'Smile 2' Is Smile 1 If It Happened to Lady Gaga
Plus some thoughts on the perils of AI-assisted filmmaking.
[This post will discuss the basic premise of Smiles 1 and 2.]
The original Smile had a juicy premise: What if there was a parasitic entity that fed on your trauma and could make you hallucinate literally anything, causing you to mentally deteriorate to the point of madness? Oh, and it just so happens that one of the things it likes making you hallucinate is people smiling creepily? It’s an idea that opens up a lot of doors filmically because as a viewer, you’re never quite sure if what you’re seeing on screen is real or just a manifestation of the victim’s deepest secrets, fears, or traumas. While it can make some of the rug pulls feel a bit cheap, it also generated some shocking moments. Audiences flocked to it; the memorable visuals and premise made Smile one of the biggest horror success stories of 2022, grossing over $100 million domestically.
Smile 2 continues the idea by applying it to the world of mega pop stardom. Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is a Lady Gaga/Britney Spears/Miley Cyrus-esque figure and she recently survived a horrifying post-drug-bender car accident that killed her boyfriend and brutally injured her. A year later, she’s doing a PR blitz to hype up a stadium tour when she somehow gets the curse/entity from the first film passed on to her. As Skye tries to hold her life together, she’ll have to battle both literal and figurative demons to survive.
Smile 2 knows what made the first film so memorable: People putting on upsetting smiles while doing really creepy, weird-ass shit. If a sequel is meant to continue what made the previous film enjoyable, then Smile 2 accomplishes that. Director Parker Finn expertly uses the trappings of being a pop star — the cavernous Manhattan sky rise apartment, the hallucinatory visuals of an arena concert — as locales for the nightmarish manifestations of the Smile curse. My only beef with the film is that it relies very heavily on jump scares, so if you’re more of a “slow burn” type horror movie watcher, this may not be for you.
But what really elevates Smile 2 above the first is Naomi Scott’s performance as Skye Riley. Sosie Bacon, who plays the protagonist in the first film, was no slouch and she did a wonderful job kicking off what’s likely to be an ongoing franchise. But Scott not only needs to convince you that she’s being terrified by a strange curse, she’s also dealing with the rigors of being an internationally known pop star (which she basically is in real life). In all these regards, she’s totally convincing. Scott is in virtually every single frame of the film and her character’s deterioration is something to behold, a Scream Queen performance for the ages.
We give a lot to our pop stars but we expect a lot in return. We expect them to live lives that are admirable and to subsume their personal issues and challenges in the furtherance of making products (e.g. concerts, albums, etc.) that we thirstily consume. When the movie is not trying to terrify you with smile-infused tableaus, Smile 2 is asking: What if a pop star couldn’t put their real life on hold? What if their deep-seated traumas all came to the surface and couldn’t be ignored anymore?
Do you really hate AI tho
Aneesh Chaganty is an enormously talented filmmaker. After making a bunch of Google ads that made me cry (this amazing Google Glass short film got him that job), Chaganty went on to make fun, well-received low-budget thrillers like Searching and Run.
Recently, Chaganty partnered with Meta to trumpet the capabilities of its new Movie Gen AI. One of the key features of Movie Gen is the ability to be able to tell the AI what you want via plain text. In theory, the AI can understand it and manipulate the footage to give you the desired result. Movie Gen won’t be available to the public until 2025 but Meta is doing a lot of PR right now to make creatives more comfortable with the concept.
The ad, which is cheekily titled “i h8 ai,” lays out Chaganty’s own anxieties with AI technology. Chaganty begins his voiceover by asking, “From everything that I have been told, AI is going to hurt my industry. How could I possibly tell a story about why AI was good for us, when all I could see from where I was standing was bad?”
The rest of the ad then shows some of Chaganty’s old home movies he made as a kid and how he can use Movie Gen to enhance them, adding futuristic backgrounds and outlandish characters. The idea is that far from replacing creative people, AI can actually inspire them reach farther in their creative ambitions. The humans are still making the key decisions; the AI is just a helper. The ad ends with the following words:
I hate AI, but with a tool like this I don’t know. Maybe I’d have just dreamed a little bigger.
Putting aside the aesthetics of the AI-generated material, I think the ad does an admirable job fulfilling what must have been a challenging creative brief. But just from a messaging perspective, it’s a muddle. It vaguely brings up the anxieties people have with AI while not really doing anything to assuage people’s actual fears around it.
For one thing, it’s highly likely that AI-generated art and video will soon replace the work of humans. It’s certainly good enough to do so for some project already, and as my co-host on the Filmcast Jeff Cannata frequently reminds me: this is the worst the technology will ever be. The technology is also terrible for the environment and I think a lot of people find the concept that we are sending tons of greenhouse gases into the air to make “art” that isn’t as good as what humans could make (but is intended to replace what humans could make) to be galling.
The public is really starting to get put off by AI when it comes to art applications and my guess is that resistance will continue. It’s possible that Meta’s Movie Gen will succeed just based on its utility, but it seems unlikely to do so based on people’s affection for it as an idea: As of this writing, Chaganty’s video on YouTube has 1.7k dislikes compared to 400 likes.
Other Stuff I’ve Made
Over on Decoding TV, we discussed The Penguin’s fourth episode, which in my estimation is one of the best TV episodes of the year.
Also on Decoding TV, we covered the phenomenon of studios consulting hardcore fans when it comes to what to make. Is it the end times or not a big deal?
On The Filmcast, we talked about why Joker: Folie a Deux is a movie that hates its audience. If you missed it, be sure to check out Matt Goldberg’s review.
[PAID ONLY] On my Patreon, we’re podcasting about @joyofnapping’s journey to Wisconsin to canvass for Kamala Harris. You can listen to the latest episode here.