"The Golden Age of the Internet Is Over" by Glink (it looks like it really is)

Glink presents “The Golden Age of the Internet Is Over”.

  

The golden age lasted between about 1999 and 2009, and maybe reached its nadir in 2007.

Myspace, the film says, allowed more creativity (an anonymity) than Facebook does today.

Facebook emphasized using real identities and social connections, rather than just content publishing.

The Internet became corporatized. Remember the days of the dot-com boom and bust?

He covers the censorship and sensitivity to mobs and cancel-culture (and vulnerable to left-wing tactics) as a natural result of too much consolidation and not enough competition, like there used to be.

  

At the end, Glink sings and performs and Internet song and tastefully shows himself off.  I believe I have seen him in DC before (but the film seems to be shot in Arizona and probably California judging from outdoor shots).  This short film (26 minutes) gets 5 stars.  He should enter it into DC Shorts (film festival every fall).

"How to Think in a Foreign Language"

“Stop Translating in Your Head: How to Think in a Foreign Language”, by Luca Lampariello.

  

He compares Italian to Spanish, and then his native Italian to Japanese.

  

He advises using translation at first, and then learn to think in short sentence fragments, and then immerse yourself in conversation in the language.

  

I took four years of French in high school.  I can remember we read a lot the last three years (Les Miserables) and the final exams were mostly answering essay questions in French. In college, I took German, and we had an audio lab with tape recorders and 1962 technology.

  

German is easier to understand when spoken, even if the language is seen as a little harder to learn from English.

  

Madrid Spanish (in the movies) is easier to follow than Mexican Spanish.

"What If We Could Build Wormholes?" Maybe the Lorentzian model is possible

“Unveiled” on YouTube has some videos about wormholes, and a good introduction is “What If We Could Build Wormholes?”

The video explains the difference between Lorentzian and Euclidean wormhole.  The former is considered more likely to be possible to build in the future (and later we’ll look at a video on building one).

The technology could be like an Internet on steroids, but capable of moving people among various nodes, and it offers limited time travel, back to when the nodes were set up.

Mankind probably has a few hundred million years to do this before natural global warming (from the Sun getting hotter, not just human activity now) makes the Earth uninhabitable.

"Masked": short film from Australia festival circuit on a female-to-male trans teenager

“Masked” (15 min, from Momentum Films) is a short film (15 min) from Australia, about a trans teenager Zoe (Kelsie Schultz) who wants to transition from female to male.

A birthday arrives, and her mother still thinks this is something she will outgrow.  On social media, she gets some brutal messages (“you can’t make it as either”).  She already wears a patch on her wrist.

Some contemporary friends seem more supportive.

The film is directed by Michael Jay Haredinge and Jay Beckenleg.

  

The short has been aired in a trans film festival (it premiered in January 2019).

"Shisak": India's first silent gay film

“Shisak”, by Faraz Arif Ansari, bills itself as “India’s First Silent LGBTQ Love Story”. There are no words.

The film says it is commemorating the final decriminalization of sodomy in India, where homosexuality is very much a taboo, still.

A young man, maybe 20, keeps playing eye candy with a well dressed business executive on repeated commuter train trips. 

Somehow this film (15 min) reminds me of Alfred Hitchock's "Strangers on a Train" (the opening, with the footsie playing). 

  

Will they ever meet?

Wikipedia: By Nikhil B - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

"Fracture": Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins faced off in 2007 crime film

Recently I reviewed “Fractured” on a Wordpress blog about a broken reality experience associated with an accidental death.  But there is a 2007 movie called “Fracture”, directed by Gregory Hoblit, based on a story by Gregory Pyne, from New Line Cinema.  It turns out I had seen it then and reviewed it briefly on a legacy site.

Anthony Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, a structural engineer, who discovers his wife is in an affair with a cop (Billy Burke), and shoots her (Embeth Davidtz).

  

Crawford matches wits with a rising prosecutor Willy Beachum (Ted Crawford), and even tries to represent himself.  Beachum is trying to move into civilian corporate practice.  Crawford gets himself off on a technicality, but later becomes involved with taking his wife off life-support, losing his right to protection from double jeopardy.

"Bad Boy's Group Session": Screenwriting lessons for gay comedy?

Artie O’Daly has a series of short films called “Bad Boy”, whose subject matter seems elusive.

Film #10 (like a Symphony #10) is called “Bad Boy's Group Session”.  An African-American woman counsels a young screenwriter (think “Adaptation” with Nicholas Cage playing twin screenwriters) in a group session with other characters, including another guy who is the screenwriter’s would-be boy friend.

There is a lot of word salad, with some alliterations, puns and metaphors, one referring to the scene in “Fargo” where one of the villains falls into a wood chipper (making an ending "piece-ful"). 

But the idea here seems to be that the writers have to come up with what will really sell to agents. Comedy writing for series is very hard.

I remember that a guy in Minneapolis had a script called "I Hate Speed-dating".  I heard a table reading of it in 2003.  (Remember the Jungle Theater, near Lake Street.)  This film reminded me of "Brent".