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https://blacknerdproblems.com/big-budget-family-friendly-but-lacking-ant-man-and-the-wasp-quantumania-review/

The Little Guy

Welcome back to the wonderful world of Scott Lang, where things just always work out in the end. When we left off with Scott in Endgame in 2019. Wait, we haven’t seen this dude for a whole presidency?!? Well, nothing has really changed. He’s still coasting off being the MVP of ‘the blip’ and finally getting the recognition he’s always wanted. He wrote a book. Now, Quantumania is clearly supposed to change his status as a hero, but how do we do that after Thanos? Where can he possibly go from here? What’s the next level up? Oh yeah, he’s Ant-Man so the next level is down. We’re going back to the Quantum Realm.

Ant Man Quantumania
Back up in the land down under? (Paul Rudd L. as Scott Lang/Ant Man and Kathryn Newton as Cassie Lang R.) Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

Scott Lang, Edgelord?

Quantumania tries really hard to make us care about Scott Lang and the stakes of his hero’s journey, and it falls kind of flat. There’s a huge focus on Scott’s home life and his relationship with his daughter in particular. Cassie is running around these streets doing vigilante things having never been to one superhero class. The whole movie really revolves around two plots. Cassie and her development into who we know to be the hero, Stinger. Also, the mystery of what led Janet Van Dyne to want to escape the Quantum Realm and never return. Both points are never really resolved, have Galactus-sized plotholes in them, and make this movie look a lot like a setup for later Phase 5 projects.

Quantumania attempts to make Ant-Man into a high-stakes hero and the movie uses Scott’s love for his daughter to do it. This Scott Lang is more edgy and capable of going to a dark place to get the job done, but can the MCU’s resident funny man take us there and make us care? Not really. We get way more from Michelle Phiffer’s Janet than ever before and it feels refreshing but seems out of place. The more we learn about Janet’s thirty years in the Quantum Realm, the more it feels like we needed more than one movie to flesh that arc out. We are given a whole new dimension to branch off into for more Ant-Man adventures.

Ant Man
Scott (Paul Rudd, L.) gives Kang (Jonathan Majors, R.) the ice grill. Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

When He Was Kang(s)

If you didn’t know before this movie, Jonathan Majors is HIM right now. The brother is in three high-profile films this year alone. That said, his reprisal of Kang is the exact level of intensity and charisma Majors is known for. However, after he gave us the slick, suave, knowledgeable He Who Remains at the end of Loki season one I was not ready for him to flip the switch and wild out in Quantumania. Majors already let folks know what he was called to do as the multiversal mega villain, to play. Play. All. The. Kangs. Meaning each one is different, and he’s going to bring everything he’s got in the tank to make it happen.

This take on Kang hits. He’s focused and ruthless and plays his cards close to his chest until the very last second. More nuanced is the core of desperation that fuels this man, Majors is in touch with the very core of this character. He eats every scene he’s in. And really shines playing off of the naivete and innocence of Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man. Something about the manic way Kang bares his teeth at others brings out their own desperation and it shows. Majors really applied pressure on everyone he shared the screen with. In all honesty, he’s the sole reason to check this movie out. The way he holds the character begs the question: can he keep the MCU as shook as Thanos did? Can he keep the Avengers in a chokehold for like five to ten years? Can Kang’s name ring bells across the multiverse? We gon’ see.

Ant Man
He even sits with intensity. (Jonathan Majors as Kang) Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

The Review

Real rap, Quantumania is not terrible, but it is a miss for me. The pacing is strange for an MCU movie, the way we move into the Quantum Realm is so quick it feels cheap. It was like, “You already know where we’re going from the trailer! Let’s go!” Quantumania was really giving Osmosis Jones energy and it felt wrong for the format. The hollow pieces of plot (that could have been rich with lore from the source material) made it feel more episodic than it should have. This could have easily been a Disney+ ‘Special Presentation’ in the way that Werewolf By Night was and setup the rest of Phase 5.

In spite of its shortcomings, the acting was great. Michelle Pfeiffer’s still got it and does a great job gifting us more substance than we’ve ever gotten from any version of Janet Van Dyne. Majors does his thing and transcends the medium; it feels like he brings one hundred and ten percent to every moment. Everyone else kind of fades into the background. Kathern Newton holds her own but is a weird choice as Cassie Lang. Simply because MCU audiences have been asked to engage Scott’s identity through his plucky and clever daughter and now she’s…someone else…with none of the chemistry of the last two Cassies.

Standout performances came from the denizens of the Quantum Realm, Katy O’Brian stole a few scenes as the stone-spirited Jentorra whose abs alone could have saved the multiverse. David Dastmalchian doesn’t reprise his role as Eastern Bloc hacker Kurt but shows his versatile whimsy as the gelatinous Veb.


Sadboi William Jackson Harper as Quantum Realm telepath Quaz. Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

The one that hurts my heart is the use of fellow unexpectedly chiseled and very talented Black actor William Jackson Harper (who many have petitioned for to be the next Reed Richards) as a throwaway plot device character. He channels some of the Chidi swag from The Good Place and performs really well with a wasted character. Standing out in a different light is the very unnecessary cameo from Bill Murray as a resistance contact from Janet’s heyday. It was just weird and distracted entirely from what was happening.

Mind you, Quantumania is pretty to look at – the visual effects are running on a high clip. The Ant-Man suit is looking a little evolved and it’s bordering on too much detail, but it has the functional look down pat. The Wasp and Stinger suits look great and the details like the push-button deployment look dope too. Kang looks as great as The Conqueror, I know that metallic purple and bright green are not easy to pull off, so, props to the design team. Visually there was very little to pick at and the sound choices are still as dynamic and unique as the ones for Star Wars. You know exactly when Pym particles are being used and when Kang is out here letting his Time Blicky off and erasing bystanders from the timeline.

Ant Man
The aforementioned ‘time blicky’. (Jonathan Majors as Kang) Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

Is the MCU Too Big to Fail?

This movie does not feel like an Ant-Man movie. Peyton Reed misses out on the key details that made Ant-Man stand out from the rest of the MCU. The comedy used to be circumstantial and based on these well-acted relationships. To watch a whole Ant-Man movie without any of Michael Peña’s Luis is criminal. Not just a fan favorite, but there are folks who would watch an entire movie of just Luis talking his shit and punching people in the face. So yeah, that’s a monstrous fail. Add to that not having Judy Greer and Bobby Cannavale to ground audiences in Cassie’s development – and it becomes so much harder to care about anything that happens to her at all.

I firmly believe there are places for politics in any piece of media, but they went too hard in the paint on this one. Peyton Reed had Cassie looking like Kendell Jenner in that Pepsi ad solving the world’s ills by doing little performative actions. The caucasity was at peak levels in ways that distracted from the ‘look out for the little guy’ thematic thread that made the franchise unique. Reed’s execution makes it look like protestors are ‘the little guy’. It reads as out of touch. Add all these things up and it feels like Quantumania gets pumped out because the MCU machine demands it. As if the studio is too big to fail, making it subject to putting out the kind of lackluster movies the nerdosphere clowned the DCEU for.

As A Blerd…[spoilers!]

Spoilers from here people…

As a lifelong comic reader, there are some egregious and self-destructive deviations from the source material. Yall finna hear about it here. 

How in THE hell is Darren Cross now MODOK? Why? Tell me the reason! He was great as the villain of the week in Ant-Man, but to do that Marvel Studios already had to undermine Hank Pym’s run as Yellowjacket. Which came after Marvel Studios took the creation of Ultron from Pym too?! We will not have it, oh! To make MODOK a Kang lackey removes his AIM origin and limits his life and second death to the Ant-Man franchise. MODOK has so much to offer as an off-kilter character that seeing them mishandled like that annoyed me to no end. Marvel Studios, y’all need to stop killing your villains. The stakes need to be at their highest to necessitate that. If it ain’t Endgame-level drama happening, just don’t do it. Deadass.

Ant Man
Darren Cross (played by Corey Stoll) is MODOK, in ‘Why the hell is this happening?’ Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

Kang’s empire in Quantumania was the spitting image of his Chronopolis in the dimension of Limbo. Both are important to the character of Kang and the fabric of the multiverse. Making his base of operations in the Quantum Realm feels like a cheap ploy to keep the dimension relevant. Especially since Ant-Man and the Wasp had it looking like a trippy no-man’s-land where Janet was left to her own devices and couldn’t wait to send Scott there to collect them special particles. So why make it a place so dangerous now where Janet was a *checks notes * “freedom fighter” against Kang’s authoritarian rule? So much of this realm (which doesn’t exist in the comics) is so convenient for the sake of this one movie, and it doesn’t hit. I dub the Quantum Realm as Liquid Asgard from here on out.

Whose choice was it to reveal one of Kang’s essential “alias” identities? Whose? In the mid-credits scene, we are treated to a meeting of a gathering of Kangs, and it’s cool on one hand to see the full scope of Kang’s impact on the multiverse. We revisit a newer trope in the digital movie age, one actor playing dozens of themselves with different reactions and expressions. Majors goes all out for it, and it lands. However, we also meet the high council of Kangs. A trio representing his most influential and powerful versions from the far past, present, and far future; we see it led by none other than Immortus, ruler of Limbo (what they are calling the Quantum Realm in the MCU). It’s our first time seeing Immortus in live action although he is referred to by He Who Remains in the Loki season one finale. It’s cool to see, but it felt like a weird place to reveal such a large and potentially brilliant secret.

When I first saw Immortus, I thought it was Conan (the barbarian, not the comedian) and Dr. Strange’s rogues all-star Kulan Gath! Now, the character of Kang has been around since 1963 and Kulan Gath since 1974, and they weren’t revealed to have any interaction until Savage Avengers in 2021. If that was Kang all dolled up in a Kulan Gath get-up, in the post-movie credits no less, could you imagine the implications? Do you know how dope it would be to get an Ant-Man and Dr. Strange team up ala No Way Home? Well, it wasn’t him, but who knows? One day, far in the future, we might get that as an escape loophole for Kang. But, probably not.

The Victor Timely cameo was cool and a great deep cut for comic historians. Its’ connection to Disney+’s Loki season two was the most refreshing part of the movie and that is saying the quiet part out loud. Why play with such vaulted and important Marvel lore without any payoff? Comics fans will suffer quite a bit through Quantumania while MCU fans get their worlds expanded.

Ant Man
The family that goes subatomic together… Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Stinger (Kathryn Newton), and The Wasp (Evangeline Lily) Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking for a fun, family-friendly, big-budget marquee superhero movie, this is your flick. Quantumania is purely set up for Phase 5 of the MCU, dressing the stage for Kang to be the big bad. Nothing about the movie moves Scott’s story forward, but everyone else’s does. As a standalone movie, it falls squarely right in the center of worth it and not worth it to see in theaters. The reality is, if you want to keep up with the universe, you’re gonna see it anyway. Until we see how this phase pans out, Quantumania is ranking pretty low as far as Marvel movies go. Let’s see what happens next.

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The post Big Budget, Family-Friendly But Lacking: ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ Review appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.

February 25, 2023

Big Budget, Family-Friendly But Lacking: ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ Review

https://blacknerdproblems.com/big-budget-family-friendly-but-lacking-ant-man-and-the-wasp-quantumania-review/

The Little Guy

Welcome back to the wonderful world of Scott Lang, where things just always work out in the end. When we left off with Scott in Endgame in 2019. Wait, we haven’t seen this dude for a whole presidency?!? Well, nothing has really changed. He’s still coasting off being the MVP of ‘the blip’ and finally getting the recognition he’s always wanted. He wrote a book. Now, Quantumania is clearly supposed to change his status as a hero, but how do we do that after Thanos? Where can he possibly go from here? What’s the next level up? Oh yeah, he’s Ant-Man so the next level is down. We’re going back to the Quantum Realm.

Ant Man Quantumania
Back up in the land down under? (Paul Rudd L. as Scott Lang/Ant Man and Kathryn Newton as Cassie Lang R.) Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

Scott Lang, Edgelord?

Quantumania tries really hard to make us care about Scott Lang and the stakes of his hero’s journey, and it falls kind of flat. There’s a huge focus on Scott’s home life and his relationship with his daughter in particular. Cassie is running around these streets doing vigilante things having never been to one superhero class. The whole movie really revolves around two plots. Cassie and her development into who we know to be the hero, Stinger. Also, the mystery of what led Janet Van Dyne to want to escape the Quantum Realm and never return. Both points are never really resolved, have Galactus-sized plotholes in them, and make this movie look a lot like a setup for later Phase 5 projects.

Quantumania attempts to make Ant-Man into a high-stakes hero and the movie uses Scott’s love for his daughter to do it. This Scott Lang is more edgy and capable of going to a dark place to get the job done, but can the MCU’s resident funny man take us there and make us care? Not really. We get way more from Michelle Phiffer’s Janet than ever before and it feels refreshing but seems out of place. The more we learn about Janet’s thirty years in the Quantum Realm, the more it feels like we needed more than one movie to flesh that arc out. We are given a whole new dimension to branch off into for more Ant-Man adventures.

Ant Man
Scott (Paul Rudd, L.) gives Kang (Jonathan Majors, R.) the ice grill. Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

When He Was Kang(s)

If you didn’t know before this movie, Jonathan Majors is HIM right now. The brother is in three high-profile films this year alone. That said, his reprisal of Kang is the exact level of intensity and charisma Majors is known for. However, after he gave us the slick, suave, knowledgeable He Who Remains at the end of Loki season one I was not ready for him to flip the switch and wild out in Quantumania. Majors already let folks know what he was called to do as the multiversal mega villain, to play. Play. All. The. Kangs. Meaning each one is different, and he’s going to bring everything he’s got in the tank to make it happen.

This take on Kang hits. He’s focused and ruthless and plays his cards close to his chest until the very last second. More nuanced is the core of desperation that fuels this man, Majors is in touch with the very core of this character. He eats every scene he’s in. And really shines playing off of the naivete and innocence of Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man. Something about the manic way Kang bares his teeth at others brings out their own desperation and it shows. Majors really applied pressure on everyone he shared the screen with. In all honesty, he’s the sole reason to check this movie out. The way he holds the character begs the question: can he keep the MCU as shook as Thanos did? Can he keep the Avengers in a chokehold for like five to ten years? Can Kang’s name ring bells across the multiverse? We gon’ see.

Ant Man
He even sits with intensity. (Jonathan Majors as Kang) Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

The Review

Real rap, Quantumania is not terrible, but it is a miss for me. The pacing is strange for an MCU movie, the way we move into the Quantum Realm is so quick it feels cheap. It was like, “You already know where we’re going from the trailer! Let’s go!” Quantumania was really giving Osmosis Jones energy and it felt wrong for the format. The hollow pieces of plot (that could have been rich with lore from the source material) made it feel more episodic than it should have. This could have easily been a Disney+ ‘Special Presentation’ in the way that Werewolf By Night was and setup the rest of Phase 5.

In spite of its shortcomings, the acting was great. Michelle Pfeiffer’s still got it and does a great job gifting us more substance than we’ve ever gotten from any version of Janet Van Dyne. Majors does his thing and transcends the medium; it feels like he brings one hundred and ten percent to every moment. Everyone else kind of fades into the background. Kathern Newton holds her own but is a weird choice as Cassie Lang. Simply because MCU audiences have been asked to engage Scott’s identity through his plucky and clever daughter and now she’s…someone else…with none of the chemistry of the last two Cassies.

Standout performances came from the denizens of the Quantum Realm, Katy O’Brian stole a few scenes as the stone-spirited Jentorra whose abs alone could have saved the multiverse. David Dastmalchian doesn’t reprise his role as Eastern Bloc hacker Kurt but shows his versatile whimsy as the gelatinous Veb.

Sadboi William Jackson Harper as Quantum Realm telepath Quaz. Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

The one that hurts my heart is the use of fellow unexpectedly chiseled and very talented Black actor William Jackson Harper (who many have petitioned for to be the next Reed Richards) as a throwaway plot device character. He channels some of the Chidi swag from The Good Place and performs really well with a wasted character. Standing out in a different light is the very unnecessary cameo from Bill Murray as a resistance contact from Janet’s heyday. It was just weird and distracted entirely from what was happening.

Mind you, Quantumania is pretty to look at – the visual effects are running on a high clip. The Ant-Man suit is looking a little evolved and it’s bordering on too much detail, but it has the functional look down pat. The Wasp and Stinger suits look great and the details like the push-button deployment look dope too. Kang looks as great as The Conqueror, I know that metallic purple and bright green are not easy to pull off, so, props to the design team. Visually there was very little to pick at and the sound choices are still as dynamic and unique as the ones for Star Wars. You know exactly when Pym particles are being used and when Kang is out here letting his Time Blicky off and erasing bystanders from the timeline.

Ant Man
The aforementioned ‘time blicky’. (Jonathan Majors as Kang) Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

Is the MCU Too Big to Fail?

This movie does not feel like an Ant-Man movie. Peyton Reed misses out on the key details that made Ant-Man stand out from the rest of the MCU. The comedy used to be circumstantial and based on these well-acted relationships. To watch a whole Ant-Man movie without any of Michael Peña’s Luis is criminal. Not just a fan favorite, but there are folks who would watch an entire movie of just Luis talking his shit and punching people in the face. So yeah, that’s a monstrous fail. Add to that not having Judy Greer and Bobby Cannavale to ground audiences in Cassie’s development – and it becomes so much harder to care about anything that happens to her at all.

I firmly believe there are places for politics in any piece of media, but they went too hard in the paint on this one. Peyton Reed had Cassie looking like Kendell Jenner in that Pepsi ad solving the world’s ills by doing little performative actions. The caucasity was at peak levels in ways that distracted from the ‘look out for the little guy’ thematic thread that made the franchise unique. Reed’s execution makes it look like protestors are ‘the little guy’. It reads as out of touch. Add all these things up and it feels like Quantumania gets pumped out because the MCU machine demands it. As if the studio is too big to fail, making it subject to putting out the kind of lackluster movies the nerdosphere clowned the DCEU for.

As A Blerd…[spoilers!]

Spoilers from here people…

As a lifelong comic reader, there are some egregious and self-destructive deviations from the source material. Yall finna hear about it here. 

How in THE hell is Darren Cross now MODOK? Why? Tell me the reason! He was great as the villain of the week in Ant-Man, but to do that Marvel Studios already had to undermine Hank Pym’s run as Yellowjacket. Which came after Marvel Studios took the creation of Ultron from Pym too?! We will not have it, oh! To make MODOK a Kang lackey removes his AIM origin and limits his life and second death to the Ant-Man franchise. MODOK has so much to offer as an off-kilter character that seeing them mishandled like that annoyed me to no end. Marvel Studios, y’all need to stop killing your villains. The stakes need to be at their highest to necessitate that. If it ain’t Endgame-level drama happening, just don’t do it. Deadass.

Ant Man
Darren Cross (played by Corey Stoll) is MODOK, in ‘Why the hell is this happening?’ Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

Kang’s empire in Quantumania was the spitting image of his Chronopolis in the dimension of Limbo. Both are important to the character of Kang and the fabric of the multiverse. Making his base of operations in the Quantum Realm feels like a cheap ploy to keep the dimension relevant. Especially since Ant-Man and the Wasp had it looking like a trippy no-man’s-land where Janet was left to her own devices and couldn’t wait to send Scott there to collect them special particles. So why make it a place so dangerous now where Janet was a *checks notes * “freedom fighter” against Kang’s authoritarian rule? So much of this realm (which doesn’t exist in the comics) is so convenient for the sake of this one movie, and it doesn’t hit. I dub the Quantum Realm as Liquid Asgard from here on out.

Whose choice was it to reveal one of Kang’s essential “alias” identities? Whose? In the mid-credits scene, we are treated to a meeting of a gathering of Kangs, and it’s cool on one hand to see the full scope of Kang’s impact on the multiverse. We revisit a newer trope in the digital movie age, one actor playing dozens of themselves with different reactions and expressions. Majors goes all out for it, and it lands. However, we also meet the high council of Kangs. A trio representing his most influential and powerful versions from the far past, present, and far future; we see it led by none other than Immortus, ruler of Limbo (what they are calling the Quantum Realm in the MCU). It’s our first time seeing Immortus in live action although he is referred to by He Who Remains in the Loki season one finale. It’s cool to see, but it felt like a weird place to reveal such a large and potentially brilliant secret.

When I first saw Immortus, I thought it was Conan (the barbarian, not the comedian) and Dr. Strange’s rogues all-star Kulan Gath! Now, the character of Kang has been around since 1963 and Kulan Gath since 1974, and they weren’t revealed to have any interaction until Savage Avengers in 2021. If that was Kang all dolled up in a Kulan Gath get-up, in the post-movie credits no less, could you imagine the implications? Do you know how dope it would be to get an Ant-Man and Dr. Strange team up ala No Way Home? Well, it wasn’t him, but who knows? One day, far in the future, we might get that as an escape loophole for Kang. But, probably not.

The Victor Timely cameo was cool and a great deep cut for comic historians. Its’ connection to Disney+’s Loki season two was the most refreshing part of the movie and that is saying the quiet part out loud. Why play with such vaulted and important Marvel lore without any payoff? Comics fans will suffer quite a bit through Quantumania while MCU fans get their worlds expanded.

Ant Man
The family that goes subatomic together… Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Stinger (Kathryn Newton), and The Wasp (Evangeline Lily) Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios 2023

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking for a fun, family-friendly, big-budget marquee superhero movie, this is your flick. Quantumania is purely set up for Phase 5 of the MCU, dressing the stage for Kang to be the big bad. Nothing about the movie moves Scott’s story forward, but everyone else’s does. As a standalone movie, it falls squarely right in the center of worth it and not worth it to see in theaters. The reality is, if you want to keep up with the universe, you’re gonna see it anyway. Until we see how this phase pans out, Quantumania is ranking pretty low as far as Marvel movies go. Let’s see what happens next.

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The post Big Budget, Family-Friendly But Lacking: ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ Review appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.


February 25, 2023

Steph Curry Partners With AI Platform Simplicity To Help Residents Connect More With Their Cities

https://www.blackenterprise.com/steph-curry-partners-with-ai-platform-simplicity-to-help-residents-connect-more-with-their-cities/

NBA superstar Steph Curry is adding artificial intelligence to his résumé.

According to a press release, the Golden State Warriors point guard is working with Simplicity to connect residents with their cities. Simplicity is a leading AI-driven platform that is making noise in Silicon Valley. The startup allows people to find all city services, updates, and events, all in one place. With the core mission of the platform being “to help the city administration improve the residents’ quality of life,” Curry felt it was a great fit. “I’m thrilled to join forces with the Simplicity team and support the company’s mission of enhancing our cities and streamlining the way we receive information,” Curry said.

“Technology is a powerful connector, and Simplicity is leading the charge in using it to make daily life easier for our communities.”

The startup’s website states their cutting-edge technology has already proven its capabilities in 30 major cities across the country, including New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Austin, Denver, Buffalo, St. Louis, Cleveland, and more.

Curry will be working side-by-side with Simplicity founding partners Miguel Gamino and Juraj Gago. Gamino has worked with the city of San Francisco and Mastercard. Gago says working with Curry is exciting based on Curry’s passion for community outreach. “Stephen brings a unique perspective and drive to Simplicity, and we’re honored to have him join our company,” Gago said. “His commitment to making a positive impact aligns with our mission and we’re excited to see what the future holds with him on our team.”

Curry is known for bridging the gap within the communities he represents. Last year, Curry and his wife, Ayesha, announced a plan called “Little Town Libraries,” encouraging book sharing and childhood literacy in Oakland. He also partnered with, NinetyToZero, a nonprofit, looking to petition organizations across the country to help close the racial wealth gap.


February 24, 2023

Meagan Good Shares Desire to Star in Eartha Kitt Biopic, ‘I Identify With A Lot of Her Ideals’

https://www.blackenterprise.com/meagan-good-shares-desire-to-star-in-eartha-kitt-biopic-i-identify-with-a-lot-of-her-ideals/

Meagan Good desires to play the late great Eartha Kitt in a biopic. Her reasoning might highlight how the Harlem star feels about relationships after her divorce from Devon Franklin.

Good appeared on SiriusXM Urban View’s The Clay Cane Show, opening up about her dream role to play Kitt in a biopic.

“I loved how she [Eartha Kitt] said, ‘Compromise, compromise for what? For what? For who?’” Good said, referencing an old interview clip of Kitt that has made its rounds on social media.

The saying and mindset resonate with the Think Like A Man star as she believes “compromise” is a natural part of a relationship with someone who “genuinely loves you.”

“I get that because to me, I just feel like when someone genuinely loves you – I think compromise is a natural thing,” Good explained.

“But I don’t think it’s something that you should be asked to do. I think it should be an authentic thing that you want to do that is not expected of you. It just happens naturally.”

“I’m a big believer of just letting people be exactly who they are, the fullness of their authenticity,” she continued. “I think that’s because that’s what I desire as well, but I think everybody deserves that. And so I really identify with a lot of Eartha Kitt’s ideals.”

Good and Franklin finalized their divorce in June 2022 after nearly 10 years of marriage, Us Weekly reports. Both stars have remained mum about the cause of the split while subtly referencing their divorce in interviews and appearances.

“I’ve learned a lot about myself,” she shared during the Jan. 24 episode of The View. “I’ve rediscovered myself in a lot of ways.”

In the SiriusXM interview, Good also opened up about her past desires to play Aaliyah and Whitney Houston in film biopics. She also touched on the possibility of a sequel to the 1997 film Eve’s Bayou, saying she and co-star Jurnee Smollet have discussed it.

“We’ve talked about it a lot. But I think sometimes when something is so special, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to touch it,” Good said. “But that would be up to Miss Kasi [Lemmons]. If she ever said she wanted to do it, I think all of us would jump on board.”


February 24, 2023

Suggested Materials for Any AI Art Apologists

https://blacknerdproblems.com/suggested-materials-for-any-ai-art-apologists/

Back at the tail end of 2021, I remember stumbling upon a random image on Twitter. It was clearly something procedurally generated, a vague resemblance of an object, blurred shapes that roughly evoked a prompt that acted as the piece’s title. It was intriguing to look at, and as such when I discovered that it was generated from a mobile application called Wombo.AI, I couldn’t help but download it and play with the new toy.

At the time, I really thought it was just going to be a toy, which given historic trends and the eventual end result was perhaps foolish. This magic black box of an application was simple enough in nature. You’d give a series of words, select a style, and the computer would comb through its database and assemble a hasty pastiche. It was never particularly distinguishable, but if you asked for a castle, you’d get something like a tall building. Animals would be a distorted show. It was an interesting thought experiment more than anything, a place to give an idea a prototype form. Unfortunately, Wombo quickly announced that it would be using its proprietary to mass generate Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs, and quickly the interest waned. It was one thing to play with a toy, it was another to willingly participate and enable volatile cryptocurrency practices that prioritize mass generation of images and pretending that they were immune from copy-paste tactics.

Early in 2022, Midjourney entered the scene, and Midjourney was remarkably more powerful than anything Wombo had done. Detailed images could be generated from oddly specific prompts. Multiple options with the ability to select and refine pieces. The computing power alone must have been immense, but Midjourney offered a taste at this fascinating piece of technology. It made perfect sense that this type of data-intensive aggregation took up processing power, but at least for me, if I were to pay for art, I was always going to pay an artist directly.

And then everything sort of came crashing down at once. Before long, the various twitter circles I inhabited began pointing out grievance after grievance. The two that constantly stuck out the most (and also deeply entwined) were the use of these generators to bypass paying actual artists and the blatant theft of different artists’ work. There was a whole book generated from AI and at least one book cover.

For those unfamiliar, AI Art is not spontaneously generated. These programs are trained on gargantuan large data sets and through user-influenced iteration, they learn how to associate certain phrases with certain images. Like with many models, these only exist because of the person feeding and extracting information.

This is not an emergent problem unique to the 2020s. Concerns of automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have been around since the start of the industrial revolution. It has just taken to the forefront of the conversation because the technology has advanced significantly and the constant need for engagement with social media platforms makes it criminally easy to aggregate and disseminate. To call AI Art “art” or just another tool in a toolbox is a little disingenuous. The very foundation of the technology is theft. The very process the algorithm goes through is not a creative endeavor. It’s a convoluted series of binary choices that makes for an uncanny simulation.

The original promise of automation was that the work we as humans were fundamentally bad at would no longer need to be done by humans: strenuous physical labor, intensive calculations, repetitive iterative protocols. Automation was supposed to free up time for humans to do the things that machines and computers were bad at: art, comedy, and writing. The principles of artificial intelligence and machine learning get conflated constantly, and in our pursuit to streamline processes, we lose sight of that sometimes that the act of going through the process is the entire especially when it comes to art.

I’m a well-documented robot sympathizer, and there was a time that I would side with the robotic overlords; however, the current trajectory of the technology is simply not heading out. The software is a pale facsimile that is nothing more than a poor speaker box and project. 

As such, I felt compelled to compile several different stories that demonstrate how the actual artistic process compares to the endless dirge of pastiches. There are some spoilers in the next few paragraphs so be wary past the titles.

The first that came to mind was Diva/Vivy from Vivy Eyes Flourite Song. A singing robot who is an actually designed music player that eventually gains sentience over the course of a hundred some years. And even with all of the fancy programming and technological advancements, it still takes one hundred some years and harrowing experiences for Vivy to produce a single original song. And in what can only be described as a little too prescient, said song gets co-opted briefly for a robotic uprising that nearly upends humanity before Vivy willingly resets herself to course correct because of the *personal* connections she made. The deliberate decision she chose.

Love, Death & Robots" Zima Blue (TV Episode 2019) - IMDb

Then I thought about Zima Blue from Netflix’s Love Death Robots, another story about a robot (this time a pool cleaner) that takes hundreds of years to eventually develop masterful art based on a pool tile it used to clean back when it was a primitive machine. Even in fiction, true art takes so much of a larger time scale that we often acknowledge and the use of AI to somehow accelerate the past this ignores the very fact that this is not something that can simply be automated. Art is a complex process and creation is something we should trifle with so haphazardly (something Hayao Miyazaki has touched on in the past).

Of course, Carole and Tuesday deserves several mentions. In a world where almost all music is procedurally generated by advanced algorithms, the endurance of the human songwriters is still able to break through and spark revolution specifically because it comes from a place that computers will never be able to parse. One of the many truisms I have learned is that the goal is always to create something only you can create. Whether it’s Carol and Tuesday getting inspired by the circular motion of the laundromat or Ezekiel rebelling against the oppressive governmental systems, there is substantially more passion and authority than the songs that merely follow standard cookie cutter formulas, a sentiment that is reflected in our society.

Hell, all of this even got me thinking about Gearless Joe from Megalobox. Even with all of his opponents having biotic enhancements, Gearless Joe is able to stand in the arena and fight back on equal terms. There’s a factor of human grit and determination that is capable of closing the gap. As much as enhanced biometrics are capable of doing, at its core, they only augment, not fully replace.

I really wish AI generated tools were more toys or starting points. I wish that there were a means to start giving form to a shapeless figment that could be refined through human hands. But that’s not what “AI art” is currently being used for. It’s being used to churn out thousands of meaningless images for use of NFTs. It’s being used as a means to steal from artists two times over, first by literally stealing their stylistic choices and second by not paying to create art. It’s attempting to streamline the act of creation in a discipline where the entire part is learning the intricacies of creation. It’s not that the tools don’t have a place, it’s that the current application of the tools is actively detrimental and harmful to actual artists. 

Computers are great at taxes, optimizing supply chains, doing number crunches for rockets. Computers can discrete problems with discrete conclusions. But art, whether drawings, painting, writing, filmmaking, is not a discrete problem with discrete conclusions. It’s an infinite canvas of possibilities and if there’s one thing we also know from watching the media it’s that computers struggle with the infinite.

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The post Suggested Materials for Any AI Art Apologists appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.


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