Subway Newsstand Art Project

 

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”   

[I’ve posted several reports on art in the New York City subways; see, for instance, “Tom Otterness & Life Underground” (27 April 2011), “A Helluva Town, Part 2” (18 August 2011), and “Can Art Be A Crime?” (9 July 2025).

[The article below is a little different.  The art installation here is sanctioned, but dynamic—it changes regularly—it’s multifarious, and it’s housed in a disused newsstand on a train platform.  The rest you’ll read for yourself.  Oh, and it’s called the W4 Newsstand Project (because it’s at the West 4th Street station on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village for the Brooklyn-bound B, D, F and M trains).]

“A SUBWAY DIVERSION THAT AIMS TO DELIGHT”
by Winnie Hu 

[This article ran in the “Metropolitan” section of the New York Times on 2 August 2026; it’s on the paper’s website as “A Newsstand That Aims to Delight N.Y.C. Subway Riders,” dated 28 July 2026.]

Whimsy and freebies at a vacant newsstand in a West Village station.

Trading cards that highlight fun facts about retired subway conductors and operators. Key chains with a fake rat’s foot for “good train luck.” A bucket hat with a sliding veil that riders can borrow to cry in private.

These specialty items for straphangers, which they may not have even realized they need, or want, will be available for free starting this weekend [1-2 August] at a former newsstand inside the West 4th Street station in Manhattan.

The transit-themed newsstand will have no other purpose than to amuse and intrigue New Yorkers — or console them on a bad day — and make their commutes just a little better in the nation’s largest subway system.

It is the latest creation of Al Mullen, 37, a comedian and writer known for his humorous and upbeat takes on the transit world. The newsstand “snowballed” from his free zine, Public Transport Magazine, which he started in 2022 from his Brooklyn apartment and leaves on trains and in stations for riders to discover.

“Everyone’s on the subway,” Mr. Mullen said while fixing up the newsstand on a recent afternoon. “It’s a place where I can meet all kinds of people and see if they’ll be delighted.”

Mr. Mullen partnered with Art on the Ave NYC, a nonprofit that displays art in vacant storefronts, and the David Prize, a philanthropic initiative of the Walentas Foundation [aka: the Walentas Family Foundation; a New York-based private grantmaking organization founded in 2013 that supports civic institutions, the arts, public spaces, and education], to secure a one-year license for the shuttered newsstand from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Then, Mr. Mullen enlisted the help of his friends and fellow transit enthusiasts to transform it into a place where busy New Yorkers would actually want to stop. Edward Steed, a cartoonist whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, designed a whimsical mural of trains, buses and people to wrap around the newsstand. Comedians, writers and artists are creating travel guides to the city’s 472 subway stations, which will be handed out at the newsstand.

Mr. Mullen also plans to offer live entertainment, including puppet shows that will run between train arrivals and departures. He is installing a photo booth with a subway pole that commuters can grab to find out “their inner train line.” The picture will show a colored circle around them, which corresponds to a particular subway line and reveals their “train aura.”

Even in its unfinished state, the newsstand on the downtown platform for the B, D, F and M trains has buzzed with activity. Riders have come over to ask directions to their trains. A group of teenagers on scooters zipped behind the counter and made themselves at home, pretending to hawk Newport cigarettes.

The other day, five big round clocks were behind the counter, all displaying the same exact time. Below each clock was a yellow sticky note with the name of one of the city’s five boroughs scrawled in red.

Markus Kusano, 35, a software engineer, stopped to tell Mr. Mullen how much he liked the clocks.

“I thought it was funny,” Mr. Kusano said afterward. “It’s kind of a New York or nowhere kind of thing — that’s all the time you need.”

Mr. Mullen grew up in the coastal town of Scituate, Mass., and later studied film at Occidental College in [Los Angeles,] California. He arrived in New York City in 2011 and worked as a film and video editor. In his free time, he wrote and performed stand-up comedy.

But by 2019, Mr. Mullen was ready for a change. While reporting for jury duty one day, he looked around at all the different people in a Brooklyn courthouse and realized how small his own world was. “I wanted to reach out to people in some way,” he said. “I realized the closest thing to jury duty was the subway.”

So Mr. Mullen made the subway his stage. He created Public Transport Magazine on a home printer and distributed it with guerrilla-style drops on trains. It looked like a school project but was packed with a slew of talented comedians, writers, cartoonists and illustrators, including Jack Handey, an author and former writer for “Saturday Night Live,” and David Cross, an actor and comedian.

As it gained a following, he met Erika Augustine, the executive director of the David Prize, in 2024. He applied for the prize, which awards a total of $1 million annually to five New Yorkers who are working to make the city a better place. Though Mr. Mullen did not win, he made an impression.

“His love for the transit system, I think, is so uniquely New York,” Ms. Augustine said, adding that Mr. Mullen has inspired other straphangers to look past the usual gripes about train delays and rats.

Last year, Mr. Mullen reached out to Ms. Augustine with his idea for a transit-focused newsstand. She connected him with Barbara Anderson, the executive director of Art on the Ave NYC and a 2025 finalist for the David Prize.

Ms. Anderson’s group has organized art exhibits in 106 vacant retail spaces around the city since 2020. Last year, the group converted a newsstand in the West 81st Street station in Manhattan into a sound booth [named Sound Booth] where riders can drop by to sing, play the piano, D.J. and catch live performances.

On a Saturday in June, Mr. Mullen held up the keys to the newsstand for the first time outside the West 4th Street station. “It feels like I’m holding the smallest trophy,” he said, before heading down the stairs to see what he had gotten himself into.

A few minutes later, he unlocked the newsstand to find Us Weekly and Cosmopolitan magazines from 2016 still sitting on the shelves and an unplugged Coca-Cola refrigerator in a corner. There was graffiti on several display cases and a thick coating of grime over everything.

“I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity here, a lot of dirt and no rats that I can see,” he said.

Mr. Mullen returned with cleaning supplies and friends to scrub the newsstand. They found a quarter and placed it on the counter. A man ran up, grabbed the quarter and jumped onto a train. “It was a heist,” Mr. Mullen said. “He hopped on a getaway train.”

The former newsstand was licensed rent-free through an M.T.A. program [Vacant Unit Activation Program] started in 2023 to activate former retail spaces in the subway with public art exhibits. Currently, there are 17 sites, including the newsstand-turned-sound-booth and another former retail unit that became a bodega for dinosaurs [Rex’s Dino Store] at the Grand Army Plaza station in Brooklyn.

Mr. Mullen received $10,000 in initial funding from the David Prize to develop and open his newsstand. He spent $4,200 on the mural, which included getting it made on vinyl. He plans to pay $100 each to other contributing artists and writers, including those creating the station guides.

Mr. Mullen, who works as a writer for a game show app, has not paid himself. He said he saw the newsstand as a space where he could collaborate with more people. “The New York thing is being in company with people, being in community,” he said. “And this is definitely an extension.”

Mr. Mullen and his friends will take turns staffing the newsstand from Friday to Sunday [Gothamist says 1-4 p.m., Saturday and Sunday]. He hopes to raise more money to keep the newsstand running for the next year.

Lily Crandall, 28, a textile artist, volunteered to make the trading cards of subway workers and even has a personal connection — her great-grandfather was a construction worker on the 8th Avenue line. “I love all of his ideas,” she said of Mr. Mullen. “They’re really fun to be a part of.”

The other day, Harris Alterman, 34, and Dave Ross, 43, both comedians, were taking measurements at the newsstand. In June, they had made a video of themselves putting up fake (and temporary) tech ads in Brooklyn subway stations to spoof the real ads that they said were annoying and ugly [see We put up fake tech ads and We put more fake tech ads].

After their video went viral, Mr. Ross posted on social media asking if anyone had access to a space in the subway. Mr. Mullen replied, “Weirdly I do.” Now, the newsstand will host a one-day installation of their fake tech ads on August 8.

“I love how much art and music is in the city — and how much isn’t in the zeitgeist but the city supports it anyway,” Mr. Ross said. “There’s a little scene for everything if you can find it.”

[You know from above that Al Mullen is originally from Scituate, Massachusetts, which is in the northwest corner of Plymouth County on Massachusetts Bay.  (Plymouth County is northwest of Barnstable County, which is Cape Cod.)  He went to college in Los Angeles and came to New York in 2011, when he was about 22.  Here, Mullen works as a freelance film and video editor and writes and performs stand-up comedy.

[Brooklyn-based, Mullen is heavily engaged in New York’s alternative comedy and live performance scenes.  He’s best known for his work with the sketch and performance group Channel 101 NY.

[His work explores the absurdities of daily life and corporate structures.  His satirical prose has been featured across prominent humor platforms, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency (a Patreon page), The New Yorker, and The Huffington Post.

[Beyond his solo writing, Mullen focuses heavily on collaborative and live performance formats.  With Max and Al, he performs alongside comedian Max Brand as half of this live musical-comedy duo.  Mullen manages the New York chapter of Channel 101, a monthly non-profit short film festival where creators submit short, episodic video pilots to be voted on by a live audience.  

[His comedic work and digital projects have earned him industry opportunities with the largest and most prestigious stand-up comedy festival in the world, Just For Laughs (Montreal, Canada), and the once wildly popular live, interactive game show app HQ Trivia.

[Winnie Hu is a New York Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City.  She writes about demographics, immigration, public spaces, and socioeconomic trends that shape the urban landscape and help explain how people live, work, and move around the city. 

[She’s lived and worked in New York City for more than two decades and has written stories about nearly every aspect of urban life, including transportation, crowding, education, and city and state politics.  Hu joined the Times in 1999, having previously worked as a reporter for the Pensacola News Journal in Pensacola, Florida, and briefly for the Dallas Morning News.]

The Reviews of 'Dreams of Violets'

 

When I posted “Dreams of Violets: AI Movie Première” on Sunday, 7 June 2026, I promised to return and add a survey of the film’s reviews published after the opening at the Tribeca Film Festival on the 10th.  I got distracted, but now I've typed up the review round-up.  It came out longer than I anticipated, so I decided to post it as a separate piece.

[I strongly suggest, however, that readers who haven’t seen the first report on the film go back and read it before trying to make sense of the reviews.  I explained and defined a lot in the original post that I haven’t duplicated below.]

The Tech

In his review of Dreams of Violets in Variety (“‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: What Does a Film Made Entirely with AI Look Like? AshKoosha’s Iranian Protest Drama Is Dramatically Numbing, but It’s Still aStartling Portent of the Future”), Owen Gleiberman stated:

[T]hose of us at the premiere were really watching—and evaluating—two films at once.  The first is a drama, set in Tehran . . . .  But the other movie, which is far more interesting and significant, is the one that demonstrates, simply by virtue of its existence, what some of the possibilities might be for the use of AI within the world of feature filmmaking.

I also see the criticism of Dreams of Violets as the evaluation of two aspects of the film: the AI technology in all its implications, including its ethical considerations, and the cinematic or artistic assessment—how good a movie it is, irrespective of how it was made.

I think I covered the ethical debate over AI filmmaking in the original post, and I don’t think seeing the movie has changed people’s minds about where they stand in that debate.  So, let’s see what reviewers said about the effectiveness or lack thereof of the technology.

In “Iran’s Political Violence In A.I.-Generated Film” (online: “The Violence in Iran Was Real. The Film Showing It Was A.I.”), Malia Mendez and Matt Stevens reported in the New York Times that among viewers, “Some felt it was evident that the footage had been generated by A.I. and not filmed, while others said they were shocked by how real the people looked.”

“Andres Ramirez, a filmmaker [Mexican; b. 1996; independent filmmaker],” from whom they quoted, “was critical, calling some scenes ‘cartoonish’ and akin to ‘early PlayStation 2 graphics.’  The characters’ emotional reactions, he added, did not always look genuine.”

The filmmaker added “that atrocities depicted by A.I. just do not have the same impact as ‘the real thing,’ and continued, ‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”

In the Financial Times (“AI-generated film about Iran protests turns tragedy into slop”), Nicolas Rapold expressed the opinion that “the movie . . . arrives with the growing pains of AI evident in every aspect—less proof of concept than cautionary tale.”

Observes Rapold, “technically [the movie is] a mess.  The AI-generated humans have vacant eyes, the usual bland burnish and push-button emotional expressions.  They move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited.  In an astonishing unforced error, their dialogue sounds muddy, even garbled . . . .”  He adds, “AI’s tendency to homogenise [sic] reality keeps undermining any attempts to make the portrayal of resistance feel grounded.”

In conclusion, Rapold asserts, “Dreams of Violets is better described as a vibe—a prolonged evocation of concussed trauma—rather than a fully realised [sic] movie.  AI cinema still awaits its Lumière brothers.”

[The most significant accomplishment of the Lumière brothers (Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis Lumière (1864-1948), French manufacturers of photography equipment, was the invention of the Cinématographe (1895), an all-in-one device capable of capturing, printing, and projecting motion pictures.  This breakthrough paved the way for the birth of cinema as a mass medium and entertainment industry.]

Gleiberman, in his Variety notice, first asks “an aesthetic question: Is ‘Dreams of Violets’ a weirdly distant and unsatisfying movie because it was made with AI?  The strange answer to that is yes, but not really.”  (I’ll get to his “aesthetic” answer in a bit.)

If you see a soldier killing a civilian in a documentary, it’s horrifying, but the effect is 100 times less powerful in a film that simply looks like a documentary, since we know, in our gut, that we’re not watching reality.  That’s why the quality that draws us into a movie, even if it is a documentary, is the connection we feel to the people we’re watching.  But Ash Koosha hasn’t scripted “Dreams of Violets” that way.  He has made a movie with an uncanny-valley problem, an “existential” drama that’s all “authentic” but abstract moments: the vérité political-war-movie equivalent of calendar art.  It’s like synthetic prize-winning photojournalism that moves.

[I was unfamiliar with the expression “uncanny valley” (or “uncanny valley effect”) so, for others in the same boat, according to Wiktionary, it means:

Digital or ambiguous physical spaces that create a sense of unease or eeriness due to deviations from familiar patterns that challenge perception and categorization, leading to discomfort. (e.g., liminal spaces, haunted houses, the Backrooms, etc.).

[The phrase is a literal translation of a Japanese expression first used in 1970 by roboticist Masahiro Mori (1927-2025) from his essay entitled “Bukimi No Tani” (“The Uncanny Valley”).  The terms both come up often in reviews of Dreams of Violets.]

“But if ‘Dreams of Violets,’ as a movie, is mostly a bust,” concludes Gleibman, “as an AI showreel it’s something more.”  He elucidates:

[W]hat I saw in “Dreams of Violence” looked plenty textured and realistic.  Does this mean that AI can “make a movie”?  No.  But it does mean that AI can give you scenes of roiling tumultuous Civil War set in the hurly-burly of Tehran at sunset, with soldiers roaming the streets and forcing citizens into vans as others scurry out of the way, and it can make you believe your eyes.  

Then, his clincher:

And here’s the buried lead: The film’s entire budget was $2,000. . . .  [T]he most powerful message to emerge from “Dreams of Violets” isn’t that the Iranian regime is a ruthless pack of totalitarian oppressors.  It’s that $2,000 can now buy a hell of a lot of motion picture.

In “‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: An AI-Generated Movie Is Worrisome for All the Right Reasons” on The Wrap, Matthew Creith observes, “Memories blur together, and faces appear and quickly vanish like vignettes without a motive.  Whether intentional or not, the dreamlike nature of AI-generated moving imagery often mirrors emotional reality rather than depicting actual emotions through acting or historical reenactments.” 

The Wrap reviewer continues:

The limitations of current technology are impossible to ignore on the artificial intelligence front.  Characters frequently move with an unnatural stiffness while [Ash] Koosha lingers on close-ups of eyelashes and tears to signify the detail that AI is supposed to be good at creating.  Facial expressions often feel generic rather than lived-in, and frequent quick cuts are distracting at best.  The dialogue, much of it generated from Koosha’s own vocal performances and modified through common AI tools, can sound muddy and disconnected from the images on screen.

When a film like this, despite its short runtime, is asking viewers to engage with real human suffering, that emotional disconnect can be difficult to overcome.

Describing what I understand as the “uncanny valley effect,” Creith reports:

The faces in “Dreams of Violets” often feel ghostly, almost suspended between existence and disappearance.  The streets of Tehran seem simultaneously real and imagined, sort of like Spike Jonze’s [b. 1969] “Her” [Warner Bros., 2013] without the authenticity of its central characters.  Rather than recreating reality with documentary precision, the film exists in a liminal space between memory and testimony.

In The Indypendent [sic] (“The Tribeca Film Festival AI Movie Is Not Just Bad, It’s Cynical”), a progressive newspaper based in Brooklyn, New York, that covers local, national and international news; food; cinema; and culture, John Teufel complained that

at no point does the film allow you to forget that it was made with AI—which makes sense, as we will see (cash-grab!).  Everything is exaggerated past reality in an attempt to show off how “good” the AI is, but it overshoots, and becomes hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense.   When a character has wrinkles, they have the most wrinkles.  More wrinkles than any man you’ve ever seen.  When a woman looks concerned, she looks comically concerned, because someone typed MAKE HER LOOK VERY CONCERNED as the prompt.

[Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French sociologist and philosopher with an interest in cultural studies.  He’s best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication.  His concept of hyperreality is complex and hard to explain in a few words, so I suggest readers who want to unpack this comment look it up for themselves and try to sort it out.  The simple definition is that Baudrillardian hyperreality is a condition in which what is real and what is fiction blend together so seamlessly that we can no longer tell the difference.  In this state, simulations, images, and media models replace the original reality, becoming “more real than real.”

[As for “cash-grab,” Teufel reports later in his column, “[Ash] Koosha has a long history of trying to make money from AI, which undercuts any claims that the tech was forced on him to represent the horrors inflicted on his people.”  He lists some of Koosha’s tech holdings to suggest that the film’s creator is promoting his commercial enterprises to sell his services.]

The AI also chooses the same type of shots, again and again . . . .  Most scenes, particularly ones with a lot of people on screen at once, have a weird blur effect around the edges, so the viewer can’t make out details.  Nothing about the film feels like deliberate artistic choices—all of it feels like “what could the computer do.”

The Indypendent review-writer notes that the movie “is filled with glitches and what we would call “bugs” if it was a video game.  A man has nothing on his face, wipes it off his face, and has nothing on his hand.  A man is pushed against a wall face-first and suddenly turns face-out.  Someone is shot—there is no bullet wound.”  And so on. 

The Art

The Times didn’t have much to say about the movie as a movie, but filmmaker Ramirez, while offering the opinion that “‘Dreams of Violets’ would be the most-talked-about movie of the festival,” mused, “‘I think I will always wonder what the documentary of this film would look like.’”

FT’s Rapold found “The film’s very loose train of events returns to a few largely perfunctory characters—a doctor, a young pianist, a boy in a wheelchair watching from a window—while cycling through street scenes of security forces attacking protesters.”  He added that the characters “move through scenes and shots that are clunkily edited.

“There’s also no substitute for good writing,” he admonished: “the wheelchair-bound boy and his caretaker brother are cornily sketched out, as is the pianist who declares: ‘I don’t have anything but music.’”

“Koosha . . . appears to weave in actual audio recorded by protesters,” reports Rapold, which a “more documentary-oriented version of the movie might have emphasised [sic] . . ., so it’s maddening to hear sometimes barely audible snippets playing in the background of scenes.” 

Rapold observed that “scenes are shoddily realized [sic]: a tone-deaf replay of the wheelchair-bound child’s parents dying in a car that flies off a cliff; a street scene involving a falling loaf of bread that wobbles in slow-motion.”

In his assessment of Dreams of Violets in Variety, Gleiberman said of the “first” movie, the “drama set in Tehran,” “I didn’t find that movie to be particularly effective.  In fact, after a while I thought it was stultifying.”

I gave the Variety reviewer’s technical response to his “aesthetic question above, but here’s the artistic response:

It’s actually the form of the movie that’s odd and off-putting: a barely scripted series of anecdotes, or mere moments, with little in the way of dramatic development. . . .  But though the characters in “Dreams of Violets” look and talk like real people, and the rubble-strewn urban streets look and feel like real rubble-strewn urban streets, we’re barely given a context for what we’re seeing . . . .

“Koosha doesn’t create fully realized scenes,” writes Gleibman.

“Dreams of Violets” is not a days-of-rage tale of inspiration.  It’s set after the protests have already been contained (the country’s police are doing a clean-up operation), and what it offers, mostly, is raw snapshots of state-sanctioned murder and political oppression.  Yes, we “get to know” half a dozen characters—a boy in a wheelchair, his physician older brother, a reminiscing old woman, a music student, and several others.

The justification Koosha gives for making Dreams of Violets with AI is that it couldn’t have been made any other way.  Says Gleibman:

[B]ut effective art needs no justification.  If you wanted to be cynical about it, you could say that Ash Koosha is exploiting the tragedy of his homeland to have the best possible excuse to craft an AI showreel.

This is Gleibman’s version of the “cash-grab” scenario, and makes the same point that The Indypendent’s Teufel made about Koosha’s AI businesses.

On The Wrap, Creith observes, “Rather than following a traditional narrative, the film drifts between interconnected stories . . . .” 

The result often feels less like a conventional feature and more like fragments of memory stitched together.  Scenes emerge and fade as characters cross paths, without necessarily creating a clear narrative throughline.  At times, the experience is meant to feel like watching a documentary, though it evokes emotions akin to flipping through a collection of postcards from a traumatic moment in history.

. . . .

The strongest moments arrive when Koosha focuses less on spectacle and more on human experience, though these are few and far between and obviously not actually human.

The Wrap review-writer concludes:

As an experimental and timely film, “Dreams of Violets” is uneven, frequently frustrating, and undeniably flawed.  As a snapshot of where both filmmaking and AI technology currently stand, it may ultimately prove more significant than the movie itself.  What cannot be denied is that it leaves an impression, whether good or bad, and the movie deserves the conversation that will undoubtedly surround it.

At the very least, “Dreams of Violets” remains one of the most unusual and thought-provoking films playing at Tribeca this year.

At the start of his review, The Indypendent’s Teufel gives his mindset away: “Before I attended the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Dreams of Violets . . . I had one serious fear: what if it was good?”  His fears don’t materialize: “As it turns out, Dreams of Violets is awful, and if this is the best AI can do, then it is possible it will never be able to replicate even passable visual art.”

“I am just here to inform you this is, possibly, the worst film of all time,” he confirms.  (Do you suppose it’s relevant that Teufel is German for ‘devil’?  Naah!)

The reviewer expands a little on his pronouncements:

If you are going to see Dreams of Violets—which you should not—I urge you to read up on these events [the January 2026 protests in Tehran] before you watch, because nothing is explained, including the demonstrators’ motivations, which adds to the film’s torture-porn vibes.  Essentially, you are going to watch a bunch of strangers get killed, with some brief, emotionally manipulative backstories for some of those strangers.  There is even a sad handicapped child sadly wheeling his way through scenes (although, weirdly, his legs appear to work fine at one point).  If this was well-made, it may have been upsetting.  As it stands, it is mostly just eyeroll-inducing.

“The film entirely lacks narrative logic,” complains Teufel, “making it impossible to follow, much less become engaged by.  After just the first few scenes it becomes little more than a series of images.”  Adds the reviewer, “And the images themselves are astoundingly ugly, far worse than even uncanny valley-fests like The Polar Express [Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004].”

[Some critics panned The Polar Express’s character animation for dipping into the uncanny valley, because it seemed to falter in mimicking realistic facial expressions and emotions.]

“It is typical at film festival screenings for movies to get applause,” Teufel concluded. “When the lights came up on Dreams of Violets, nobody clapped.  The vibe was funereal.”

[It seems to me, from reading these and other reviews, that the artistic weaknesses in Dreams of Violets are the fault of the fact that Ash Koosha isn’t either a screenwriter or a filmmaker.  He’s essentially an amateur and he worked alone, without even an editor to advise him. 

[So, when it came to making choices about how to frame a scene or write a piece of dialogue, he had nowhere to go except his untrained eye and ear.  No wonder he made bad choices.

[On the other plane, however, where his expertise lay, he had to contend with the inherent weaknesses of the medium.  But that’s just temporary.  Variety points out that

the baby is going to grow up.  And what will it look like when it does?  “Dreams of Violets” offers indications of at least a few of the places that AI, as its symbiosis with the industry grows and gathers force (which it surely will), might go.

[Some day, and probably soon, given the speed at which time passes in the cyber world, AI will be able to compensate for all the problems the reviewers above all spotlighted.  That may or may not be a goof thing for the industry, but it’s gonna happen sure as God made little green apples.

[In the hands of an actual filmmaker with a real screenplay, Dreams of Violets will become just a far-off—in computer terms—memory, like black-and-white TV or color TV with the colors that bled.]