Michael Wood Journalist Profile

Articles

Michael Wood · At the Movies: ‘Conclave’

Dec 18, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Michael Wood

Edward Berger’s Conclave looks rather stately at first, a matter of grand buildings, Michelangelo murals and a simple question: the pope is dead; who will succeed him? But this impression doesn’t last long. Roman buildings start to whisper their histories, murals are spectacular but often threatening, and the question is not so much who as how.
Michael Wood · At the Movies: ‘Anora’

Nov 13, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Michael Wood

In a recent interview Sean Baker said he likes to resist purely ‘grey and drab’ moments in life or movies. ‘Even when I’m going through hard times, I still see colour.’ This is literally true of the palette of his films and especially of the scenes at Brighton Beach and Coney Island in his new movie, Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. It is perhaps even more true metaphorically.
Michael Wood · At the Movies: ‘Megalopolis’

Oct 16, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Michael Wood

Reflecting on Megalopolis, a film he first envisaged in the 1970s and filmed (mostly in Georgia) in 2022, Francis Ford Coppola recalled thinking about a famous definition offered by Jean-Luc Godard: a film is composed of a beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in that order. With a little tweaking the phrase helps us to contemplate this sprawling new movie. It has a beginning and an end, in that order, and more middles than the director or the audience can cope with.
Backwards is north

Oct 2, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Anne Carson |Michael Wood

‘This is the Nile and I’m a liar.’ These are the opening words of an amazing play by Anne Carson, first performed in 2019. The statement is in one sense correct. The speaker is nowhere near Egypt and about three thousand years too late for the Trojan War. J.L. Austin listed being ‘said by an actor on the stage’ as one of the ways in which an utterance might be ‘hollow or void’, and for a moment Carson’s speaker takes exactly this line. The voice continues:Those are both true. Are you confused yet?
‘Only the River Flows’

Sep 18, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Michael Wood

One of the most fascinating aspects of Wei Shujun’s film Only the River Flows is the continuing contrast between its look and its story, between the faithful realism of the first and the elusive options of the second. An early instance of the former is the picture of a police station in a provincial Chinese town in the 1990s taking over a closed cinema as additional office space. Desks occupy the stage but the rows of seats for the audience are still where they were.
ChatGPT’s Dirty Little Secret

Aug 13, 2024 | medium.com | Michael Wood

Discover the secret reason why ChatGPT is getting worse over time. This article discloses:• Evidence that GPT 4 is getting worse over time. • Demonstration of a dirty little secret that explains why this is happening. • How to protect your company and yourself against devolving LLM performance. A Stanford/Berkeley study empirically documented “that the performance and behavior of both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can vary greatly over time. Forexample, GPT-4 (March 2023) was reasonable at identifying prime vs.
Michael Wood · At the Movies: ‘Crossing’

Aug 7, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Michael Wood

Towards the end of Levan Akin’s shape-shifting movie Crossing, a character says that she has begun to think of Istanbul as ‘a place where people come to disappear’. She has strong personal reasons for the thought, having travelled from Batumi in Georgia to look for her sister’s transgender child, who left home long ago, chased out by an angry father. The child’s old name is unknown but it is now said to be Tekla.
Michael Wood · At the Movies: ‘The Beast’

Jul 10, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Michael Wood

The bad year in Bertrand Bonello’s dizzying film The Beast is 2025. That’s when everything went wrong. By 2044, the latest date in the movie, the world is steady again and much improved. The bots are in charge and humans have only humble clerical jobs where their mistakes will not matter much. The bots are human in their fashion, a long way from being mere machines. They have emotions but are not burdened by the baggage of their pasts in the way humans are.
The need for speed: Government looking to fast-track private land acquisitions

Jun 20, 2024 | lexology.com | Donna Hurley |Hamish Harwood |Michael Wood |Mike Wakefield |Nick Wilson |Nicky Hall | +2 more

The Public Works Act 1981 (PWA) gives the Crown and local authorities the power to acquire land from private landowners for public works, such as roads, schools and railways. The PWA sets out the process that must be followed to ensure that the rights of private landowners are protected. However, the PWA can at times be a hindrance resulting in a protracted acquisition which is undesirable for all involved.
'The Dead Don't Hurt'

Jun 12, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Michael Wood

The opening scenes of Viggo Mortensen’s new film, The Dead Don’t Hurt, are like an essay in montage or a puzzle for students of Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin. A knight in armour rides a horse through a forest. A woman lies in bed. There is a shoot-out in a small Western town. How are we to put these pictures together? Mortensen is not going to help us.