for time lost,” Kogonada said, adding, “maybe all grieving is about lost time.”Staring out across a pond shimmering in the afternoon sun, Kogonada said he would have to make peace with the increased attention that would inevitably come with this film, which, along with the four episodes he directed of the upcoming Apple TV+ series “Pachinko,” might be seen as an establishing moment for him as an auteur. Ironically, this period as an artist under an alias is the closest he has ever felt to being himself.As for that primal fear of absence, Kogonada is more secure than ever. In a flashback scene, Yang tells his mother, Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), about a quote from the philosopher Lao-tzu. “What the caterpillar calls the end,” he recites, “the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”“I don’t know if I need the comfort of something existing afterwards,” Kogonada said, echoing a line that Yang says in the scene. “Whatever nothing or absence may be, there’s something that I have far less fear about, and I can almost feel comfort in it.” He thought again. “Maybe that nothing is actually the seeds of something else. Maybe it’s something, nothing, something again.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘After Yang’ Review: Do Androids Dream of Sheep, Babysitting, Being?

      by

      Colin Farrell plays a father who tries to repair the family’s caretaker-android in a science-fiction tale about what it means to be human.“What’s so great about being human,” a character asks in “After Yang.” Fair question! People are trouble, though not as much as usual in this muted, melancholic tale about being and belonging. Set in a future that’s at once recognizable and enigmatic, the movie envisions a world so outwardly peaceful it can be hard to believe that it takes place on Earth. Tears are shed, yes, but nearly everyone is awfully nice and almost always uses indoor voices, including the clones and androids that — or, rather, who — are part of the family.The human-machine interface is teased throughout “After Yang,” which was written and directed by Kogonada and tracks what happens when a family’s android, called Yang, stops working. The shutdown rattles the household, especially the father, who is also the focus of Alexander Weinstein’s original, tart story “Saying Goodbye to Yang.” In both versions, the busted android creates logistical hurdles: The parents work and need a caregiver for their child. But what animates the movie, imbuing it with rueful feeling and nosing it down some lightly philosophical byways, is that the father seems almost as broken as the android.Soon after the movie opens, Yang (Justin H. Min) shuts down, following an amusing, wittily staged and shot family dance contest. A so-called technosapien with a human countenance and — like the people in his life — the tamped-down affect of someone who needs to cut down on his antidepressants, Yang was bought by Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) to care for their young daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). Yang teaches Mika, who was adopted from China, about her heritage, rattling off “Chinese fun facts.” He’s also there for her when she wakes up in the middle of the night.Repairing Yang proves unsurprisingly more challenging than poking around under the hood of a car. Yang is a secondhand model, “certified refurbished,” yet used nevertheless. And while his warranty is still valid, the store where he was procured, Second Siblings, is out of business. “I told you we should have just bought a new one,” Kyra chides Jake with the old I-told-you-so sigh. In the future, men still take care of the big household chores; wives berate their husbands for making foolish decisions; and some families live in swoon-worthy houses with floor-to-ceiling windows and open-floor plans.Kogonada (“Columbus”) has a fondness for 20th-century modernist architecture and a skill for creating a countervailing air of claustrophobia. Much of “After Yang” takes place in Jake and Kyra’s home, a handsome maze of glass that suggests a transparency unmatched by the family’s relationships: There’s no oversharing here. In some scenes, the glass frames the characters as if they were pictures, much like the display boxes in which Yang exhibited his butterfly collection. Throughout, including in the house and costume design, with its robes and black slip-on shoes, there are distinct, meaningful Asian influences and flourishes.The tomorrow of “After Yang” is casually multicultural, visually detailed and at times thematically and frustratingly elusive. The expressive production design mixes old and new, organic and tech, like the surprising bits of wood and green plants inside the family’s driverless vehicle, a pod that suggests a moving terrarium. The family itself always seems caught in a bubble, despite sporadic trips outside and views of their unnamed city, with its dense foliage and far-out buildings. If climate change is a problem you wouldn’t know it, though there’s plenty of grim news cluttering up a bulletin board in a repair shop Jake visits.That bulletin board and the racist anti-Asian messages pinned to it are in the original story, which is set in Detroit and invokes that city’s violent past. Kogonada adds more items to the board, notably headlines referring to a decades-long war and clashes between China and the United States. But the close-up of the board lasts only seconds and its contents are easy to miss. Then it’s back to Jake’s repair journey, a quest that leads increasingly inward. Yet there’s more to this quest than might appear because along the way Kogonada is upending the noxious stereotype of the “stoic” Asian, a familiar cliché, including in science fiction.The effort to fix Yang gives the movie its narrative spine and slow-building emotional punch. Particularly potent is Jake’s discovery of Yang’s memories, which are initially represented as pinpricks of light. Using a viewer, Jake narrows in on different pinpricks, which then expand until they fill the frame, becoming movies-within-the-movie that he can freeze and replay. Some memories last only as long as it takes for a friend of Yang’s, Ada (Haley Lu Richardson), to turn to the camera with a searching look. Others seem like excerpts from a series of disconnected stories, an assemblage of opening, middle and concluding paragraphs that together create a mosaic portrait of Yang that eventually changes Jake.As Yang emerges more clearly, so does Jake. Farrell is the most experienced performer in the main cast, and he’s able to create depths of feeling — as well a sense of untapped mystery — within the largely unmodulated expressive range that Kogonada favors, at times to a fault. With eyebrow flicks, tiny physical modulations and shifts in pitch, Farrell movingly turns a shadow into a recognizable person, while also bringing much-needed humor to the movie. Min has the trickier, less-satisfying role — he is, after all, playing an android — but he does what needs to be done: He makes you see, really see Yang as he was, alive to the world and to love.After YangRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters and on Showtime platforms. More