Rob Reiner, AI and Art, and It: Welcome to Derry

ROB REINER

The thing that's really tough about losing Rob Reiner this week (I mean, many things are tough about it, but this thing in particular) is that he was one of those people in Hollywood who was unapologetically openly kind. He made an effort to use his influence for good, which made him a target of ridicule, as awful as that is. But you only have to look at his work to see the distinctly human and loving way he saw the world. That's the thing I remember most about him: everything he did seemed to come from a place of loving — loving others, and loving yourself. Look at Stand By Me, my favorite Reiner movie (tied closely with This Is Spinal Tap, and followed by The Princess Bride), and see how much of that movie is rooted in the love these characters had for each other and the way it makes you love them too. The characters Stephen King created were troubled, broken kids, and Rob managed to capture all the pain, humor, and hope the story had to offer.

Along with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, Rob made a mockumentary about a fictional heavy metal band, filled with moments of genuine emotion and pathos. When you look at Guest's later output with much of the same crew, it's easy to see the difference between those movies and the heart that This Is Spinal Tap had. That's not to say that the Guest movies are bad or without heart, but they've got a cynicism that I think was not present in This Is Spinal Tap, and I think that's all Rob.

He also managed to get that incredible performance out of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. It was one scene, but holy shit, what a scene — acting extra hard.

To come from such a powerhouse of comedy as Carl Reiner, without a chip on his shoulder, without something to prove, was a miracle. He just showed up, did the work, and tried to do as much good as he could with his influence. You can't ask for a better example of a Hollywood kid making good. He was the best of them.

GEN AI AND ART

So a lot has been said about AI in general and specifically, AI-generated imagery in art. I figured I should collect my thoughts and see if I can't organize them into something coherent.

I know I'm supposed to froth at the mouth and scream and shout about how much AI is destroying the world, art, and the way people think and process information. And that's all valid. That said, I'm not nearly as invested as many others seem to be, one way or the other. I can see benefits to AI as a virtual assistant or for organizing notes, or something innocuous like that. I just don't care about that. There are more important things to be upset about right now as far as I'm concerned.

I get annoyed and frustrated when I hear people say that AI breaks down the walls guarding art, as though artists are somehow keeping all the talent for themselves and not sharing it. That's infuriating. Art is the most accessible thing in the world. You literally need a piece of paper and a pencil. I'm sorry if you don't want to do the work it takes to practice drawing for years. That's not gatekeeping, though. Some jobs take a long time to learn. I've been drawing my whole life. Someone typing a prompt into ChatGPT, or Midjourney, or whatever is not the same.

What really pisses me off, really, is how little people actually value art. They fundamentally fail to understand what is good about it. Being an artist isn't simply about being able to produce a cool picture. Cool pictures are great, if you want a wallpaper for your phone or something, but being cool isn't what makes an image art. What makes it art is the perspective it offers. The thought that went into it. The intention to create that art. A computer can't do that. A computer has nothing to say, and a prompter isn't saying something by asking a computer to approximate an idea. If you call something generated by the whims of a large language model art, then you probably don't deserve good art.

So fuck Generative AI. I'm with Guillermo del Toro. It's good for making a neat desktop wallpaper, but that's about as far as it should really go. It's a gimmick that's threatening people's jobs and flooding the market with shitty, amalgamations of art that look totally homogenized.

That's my two cents.

IT: WELCOME TO DERRY

Okay, so I was on the fence about whether I even wanted to watch this show or not. The movies started off decent, but like the old TV movie, it completely falls apart in the second half. That's probably because the second half of the book is also fairly weak. The second movie was hilariously bad, and I pretty much checked out of the whole franchise at that point. Besides, I never expected them to pick it up with a TV show like this.

Once I heard that they were including Dick Halloran and telling the story of The Black Spot, I was interested again. Dick Halloran is one of my favorite King characters, and I thought they handled him beautifully.

The thing that really stood out for me, in the back half of the season, was when Bill Skarsgard shows up as Pennywise, and is just incredible. Even moreso in the show than the movies. In the movies, he was mostly just a boogieman, mugging and drooling. Not a bad performance at all, just that's what that movie required. The show gets into a lot of the lore around Pennywise and what exactly he is and how he works, and it does it really well.

Sure, there are some cheesy things about it, but many of those cheesy things were things that Stephen King routinely does. It's a Stephen King flavored cheese. There was a big Lord of the Rings style ending with the characters working together to defeat the evil. There was a lot about the end that felt very classic Stephen King, and I respected that.

Bill Skarsgard is going to go down as one of the great horror actors, like Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney. He disappears in these characters. The stuff he does with his voice and his face is next-level performance. He's so animated and viscerally terrifying.

I'm a little sad the show is over. It brought a lot of interesting lore to the story and well-drawn characters with good performances. It was scary in the ways it should have been, and kept my attention. I hope they can do the other two seasons they have planned.

In personal news, today is my and Sandra's 25th anniversary so we're having lasagna and a chill day. It's been really nice 🙂