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    ‘Users’ Review: Brave New World

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    In this documentary, the artist Natalia Almada explores both the terrors and wonders of technological progress.“Users,” a new essayistic feature documentary from the artist Natalia Almada, deals in a kind of paradox. While the voice-over narration considers how technological progress has inured us from beauty and intimacy, the film demonstrates marvels of film technology — underwater photography, helicopter shots, breathtakingly crisp close-ups, sinuous slow motion — that affirm the opposite.“Could the Wright brothers have imagined that flying would be so commonplace that we’d be disinterested in the miraculous bird’s-eye view of the earth below?” Almada asks — even as she shows us drone shots of oceans and highways that provoke undeniable awe.This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of “Users,” though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images. Almada was inspired to make the film after giving birth to her son and newly confronting technology’s decisive effects on our relationships. Her view of the present anticipates her child’s future: In interludes throughout the film, she describes familiar realities — childbirth, grocery shopping, 24-hour days — in the past tense, as if they were part of a bygone history. It’s a nifty dystopian conceit, but it reinforces the air of presumption that sands down the pleasures of “Users.”The film is at its best when it allows its images and sounds to let us feel things without naming them. At a waste disposal factory, crushed electronics clatter like a symphony, which flows into the rumble of a freight train. Deep inside a grimy ocean, industrial divers float around pipes holding fiber-optic cables, the veins of our information era. Mingling beauty and terror, trash and wonder, these scenes evoke the elusive temporality of technology, which moves us backward and forwards at the same time.UsersNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour and 21 minutes. More

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      The Explosive Ambitions of Kate the Chemist

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      The dream is Vegas.“Don’t make fun of me,” said Kate Biberdorf, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, “but it would be a live show in Vegas where it’s a science show.”That is not a typical aspiration of someone who teaches chemistry to undergraduates. For Dr. Biberdorf — better known as Kate the Chemist — that dream is part of her goal to capture the fun of scientific exploration and to entice children, especially girls, to consider science as their life’s calling.“When I’m happiest is when I’m onstage sharing what I love,” she said.She’s thinking of a big spectacle, like the long-running magic shows of David Copperfield at MGM Grand or Penn & Teller at Rio Las Vegas. “If we can convince people to go to science shows when on vacation,” she added, not entirely convinced herself.For now, her efforts have focused on television and publishing, not Vegas. Over the last few years, she has written two books of science experiments to try at home, a science book for adults and, with Hillary Homzie, a children’s book author, a series of novels starring a younger, fictional version of herself.On television, she has already become something of a contemporary update of science popularizers like Bill Nye the Science Guy or Donald “Mr. Wizard” Herbert.Perhaps you’ve seen her.Dr. Biberdorf, 36, has appeared on NBC’s “Today,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and other programs with demonstrations of color-changing chemicals, magnetic slime and, very often, chemical reactions accompanied by bright, loud bangs.During a “Today” show segment in 2019, she, along with Craig Melvin, the show’s news anchor, and Dylan Dreyer, the meteorologist, forcefully dumped buckets of hot water into liquid nitrogen, instantly engulfing them in eruptions of billowing white vapor.The three, wearing lab coats, safety goggles and protective mitts, emerged a bit frost-blasted.“You didn’t tell me it was going to blow up in my face,” Mr. Melvin exclaimed.“This is a thundercloud,” Dr. Biberdorf explained.Dr. Biberdorf has appeared on NBC’s “Today,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and other programs with color-changing chemicals, magnetic slime and bright, loud bangs.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesThe TV appearances only last a few minutes — long enough to show off some chemistry “wow” but too brief to include more than passing mentions of the how and why of what is happening.For a deeper dive into science, Dr. Biberdorf is looking to star in a television show or two of her own.One of the ideas she and her collaborators are pitching is “Science Unfair.” Imagine a reality television competition along the lines of Food Network’s “Worst Cooks in America,” but with students who are bombing in their science classes.“It would be more like the kids who hate that and don’t want to do the science fair,” Dr. Biberdorf said. “We’re trying to get them together and make them do a little competition. At the end of each segment, hopefully they will now like science.”The other pitch, on the back burner for now, is “Blow My Stuff Up,” which would combine therapy and pyrotechnics to help people recovering from a failed relationship or other unhappy experiences.“There’s a therapist there as well, so they’re actually working on healing and moving forward in their lives.” Dr. Biberdorf said. Then, she would satisfyingly dispose of objects emblematic of the troubles that the people have put behind them.An episode might follow someone who had long suffered driving an unreliable, junker of a car. “They finally got a new car, they just want to blow up their old car,” Dr. Biberdorf said, “and we can do that with a bunch of pyrotechnics. So I am absolutely stoked about that.”Both of Dr. Biberdorf’s parents are psychologists, and her sister is a therapist. “It kind of brings the two worlds together,” she said.Sizzles — demo videos showing snippets of what the show might look like — have been shown to various networks.Growing up in Portage, Mich., just south of Kalamazoo, Dr. Biberdorf got hooked on chemistry because of an enthusiastic teacher in high school, Kelli Palsrok.“Honestly, ever since I was 15, I knew I wanted to be a chemist because of her,” Dr. Biberdorf said. “My dream, truthfully, is to be her for the next generation of kids.”Ms. Palsrok remembers the young Kate as “pretty much the same as she is now,” she said. “Always enthusiastic about chemistry and science. Very well-rounded student. Loved the hands-on stuff.”But the field of chemistry has not always been welcoming to Dr. Biberdorf. “You are judged on your appearance,” she said. “And I look a certain way, and I dress a certain way.”Which is to say, she wears heels, skirts and lipstick.“I lean into my feminine side,” she said. “But that’s just because I like it, and I feel like I’m at my best when I present that image.”She added, “It’s also very important for me that younger girls can see that side of a scientist.” She said women taking her college class have expressed appreciation for that.“You can look however you want and still be into science as much as possible,” Dr. Biberdorf said.But that does not fit the stereotype that many scientists have of women as scientists.“I don’t think people look at me and go, ‘Well, that’s a smart lady,’” Dr. Biberdorf said. “So I know when I’m in faculty meetings or conferences or anything like that, my first three sentences need to be articulate, accurate.”Dr. Biberdorf said she owed her passion for chemistry to her high school chemistry teacher. “My dream, truthfully, is to be her for the next generation of kids,” she said.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAs a graduate student at the University of Texas, she studied catalysts for potentially speeding up Suzuki-Miyaura coupling, a reaction commonly used in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals.There, she found that she did not like laboratory work. In addition, pure academia was a difficult place for her. “I didn’t want to be in that environment,” she said. “I wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.”Her current job at the university is as a professor of instruction — all teaching and no lab research. In 2014, when she started, she was teaching two undergraduate chemistry classes, and she went to her boss asking if she could do more.“We created an outreach program called ‘Fun with Chemistry,’” she said. “I was supposed to go to two elementary schools a semester. That was the deal.”The program turned into something much more popular, with many more schools asking her to visit. “I interacted with something like 16,000 students that first year,” she said. “It was nuts, in my opinion.”That in turn led to monthly appearances on “We Are Austin,” a morning show on the local CBS station.A few years later, a thousand miles away in Los Angeles, Glenn Schwartz, noticed. He had been Bill Nye’s publicist, but the two went their separate business ways about five years ago. Mr. Schwartz wondered: Is there another Bill Nye out there?He searched for about a year before coming across Dr. Biberdorf.“I found Kate’s website, and I looked at some video, and I simply contacted her,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Really, it was me looking around and looking for somebody like her. And then I was lucky enough to actually find her.”Mr. Schwartz, who is now Dr. Biberdorf’s manager, said she possessed a winning mix of credentials and personality. Although there are many people posting science videos on YouTube, “Kate was obviously different,” he said.He added, “The thing about being on TV is that you can’t teach somebody to be likable.”Bill Nye the Science Guy does not mind sharing the science television spotlight. “Kate is going to be Kate, and Bill is going to be Bill,” he said in an interview.Mr. Nye said their goals were the same: to intrigue children in science. “It’s the people who are watching us that we want to succeed and change the world,” he said.(Mr. Nye is still on television, too. His latest series, “The End Is Nye,” , premieres on the Peacock streaming service on Aug. 25.)Though she does not have her Vegas shows yet, Dr. Biberdorf is planning to take a road tour of chemistry demonstrations across the country next year.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesScience on television has required a sort of research very different from the Suzuki-Miyaura coupling experiments Dr. Biberdorf used to undertake. For example, she had to figure out how to blow up a cake on “The Wendy Williams Show” last year to celebrate the host’s birthday.For safety, fire, the usual sorts of explosives and toxic chemicals were not allowed in the studio.“So what did I do?” she said. “I took liquid nitrogen, put it in a soda bottle and put it in a thing, and it exploded that way. Which is a bomb. But they don’t know that. So we just didn’t use that terminology. I said it’s vapor pressure. But it’s a way to spin that, right? You have to figure out how to say things so you don’t scare people.”After a year and a half of remote teaching because of the pandemic, she returned to the lecture hall in the spring semester. “We’re able to talk a little bit about how Covid tests work,” she said. “There’s a lot of real-world applications.”She is planning a road tour of chemistry shows next year, conducting her experiments and science entertainment at performing arts centers across the country.“We’re just trying to figure out the logistics right now,” she said. For a demonstration like the exploding birthday cake, “How do I get that from place to place?” she wondered. “Am I rebuilding my exploding birthday cake every time, or what can I reuse?”If the whiz-bang of the shows can intrigue audiences, she hopes people might delve into her books, where she can provide more detailed explanations and still make chemistry interesting to people not yet familiar with the jargon.“I use as many analogies as I possibly can,” she said. “I talked about Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively’s marriage as a way to explain double replacement reactions. And so that’s something that works for my age group. Maybe there are people that don’t know what I’m talking about, but it’s a way to hook the millennials and then Gen Z hopefully, because we need more scientists.”She does not have her Vegas show yet, she said, but, “we have some connections with Penn & Teller.” (The magician duo, Penn Jillette and Teller, are also clients of Mr. Schwartz.)“Maybe,” Dr. Biberdorf mused, “I can kind of sneak in there somehow and do something fun with them.” More

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      Bourdain Documentary’s Use of A.I. to Mimic Voice Draws Questions

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      The documentary “Roadrunner” by Morgan Neville uses 45 seconds of a voice that sounds like Bourdain, generated with artificial intelligence. Is it ethical?The new documentary about Anthony Bourdain’s life, “Roadrunner,” is one hour and 58 minutes long — much of which is filled with footage of the star throughout the decades of his career as a celebrity chef, journalist and television personality.But on the film’s opening weekend, 45 seconds of it is drawing much of the public’s attention.The focus is on a few sentences of what an unknowing audience member would believe to be recorded audio of Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018. In reality, the voice is generated by artificial intelligence: Bourdain’s own words, turned into speech by a software company who had been given several hours of audio that could teach a machine how to mimic his tone, cadence and inflection.One of the machine-generated quotes is from an email Bourdain wrote to a friend, David Choe.“You are successful, and I am successful,” Bourdain’s voice says, “and I’m wondering: Are you happy?”The film’s director, Morgan Neville, explained the technique in an interview with The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner, who asked how the filmmakers could possibly have obtained a recording of Bourdain reading an email he sent to a friend. Neville said the technology is so convincing that audience members likely won’t recognize which of the other quotes are artificial, adding, “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”The time for such a panel appears to be now. Social media has erupted with opinions on the issue — some find it creepy and distasteful, others are unbothered.And documentary experts who frequently consider ethical questions in nonfiction films are sharply divided. Some filmmakers and academics see the use of the audio without disclosing it to the audience as a violation of trust and as a slippery slope when it comes to the use of so-called deepfake videos, which include digitally manipulated material that appears to be authentic footage.The director Morgan Neville said in a statement on Friday about the use of A.I. that “it was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tony’s words come alive.”Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival“It wasn’t necessary,” said Thelma Vickroy, chair of the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at Columbia College Chicago. “How does the audience benefit? They’re inferring that this is something he said when he was alive.”Others don’t see it as problematic, considering that the audio pulls from Bourdain’s words, as well as an inevitable use of evolving technology to give voice to someone who is no longer around.“Of all the ethical concerns one can have about a documentary, this seems rather trivial,” said Gordon Quinn, a longtime documentarian known for executive producing titles like “Hoop Dreams” and “Minding the Gap.” “It’s 2021, and these technologies are out there.”Using archival footage and interviews with Bourdain’s closest friends and colleagues, Neville looks at how Bourdain became a worldwide figure and explores his devastating death at the age of 61. The film, “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” has received positive reviews: A film critic for The New York Times wrote, “With immense perceptiveness, Neville shows us both the empath and the narcissist” in Bourdain.In a statement about the use of A.I., Neville said on Friday that the filmmaking team received permission from Bourdain’s estate and literary agent.“There were a few sentences that Tony wrote that he never spoke aloud,” Neville said in the statement. “It was a modern storytelling technique that I used in a few places where I thought it was important to make Tony’s words come alive.”Ottavia Busia, the chef’s second wife, with whom he shared a daughter, appeared to criticize the decision in a Twitter post, writing that she would not have given the filmmakers permission to use the A.I. version of his voice.A spokeswoman for the film did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who gave the filmmakers permission.Experts point to historical re-enactments and voice-over actors reading documents as examples of documentary filmmaking techniques that are widely used to provide a more emotional experience for audience members.For example, the documentarian Ken Burns hires actors to voice long-dead historical figures. And the 1988 documentary “The Thin Blue Line,” by Errol Morris, generated controversy among film critics when it re-enacted the events surrounding the murder of a Texas police officer; the film received numerous awards but was left out of Oscar nominations.But in those cases, it was clear to the audience that what they were seeing and hearing was not authentic. Some experts said they thought Neville would be ethically in the clear if he had somehow disclosed the use of artificial intelligence in the film.“If viewers begin doubting the veracity of what they’ve heard, then they’ll question everything about the film they’re viewing,” said Mark Jonathan Harris, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker.Quinn compared the technique to one that the director Steve James used in a 2014 documentary about the Chicago film critic Roger Ebert, who, when the film was made, could not speak after losing part of his jaw in cancer surgery. In some cases, the filmmakers used an actor to communicate Ebert’s own words from his memoir, or they relied on a computer that spoke for him when he typed his thoughts into it. But unlike in “Roadrunner,” it was clear in the context of the film that it was not Ebert’s real voice.To some, part of the discomfort about the use of artificial intelligence is the fear that deepfake videos may become increasingly pervasive. Right now, viewers tend to automatically believe in the veracity of audio and video, but if audiences begin to have good reason to question that, it could give people plausible deniability to disavow authentic footage, said Hilke Schellmann, a filmmaker and assistant professor of journalism at New York University who is writing a book on A.I.Three years after Bourdain’s death, the film seeks to help viewers understand both his virtues and vulnerabilities, and, as Neville puts it, “reconcile these two sides of Tony.”To Andrea Swift, chair of the filmmaking department at the New York Film Academy, the use of A.I. in these few snippets of footage has overtaken a deeper appreciation of the film and Bourdain’s life.“I wish it hadn’t been done,” she said, “because then we could focus on Bourdain.”Christina Morales contributed reporting. More

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      Andy Weir’s New Space Odyssey

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      When Andy Weir was writing his new novel, “Project Hail Mary,” he stumbled into a thorny physics problem. The book’s plot hinges on a space mold that devours the sun’s energy, threatening all life on Earth, and that propels itself by bashing neutrinos together. He needed to figure out how much energy would be produced […] More

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      ‘A Glitch in the Matrix’ Review: Is This All Just a Simulation?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘A Glitch in the Matrix’ Review: Is This All Just a Simulation?This documentary, from the director of “Room 237,” is a lively yet superficial exploration of the theory that our reality is actually a computer simulation.A still from the documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix.”Credit…MagnoliaFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETA Glitch in the MatrixDirected by Rodney AscherDocumentary1h 48mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.In the 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov asserted, not entirely playfully, that “reality” is a word that should only ever have quotation marks around it.Contemporary technology has enabled thinkers to become more elaborate about the nature of the quotation marks. “A Glitch in the Matrix,” directed by Rodney Ascher — who also made “Room 237,” a 2013 film that gave certain Stanley Kubrick enthusiasts a platform to theorize about “The Shining”; many seemed to have too much time on their hands — explores the notion that we’re all living inside a computer simulation.[embedded content]This documentary’s jumping off point is a lecture delivered by the writer Philip K. Dick in France in the 1970s. Dick was a genuine artist, and also lived with mental illness; his pained “revelations” about the nature of his reality are moving to hear. Less rewarding are the self-assured cyber-bromides offered by the billionaire C.E.O. of SpaceX, Elon Musk, who comes off like a dorm-room tech-bro bore. The movie also explores how this idea has manifested in popular culture, hardly limited to the “Matrix” franchise.But “A Glitch” wades only shin-deep into the complex logic that’s attached to this speculation. We’re shown Philosophy 101 stalwarts Plato and Descartes as its pioneers. There’s interview footage with the contemporary philosopher Nick Bostrom, but nothing on his significant forebears W.V. Quine or Alfred North Whitehead.These ideas have consequences, and these days, they’re sometimes dire. Throughout the movie, Ascher threads in a phone interview with a man who came to believe the world depicted in “The Matrix” was genuine. This belief led him to kill his parents. The director edits the material so that, if the viewer doesn’t already know who this individual is, the end of the account plays as a suspense narrative “reveal.” It’s exploitative and opportunistic. But not atypical of the movie’s slick sensory overload, which doesn’t disguise its fundamentally glib approach.A Glitch in the MatrixNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More