DeepMind IRL, Vibe Filmmaking, and Miami's O Cinema Censorship Battle

Google DeepMind's latest humanoid robots are blurring the line between science fiction and reality. In this episode of Denoised, Addy and Joey explore how AI is making robots understand our physical world in real-time, the exploration of 'vibe filmmaking' as a creative approach using generative AI tools, and the alarming free speech battle facing Miami's O Cinema over screening the Oscar-winning documentary 'No Other Land.' From cutting-edge AI to cultural censorship, this episode unpacks what these developments mean for creative professionals.

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In this episode of the Denoised podcast, we're going to take a look at Google DeepMind, Vibe Filmmaking, and the battle O Cinema is facing against my hometown, the city of Miami beach. Let's get into it. Welcome back. Welcome back. How was your weekend? Good weekend. Pretty chill. How was your weekend? You went up the, uh, Malibu coast. Yeah. First time driving up the PCH ish as much as we could since the fires, a lot of the roads still shut down. So kind of had to do a big loop zigzag to go around it. But yeah, it's one of my favorite drives. So it was nice to, nice to be back there. It's always beautiful. Let's see. First up, we got Google DeepMind and Gemini Flash 2.0. So tell me about Google DeepMind, what you've been seeing with it. Yeah, let's take a step back. Google DeepMind is a research arm of the massive company, Google. Now, when it comes to AI. We always talk about OpenAI and Perplexity and Anthropic, but Google just doesn't enter the conversation in that top tier kind of way, at least not the way I perceive it. However, having said that, DeepMind and the team there are doing incredible work. Okay. So what are you saying? So there's this video that just came out where they have a humanoid robot and then bits and bobs up robots like an arm or whatever. Um, Doing things in real time responding to commands in real time. So that, like what, like what do you, what do they do? Like, yeah, so like, um, you roll a green dice and it shows up as number five and then there is a red dice next to it and you tell the robot, Hey, take that red dice and match it to the green dice, you know, like do it in real time. Of course, it's a, it's a little bit slow and you're telling it in just plain English, natural language, and then you could kind of see the camera feed of the robot. So the magic to all of this, and I think the overarching. engineering project is that taking any camera feed as input as like our eyes and using AGI turning it into actual responses and commands for the robotic limbs and so on. So kind of this like bridging the gap between like a computer being able to understand the physical world. So if you go back to Google AI Studio and then I think you covered Google Flash. 2.0 as well. What it's doing is it's grabbing a screen grab from a computer and then using those RGB pixels as an input into a real time inference system. This is like a general sense of that. So you would need something like Cosmos, what Nvidia has, which is a world model, so it can decipher everything around you, chair, table, coffee cup, laptop, you name it. In real time, figure out what it is. And then have an understanding of what the user wants you to do. Overlay that, and then turn it into commands for the robotic servos. So it can move its arm accurately. Okay. So is it kind of doing this, but in a slower motion, like move arm, take picture, figure out what's happening, move arm, take picture, figure out what's happening. A little bit. Because that was happening now. It's like 10 frames per second. Right. But the future point is like, it can move this and sort of like our brain operates. I'm like, I'm moving my hand and I see my hands approaching my laptop screen. It's crazy. To close it. So like, that's where we're heading. And, uh, I don't know if you run AI inference locally on your machine. I do. I do ComfyUI stuff all the time. That stuff takes minutes. maybe tens of minutes. I mean, real time inference on a general purpose system is crazy. I mean, imagine the gigabytes of stuff that it has to churn through. Yeah. Yeah. So where else do you see this? Like what applications, where else do you see this going with the DeepMind applications? Great, great question. So obviously the immediate one that comes to mind is cars, autonomous cars. I think, uh, what, what's happening with Waymo. Yeah. I see them all the time. Yeah, like that's a very specialized system and I think it's a little bit legacy because it's built on lidars and just like an older system. Whereas if you convert that over to a general AGI type system like Gemini, that could really open things up to put it on motorcycles, put it on planes, put it on anything. And it'll work. Now, obviously something like Waymo with a car, that needs to happen in real time. Not at 10 frames per second, like 100 frames per second. There's no delay for waiting for the car to figure out if I'm about to hit a pedestrian or car. And yeah, I think that's probably why when you talk about legacy systems, like, I mean, we need that in a car for now, for sure. Let's actually just go to cut to the chase, if you will, Joey. Like in our lifetime. We're gonna see humanoid robot servants. Mm hmm That's fully capable of doing the dishes doing the laundry picking up the kids, whatever Mm hmm, that is where DeepMind is heading and they're making pretty significant progress. Yeah Yeah, are you scared? Am I scared? I mean, I'm more excited about interesting about this. Yeah, well, the flip side of it is if it's so good at a general problem solving robot dexterity and real time problem solving, what's stopping China from turning it into military bots with guns? I mean, yeah, I feel like I've seen videos of not like bipedal robots, but those dog looking robots that are kind of medicine looking on them. Yeah. Yeah. T 1000, right? Like a humanoid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is also like that. Black Mirror episode with the killer robots chasing people with guns like drone swarms drone warfare. Yeah, being able to just mass produce thousands of drones and yeah, those drones would have to real time Inference on device on the drone and with the way compute is going now and there is a shift towards uh, GPU away from GPU into TPUs, tensor processing units, which are more efficient at real time inference offline interference. And, uh, and they're smaller. They're more like a chip and not a giant GPU. So that's the world we're heading in. Yeah, I'm more optimistic about the good stuff about this. Not not as excited about the crazy robot warfare. I think we'll see both to be fair. Maybe more of the good stuff and couple of the bad stuff. I mean, there's just gonna be a new Arms race of like both sides developing like crazy robots, and then it's like, well, we don't actually want to get into a fight in a stalemate or whatever happens if, like, just you just send swarms of robot armies after each other. Yeah, and just to kind of re cover robotics in general, the robotic mechanical stuff. Like the motors, the limbs, the inverse kinematics to drive arms and like all the math, that's old, right? That's been figured out. Like if you go to any Disney park, there's robots in there. Um, Imagineers play with robots every day. The new bit is the brain. The general intelligence which unlocks everything being able to like actually understand the physical world. Yeah And without without running a crazy instruction set and then or pausing when you don't don't know what you're doing Because it's not in the programming language or whatever, right? It has an understanding of the world doesn't need to have been programmed with everything. It can figure it out. Yeah Yeah. Yeah. That's the crazy part. Yeah. And if it can learn from its mistakes, like if it just gets better at picking up the dice every time and just becomes super proficient at, uh, hand eye coordination, if you will. I mean, the other interesting thing I've been seeing, and this came out in a couple, it seems like Disney Imagineering did a creator push recently. Cause I've seen two separate videos of like Imagineer tours from two big YouTube creators. Yes. Covering very similar things. Cleo Abrams had one. Cleo Abrams and uh, uh, Mark Rober had another one that just came out and some of them covered some different stuff, but both kind of covered the Star Wars robots that they built that are autonomous, sort of autonomous. I think she was explaining like you control it, but you say, okay, get from point A to point B, but it figures out how to get there and can. Go over obstacles. That's what I'm saying because it has some level of general intelligence. And but the training part was the moat was really interesting because they build virtual simulations of the robots in a physical world on the computer and then in that environment you're able to just train it thousands and thousands of times. They didn't get into speed but I've always wondered that too because you could also train them like time is relative in a computer. It doesn't need to be like a real time training so you could amp up the speed that is running in a computer and have it run through. I don't know what the max speed is. I was curious about that. They didn't get into that. But like how fast could you simulate time in a computer to have this robot? Oh, I see. Run for thousands of iterations. Like if you're saying, okay, I need a robot to walk around this room. And if you're doing that in real life, it'd be like, okay, well, the robot takes 60 seconds to walk around this room. So you can only do 60 trainings an hour, but a computer, you could run it at a faster training speed. Speed. I don't know how fast. So it's like, can you run thousands of simulations like in a minute? Like the matrix? Yeah. Matrix style. That's crazy. I don't know what the, what the top speed is, but that's the advantage of like you could run thousands of training simulations at a computer to like really amp up the speeding of mimicking the physical world. And then so by the time you put it into your very expensive prototype robot, you're at least not starting from zero. You have like this training data from simulations that you can put into your real life. And they do this for autonomous cars. Uh, this is like four or five years back. So before they Yeah. I was interviewing for Cruise, the autonomous company competitor to Waymo, and they were looking for Unreal engineers and Unreal artists because they're building entire worlds in Unreal so their cars can simulate. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. That's also what NVIDIA keeps picking up where they're just like, we're just vacuuming driving camera data because it's just. Camera is in the real world. Yeah, just like you just keep sucking that up. Well, the video one is interesting because they could take all that, uh, image feed into Gaussian splats. Oh, so they could bypass much faster. Yeah, they can bypass game engines altogether and still have a 3D perception of the world. That's interesting. Yeah. So the other interesting thing that's come out of Google and ties into, I believe it's They have so many projects going on. I'm assuming it sort of is under DeepMind. It's definitely under Gemini, Google Gemini Flash 2.0 and the thing that's been going around, it's available in the AI studio. It's basically conversational photo editing. That's like really good. And it just like understands it. Give me an example. So I've seen a lot of examples on X of just colorizing historic photos. You give it a black and white photo and he said, colorize this. And it just like colorizes it. That's probably very simple. But do you know how hard that is to do? I know, to understand what the color should be. Yeah, and then go through it channel by channel. That's how they do it. So you go through just the red, just like an actual, like when they were restoring or trying to restore the colors. But even wilder examples are, you know, upload a photo of yourself. And kind of similar to the Pica additions thing we were talking about a while ago, you know, a picture of us. And it's like, Oh, like add a robot in between us. And it just like takes the picture. And then as a robot here, I'm usually not a fan. fan of like chat and text interfaces for creative work because it's like doesn't understand. But in this case it kind of seems like it does understand if you're like put a cup of water in my like right hand and that like just modifies that segment and like as a cup of water. But what about precise control? Like, Hey, can you put a logo on that cup of water? This logo, I think you could maybe upload another image, but you're still going to hit that issue when you're start talking. Yeah. If I'm like, okay, I put my hand, you know, on the table versus higher up, like it's still lacking that precise control. But the fact that it's able to. understand the natural language, natural language and the physics and of what's in the image and recreate a new output. I think that's just like a thin ligament of what they're really after, which is like general world recognition and inference and intelligence. Yeah. And I think just more updates in the three d space and in the physical world is like going to be a big thing for the rest of this year. Like, is there a point where you're done? Or is it just always a work in progress? With the photo? With general intelligence. I don't know. Right? That's like a philosophical question. Do you, I guess, when you surpass human intelligence. Does it start just like improving on itself? Is that like what H. I. should be doing? Okay, let's say we have a humanoid robot that could 100 percent do what humans can do. Do you say like, yeah, I just, I think we want to exceed humans at this point. I feel like if the H. I. truly exists, it would. Probably want to do that, right? Uh, actually this dice rolling thing is dumb. I know the odds of this already I'm just gonna like build a rock ship and go explore the universe. Yeah, like goodbye. Peace All right. So next up vibe filmmaking. Vibe filmmaking. Tell me all about it This doesn't really we're making this a thing now. This doesn't actually exist. This is a an example or an example experiment of going off of vibe coding, which has been a thing that's been going around for like a month or so. And so vibe coding is a style of coding using these new AI tools that we've mentioned in the past that are AI tools that are focused on coding where they could just code for you using natural language. So like some of the big ones are replit cursor, uh, bolt, I believe is another one. And you just kind of give it a text prompt Gemini. Yeah. And, but instead of making an image, it's It's making a program, programming snippets of code. These go beyond that. It builds out the full code where you could run IDE, integrated developers environment, something like that. Yeah, I think it's a full if you're trying to code in Claude, it can kind of run some of the code, but it's not like a full fledged. It's not compiling. It's not compiler compiler. Yes, this is a full on compiler. Yeah, these can do the compiling and it can build out the full application just from text prompts. Yeah. So instead of you typing, you just vibe, right? So the vibe idea is. You're not getting as in the weeds with, like, actually, like, figuring out what the code's doing. You're just like telling the AI, like, build me this, you know, app. And then it creates it. And then you start testing it. And then you start kind of vibing. It's like, no, that's not working. Like, make it better. And there's a bunch of memes about this, but it's like, you know, just fix this error. All the elite coders, like even like a Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or, you know, these guys that kind of built the world, right? They're probably like, wow, I mean, I think there are bad sides to this and we've also talked about this before where it's like, well, if this is how you're learning to code and you don't have the basic understanding of coding, how are you going to know what's wrong with it when it doesn't work? Three or four versions later, or maybe like 20, 30 years later, that chunk of code is completely understandable. Like who can go in there and service it? Because it's all like mumbled, just like, yeah, it's not making documentation as it's going along, but so for the sense of vibe coding. And so let's just go with the assumption that people are doing this for fun and not putting it into production. People probably are putting into production, but let's just go where they're doing it for fun. And some of the attendance about our ideas behind this are rapid iteration. Acceptance without full understanding, minimal code writing. So this is a path for doing this with code, but how could we do this with filmmaking? Oh, that sounds fun. Vibe filmmaking. So first of all, you don't need a camera or a budget anymore. You can, I would say the number one driver is just generative workflows. Text to image, text to video, image to video. For me, I would start with story concepts. What I want to create. How about you? I was thinking, I was determining this more as like a mood board exercise. So not necessarily like I'm going to vibe film make something that I'm going to like publish. So you go right to the generation. Yeah, I'm thinking, well, because if it's vibe filmmaking, I want to like start seeing visual stuff and assuming I'm like, I maybe have some, I'm not. Going after a specific story like I'm going at this from I don't have a specific script from like or a specific shot of mine or like I got to like execute that because I would I feel like you have to be much more specific about that. Yeah, more like, you know, let me make like a vibe pirate. You know what? Something that has like a pirate vibe or something that's like an ancient Egypt vibe. And then you generate some something with pirates. You're like, I think that should have. More pirates in it or yeah, or I could just go into this was like, I don't really have a specific output. I'm looking for. I'm just going to try to go with the flow. That's my interpretation of vibe filmmaking. And I guess if you're creative enough, it can kind of you could take these paths. I feel like it would be a path where you want to kind of see like I don't know where the destination is going to be, but I want to like explore that. And there's a couple of tools or techniques, I think, that can lend itself to doing that to vibe filmmaking. Divide filmmaking. Yeah. I think there's some things that are out there that already exists. That would be a good example for this. Like what? Okay. So my go to one when we were talking about this beforehand that I think is really ideal for this is a Luma Dream Machine. Oh, never heard of it. So luma, luma. I know. I don't know what Dream Machine Dream Machine is just kind of what they call their, um, generative platform. But it's yeah, it's luma AI. It's the same tools, but the dream machine was something like super hallucin hallucination induced. Maybe just more creative. It's it's what they call it platform. It's like it's okay, but it's running their their new array to models. They just redid their interface and they call it the dream machine, but it's running their current models and some of their older models and what they can do. But it has some features built into it that it. I haven't seen anyone else do and I think it lends itself to vibe filmmaking. So one of them is you sort of start a project and you kind of like give it your first prompt and then it'll give you the images but then it'll turn some of the words into pill boxes with suggestions for like other words so like other characters other styles and so you can just click on a pill box and then as soon as you click on it it'll start making a new set of images oh that's awesome and then it'll start making a new set of images like every time you change an option it just it doesn't even ask for permission it just starts generating more images it's like generate your own Adventure kind of thing. Yeah, so it really lends itself to and it just it doesn't even put it in a new chat box. It makes a horizontal scroll. So it's very much like just keeps putting out a bunch of images and then it has a brainstorm feature where it'll kind of take what you've done so far and then give you more ideas for like different styles of prompts or different directions you can take it in. I feel like if you gamify it enough, you could turn it into a pretty fun game. Yeah, I mean, this is probably the most gamey, just kind of like really just explore an idea or see where it takes you. Free environment, free open world kind of a thing. Yeah, they're definitely the most like, here's some ideas and here's where it takes you. There's a restyle feature, you can combine a bunch of images to like turn it into a different style. So, I feel like Dream Machine as a all in one platform without having to bring in other tools is like the best for this vibe. Yeah. There, you heard it here first on Denoised. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. Luma Dream Machine, Vibe Filmmaking, you can take that idea of Luma Dream Machine. Just credit us. Maybe, uh, if any of our listeners want to submit a film, uh, we'll talk about it here on the pod. A vibe filming. Yeah. Just tag us. Yeah. The other one that came to mind is Midjourney, which I know you, you know about, but when you're doing prompts and Midjourney, they have different settings. And so there are three settings that sort of became famous for if you want to just kind of take things off the rails and really explore. Okay. And the three settings are Stylized, Chaos, and Weird. Oh wow. That's awesome. And you used to have to, now it's easier 'cause there's a slider in the web interface of Midjourney, but you used to have to know these specific codes and call 'em up. So, uh, midjourney to me feels uh, a little bit old school 'cause they were one of the first, and so I haven't revisited them in a while. They still, I think, one of the best, one of the best image generators. Okay. And for stuff like this, so stylize is, it's a setting so you can max out stylize to a thousand and it determines how much. Midjourney applies its artistic flair to prompt. So if you crank that all the way up, it's going to take a lot of liberty. A lot of interpretation. Yeah, chaos. You can crank that up to 100. Uh, and that is how similar because when you prompt Midjourney, it makes four images. Chaos is how similar these images should or should not be. So if you crank it up to 100, the images are going to be as different as possible. So you get a lot of variety. Yeah, I mean, learning more and more about diffusion models like there is a dial called CFG. It's something configuration free guidance. Uh, and uh, basically it's just a dial of how autonomous you want the generation to be and how much you want it to stick to the text that you gave it. And a lot of newer, or some of the tools have under the hood, they call it like a magic enhancer or something. And it's basically taking your text prompt and then running it through another prompt to like expand the prompt. Yeah. And before it actually sent us like doubling up on the basically like as if you were to give your prompt to like chat GBT and be like, Hey, I need to create an image prompt, like improve this prompt. And then it makes a much more descriptive prompt that works better with image generation. Okay. It's kind of doing that under the hood. So you don't know it. You put in like, yeah, I want a picture of a table. Yeah. And I was like, well, that's kind of vague. Yeah. So under the, in the background, it's actually like Enhancing that text prompt before it gives it to the image generators on some of these tools. Majority last one weird, you can crank that all the way up to 3000. And that is just how much originality or quirkiness it adds to the images. So if you crank these all the way up, stylize 1000 chaos, 100 weird 3000 and you put in your prompt, that's a good way. I've done this before too. If I'm just sort of like trying to mood board or brainstorm and it's like, I don't really know what style I'm looking for. Let me just put some words in here and hit, see what comes out weird. Yeah, and that's another good way to just kind of vibe, vibe generate. Another thing, too, is you could also prompt with, um, emojis, which is another thing you can try. And sometimes that gets you weird and interesting results. So that's just another hack for like, for vibing. I mean, it's a, it's a way to communicate with, uh, you know, like emojis. You could. So it can say so much. Just ask any, any kid. I will say one thing. I think with this idea of vibe filmmaking, the challenge is a speed because you're vibing and you're making, you want to like get that real time feedback. But with the generative tools, it's hard because you put your thing in. And then you wait. Yeah. And then you wait. Uh, Luma runs pretty quick, but a lot of others, especially like a cling or something where it could take like 10 minutes to get a video out. Sure. That's an impediment. That's, that's. Yeah. You lose your vibe. It ruins the vibe. Yeah. I mean, like, just, I guess I'm so, I'm so old school because I am so structure driven and, uh, sequence and shot driven that I can't, I can't buy film make. you're, this is, but I like the way you're, this is too, you're, dude, you are the future man. This is too much of a too vibing. So. I can't, I can't vibe enough around the, the creation. Well, the one tool that I think could work with the real time issue is a Krea. Have you messed with Krea? A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So they have a real time generative feature. It's lower res, but it's, and it could take webcam input and could take a webcam. Yeah. They could take, you could just start drawing shapes. Yeah. And then be like, oh, I need this to be like an alleyway. And it's like. And as you move it in real time, it starts generating the image. Leonardo does that too. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So those two would be really good for this too, because you can like actually see it in real time. Yeah. It's funny, besides the story with Krea. When I was filming the AI on the lot last year, they did a Cinema Synthetica filmmaking competition. Yes. With a couple of teams. And so I was filming the behind the scenes documentary for the whole thing. And one of the teams is doing a zombie film and they were trying to do like a webcam hooked up to Craya and turn it into zombies. And for whatever reason, it would, um, keep making the female zombies, uh, topless. It's like negative prop, negative prop, not working. And, uh, yeah, we were never quite sure why. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Like images of just topless, like zombies. Yeah. Like where's the training? With your more structured, less vibey approach, how would you, uh, how would you I don't know, try to bring more vibe into your, uh, creative process. Yeah. So first of all, having an idea in your head of, look, I want to do a bank heist movie like, um, what's that famous Michael Mann movie? Heat. Yes. So I want to do Heat, uh, but I want it to be set in the Caribbean with the island vibe. I don't know, something like that. Okay. Like Canyon Island, Heat. Okay. So you know this, what, what would be the next, what would be the tool you hit up? So, do I want to replicate all of the main characters like a Robert De Niro, and da da da da, or do I want a new set of characters? So, stories are always character driven, so I would want to define and round up primary characters, secondary cast, all that. So that's my structure, and then in each act, what do I want to introduce, what do I want to fill out, and then how do I want the movie to end. Does it go into a sequel, all those things are, we're still in ChatGPT land, I think, or some kind of natural language land. So like, yeah, Claude or ChatGPT or something. So then, uh, I would actually, I'll actually finish out a whole script and then take that script, feed it into a shot generator of some type, sequence generator. And then I would use the Vive filmmaking tools, knowing exactly what shot I'm making. You know, I think one of the tools you talked about in the past, uh, the newer ones, uh, Flora. Yeah. Could work well with that because that one of their examples was like, took a script, looked at the shots, figured out what the shots were, turned it into a prompt, turned that into an image. Yes. And it was like kind of like a way to do a first draft of like a storyboard. So my vibe filmmaking would be problem solving at a shop level, which is way easier to me than just freestyle vibing. Okay. Yeah. So you're like structure, step one, still structured. Step two. Yeah, it's like I want the main character to walk into this beautiful Cayman Island Bank And I want there to be a giant palm tree because you're in in Cayman Islands and the main characters wearing Hawaiian shirt And I want the white shirt like very specific things and then I want to vibe on those needs. Okay, okay Yeah, but I feel like I mean you got a vibe but then you gotta lock it in cuz then you want that consistency Right. So like you need to like that's why I was like thinking like this It just feels like a brainstorming, uh, mood boarding kind of process to like But, uh, I mean, if structure it and vibe it and finish a 90 minute thing, then you go get your funding using that thing and make a real movie. Right. Maybe you have a script and you're like, all right, I need to take my script, turn it into a visual vibe. Yeah. To convey what I'm trying to go after. Yeah. Like you talked about a while ago with the Matrix. Yes. Because, uh, the Wachowskis did it 26 times or something insane. Yeah. And they just couldn't convey to the people like what the, what the vibe of the Matrix was supposed to be like. If they had vibe filmmaking back then. They just let the robots make the vibe film about the film about the robots. How ironic. Yeah. What else would you want to see in vibe filmmaking to, uh, I don't know what to make it more productive. Yeah. To make this like more productive for brainstorming, like where, where do you think the gaps are? Like I thought it was like the wrong person to ask because no, I mean, look, I am a type of filmmaker or whatever. Name you associated with that. I think vive filmmaking and the way you create stories is It should be unstructured and nonlinear and for a new generation of filmmakers So like I can't think of how to make a proper film with vive filmmaking tools because I'm not that person But I respect the person that picks up these tools and does something amazing with it partly I think yeah It'll be interesting to see where things go in the future or with like, you know new generation filmmakers We're like this is sort of the baseline of what they learn on Yeah And then other part of me is like, maybe they'll dabble with this and then maybe as things mature, they'll realize that the structure and process that has already been established. Yeah. Um, sticks around for a reason. Well, that's the thing. Like we've been making movies for over a hundred years and the way movies are made, uh, with pre production production posts, like it's there for a reason. Yeah. Like I'll do things even on YouTube stuff where it's like, well, we'll shoot and, you know, we'll just kind of edit it down. And then it's like, I was like, man, we just would have saved so much time if we like had scripted some stuff out some more, just like at least have an outline. Yeah. Before going in, it's like, Oh, right. You know, that's why, that's why we do that. Yeah. To like save time in the long run. Yeah. But I, I, if you can beat it, you know, go for it. Yeah. I mean, maybe that, you know, at least some people, the process works differently or they're better with other processes. And so it's like having more options too, that could ultimately lead to, uh, We have such a good problem process. The filmmakers of today have such a good problem on their hands, which is, we have Too much tools. Yeah. They have too many things to do the same thing with. Yeah. It's a good problem to have. Yeah. It's a good problem. Alright. And next story. Something that kills the vibe. Uh. So. Yeah. Alright. So this one, this one's personal. This one's my hometown in Miami Beach. There's controversy with uh, O Cinema. So O Cinema is the local art house movie theater. Currently, their location is in the city of Miami Beach. They were going to do a screening of No Other Land, the Oscar winning best documentary, which kind of focused on the Palestine Israeli conflict. And the mayor, Steven Meiner of Miami Beach, asked them to not screen it and said that it was biased. And initially, they were going to comply. And then They realized like, no, it's, you know, freedom of speech is the point to play this film. Yeah. So they went forward with it. And then now Steven Meiner wants to, basically, he wants to, uh, Shut the movie theater down. Yeah. So the theater, so from background, the theater is on, uh, it's in a city owned building. So they lease it from the city and they also received some funding from the city. So now he wants to cancel the lease and evict them. Do you know what his, uh, public reason is for that? Like, what did he say vocally about it? The mayor, uh, he called the film anti semitic and inconsistent with Miami Beach's values. Oh, interesting. Is it, is the film mean, I, I've not seen the film, so I cannot make that call. I mean, as far, like, from what I know and from what I saw from winning best, uh, documentary, it was made by both a Palestinian and an Israeli. Oh, so it's an award winning film. This won best picture- this won best documentary. At the Oscars? At the Oscars. We didn't cover it in the Oscars episode. So look, if a movie is Oscar winning, it's certainly balancing out both sides of the story. I feel like no matter what, that validates Agree with that or not. It validates that it is important. Important, like to show people, show media, and like Yeah. That it is not, that is, can't classify it as propaganda. Yes. Maybe you disagree with it, maybe, you know, you could voice your opinion, your opinion against it, but it's not, uh, defamation of the Jewish people like he's saying It is. I mean, that's not, I mean that's not what I've heard. Yeah. I mean, I can't, I have not seen this film. Right. Also. This one does not have distribution. No one wanted to touch this film for like reasons similar to this, where it's just such a hot topic. And like it's important controversy and it's like stuff like this is happening where I mean, it's such a slippery slope, right? It's like the minute you start to penalize movies for being a vehicle of free speech. Like at that point, any movie is fair game. Look, I mean, you can, he's more than welcome to like voices, uh, you know, opinion against it. Totally. Obviously. Yeah. Fine. Please voice your opinion against it. But to then. you know, if you don't get your way to shut down a movie theater, which also they play, they host the Jewish, the Miami Jewish film festival every year. There's like, no, I mean, I don't want to get this into a debate of like, how supportive of the Jewish community are they? I mean, I mean, it's, it's, it's a slippery slope and ridiculous argument to like, then also retaliate. Have your opinion. Fine. But then to retaliate, try to kick them out. Also, just some backstory. So like, O Cinema, it was, uh, co created by, uh, my good friend, Kareem Tabsch and, uh, Vivian Marthell. And they were initially started in Wynwood, which is a area turned into an arts district across in the city of Miami, the cool part of town. It is a cool part of town now, but Oh, cinema and Panther coffee were a single dual handedly responsible for like turning Wynwood. Into like what it is today. They were the first like Wynwood was 10, 15 years ago. Wynwood was just like a rundown warehouse district that had like some art studios, but there was like no. Oh, it's kind of like the arts district in downtown here. Yeah, similar to that. We're just like now it's the grungy warehouse. Yeah. Now it is like Ducati dealerships and like parents with like baby strollers. Yeah. Now you have Michelin star restaurants there. Yeah. I mean, it got so crazy where the Wynwood walls, which was like a, uh, yeah. A famous place where like they had a bunch of a wall street art. They started charging admission to go into that. Yeah, it turned into like Disneyland, but come on, like this was like a pretty kind of sketchy bullet casings on the floor area like 10, 15 years ago. And Panther Coffee came in, had a coffee shop there and then Oh, cinema was around the corner and they were like, they gave you reasons to go there. Yeah. Outside. Does that help turn and establish the like cultural art scene? I would also say like without sort of indirectly without a cinema, uh, moonlight, uh, yeah, which was shot in Miami. Barrett Jenkins shot. So McCraney, another Oscar, another Oscar winner that like, I would say that also like would not have existed. Wow. Indirectly. I can't. I'm trying to like. That's cool. It's just like they brought the independent film scene and like made it worthwhile in Miami. So like hugely culturally important. Okay. Has done a lot for the culture of Miami. So let me ask you this, like you're from there. Uh, is this mayor like problematic? Just in general? I didn't know anything about him. Okay. Until this thing came up. Okay. So, so no. I've not heard anything else. I mean, I haven't been involved in the like day to day action of Miami Beach. Yeah. Look, I'm just glad that, um, like this is not something that's going under, uh, under reported. No. And now this is making like international news. Like now, like I first saw this in like my local, like, you know, Facebook feed and like Miami Herald. And now it's like the guardian, the New York times NPR NPR. Yeah. Yeah. It is. I mean, it's. Just kind of, it's, it's not like, because I'm trying to think, okay, what would be the line of like, oh, a propaganda film and like something that like, maybe someone has a right to say like, no, you can't play this. And if it's an actual defamation of the Jewish people, then I get it like, yeah, yeah. And, and, and that there's no, I don't know who produced it or like, I'm trying to think, how would you like draw the line between like, you know, a piece of media that is accurate and maybe disagree with or straight up propaganda with like, You know, like inaccurate facts or like warping facts. I don't have a clear answer to that, but the thing I am leaning on is like, not only was it nominated for Academy Award and won best picture documentary, which feels like a hugely important validation of like, regardless of your personal opinions or beliefs about it, like still important to people need to see this display or yeah, or they have the right to to play it. They have the right to play it. Absolutely. Whether you want to see it or not, that's your choice. Right. Well, you can voice your opinion against it. Yeah. But yeah, to retaliate because they're doing something, playing a movie that you're not happy with. So if they weren't in a city owned building, you think the retaliation would still be there? I mean, just speculating. Like, there may be a different type of You wouldn't have that control. But it's a city owned building. They lease from it. I mean, they also have some city, they receive some city grants. I mean, O Cinema, you know, I mean, it's a state of, of, of independent movie theaters. Yeah. They rely on grants and outside funding. They can't just sell, uh, support like in order to movie theater business is not a good business. He has a tough business, especially if you are not playing Marvel movies all the time and you're trying to play smaller independent films. Yeah, maybe Quentin Tarantino should just buy him out. Just buy every independent movie theater and keep them going. So it is up for a, uh, city commission vote on if they're going to void their lease. And I'm sure I'm assuming if they Do you pass that that there will be a lot of like legal challenges to if they can actually do that? Yeah, but this is the vote is Wednesday the 19th So like tomorrow from when this episode comes out so that we should have an answer I have seen some comments from other commissioners being like you could have you're like, I don't support the film I have my opinion against it. But like Oh cinema's been a great partner like kicking them out is Absolutely ridiculous. Oh, that's awesome. I mean look we're not a political show here, right? The reason we're covering this is because it's not a cinema. It's about distributing and consuming cinema Yeah, and yeah, this just feels This feels wrong at its core. Personal to me. Yeah, and also good news though, too. One other thing is, uh, O Cinema has also finally secured, uh, building out their own dedicated movie theater in, uh, Little River, which is another area of Miami. So, and that's supposed to open this summer. Oh, dope. Uh, regardless how this plays out. Yeah. I mean, I think maybe they're probably hoping for to have two locations. I'm not entirely sure. Why don't they just go back to Wynwood? That was the spot. Well, so they did so well in like turning Wynwood into a, uh, you know, happening spot that the owner of the building they were in sold the land. So it could be developed. So now it's, I think, so ironic condos or something. Um, so yeah, it got multimillion dollar condos, something. Yeah. So I got demolished and um, it was, it was aware, yeah, it was like a converted warehouse that they were operating in. Um, and so it basically doesn't exist anymore because um, yeah, it's when would property got so, uh, valuable that it's like downtown Austin. It went from probably a similar grungy to super elite. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So same thing happened there. They got, and they passed around a few, a couple other locations and stuff, but yeah, the, the, the building they've been in now, it's also, it's a cool building. It's the, um, old historic, uh, city hall of Miami beach. Oh, that's awesome. And it's, yeah, it's an, it's a cool building. It used to be the Miami Beach Cinema Tech, which ran it. And then I think the owner was retiring or something. And then O Cinema took over. Miami is, uh, like, uh, Historic town like it's been around for a while longer than LA. I'm sure right Beach was 1915. Oh, okay So as a city, okay, so LA is older. I'm in a swampland like okay Keep thing like Florida was developed Because it's on the East Coast. Yeah, but once you start going south, it's all it was all mangroves and swamps. Okay, it was Everything there is pretty artificial. It's not, it was not a hospitable area. Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. It only really started booming in like the 30s and they built the train line down there and then realized like, Oh, when everyone's freezing up north, you can come down here and, you know, have some nice, uh, sun and fun. And then that was. Oh, that's kind of a little segue, but it's kind of like Hawaii in a lot of ways. Like, did you know, uh, and there's an island across from Maui that is completely uninhabitable because in World War II, they were using it as a, yeah, like a bombing range, mining range or whatever. Yeah. And now it's like prime real estate that nobody can live in. Yeah. Because nobody could get there back in the day. Like, you'd have to take a ship. For a couple of weeks to get to Hawaii and then all it was was pineapple and sugarcane farms. They're like, we're never going to use this land. Yeah. Other tangent or side thing, uh, with history of Miami doing crazy stuff against film. So Rene Rodriguez, who's a reporter at the Miami Herald, uh, pointed out that, uh, with Scarface, which famous film shot at Miami beach, the city commission there was not a fan of, uh, Scarface filming. in Miami and tried to kick them out. So, uh, not the first time Miami's done some crazy reactionary stuff against. I mean, like to LA's defense, there's a lot of films that take place in LA. That are harmful to LA's image, I guess, like LA gets destroyed over and over again, you know, it's like, we don't care. It's just a film, man. It's all fake. Yeah, I think everyone here knows it's all, it's all fake. Yeah, but we'll see how the vote goes. I'm hoping that this doesn't pass and they're not evicted because that just seems it just also seems like an egregious like i mean right to free speech in a country of like free speech and expressing yourself do you disagree with stuff like that's what we have a right to do but where else in the world can you actually have the discussion and then go to court with it so we are a unique outlier in in this whole ecosystem yeah Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I hope it doesn't set, you know, you don't want to see this set a precedent for like other independent film, right? And other movies that were like, okay, maybe you don't agree with the topic, but like it has a right to play and people for it to see it and make their own decision. Right. Comedy films need to just be what they are. Just let it be. Yeah. Yeah. We'll wrap it up there. So links to everything we talked about are available at the show notes and at denoisedpodcast. com. Give us a like, give us a comment, give us a follow, and we really appreciate your support. Thank you. All right. Thanks everyone for catching the next episode.