Film Wonk Podcast Episode # 179 ' Bliss' (dir. Mike Cahill), ' The White Tiger' (dir. Ramin Bahrani) - Бесплатная аудиокнига

This week, Glenn and Daniel escape the doldrums of 2020 with a mind-bending, reality-warping thriller from I Origins director Mike Cahill, Bliss, now available on Amazon Prime. And then we gaze across the world at India, a country currently engaged in the largest protest in human history, through the eyes of a Booker Prize-winning novel adapted by director Ramin Bahrani, The White Tiger. This film, which we described as having "a chip on its shoulder and a swagger in its step," is now available on Netflix. (01:02:57).

May contain NSFW language.

FilmWonk rating (Bliss): 8 out of 10

FilmWonk rating (The White Tiger): 8 out of 10

Show notes:

• [01:25] Review: _Bliss_

• [12:33] Spoilers: Bliss

• [25:10] Review: _The White Tiger_

• [45:53] Spoilers: _The White Tiger_

• The "Thought Visualizer" depicted in Bliss is just barely still science-fiction, but the technology that could power such a device in the future does exist today. Check out the OpenAI Multimodal Research frameworks, including DALL-E, a neural network which can create images based on a text description, and CLIP, which can generate a text description from a photo (and these networks were, in turn, used to train and validate each other). I'd suggest you start with the DALL-E demo, especially if you're eager to see what a giraffe/walrus hybrid, or a cat made of fried chicken, or a pig made of cucumbers looks like.

• Check out Rohan Naahar's review of _The White Tiger_ in the Hindustan Times for one Indian critic's take on the film, which obviously picked up on some details we missed. NPR also interviewed a number of regular people who have experienced poverty in India for their takes on the film, which are expectedly wide-ranging. The /Filmcast (with David Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Jeff Cannata) had an excellent discussion as well.

• CORRECTION: We referred to the 2016 Indian banknote demonetization, which - as you might expect, we oversimplified a bit. Same goes for the Citizenship Amendment of 2019.

• CORRECTION: While the caste system is deliberately simplified in The White Tiger, the Halwai caste (which Balram was born into) is briefly defined in the film - it was traditionally associated with confectionery and sweet-making.

Check out all of our podcasts at FilmWonk.net.