Bibliographic record
Abstract
I am not the ideal festivalgoer. So many of my friends and fellow critics seem able to cope, quite happily, with three or four films a day. Two is generally my limit. I can't come out of one movie and walk straight into the next. I need time to ponder, to relax, to make notes. And this isn't just old age, I've always been like that. And I begin by telling myself 'This year you really must search out new talent, look at films by people you've never heard of, use the programme ...'. But the programme is in my case the opposite of helpful: it tells me that every film in the festival is one I absolutely must see and some kind of masterpiece (do the writers of the entries really believe this?). So I inevitably end up going to the films by directors I already admire, and whose films will eventually (perhaps!) appear on DVD. I'm not really complaining, just confessing. I don't see how a programme writer could tell me of a new film 'Don't expect a masterpiece, but it's interesting ...', or 'The film is awkward and even slightly amateurish but it has a lot to say about some important issues ...' (Actually, I think I would be far more likely to see the film if the blurb did say such things ...). So here, once again, is not a revelatory account of unknown masterpieces by unknown directors, but yet another celebration of the latest works of some of my favourite living directors. 1. SARAH POLLEY: Away from Her Well, of course, Ms. Polley has not yet had the opportunity to become quite that, and, alas, one must immediately wonder whether, within the framework of Canadian film production and its shortsighted financing agencies, she ever will. My introduction to Sarah Polley was in a modest little Canadian film made many years ago and never heard of since called Joe's So Mean To Josephine. The film was quite good but Ms. Polley was quite dreadful, self-conscious, overacting like crazy. But I've forgotten the film and never forgotten Sarah Polley. Inexperienced as she was, she had that mysterious thing called 'presence', the stuff that stars are made of. I started watching out for her. The clincher took some years to arrive: a film called Guinevere, a distinguished work that now seems to be as forgotten as Joe's So Mean ..., though at least it came out briefly on DVD. Here there could be no doubt: Sarah Polley could (and, in a different financing and promotion situation, would) have become a star of the magnitude of Hepburn or Bergman or at least, in more contemporary terms, Michelle Pfeiffer or Julia Roberts (I am not, of course, suggesting any direct comparison or likeness: Polley's 'star quality' is all her own). If you doubt me, get hold of the movie. So what happened? Apparently, zilch. Polley identified herself proudly as a Canadian, and made clear her quite explicit and outspoken connection to left wing politics, which also included not responding to the allurements of Hollywood (who at least can recognize a 'star' when they see one). But, eventually, to Hollywood she went--which tells you in a nutshell much of what is wrong, backward and incompetent in Canadian cinema. Go is a good little movie by an interesting (if clearly minor) director, Doug Liman, and Polley's performance is excellent. But apparently her experience of Hollywood filmmaking was (quite understandably) not to her taste, and she returned to Canada. She should have been welcomed with open arms and a whole armful of projects that might have interested her, but apparently zilch, once again. Since then she has been hovering about in the sidelines, accepting this or that but nothing of great consequence, trying Hollywood again very briefly (the 'sort of' remake of Dawn of the Dead), coming home to ...? One would have hoped, to a large group of supporters working out with her and under her guidance passionately felt political projects, outspoken and anti-American, with herself as star, director, writer or whatever she wanted, surrounded by strong, committed support. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".