Well, gang, we made it to a second issue of this newsletter. Good job all around, though especially to you folks. You did the hard work by clicking on that subscribe link. Let's keep it going.

I think it is safe to say that figure skating is not my bag. (In terms of the Winter Olympics, I'm much more into luge. Shout out to all my fellow Georg Hackl-heads out there.) It's nothing personal against skating — I just find subjectively judged sports harder to get into. Have a bunch of guys slide down a hill and time who's fastest? Great. See which ladies can push a puck into a goal past some other ladies? Sublime. Evaluate the artistic merits of assorted salchows and axels and lutzes? Ah well, now you've lost me.

So if skating is usually such a hard pass for me, why was I cheering my fool head off last week for Alysa Liu?

Part of it is proximity, of course. Alysa Liu hails from Oakland, which is a short swim from World Get Your Phil headquarters, so naturally, I'm going to be inclined to delight in the triumphs of someone bringing greater glory to the Nickel and Dime. Seeing our neighbors do well makes us feel better about ourselves and makes us think it's possible to hit heights of our own — if not in figure skating then in some other walk of life.

But also: Look at that performance. You don't have to know a thing about skating to know that you're watching someone execute to the best of their ability.

More than that, though, the thing that comes across in Alysa Liu's performance is the joy, almost to the point of abandonment. Here's someone who gave up figure skating for a time, decided she missed the competition and came back but on her own terms — skating was no longer a life-or-death matter for Liu, but a way to express herself. She freed herself from the weight of expectation, the specter of pressure, and that allowed her to transcend the moment.

I don't know about you, but I have a hard time surrendering myself to the moment, even when I'm enjoying myself. There's always something nagging me at the back of my mind — stuff I have to do, niggling worries, gnawing doubts. At best, there's a part of me that's always thinking ahead to what I have to tackle next; at worst, there's an existential dread that no matter how much I'm enjoying myself at any one moment, it's all going to come grinding to a halt soon enough. So I see Alysa Liu losing herself in pure joy, and I know it's maybe possible for me.

Who wouldn't want to experience the kind of feeling Alysa Liu experiences in that moment? Certainly not on an Olympic stage, but just when we're going about our daily lives. And that's why I think I'm going to remember that particular skating performance, even as my interest in that sport goes dormant until the next Olympiad.

I was in the audience at Google I/O 2025, as Google showed off Veo 3, the updated version of its generative AI tool for video creation that added the ability to insert audio produced by nothing more than prompts. I remember feeling rather conflicted about that announcement as well as the subsequent news that director Darren Aronofsky* was going to incorporate AI tools into his filmmaking.

I admit to being skeptical about AI and some of the more extravagant claims its advocates make about the technology. My feeling is that it works best when it's speeding up dull, repetitive tasks that might otherwise take an inordinate amount of time. I'm less sold on the idea that it's a tool that goes hand-in-hand with human creativity.

But am I off-base here? After all, movie-makers use CGI and all sorts of non-practical effects in their story-telling to the outrage of no one. Who's to say that AI-generated video and audio tools are any different?

“Filmmaking has always been driven by technology,” Aronofsky is quoted as saying in a Variety report on his Google AI tools partnership. “After the Lumiere brothers and Edison’s ground-breaking invention, filmmakers unleashed the hidden storytelling power of cameras. Later technological breakthroughs — sound, color, VFX — allowed us to tell stories in ways that couldn’t be told before. Today is no different. Now is the moment to explore these new tools and shape them for the future of storytelling.”

Of course, the difference between some of those tools and generative AI is that sound, color and VFX still require mastery to implement correctly. Generative AI's selling point is that any slob can whip up a Hollywood-style production with just a few well-chosen prompts. That's my knee-jerk analysis, anyhow.

Reviewer Phillip Maciak has a more in-depth analysis of the issues surrounding generative AI in cinema in a recent New Republic article, and it's well worth a read, even if Maciak insists on spelling his first name incorrectly. The prompt is a series of AI-generated videos created by none other than Darren Aronofsky that highlight the American Revolution. You will be surprised to learn that the videos are not very good.

Aronofsky may want to "explore these tools and shape them for the future of storytelling," but it sounds like there's a lot more shaping that will need to be done if the early episodes of On This Day... 1776 are anything to go by. (Full disclosure: Your correspondent did not sit through more than a minute of the first episode on account of a comprehensive "Don't patronize AI slop" policy.) And even if future efforts look decidedly less crappy, Maciak strikes a hopeful note at the end of his review by citing D.W. Griffith's 1915 forecast that movie-making would mean the end of books. That clearly didn't happen, and history is likely to repeat itself in regard to AI tools, no matter what its most vocal enthusiasts claim.

Yes, that's now two editions of this newsletter that have featured Darren Aronofsky-related content. I swear he's not going to become my bete noire* or that we're going to rebrand as Get Your Phil of Darren Aronofsky.

My daughter had the week off school, which was conveniently timed with my unemployment, as I didn't have to take off any time from work. ("You better believe I'm on PTO — Permanent Time Off.") On the downside, the unemployment also means not expending those precious pennies on lavish travels, so who's up for a frugal day trip to Sacramento, the Paris of West Coast state capitals?

Don't all raise your hands at once.

Actually, my daughter was surprisingly amenable to visiting Sacramento, a place she had never been, and letting me drag her around to see all the free sights in the downtown area. That included a visit to the State Capitol Building as well as a walking tour of the Leland Stanford mansion, which was once inhabited by the eighth governor of California, the railroad magnate and the founder of a vocational school for venture capitalists in Palo Alto.

I'd also tell you about the wonderful local food we ate, but my daughter is fully embracing the Teenagers Eat Like Trash Pandas phase of her adolescence and demanded we eat at a Panera. The Panera campaigning had begun the night before the trip, and when she discovered a Panera located next to the garage where we parked — totally by happenstance, by the way — she shouted "This is the best day ever" with a shocking lack of irony. She had the pick-two combo of a sandwich plus mac-and-cheese; I had the salad and simmering resentment.

I think the highlight of trip, though, was showing my daughter the official gubernatorial portrait of Jerry Brown from his 1975 through 1983 stint in office. It was a controversial portrait at the time of unveiling, adopting a more modernist style than the ones you normally associate with official portraiture. And though, not as controversial as it was back when I slapped eyes on it during a middle school field trip to the Capitol, Jerry Brown’s painting still causes heads to turn.

The artist, Don Bachardy, didn't much care for painting Jerry Brown, whom he found to be an uncooperative subject. (The official portrait is apparently the fifth stab at capturing Brown.) The once-and-future governor seemed more pleased with the finished product, if a bit put off by its unfinished nature. And if the Wikipedia entry about the portrait is to be believed, the legislature banished the portrait to the third floor so that fewer people would have to set eyes on it.

Whether that's true or not, I can't say. It remains on the third floor of the Capitol, but wedged between Brown's predecessor, Ronald Reagan, and his successor, Pete Wilson. So these days, it just seems that the recent governor portraits are hanging in that area as opposed to some sort of concerted effort to keep modern art out of the public eye.

I don't know if Jerry Brown is getting or has gotten a portrait for his 2011-2019 term in office — the portraits I saw stopped with Arnold Schwarzenegger. (We elect fascinating governors in this state.) But if so, I hope that the second painting is even more minimalist, like a black-and-white pencil sketch.

I think we all agree what Gavin Newsom's gubernatorial portrait should be.

My daughter's week off of school also meant less homework and more time for watching movies with her parents, and she was afforded the honor of programming our vacation film festival. She picked a pair of titles that hit theaters long before she was born, in case you're looking for more evidence of nature-vs.-nurture.

Ironically, both older movies — well, older to her at any rate — are ones I'm not particularly enamored of, though on second viewing, I found more to appreciate.

It's not that I don't like The Graduate, Mike Nichols' very well-regarded movie about youthful alienation that resonates beyond its 1967 release date. I've always thought the Buck Henry/Calder Willingham screenplay is top-drawer, and you don't need me to tell you that are some very memorable moments in that picture. But I had a hard time identifying with Ben Braddock even when I was a young man, and that hasn't eased with age. He's simply too unlikable for my tastes, which I realize is something of the point of the story, though it's too big a hurdle for me to clear to fully embrace The Graduate.

Also, the extended musical sequences scored by Simon & Garfunkel feel like a cheat to me. The songs are certainly bangers, but by relying on them as much as he does, it comes across like Mike Nichols taking a smoke break and letting the music advance the plotline.

That said, on this viewing, I came to appreciate Nichols' direction a bit more — the cross-cutting, the way the camera setup emphasizes Ben's isolation or Elaine's vulnerability during her disastrous first date with Ben. I liked The Graduate a lot better this time around, though I still think it's not entirely clear why Elaine should give Ben the time of day, let alone run off with him at the end.

As for The Truman Show, I saw that movie in the theater back when it came out in 1998, and it's unsettling now as it was then — perhaps more so in that the movie pre-dates the reality TV push of the early 2000s. There's not a dime's bit of daylight between that Truman-focused talk show Harry Shearer hosts in the movie and the many after-shows that pop-up in the walk of today's TV offerings. It's like Bravo TV executives screened The Truman Show and saw it as a roadmap and not a cautionary tale.

I still think Jim Carrey's performance — turned in at the start of the "I can be serious, give me an award" phase of his career — doesn't quite land, and the climactic dialogue between Carrey and Ed Harris feels too on-the-nose. But kudos to the movie for getting just about everything right, except for maybe the idea that anyone would want to free Truman from his predicament.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. Same Phil time, same Phil channel a week or so from now.