Hark a vagrant dracula12/17/2023 Rather than submit to his oppressors, Vlad strikes a Faustian bargain with an ancient creature (Charles Dance, in the film’s sole arresting performance) who lurks in a cave in nearby Broken Tooth Mountain. (Why does Vlad The Impaler get the works? That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’.) But it’s déjà vu when the new Turkish sultan, Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper), who was once Vlad’s brother-in-arms, comes to Transylvania demanding another thousand boys, including Vlad’s son, to add to Mehmed’s army. Vlad struck fear into the enemy when he was a young man, but he’s learned to repress his dark side, rule peacefully over his subjects, and be a Ward Cleaver type to his wife Mirena (Sarah Gadon) and their pre-teen son. As trade-offs go, it’s about as fair as the Louisiana Purchase.ĭrawn from the historical figure of Vlad The Impaler, the prologue tells how Prince Vlad (Luke Evans) and a thousand other Transylvanian boys were enslaved by the Turks and trained (and mercilessly beaten) to become fearless, relentless soldiers. The filmmakers apparently calculated that audiences won’t miss all that stuff if they’re distracted enough by green-screen gothic landscapes, slo-mo action sequences modeled after 300, and wave after wave of CGI bats. And now, Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century. First, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive held a special fascination with the concept of eternal life, and the quirks, knowledge, and accumulated wisdom of vampires who have simply been around a long time. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.This year has brought two of the most original takes on vampire mythology in recent memory. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.īut then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. ![]() So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.īasically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.īut! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare.
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