Less death, more social media: Formula One films decades apart reveal a changed world | Emma John
‘Let’s try to get the season off to a good start, shall we? Drive the car,Don’t try to stand it on its bloody ear,”Have you watched the movie? It’s about a rule-breaking American Formula One driver, the kind who blows past blue flags and crashes into his own teammate,You must have heard of it,They shot it in real race cars, across some of the most prestigious circuits in the world.
It even had contemporary world championship drivers making notable cameos on the track.If you’ve never watched 1966’s Grand Prix, now is the time to do it.This summer’s blockbuster slot may belong to F1; and its director, Joseph Kosinski, may have gone to extraordinary lengths to capture the visceral speed of the fastest class in motor sport.But John Frankenheimer got there first.The close parallels between the two films have gone largely unremarked in the reviews.
Six decades ago, when the glamour of the sport was peaking, Frankenheimer set out to capture its thrill, daring and inescapable danger.He fixed cameras to the chassis of Formula Two cars – the same substitute Kosinski has used – that hared round Brands Hatch, Spa, Monaco.Like Kosinski, he spliced real race footage into his own.His American lead, James Garner, did his own driving, just like Brad Pitt.There are even occasional shots in Kosinski’s film that seem to pay tribute, intentional or not, to its predecessor – the moment that recalls Frankenheimer’s stylistic use of split-screen, or when Pitt jogs around the old Monza banking.
F1 the Movie, to be clear, is a billion-dollar industry giving itself a full valet – shampooed squeaky clean and buffed to an impossible sheen.But it’s also the kind of sports-washing I’m prepared to indulge for the sake of the pure adrenaline thrill.After watching Top Gun: Maverick at the cinema, I walked straight back in for the next screening and sat in the front row so I could pretend to be in the cockpit.At the Imax this week I was practically climbing into the screen.I was definitely the only woman my age leaning into the turns, and wishing they would stop cutting back to Pitt’s face so that I got more track time.
For a bit of perspective, I had gone with my father, a man with a decades-long following of motor sport and a habit of nitpicking at movie details.Ten minutes into F1’s opening track sequence he leaned over, and I braced for a critique of the pit crew’s refuelling technique.“We can go home now,” he whispered.“It’s good enough already.” A movie that can impress my father with its motor racing action deserves all the hype it gets.
But neither he nor I had anticipated just how much it would remind us of Grand Prix – or how well that 59-year-old work would stand up in comparison.The Silverstone marching band, paraded past the clubhouse by a moustachioed sergeant-major, has given way to night-race fireworks in Las Vegas, and the ruinous cost of running an F1 team has jumped from a few hundred thousand to £100m.The stomach-buzz as the asphalt whizzes beneath you remains the same.Putting the two stories side by side does, however, show you interesting ways the sport has changed.Grand Prix’s opening lingers, fetishistically, over images of working pistons and twisting wrenches.
Such lowly mechanical details are almost entirely absent in F1, where the team headquarters looks like a space station and every element of the engineering process is rendered in gleaming sci-fi.There’s also a lot less death.Frankenheimer’s crashes are genuinely shocking – not because the stunts are realistic (and they are) but because of the bluntness of their outcome.Drivers are catapulted from their seats to fall on whatever part of the landscape they meet first.Spectators aren’t safe either.
The fact that horrifying incidents are a part of the public’s fascination with Formula One is a recurring theme,F1 still plays on the life-or-death stakes, but does it in a very different way, as you’d expect from a film licensed by the governing body as a big-screen advert for the sport,It’s also pretty keen that everyone you meet on screen shows motor racing in a good light,Team principals are loving family men! Drivers’ managers are cuddly BFFs! People cycle eco-consciously to work! Everyone is so empathic and good at giving advice!It was the latter that had me balking at the chutzpah,There’s a point where our hero tells the rookie to stop thinking about his social media.
The hype, the fan engagement – “it’s all just noise,” he says.This in a movie that was produced, at phenomenal cost, as a method of growing hype and fan engagement.The film’s only baddy, meanwhile, is a corporate investor, who we know must be a bad ’un because he spends his time schmoozing The Money in hospitality.Here’s a game for you when you’re watching F1: try to go two minutes without seeing or hearing the name of a brand that’s paid to be there.I left the auditorium still blinking the name of accountancy software.
By contrast, Frankenheimer’s film seems bracingly honest.In Grand Prix, the drivers may have moments of self-reflection but they’re also uncompromisingly selfish in their pursuit.The philosophical Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sarti suggests they live in denial: “To do something very dangerous requires a certain absence of imagination.”“Why do we do it? Why not tennis, or golf?” It’s the question at the centre of every motor-racing film.In Le Mans, Steve McQueen answered by stripping out everything but the sound and feel of the track.
F1’s hero describes the feeling when he’s “flying” (not for nothing does he arrive walking down the tarmac, carrying a duffel like a certain fighter pilot).Perhaps that’s what makes motor racing ripe for big-screen treatment – it’s the most literally escapist form of sport there is.If F1 gives it the glossy treatment, Grand Prix sees beneath the sheen.
Inside a plan to use AI to amplify doubts about the dangers of pollutants
An industry-backed researcher who has forged a career sowing doubt about the dangers of pollutants is attempting to use artificial intelligence (AI) to amplify his perspective.Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox Jr, a Denver-based risk analyst and former Trump adviser who once reportedly claimed there is no proof that cleaning air saves lives, is developing an AI application to scan academic research for what he sees as the false conflation of correlation with causation.Cox has described the project as an attempt to weed “propaganda” out of epidemiological research and perform “critical thinking at scale” in emails to industry researchers, which were obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests by the Energy and Policy Institute, a non-profit advocacy group, and exclusively reviewed by the Guardian.He has long leveled accusations of flimsiness at research linking exposure to chemical compounds with health dangers, including on behalf of polluting interests such as cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris USA and the American Petroleum Institute – a fossil fuel lobbying group he has even allowed to “copy edit” his findings. (Cox says the edit “amounted to suggesting a small change” and noted that he has also obtained public research funding
Trump’s tax bill seeks to prevent AI regulations. Experts fear a heavy toll on the planet
US Republicans are pushing to pass a major spending bill that includes provisions to prevent states from enacting regulations on artificial intelligence. Such untamed growth in AI will take a heavy toll upon the world’s dangerously overheating climate, experts have warned.About 1bn tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide are set to be emitted in the US just from AI over the next decade if no restraints are placed on the industry’s enormous electricity consumption, according to estimates by researchers at Harvard University and provided to the Guardian.This 10-year timeframe, a period of time in which Republicans want a “pause” of state-level regulations upon AI, will see so much electricity use in data centers for AI purposes that the US will add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than Japan does annually, or three times the yearly total from the UK.The exact amount of emissions will depend on power plant efficiency and how much clean energy will be used in the coming years, but the blocking of regulations will also be a factor, said Gianluca Guidi, visiting scholar at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features
The Danish government is to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice.The Danish government said on Thursday it would strengthen protection against digital imitations of people’s identities with what it believes to be the first law of its kind in Europe.Having secured broad cross-party agreement, the department of culture plans to submit a proposal to amend the current law for consultation before the summer recess and then submit the amendment in the autumn.It defines a deepfake as a very realistic digital representation of a person, including their appearance and voice.The Danish culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, said he hoped the bill before parliament would send an “unequivocal message” that everybody had the right to the way they looked and sounded
Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez arrive in Venice for divisive wedding
The billionaire Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, and the former TV journalist Lauren Sánchez have arrived in Venice as they prepare to tie the knot in a lavish three-day celebration that has divided the lagoon city.Scores of celebrities and other members of the world’s super-rich will also join the pair in Italy, arriving on superyachts and private jets.Bezos, the world’s fourth-richest person, and Sánchez were seen stepping off a water taxi on Wednesday as they entered the exclusive Aman Venice hotel on the Grand Canal, where many of the celebrities will stay.More than 90 private jets are expected to land in Venice before the celebrations officially begin on Thursday, bringing in guests for an event that some have called the “wedding of the century” and is rumoured to involve everything from pyjama parties to elegant dinners.Among the first guests to arrive were Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, her husband, Jared Kushner, and their children
Group of high-profile authors sue Microsoft over use of their books in AI training
A group of authors has accused Microsoft of using nearly 200,000 pirated books to create an artificial intelligence model, the latest allegation in the long legal fight over copyrighted works between creative professionals and technology companies.Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its Megatron AI to respond to human prompts. Their lawsuit, filed in New York federal court on Tuesday, is one of several high-stakes cases brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright holders against tech companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over alleged misuse of their material in AI training.The authors requested a court order blocking Microsoft’s infringement and statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work that Microsoft allegedly misused.Generative artificial intelligence products like Megatron produce text, music, images and videos in response to users’ prompts
Meta wins AI copyright lawsuit as US judge rules against authors
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has won the backing of a judge in a copyright lawsuit brought by a group of authors, in the second legal victory for the US artificial intelligence industry this week.The writers, who included Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, had argued that the Facebook owner had breached copyright law by using their books without permission to train its AI system.The ruling comes after a decision on Monday that Anthropic, another major player in the AI field, had not infringed authors’ copyright.The US district judge Vince Chhabria, in San Francisco, said in his decision on the Meta case that the authors had not presented enough evidence that the technology company’s AI would cause “market dilution” by flooding the market with work similar to theirs. As a consequence Meta’s use of their work was judged a “fair use” – a legal doctrine that allows use of copyright protected work without permission – and no copyright liability applied
England fall to heaviest T20 defeat as Mandhana century sparks India rout
F1: Lando Norris on pole for Austrian GP with Max Verstappen down in seventh – as it happened
Lando Norris storms to Austrian F1 GP pole as angry Verstappen slumps to seventh
Tomos Williams injury leaves Farrell’s Lions facing race to fill scrum-half slot
Western Force 7-54 British & Irish Lions: rugby union – as it happened
Lions cut loose with eight-try win over Western Force for solid start in Australia