JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:
There was a debate today on a subreddit about classical architecture, agonizing over the administration’s return to its previous position, which was, well, RETVRN. All Federal buildings will now be constructed in traditional styles. No more concrete monstrosities, no more deconstructed alien embassies, just nice sober structures with columns and porticos, connecting the present to the past. The group is predisposed to approve, but there are worries that the style will now be stained with Fascism.
During President Trump’s first term, when the former real estate developer attempted to steer federal building policy back to more traditional forms and stylings, it was absolutely hilarious watching establishment leftist sites such as Politico and Slate defend brutalist architecture. In the 2018, the latter had the headline, “Of Course Trump Hates Brutalism —Buildings like the FBI headquarters are everything Trump is not.”
It is also not surprising that Trump the architecture critic has no love for FBI HQ, one of the most reviled examples of the maligned Brutalist style. In the public imagination, capital-B Brutalism—the postwar fad named for béton brut, French for raw concrete, and defined by its heavy, cast-concrete forms—tends to be lumped in with both the shoddy, underfunded modernism of public housing projects and the space-age experiments that followed. As Julia Gatley and Stuart King write in Brutalism Resurgent, a 2016 anthology, brutalist came to be “a pejorative term used to describe monolithic buildings of raw concrete construction that impose themselves on their surroundings.” In the New York that shaped Trump’s aesthetics, that description would have suited affordable housing projects like Waterside Plaza, River Park Towers, Chatham Towers, and Tracey Towers—the antitheses of Trump’s new brand. The far right appears to be leading a broader backlash against architecture self-evidently built with 20th-century technology. Such structures, in addition to their perceived deviance from the “Western traditions” venerated by American fascists, represent the tastes and lifestyles of America’s treacherous urban elite.
It takes chutzpah to defend with a straight face soul-crushing architecture such as this:
Speaking of which, sad news for the movie celebrating the left’s favorite new architecture: Has AI killed The Brutalist’s Oscar chances?
Is it that time of awards season already? Time for the sudden and unexpected snowballing of negative media stories about an Oscar frontrunner that may, or may not, have a deleterious impact on its chances of winning one or more Academy Awards?
Step forward this year’s Oscar frontrunner The Brutalist. The film is a stunning historical epic about a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, played by Adrien Brody, who becomes a celebrated architect in postwar America. Brody is hotly tipped to win the best actor Oscar, having bagged a Golden Globe, while the film’s equally lauded director, Brady Corbet, is considered a shoo-in for the directing and writing Oscars at the ceremony in March.
There’s just one snag. This week an article, originally published by the tech website Red Shark News on January 11, became the focus of attention online because it revealed that the editor of The Brutalist used AI software to correct some of the pronunciations of Brody and his co-star Felicity Jones during the few moments in the movie when they speak Hungarian.
In the interview David Jancso said: “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce … We also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.
“If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp. We first tried to ADR [automated dialogue replacement] these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it.”
The social media frenzy (typical post: “This is a disgrace!”) became so intense that the detail-obsessed Corbet was forced to issue a clarifying statement where he explained that the AI software was used “specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy. No English language was changed.”
RX, Izotope’s long-running audio cleanup program, is popular among Hollywood backroom boffins because of all of the ways it can digitally tweak an actor’s vocal performance, long after the shooting’s stopped, and he can’t be bothered (or isn’t contractually obligated) to return to the dubbing stage to loop his dialogue. It’s but one of numerous tools in a sound designer’s arsenal to manipulate dialogue when editing a movie or TV show.
Everyone in Hollywood knows this. All the people freaking out on social media about voices being replaced in a Hollywood movie then went onto YouTube to watch clips of Star Wars, where this actor’s voice was not only replaced, the replaced voice was tweaked electronically as well:
Incidentally, this detail about Hollywood’s Oscar wars is a riot as well:
Bradley Cooper, for example, was the obvious frontrunner for last year’s best actor Oscar. His performance as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro was extraordinary, and arguably more complex and demanding than that of the award’s eventual winner, Cillian Murphy, for Oppenheimer. But Cooper’s decision to wear a prosthetic nose was deemed antisemitic by moral guardians online. The charge was nonsense, rubbished by Bernstein’s own children. But it hung around the movie like a crazed, Oscar-killing, one-word summation.
I’d add that Orson Welles wore a fake nose in just about every one of his film performances — but he never won an Academy Award for acting, either. His only Oscar was for writing Citizen Kane. (Herman Mankiewicz, his cowriter, wasn’t nominated.)
Related: Actors wearing fake noses? You ain’t seen nothing yet, Hollywood!
There should be no outrage on the right. Let this dude take home the best actress trophy. The actual female actresses who get robbed deserve it. None of them have the courage to speak out. All of them supported this madness. Now the monster turns against them. Poetic justice. https://t.co/ej5vsAUXNj
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 23, 2025