Nova Scotia RCMP says its human trafficking unit has charged two men as a part of “Operation Homeward.”
Police say they opened an investigation after receiving a tip on June 9 that a Yarmouth man was allegedly trafficking a woman.
Police said in a release Friday that they determined the man was involved in trafficking several victims, “for both sex and labour,” They also determined that a second man was involved.
One man, who police don’t name, is facing 33 charges in this case. These include five counts of human trafficking, as well as charges related to sexual assault, assault causing bodily harm and drug trafficking.
That man was already in custody on unrelated charges, and appeared in count on Thursday. His next court appearance is set for Sept. 13.
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A second man, who police also don’t name, is facing six charges, including human trafficking, sexual assault and threats. His next court appearance is set for Aug. 8.
RCMP say in the release they did not name the men charged, “out of respect for the privacy of the victims and the publication ban that has been put in place by the courts.”
Police said support is being provided to the victims and their families.
Survivors of sex trafficking can call 211 for help.
The Canadian Human Trafficking Hotline is confidential and available 24/7 at 1-833-900-1010.
In June, 100 fruit fly scientists gathered on the Greek island of Crete for their biennial meeting. Among them was Cassandra Extavour, a Canadian geneticist at Harvard University. Her lab works with fruit flies to study evolution and development — “evo devo.” Most often, such scientists choose as their “model organism” the species Drosophila melanogaster — a winged workhorse that has served as an insect collaborator on at least a few Nobel Prizes in physiology and medicine.
But Dr. Extavour is also known for cultivating alternative species as model organisms. She is especially keen on the cricket, particularly Gryllus bimaculatus, the two-spotted field cricket, even though it does not yet enjoy anything near the fruit fly’s following. (Some 250 principal investigators had applied to attend the meeting in Crete.)
“It’s crazy,” she said during a video interview from her hotel room, as she swatted away a beetle. “If we tried to have a meeting with all the heads of labs working on that cricket species, there might be five of us, or 10.”
Crickets have already been enlisted in studies on circadian clocks, limb regeneration, learning, memory; they have served as disease models and pharmaceutical factories. Veritable polymaths, crickets! They are also increasingly popular as food, chocolate-covered or not. From an evolutionary perspective, crickets offer more opportunities to learn about the last common insect ancestor; they hold more traits in common with other insects than fruit flies do. (Notably, insects make up more than 85 percent of animal species).
Dr. Extavour’s research aims at the fundamentals: How do embryos work? And what might that reveal about how the first animal came to be? Every animal embryo follows a similar journey: One cell becomes many, then they arrange themselves in a layer at the egg’s surface, providing an early blueprint for all adult body parts. But how do embryo cells — cells that have the same genome but aren’t all doing the same thing with that information — know where to go and what to do?
“That’s the mystery for me,” Dr. Extavour said. “That’s always where I want to go.”
Seth Donoughe, a biologist and data scientist at the University of Chicago and an alumnus of Dr. Extavour’s lab, described embryology as the study of how a developing animal makes “the right parts at the right place at the right time.” In some new research featuring wondrous video of the cricket embryo — showing certain “right parts” (the cell nuclei) moving in three dimensions — Dr. Extavour, Dr. Donoughe and their colleagues found that good old-fashioned geometry plays a starring role.
Humans, frogs and many other widely studied animals start as a single cell that immediately divides again and again into separate cells. In crickets and most other insects, initially just the cell nucleus divides, forming many nuclei that travel throughout the shared cytoplasm and only later form cellular membranes of their own.
In 2019, Stefano Di Talia, a quantitative developmental biologist at Duke University, studied the movement of the nuclei in the fruit fly and showed that they are carried along by pulsing flows in the cytoplasm — a bit like leaves traveling on the eddies of a slow-moving stream.
But some other mechanism was at work in the cricket embryo. The researchers spent hours watching and analyzing the microscopic dance of nuclei: glowing nubs dividing and moving in a puzzling pattern, not altogether orderly, not quite random, at varying directions and speeds, neighboring nuclei more in sync than those farther away. The performance belied a choreography beyond mere physics or chemistry.
“The geometries that the nuclei come to assume are the result of their ability to sense and respond to the density of other nuclei near to them,” Dr. Extavour said. Dr. Di Talia was not involved in the new study but found it moving. “It’s a beautiful study of a beautiful system of great biological relevance,” he said.
Journey of the nuclei
The cricket researchers at first took a classic approach: Look closely and pay attention. “We just watched it,” Dr. Extavour said.
They shot videos using a laser-light sheet microscope: Snapshots captured the dance of the nuclei every 90 seconds during the embryo’s initial eight hours of development, in which time 500 or so nuclei had amassed in the cytoplasm. (Crickets hatch after about two weeks.)
Typically, biological material is translucent and difficult to see even with the most souped-up microscope. But Taro Nakamura, then a postdoc in Dr. Extavour’s lab, now a developmental biologist at the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki, Japan, had engineered a special strain of crickets with nuclei that glowed fluorescent green. As Dr. Nakamura recounted, when he recorded the embryo’s development the results were “astounding.”
That was “the jumping-off point” for the exploratory process, Dr. Donoughe said. He paraphrased a remark sometimes attributed to the science fiction author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov: “Often, you’re not saying ‘Eureka!’ when you discover something, you’re saying, ‘Huh. That’s weird.’”
Initially the biologists watched the videos on loop, projected onto a conference-room screen — the cricket-equivalent of IMAX, considering that the embryos are about one-third the size of a grain of (long-grain) rice. They tried to detect patterns, but the data sets were overwhelming. They needed more quantitative savvy.
Dr. Donoughe contacted Christopher Rycroft, an applied mathematician now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and showed him the dancing nuclei. ‘Wow!’ Dr. Rycroft said. He had never seen anything like it, but he recognized the potential for a data-powered collaboration; he and Jordan Hoffmann, then a doctoral student in Dr. Rycroft’s lab, joined the study.
Over numerous screenings, the math-bio team contemplated many questions: How many nuclei were there? When did they start to divide? What directions were they going in? Where did they end up? Why were some zipping around and others crawling?
Dr. Rycroft often works at the crossroads of the life and physical sciences. (Last year, he published on the physics of paper crumpling.) “Math and physics have had a lot of success in deriving general rules that apply broadly, and this approach may also help in biology,” he said; Dr. Extavour has said the same.
The team spent a lot of time swirling ideas around at a white board, often drawing pictures. The problem reminded Dr. Rycroft of a Voronoi diagram, a geometric construction that divides a space into nonoverlapping subregions — polygons, or Voronoi cells, that each emanate from a seed point. It’s a versatile concept that applies to things as varied as galaxy clusters, wireless networks and the growth pattern of forest canopies. (The tree trunks are the seed points and the crowns are the Voronoi cells, snuggling closely but not encroaching on one another, a phenomenon known as crown shyness.)
In the cricket context, the researchers computed the Voronoi cell surrounding each nucleus and observed that the cell’s shape helped predict the direction the nucleus would move next. Basically, Dr. Donoughe said, “Nuclei tended to move into nearby open space.”
Geometry, he noted, offers an abstracted way of thinking about cellular mechanics. “For most of the history of cell biology, we couldn’t directly measure or observe the mechanical forces,” he said, even though it was clear that “motors and squishes and pushes” were at play. But researchers could observe higher-order geometric patterns produced by these cellular dynamics. “So, thinking about the spacing of cells, the sizes of cells, the shapes of cells — we know they come from mechanical constraints at very fine scales,” Dr. Donoughe said.
To extract this sort of geometric information from the cricket videos, Dr. Donoughe and Dr. Hoffmann tracked the nuclei step-by-step, measuring location, speed and direction.
“This is not a trivial process, and it ends up involving a lot of forms of computer vision and machine-learning,” Dr. Hoffmann, an applied mathematician now at DeepMind in London, said.
They also verified the software’s results manually, clicking through 100,000 positions, linking the nuclei’s lineages through space and time. Dr. Hoffmann found it tedious; Dr. Donoughe thought of it as playing a video game, “zooming in high-speed through the tiny universe inside a single embryo, stitching together the threads of each nucleus’s journey.”
Next they developed a computational model that tested and compared hypotheses that might explain the nuclei’s motions and positioning. All in all, they ruled out the cytoplasmic flows that Dr. Di Talia saw in the fruit fly. They disproved random motion and the notion that nuclei physically pushed each other apart.
Instead, they arrived at a plausible explanation by building on another known mechanism in fruit fly and roundworm embryos: miniature molecular motors in the cytoplasm that extend clusters of microtubules from each nucleus, not unlike a forest canopy.
The team proposed that a similar type of molecular force drew the cricket nuclei into unoccupied space. “The molecules might well be microtubules, but we don’t know that for sure,” Dr. Extavour said in an email. “We will have to do more experiments in the future to find out.”
The geometry of diversity
This cricket odyssey would not be complete without mention of Dr. Donoughe’s custom-made “embryo-constriction device,” which he built to test various hypotheses. It replicated an old-school technique but was motivated by previous work with Dr. Extavour and others on the evolution of egg sizes and shapes.
This contraption allowed Dr. Donoughe to execute the finicky task of looping a human hair around the cricket egg — thereby forming two regions, one containing the original nucleus, the other a partially pinched-off annex.
Then, the researchers again watched the nuclear choreography. In the original region, the nuclei slowed down once they reached a crowded density. But when a few nuclei sneaked through the tunnel at the constriction, they sped up again, letting loose like horses in open pasture.
This was the strongest evidence that the nuclei’s movement was governed by geometry, Dr. Donoughe said, and “not controlled by global chemical signals, or flows or pretty much all the other hypotheses out there for what might plausibly coordinate a whole embryo’s behavior.”
By the end of the study, the team had accumulated more than 40 terabytes of data on 10 hard drives and had refined a computational, geometric model that added to the cricket’s tool kit.
“We want to make cricket embryos more versatile to work with in the laboratory,” Dr. Extavour said — that is, more useful in the study of even more aspects of biology.
The model can simulate any egg size and shape, making it useful as a “testing ground for other insect embryos,” Dr. Extavour said. She noted that this will make it possible to compare diverse species and probe deeper into evolutionary history.
But the study’s biggest reward, all the researchers agreed, was the collaborative spirit.
“There’s a place and time for specialized knowledge,” Dr. Extavour said. “Equally as often in scientific discovery, we need to expose ourselves to people who aren’t as invested as we are in any particular outcome.”
The questions posed by the mathematicians were “free of all sorts of biases,” Dr. Extavour said. “Those are the most exciting questions.”
Colson “Machine Gun Kelly” Baker is literally on the run through much of the opening seconds of the official trailer for the upcoming action-thriller One Way before he hops a bus on what may be a one-way ticket to redemption or palookaville.
“No wrong turn goes unpunished” is the punny tagline for the actioner that follows Freddy (Baker), who’s on the lamb with a bag full of cash and cocaine after a he steals from the crime boss he works for (Drea de Matteo) and it goes wrong.
With a potentially fatal wound, Freddy slips onto a bus headed into the California desert. His boss and her henchmen are hot on his heels even as his life is slipping through his fingers, leaving him with few choices to salvage what is left of his crime-ridden existence. In desperation, Freddy turns to his father (a mustachioed Kevin Bacon) for one last shot at redemption.
Baker (The Dirt), Travis Fimmel (Vikings) and Storm Reid (Euphoria) star opposite de Matteo and Bacon in One Way, which is directed by Andrew Baird (Zone 414) from a script by Ben Conway.
The film will be released in theaters, on digital and on demand by Saban Films and Paramount beginning September 2.
Jim Steinman, who died last year at 73, left behind one of the most distinctive catalogs of music in history, filled with chart-topping hits written for the likes of Meat Loaf, Bonnie Tyler and Celine Dion. With songs ranging from the restless (“All Revved Up With No Place To Go”) to the wrenching (“For Crying Out Loud”), Mr. Steinman spent decades establishing himself as a sophisticated songwriter with the spirit of a teenager.
“As far as Jim was concerned, life was about being forever young, and lusting after this and yearning after that,” said David Sonenberg, Mr. Steinman’s longtime friend, manager and now the executor of his estate. “He was going to be 17 forever, and in some ways he was.”
But perhaps nothing evokes Mr. Steinman’s legacy like the Connecticut house where he lived alone for some 20 years — a majestic museum of the self, attached to a quaint cottage in the woods of Ridgefield. He spent years expanding and reimagining the house, transforming it into an embodiment of his own eccentric, complicated personality.
Jim Steinman, left, and Meat Loaf together in New York in 1978. A year earlier, their collaborative album “Bat Out of Hell,” with songs by Mr. Steinman and vocals by Meat Loaf, sold millions of copies and made them both stars.Credit…Michael Putland/Getty Images
“The house — it’s a trip, it’s extraordinary, it’s one of a kind,” Mr. Sonenberg said. “People would walk in and their heads would spin.”
Mr. Steinman, a lifelong bachelor who had been in declining health for years, left no instructions about what he wanted done with the house after his death. Now his longtime friends are putting the property up for sale — with a provision: It is being sold “as-is,” which in real estate lingo normally means “in terrible condition.” In this case, it means that the sale includes nearly all of Mr. Steinman’s personal belongings, which remain in the house: the gothic furniture, spooky artwork, wall-mounted records, grand piano, even closets full of clothing.
“We are going to try to keep Jim’s vision and legacy intact,” said Jacqueline Dillon, Mr. Steinman’s longtime creative assistant and close friend. “Jim has been a pop-culture fixture for 50 years.”
Their hope is to sell the house — which, despite its 6,000-odd square feet, has just two bedrooms — to a musician, artist or writer, or someone seeking a creative retreat or performance space. The asking price is $5,555,569 — the $69 is a tribute to Mr. Steinman’s beloved Amherst College, where he graduated with the class of 1969 — and the annual property taxes are around $32,000.
Ms. Dillon described Mr. Steinman — by all accounts a reclusive, nocturnal introvert — as “super-shy, but always so kind, and with a lightning-quick wit.” She met him three decades ago at a concert, she said, and was soon recruited to launch his website, jimsteinman.com, to connect with fans and to monitor press mentions.
She is now helping to oversee the house sale. “This is not a sale where there is a comparable,” she said.
As with many of Mr. Steinman’s grandest achievements, the house almost never happened. It was Mr. Sonenberg who found it nearly 30 years ago. Driving through Ridgefield, he spotted the home on a secluded lot of about 1.5 acres and thought it would be perfect for his friend.
“The house was so charming,” said Mr. Sonenberg, whose own artistic dreams were dashed after he met Mr. Steinman in the 1970s. “I wrote a song called ‘Pear Tree in the Shade,’” he said. “Jim wrote a song called ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’”
Mr. Steinman, who started writing musicals for Joseph Papp at the Public Theater before conquering the pop charts with songs for Meat Loaf’s 1977 smash album “Bat Out of Hell,” was seeking a place to hide away and work. After years of delays, he and Meat Loaf (born Marvin Lee Aday) were completing production on “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell,” which (to no one’s expectation but their own) would become one of the best-selling albums of the 1990s.
Mr. Sonenberg suggested that Mr. Steinman buy the Ridgefield house: “I said, ‘It’s perfect — you’re by yourself, you never have any guests.’ And he said no, it was too small.”
Around that time, while Mr. Steinman was working with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the musical “Whistle Down the Wind,” he visited Lloyd Webber’s manor house, Sydmonton Court, in Hampshire, England, and “was just blown away,” Mr. Sonenberg said.
So Mr. Steinman decided to buy the Ridgefield cottage, paying about $425,000, and convert it into a soaring sanctuary, a creation as epic as his music.
“It is really special, almost otherworldly,” said Laura Freed Ancona, the listing agent, of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty. “Yes, it was a roof over Jim’s head. But it was also a creative space for him.”
Ms. Ancona said the plan now is to start with private and group showings, and to reach out to various arts and cultural organizations, looking for a potential buyer. “We want to cast as wide a net as possible,” she said.
The house, Mr. Sonenberg said, could be sold to a school or institution and used for a combination of living, office and performance space.
Mr. Steinman, who grew up primarily in Hewlett Harbor, on Long Island, moved to Manhattan after graduating from Amherst and was hired by Mr. Papp, who was captivated by songs Mr. Steinman had written for his senior project, a rock musical called “The Dream Engine.” It later morphed into “Neverland,” inspired by Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. (A few years after getting the Public Theater gig, Mr. Steinman, always pitching, wrote a letter to Mr. Papp asserting that “writing and conceiving serious strong musical dramatic works” was something “I really think I can do better than anyone I’ve ever come across or heard about.”)
Back then, “his taste in décor was zero,” said Frederick Baron, a college friend, who remembered visiting Mr. Steinman in a spartan apartment with bare walls and a refrigerator holding only leftover pizza and spaghetti.
“He lived the life of the mind,” Mr. Baron said. “He had this extraordinary level of creativity. He was truly brilliant. All of his life energy was in that keyboard.”
After Mr. Steinman started making serious money, he bought a two-bedroom apartment in a postwar co-op overlooking Central Park. That’s where he met Bonnie Tyler, who would top the charts in 1983 with the Steinman-penned “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” She and her manager were welcomed with a trail of M&Ms leading to his door.
Mr. Steinman later used that home mostly as an office and for wine storage, and moved into a rented house in the woods of Putnam County, N.Y., with a bunch of cats.
“Jim was a homebody, and being in the city was quite busy for him,” Ms. Dillon said. “He was always being asked to go to people’s shows. Leaving the city removed him from having to do a lot of things. He didn’t go to big events. He let his art do the talking.”
He called the Ridgefield cottage “the house that ‘Bat II’ built,” Ms. Dillon said. “Jim used the expression ‘cottage to compound.’” The album opened with the hit “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” with an accompanying video depicting Meat Loaf as a “Beauty and the Beast”-like recluse living alone in a gothic mansion.
To expand the house, Mr. Steinman hired Rob Bramhall, a Boston-based architect, eventually spending about $6 million. Mr. Bramhall worked on the project for the better part of a decade, more than doubling the house’s size. After their initial meeting, Mr. Bramhall sent Mr. Steinman a book by the influential California architect Bernard Maybeck, he said, and “Jim knew I got his sensibility.”
The style was English Cotswolds. “Jim wanted the gables, from left to right, to become slightly larger,” he said. “I remember doing skull-and-crossbones for the faucets in the powder room off the great room. Some of the wall light fixtures were made from aircraft parts.”
Mr. Steinman, who composed primarily using a keyboard and a tape recorder, was living in a postwar co-op near Central Park West when he borrowed this boom box from his friends, the actors Larry Dilg and Mimi Kennedy.Credit…Mimi Kennedy
Although Mr. Bramhall met with Mr. Steinman in Manhattan and helped him select and place the artwork, “Jim never saw the house until it was done,” he said. “It was a fun and interesting project. I haven’t done anything like it since.”
The original part of the house — bright and sunny — includes a large living room with Mr. Steinman’s many gold and platinum albums on the wall, open to an equally large kitchen with a dining nook. There’s a laundry room and a sunroom, although Mr. Steinman preferred the dark.
“That end of the house represented normalcy to him,” Ms. Dillon said.
In the dining room, the table is set with Mr. Steinman’s china, in the Royal Copenhagen Fairy Tale pattern — not that he ever used it. He preferred to eat off disposable tableware, specifically blue Solo cups and Chinet plates.
In the den, or “viewing room,” he enjoyed watching singing competitions like “American Idol,” and critiquing the judges. He also watched cooking shows, Yankees games and “Jeopardy!”
“He could listen to music, watch a TV show and type a letter” all at once, Ms. Dillon said. “His mind never stopped working.”
The “good room” — not to be confused with the great room — holds one of his wheelchairs, which he needed after suffering a series of strokes. Of course, “it was a crazy wheelchair, like a Batmobile,” Mr. Sonenberg said.
Mr. Steinman referred to the unused guest room as the “Wendy Bedroom,” after the heroine of “Peter Pan.” The plush bear on the bed hails from the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, in London, which owns the intellectual property rights to “Peter Pan” and denied Mr. Steinman’s request to stage a rock musical based on the story, deeming the script — which opened with killer nuns — unsuitable for children.
The addition, all custom made and filled with elaborate and peculiar art and artifacts, starts with the Ring Room, a small, oval space unfurnished save for sculptures on the walls, which are a color Mr. Steinman called obsidian blue. (Obsidian was the name he gave to Neverland’s city.) The ceiling is dotted with LED stars.
“And that leads you from this sweet cottage into this other universe, which is modeled after Steinman’s vision,” Mr. Sonenberg said. “Jim was the most bizarre guy, but he was the sweetest and funniest and most generous. He was the only genius I ever met.”
The primary suite is at the end of a wardrobe hallway, where the vast closets still hold Mr. Steinman’s many clothes, few of which he wore, although candy wrappers remain in some of the pockets. So many garments are crammed on the racks that “you would think you were in Bonwit Teller,” Mr. Sonenberg said.
Parallel to the wardrobe hallway is a long corridor leading to the great room, lined with patent leather panels and used by visitors — most recently, those working on “Bat Out of Hell: The Musical,” which is touring in Britain and is slated to open in Las Vegas in September.
The enormous bedroom includes a desk, sitting area and aquarium. The art on one wall, “Inferno” by Joseph Grazi, depicts taxidermic bats flying into the maw of an alligator skull. Much of the idiosyncratic art Mr. Steinman collected was by artists from Bayreuth, Germany, the longtime home and final resting place of his idol, the composer Richard Wagner, whose operas enthralled him from childhood. The room is also adorned with items collected from fans and, on the bed, a heart pillow in tribute to the surgeon who extended Mr. Steinman’s life.
Beyond the bedroom is the house’s focal point, the great room, centered around a stainless steel sculpture resembling a cluster of giant quartz crystals — an allusion to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Mr. Steinman’s 2013 honorary doctorate from Amherst is on display. A bust of Wagner sits atop a Yamaha piano, although Mr. Steinman composed mostly on keyboards. “He had this uncanny ability to play all the parts on the piano,” Ms. Dillon said. “It almost sounded like a full band.”
Stairs ascend to a gallery overlooking the room. One chair is occupied by a skeleton mid-shriek. Another flight leads to the room at the top, with a skylight and reading chair.
Mr. Steinman often used the tiny kitchenette off the great room, stocked with fresh fruit and cans of Progresso soup. He was a fan of hot sauce, sweet soda and chewy candy. “When I visited him for the first time in his home, he had these containers of gummy bears from the pick-n-mix selection at Dean & DeLuca for $12.99 a pound,” Ms. Dillon said. “Every month, we would get a bill.”
The detached two-story garage has plumbing and electricity, and could possibly be an accessory dwelling unit. Mr. Steinman used it for storage — he didn’t drive or have a license. Despite his love of motorcycles (and songs about them), he likely never rode one. Instead, he filled the garage with copies of his programs and Playbills. “He liked stuff,” Ms. Dillon said.
The question is: Will anyone want Jim Steinman’s stuff? Ms. Ancona is hoping that the property, like Mr. Steinman’s music, will inspire someone looking for something beautiful and a little strange.
“Every house needs its own approach, whether it’s a $500,000 home or a $5 million home,” she said. “You really have to find your audience.”
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Two couples rent a vacation home for what should be a celebratory weekend get-away. The Rental: Spoilers Below In Dave Franco’s directorial debut, The Rental, a vacation becomes a nightmare for two couples when they use an Airbnb-like s…
Paramount+ has unveiled a slate of exclusive acquisitions for the U.K. and Ireland including Keshet’s “La Brea” from NBCUniversal Global Distribution and “Minx,” starring Jake Johnson and Ophelia Lovibond.
“La Brea” is a survival thriller in which citizens battle for survival after they’re pulled into a mysterious land via a Los Angeles sinkhole while “Minx” tells the story of a young feminist and low-rent publisher who set out to create an erotic magazine for women in the 1970s.
“Minx” was acquired from Lionsgate alongside Topher Grace’s “Home Economics,” about the relationship between three adult siblings, and “Son of a Critch,” which is based on the memoir from “This Hour Has Twenty-Two Minutes” host Mark Critch.
The shows will debut on the streamer in August.
“The Thing About Pam,” also acquired from NBCUniversal Global Distribution and starring Renée Zellweger, Josh Duhamel and Judy Greer, dropped on Paramount+ last month. The story is based on the murder of Betsy Faria in 2011.
Meanwhile the streamer has also acquired “Chapelwaite,” which stars Adrien Brody and is based on the Stephen King short story “Jerusalem’s Lot,” from Sony Pictures Television, and the series “Savage River” (starring “13 Reasons Why” lead Katherine Langford) from Dynamic Television. Langford plays a young woman who is determined to prove her innocence after her small rural town is rocked by a shocking murder.
“We are working hard to make Paramount+ the exclusive home of premium content from around the world,” Anna-Belen Dunlop, senior director of acquisitions, at Paramount U.K. said in a statement. “Paramount+ already brings together entertainment’s biggest names but we’ll keep building our offering to make the service completely irresistible to audiences.”
“I’ve always wanted to do sci-fi because I’ve always wanted to marry all of my practices together,” says Loki costumer designer Christine Wada. “I’ve always really been interested in trying every different genre out. As an assistant and as a key, I did a lot of period stuff, and then when I started branching out on my own, I did a lot of comedy and drama.”
Loki takes place after Avengers: Endgame, when the god of mischief escapes and creates a parallel universe that alerts the Time Variance Authority, or TVA. When given a choice between helping the TVA or meeting his demise, Loki sets off on a time-traveling thriller in search of a much greater threat. The series is nominated for six Emmys, including a nomination in the Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costume category for Wada.
“For Loki, the scripts were just really good,” she says. “The language was just really built into the script, with Madmen meets Bladerunner. I think that kind of says it all and gave us a really great language to build off of.” In terms of aesthetics, Wada says she needs to have some sort of grounding in something “visually recognizable” to create the most believable costumes, which can be difficult with a show as chaotic as Loki. “When you have something that’s a time travel show and you have a character like Loki that could go anywhere, be anything, could be stuck in any timeline… it’s just an endless source of inspiration.”
For the rogue variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), Wada says it was important to give her an androgynous look along with a “scavenged” appearance to give the impression she was on the run. “Some of her pieces have been pulled from different places and different times but still have a very ‘Loki’ quality to it,” she says. “There was also a real interest in keeping her androgynous… we carried out that semi-genderless quality in the costume throughout and I think that was also a thing throughout all of the series, trying to really get into, ‘What does gender mean?’ And, ‘Why do we have to just assign these certain things to certain genders?’… There’s a real conscious effort to cast and do things as sort of genderless as possible, to not queue into those old tropes.”
Wada is returning for the second season of Loki, which will be a first for her. “Only Loki could get me to do a second series,” says Wada, “because it really is just an endless challenge.”
Click on the video above to watch the full interview.
Playwright, librettist and screenwriter David Henry Hwang shares his experience working with theater producer Joe Papp, who produced his first play, “FOB.”
“FOB,” which premiered in 1980, explores the dynamics between assimilated Asian Americans and new immigrants. Papp produced four of Hwang’s plays, including “The Dance and The Railroad” and “Family Devotions.” Hwang’s other titles include “M. Butterfly,” Disney’s “Tarzan,” “Aida” and “Yellow Face.” He is currently penning a biopic on actress Anna May Wong.
In this Q&A, Hwang reflects on his time working with Papp, the importance of inclusion in the arts and Papp’s legacy in transforming theater.
David Henry Hwang
1. Was Joe Papp ahead of his time for the type of work he was producing and how did you view him when he first reached out to you?
Joe Papp produced my first play, “FOB,” which I wrote and produced during my senior year in college in the lounge of my dormitory—as a result of community activism. The Public had produced a play in which a Caucasian actor had once again been cast as an Asian character. This led the AAPI actors of 1979—who were few in number with little power—to hold the first “yellow face” protest in New York theater history. Papp was ahead of his time because he invited the protesters into his office and hired one of them onto his staff to find plays for Asian actors. It was just about then that my play came across his desk. So I am the beneficiary of affirmative action, a program created and implemented by Papp.
2. How do you define the ideal relationship between the theater playwright and producer?
As a playwright, I’m looking for a producer who understands my vision, embraces it and will fight to bring it to life.
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Stream Joe Papp in Five Acts documentary
3. Did you ever have to work through creative differences with Joe Papp?
Actors Victor Wong & Marc Hayashi in a scene from “Family Devotions.”
After “FOB” was first read for Papp, he took me into his office and said that he liked the play, but had some notes. I was 21 years old and of course wanted Papp to produce my play. The problem was, I didn’t agree with his notes. But I knew enough to just listen and thank him. Six weeks later, I sent him back the exact same script. About 10 days afterwards, the phone rang and it was Papp: “The play’s great now, I’m gonna do it.”
Similarly, I found in subsequent disagreements that so long as I didn’t contradict him openly, he usually deferred to my vision. He eventually produced my first four plays.
4. When we think of Papp, we think of non-profit, for-the-public theater. Why is it important to have non-commercial theater produced?
Shows get produced commercially because someone believes they can make money. Historically, however, many plays we now consider American classics were not produced on Broadway. Papp recognized the truth that there is simply no relationship between market forces and great art.
5. How do you hope people remember Papp’s legacy?
An outsider himself, Papp sought to create a theater which “looked like New York.” In doing so, he helped unleash the creative energies of artists from previously marginalized communities, which transformed the theater, Broadway and American culture.
About the Master
Joe Papp • Theatrical producer and director • Jun 22, 1921 – Oct 31, 1991
MOGADISHU, Somalia — The al-Shabab extremist group has exploited Ethiopia’s internal turmoil to cross the border from neighboring Somalia in unprecedented attacks in recent weeks that a top U.S. military commander has warned could continue.
The deadly incursions into Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and long seen as an anchor of security in the Horn of Africa, are the latest sign of how deeply the recent war in the northern Tigray region and other ethnic fighting have made the country more vulnerable.
Ethiopia has long resisted such cross-border attacks by the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab, in part by deploying troops inside Somalia, where the extremist group controls large rural parts of the country’s southern and central regions. But the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and its security forces have struggled with unrest at home especially since the Tigray conflict began in late 2020.
Experts say al-Shabab, also emboldened by instability under Somalia’s previous administration, is seizing the chance to expand its footprint and claim the killing of scores of Ethiopian security forces. But the group is also feeling the pressure of a renewed push by Somalia’s new government and the return of U.S. forces to the country after their withdrawal by former President Donald Trump.
The turn to Ethiopia is a significant strategic shift by al-Shabab, Matt Bryden, a security analyst with the Sahan Foundation think tank, told The Associated Press. The extremist group had never been able to conduct major operations inside Ethiopia.
“The reports of clashes along the Ethiopia-Somalia border are just a fraction of the overall picture,” Bryden said. “We understand that planning for this offensive began more than one year ago, when the Ethiopian government appeared to be on the verge of collapse” as rival Tigray forces pushed toward the capital, Addis Ababa. Those forces later retreated, and both sides are edging toward peace talks.
Al-Shabab has trained several thousand fighters for its Ethiopian “command,” mainly ethnic Somalis and Oromos inside Ethiopia, Bryden asserted. Ethiopia’s federal government has said it fears al-Shabab will link up with the Oromo Liberation Army, which it has designated a terror organization, though other security experts have called that unlikely.
Hundreds of al-Shabab fighters were able to slip into Ethiopia last week alone and their presence has been detected near multiple communities such as El Kari, Jaraati, and Imey, Bryden said. The incursions began in late July.
“There are also credible reports of al-Shabab units deploying in the direction of Moyale,” the main border post between Ethiopia and Kenya, he said.
Somalia’s previous president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, avoided any major confrontation with al-Shabab. But new President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has said his government will take the offensive against the group’s thousands of fighters, with the backing of returning U.S. forces.
“Al-Shabab therefore faces a much greater military challenge in Somalia than before and has therefore embarked on this Ethiopian campaign in order to preserve some of its forces and establish strategic depth,” Bryden said.
He warned that if al-Shabab establishes a stronghold in southeastern Ethiopia, “the consequences for peace and security in the region could be very serious indeed.” The fighters would be well-positioned to strike deeper into Ethiopia, into Kenya and even as far as Uganda to the west. Al-Shabab has carried out several high-profile deadly attacks inside Kenya over the years.
The outgoing head of the U.S. Africa Command, Gen. Stephen Townsend, last month warned that al-Shabab’s activities inside Ethiopia were not a “one-off” and said the fighters made it as far as 150 kilometers into the country.
Al-Shabab has long regarded Ethiopia an enemy for its long military presence inside Somalia countering the fighters. Via its Radio Andalus media arm, the extremist group has claimed killing at least 187 Ethiopian regional forces and seizing military equipment in its attacks.
Ethiopian officials have expressed alarm. On Tuesday, the country’s Somali regional president, Mustefa Omer, told a regional assembly that more than 600 al-Shabab fighters have been killed.
The region is in a lengthy war with the extremists, not just a one-time clash, he said, and “the Ethiopian federal army is currently involved in the fight against the terrorists … and we will also work with Somalia.”
He said the goal is to create a security buffer inside Somalia to guard against further incursions. “We should not wait for the enemy to invade,” he said.
Also on Tuesday, the Somali region announced that Ethiopian military officials had arrived in Somalia’s town of Beledweyne to discuss strategies to counter al-Shabab’s incursion. The statement said Ethiopia’s soldiers in the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia will be deployed against the extremists.
Residents of the Somali town of Yeed near the Ethiopian border told the AP they witnessed losses suffered by al-Shabab fighters in an Ethiopian attack last week. They spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.
And a resident of Somalia’s Bakool region, Isak Yarow, said Ethiopian military planes have carried out airstrikes in Garasweyne village in an area where Ethiopian and al-Shabab fighters have clashed.
Ethiopia’s military has claimed the killing of three prominent al-Shabab figures including its propaganda chief, but the extremist group has denied it.
While Al-Shabab’s ultimate aims inside Ethiopia are yet to be determined, its new actions signal its “growing ambition, regional capabilities, and opportunism to exploit regional geopolitics, especially as the Abiy Ahmed government struggles to contain the various insurgencies inside Ethiopia,” security analysts Caleb Weiss and Ryan O’Farrell wrote late last month.
Security analyst Ismail Osman, a former deputy of Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency, told the AP that “President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s immediate priority is to eradicate al-Shabab” and warned that regional tensions could worsen amid this new instability.
An Associated Press writer reported from Nairobi, Kenya.
As a newcomer to Neil Gaiman’s seminal comic book series “The Sandman” (cue diehard fans immediately clicking out of this review, and fair enough!), I came to Netflix’s adaptation with an open mind and curious eye. Knowing this 1989 title had spawned onscreen spinoffs of “Sandman” characters — “Lucifer,” “Constantine,” etcetera — but never one of its own, it was hard not to wonder what about it might have made a live-action version so hard that it never happened until now. As I went back and forth between the TV show and the original volumes, though, the difficulty that any production would have in tackling its scope became clearer — and made Netflix’s result more impressive, too.
As adapted by Gaiman, Allan Heinberg (“Wonder Woman”), and David S. Goyer (“Constantine,” “Foundation”), TV’s “The Sandman” errs toward a literal translation of the comics as often as possible. For as complex as the series’ mythology becomes, the show finds a way to introduce new fans without completely confusing them. All it has to do to bring us up to speed is explain that The Sandman (aka Dream, played with gravel-voiced gravitas by Tom Sturridge) is one of several siblings who rule crucial aspects of humanity, from Dream, to Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), to the twins of Desire (Mason Alexander Park) and Despair (Donna Preston). From there, you’re either in or you’re out, and off it goes.
Each of the season’s 10 episodes tend to faithfully correspond to specific comic issues, from the opening saga (“Sleep of the Just”) of how Dream got captured by a nefarious amateur magician (Charles Dance, good as ever to make an immediately sinister impression), to Dream confronting a defiant vortex that threatens to swallow his realm for good (“Lost Hearts”). Some episodes transpose Gaiman’s lines word for word, including “The Sound of Her Wings,” which introduces Howell-Baptiste as an especially magnetic, warm version of Death. Others expand and flesh out an issue’s initial ideas, such as one deeply disturbing chapter (“24/7”) in which an escaped psychiatric patient (portrayed with perfectly unnerving precision by David Thewlis) turns a rest stop diner into his own personal morality experiment.
There are, as was inevitable, a couple of exceptions to the “one issue equals one episode” rule. For one, the season excludes flashback volume “Tales in the Sand” entirely, which frankly may be for the best. For another, the TV show threads the entire season with the lurking threat of “The Corinthian,” a vicious rogue nightmare played by Boyd Holbrook with a chilling, silken smirk. But if any diehards have made it this far in the review, rest assured: Netflix’s “The Sandman” hews unusually close to its source material in terms of content. Where it diverges most, then, is in its casting and visuals — one of which proves an immediate improvement, while the other ends up a disappointment.
As Dream, Sturridge can’t do a whole lot beyond what’s asked of him (i.e. embody an incredibly self-serious immortal being without making him insufferable), which he does admirably enough. But one of the smartest aspects of Gaiman’s initial approach to sketching out the series’ enormous mythos is that the story weaves in plenty of other main characters for the audience to latch onto when Dream is too busy moping to be compelling. What’s more: in one of the most obvious and welcome changes from page to screen, many of them are no longer such similar white blondes, either. As well as Howell-Baptiste’s Death, who began as a peppy emo girl in the comics, there’s Hell’s guardian Lucifer, now played by “Game of Thrones” standout Gwendoline Christie. Dream’s faithful librarian goes from Lucien to Lucienne (a steady-eyed Vivian Acheampong). Cockney demon hunter John Constantine, who’s had plenty of TV representation already, shows up here as Johanna (a refreshingly unleashed Jenna Coleman). All told, and to its credit, the onscreen “Sandman” thankfully includes a far broader swath of people and backgrounds than its source material.
It would be tempting to say the show less monochromatic than the comic, if only that held true for its aesthetic. The original illustrations — first shaped by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III with colorist Daniel Vozzo — matched Gaiman’s stark words with equally distinct images of formidable gods, twisted realities clashing with dream worlds, and the shocking viscera of violence. It’s always asking a lot for an onscreen adaptation of a comic to match its inspiration, but Netflix’s version rarely captures the same visual spirit outside of, perhaps, “24/7,” directed by Jamie Childs. Otherwise, Dream and his cohorts too often get lost in dingy darkness or wide, muddy CGI landscapes that ring too false to be truly engrossing. Even Lucifer’s black feathered wings can’t match the majesty of the ones rendered in pen and paper with veins and the stretched leather of unfathomable age. That “The Sandman” ends up looking a whole lot like Netflix’s adaptations of “Locke and Key” or “Shadow and Bone” is remarkable, considering how wildly different Gaiman’s self-consciously gritty comic is from those YA fantasy novels.
Nevertheless: the show works hard to set itself apart from those Netflix attempts at reanimating beloved properties that instead flattened them out. Most notable — at least from this exhausted TV critic’s perspective — is that the season metes out its material with an economical approach (no episode runs over 54 minutes) and smart narrative structure. Though The Corinthian looms large throughout, the first several episodes send Dream on a hunt throughout the waking world for his beloved “tools,” which acts as a useful introduction to his powers and attitude towards his human subjects; in the back of the season, the show shifts towards explaining Dream’s siblings and precarious place amongst them as the clock ticks down to a potential catastrophe. With enough forward-facing momentum and the might of Gaiman’s ever-complicating lore behind, Netflix’s “The Sandman” justifies its existence — and the potential for so much more story to come — time and time again.
“The Sandman” is now available to stream on Netflix.
Canon’s recent launch of the mid-range EOS R7 and EOS R10 was great news for those of us who can’t afford to splash out on full-frame flagships – and it seems the camera giant could be following them up with another temptingly affordable model.
The reliable Canon Rumors (opens in new tab) has claimed that “Canon’s next RF-mount camera is in the field” and will be announced “before November 2022”. Like Canon’s two most recent releases, the camera will apparently be another APS-C model and “will be a small form-factor vlogger” camera that will likely compete with the new Nikon Z30. This means it could also be the long-rumored Canon EOS R100.
Cameras with APS-C sensors are generally much more affordable than their full-frame equivalents. So the launch of a third such RF-mount camera – following the Canon EOS R7 and EOS R10 – would confirm a big shift in Canon’s strategy. And also a very welcome one in today’s tough financial climate.
The Canon EOS R7 next to the two RF-S lenses the camera giant has announced (so far) (Image credit: Canon)
Even if you’re not in the market for a vlogging camera, the arrival of another APS-C model would be a good sign for affordable Canon cameras. As our Canon EOS R7 review explains, one of the few issues with the camera is its lack of native lenses. Right now, there are just two RF-S lenses, an 18-150mm and 18-45mm.
The launch of an APS-C vlogging model would, you’d hope, signal that Canon is planning to develop more of these lenses, particularly some affordable wide-angle primes that’d pair nicely with its rumored Nikon Z30 rival.
But there are also no guarantees. The recent arrival of the first RF-mount cameras with APS-C sensors has echoes the Canon EOS M series, which landed almost exactly ten years ago.
Back in 2012, we had high hopes that Canon would develop a small, compact mirrorless system that’d be ideal for amateur photographers. What happened over the next decade? Canon launched more cameras for the EOS M series than it did lenses, with the system receiving just eight lenses in total.
Small price to pay
An affordable camera system for photographers and vloggers doesn’t need dozens of exotic lenses – after all, the whole point is that it’s relatively cheap and simple. It’s also true that some full-frame RF lenses, like the Canon RF 600mm f/11 and RF 800mm f/11 IS STM, will pair very nicely with Canon’s APS-C cameras.
But today’s rumors about another Canon APS-C mirrorless camera have got all us feeling optimistic again that the camera giant will build a small, affordable system that could fulfill the EOS M series’ earlier potential. In the current financial climate, that’s arguably a must for both Canon and camera fans.
Canon’s new small-sensor RF-mount cameras have one other slight hurdle to overcome. Because the RF mount’s flange distance – the gap between the lens and sensor – is slightly larger than the one in the EOS M series (20mm, compared to 18mm) they’ll probably never quite be as charmingly compact as that now seemingly defunct range.
Canon’s rumored vlogging camera will hopefully be a little more compact than the EOS R10 (left) and EOS R7 (right). (Image credit: Canon)
Still, according to Canon Rumors (opens in new tab), the rumored vlogging camera “will be close to the Canon EOS M6 Mark II in design”, which is promising. The EOS M6 Mark II remains one of the best travel cameras you can buy, albeit one that suffers from the same issue as the EOS R7 and EOS R10 – a lack of native lenses.
The camera will also apparently use “a different kind of vari-angle LCD screen”, that might flip over the camera rather than round to the side. A Canon EOS R100, if that’s what it’s ultimately called, would give Canon license to be a bit more playful and innovative with its designs than its more serious full-frame cameras.
Canon may not have the resources or fanbase that it had at the dawn of the EOS M series in 2012. But it is now laser-focused on mirrorless cameras and one camera mount. Even if mirrorless cameras will never be quite as affordable as the best beginner DSLRs, let’s hope the EOS R series will indeed starting to offer as many options for amateur photographers as it does for pro ones.
Smith also remarked it was his job to “represent the books truthfully and honestly as they were written.”
It’s hard to imagine a show facing more anticipation than HBO’s upcoming “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon.” Fans and skeptics alike are wondering if it can maintain the flagship blend of Shakespearean drama, brutal violence, and of course, no-holds-barred sex scenes that made “Game of Thrones” such a hit. Jury is still out on the first two aspects, but so far it sounds like the latter category could very well exceed expectations.
As the cast and crew make the rounds to promote the upcoming spin-off, there has been plenty of chatter about the multitude of nude and sex scenes in Season 1. The creators are adamant that they’re necessary to the follow-up story being told now. But not everyone is sold on the idea: including some of the cast.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Matt Smith, who plays Prince Daemon Targaryen on “House of the Dragon,” said that he found himself wondering if the many sex scenes he filmed were necessary.
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“You do find yourself asking, ‘Do we need another sex scene?’” Smith said. “And they’re like, ‘Yeah, we do.’ I guess you have to ask yourself: ‘What are you doing? Are you representing the books, or are you diluting the books to represent the time [we’re living in]?’ And I actually think it’s your job to represent the books truthfully and honestly, as they were written.”
When asked if his character has too many sex scenes, the former “Doctor Who” star did not mince words.
“Yeah – slightly too much, if you ask me,” he said.
Smith is not the first “House of the Dragon” team member to weigh in on the sex scene debate, albeit on the other side. Following the brutal sexual violence of “Game of Thrones,” “House of the Dragon” co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik said the spinoff had no intention of backing down from portrayals of sexual violence.
“[We] don’t shy away from it,” Sapochnik said. “If anything, we’re going to shine a light on that aspect. You can’t ignore the violence that was perpetrated on women by men in that time. It shouldn’t be downplayed and it shouldn’t be glorified.”
“House of the Dragon” premieres on HBO on Sunday, August 21.
Darren Star has concocted another frothy Netflix hit with Uncoupled, his new series starring Neil Patrick Harris as Michael, a newly single man navigating dating life after his boyfriend of nearly 20 years (Tuc Watkins) suddenly dumps him — unsettling news he breaks the very night Michael throws him an epic surprise birthday party. Uncoupled chronicles Michael’s dating misadventures, which are well worth following along with if you have a taste for glamorous real estate and New York City scenery, or if you’re just looking for a charming new rom-com. This one checks all the boxes for your next binge.
Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt is back at it again – fighting aliens and saving the world. But as the actor, who doubles up as an executive producer for the film, rightly pointed out while promoting The Tomorrow War, the themes are quite relevant to today’s world. The release, although coincidental, is incredibly timely. The characters go through a crisis that could wipe out their world, something with which all of us can now relate.
Pratt plays the role of an ex-military man, Dan Forester, who is drafted once again, while he was living his life as a middle-aged chemistry teacher with a wife and daughter. But this time, he has to jump 30 years into the future to combat an alien invasion that’s threatening to end their future. The aliens are a bunch of brainless, senseless creatures, acting on survival instinct (one might even find a Stranger Things similarity here). You’d expect aliens to be more evolved in the future, but director Chris McKay did not waste time on his imagination there.
What he did spend time on, rather, was on striking a balance between emotional struggles, scientific research, and of course, his vision making his first live-action film, based on Zach Dean’s writing. McKay, coming straight from the animated The Lego Batman Movie, has a knack for engrossing action, injecting comedy into that action and letting the sweetness of the story, involving troubled father figures, shine through it all.
Dan decides to jump into the future to save the planet’s future for the sake of his 9-year-old daughter. His own relationship with his father is strained, and he is determined to prove that he can be different. Some of the most heartwarming scenes are between Pratt and Yvonne Strahovski, whose onscreen identity is one of the twists in this rather crisp tale. The Handmaid’s Tale fans will love Strahovski in a benevolent role this time.
JK Simmons as Dan’s father dazzles despite a brief role. Sam Richardson and Edwin Hodge as Pratt’s alien fighting buddies play their roles well. Richardson’s comic one-liners are balanced out by Hodge’s cynicism. Characters are largely unidimensional, leaving the intrigue for Simmons’ part only.
The Tomorrow War peddles optimism, and believes life gives you second chances. A problem in the future can be fixed in the present, an estranged relationship can be rebuild on a dangerous mission. It is this connection between the personal and the global that stays with you in the end. Despite stringing together heavy duty genres like action, sci-fi and time-travel, McKay ensures that The Tomorrow War’s heart is at the right place.
Paramount sold the film to Amazon Studios for USD 200 million, due to the global pandemic. It’s a shame that audiences will not get to watch it on the big screen. A spectacle like this definitely deserved a bigger canvas. The Tomorrow War doesn’t promise you mindblowing innovation, but will surely connect with you at a more emotional level.
Joel Kinnaman and Krys Marshall in For All MankindPhoto: Apple TV+
Everyone wants to get the fuck off Mars. There are no cool Martians, the mountains kill you, it’s endless sand, and, man, seeing red every day gets old fast. The only new life on Mars is growing inside Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu), although the nail-biting end of “Coming Home” threw that in doubt. Also, there’s an unexpected guest: A desperate looking South Korean spaceman shows up in a bonkers WTF ending, waving a pistol at Danielle (Krys Marshall) and Kuznetsov (Lev Gorn). Pretty sure he wants off the Red Planet, too.
For viewers weary of the attenuated, soap-opera plot lines dominating the past few weeks, “Coming Home” was a relief, a FAM episode that was primarily task-based. Proficient characters are doing things only they can do to achieve a collective goal. “Coming Home” co-writers David Weddle and Bradley Thompson and director Craig Zisk crafted a tight arc from hope to horror—in 47 minutes, another relief. Over the season, most episodes could’ve lost ten minutes, easy.
The combined crews from Helios, NASA, and Roscosmos are working to get the MSAM (Popeye) operational so they can blast off from Mars and dock with the Phoenix in orbit around the planet. Margo (Wrenn Schmidt), Lenara Catiche (Vera Cherny), and Bill Strausser (Noah Harpster) coordinate from Earth. At Happy Valley Base, Mayakovsky (Goran Ivanovski) is monitoring Kelly’s baby, conceived with the late cosmonaut Poletov. And Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour) and husband Larry (Nate Corddry) are hustling to contain the political danger of being outed as gay while Ellen is leader of the free world.
Even Danny (Casey W. Johnson) seems to be off the pain meds. Five months after the disastrous landslide that killed Corrado, Castillo, and Poletov, the season heel is pitching in to get Popeye fueled up and packed with nine bodies. Good riddance to the Red Planet.
The sentiment is shared in the U.S. Congress and on Helios’ board: Mars was a disaster; let’s get them home and forget it happened. A time-lapse video narrated by Danny (messaging Amber on Earth) shows astronauts digging the MSAM out of its sandy grave. To achieve liftoff, they need to generate enough methane fuel. Danny and Mueller (Anne Beyer) toil away in Popeye, discussing the slowness of the process. It’s like fueling a jetliner with a soda can, Danny notes.
Inside the Habs at Happy Valley, the blended crew seems to be getting along and keeping spirits up. Kelly is very pregnant and fussbudget Mayakovsky gives her a routine examination as proud grandfather-to-be Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) looks on. If all goes well, she’ll deliver aboard the Phoenix. A baby on the way. A plan to escape. Humans working together for the greater good. It’s all going to fall apart, right? That’s the standard rule for penultimate episodes.
Earth media is abuzz over Kelly’s pregnancy; the first Martian will be an Earthling. Apparently, hand-knitted baby booties are flooding in from around the world. The Speaker of the House (Stewart Skelton), however, will darn no baby booties. In a meeting with President Wilson and her staff in the Oval Office, the Dick Gephardt-looking pol strongly encourages Ellen to sign a bill that gives Congress oversight of NASA. The Mars mission has been such a fiasco, he reasons, she should be glad to lose the political albatross. Ellen firmly refuses.
When the Speaker asks to have the room alone with the President, he brings up Larry’s possible perjury before Congress, denying having an affair with a male White House staffer. The Speaker then alludes to the Oval Office recording system, which he notes has been in place since JFK. If he can subpoena tapes from around the time of Larry’s testimony, and finds evidence that Ellen and Larry obstructed justice, she could face impeachment. “You can’t be serious,” Ellen sputters. “Congress hasn’t impeached a president in more than 120 years.” Such innocent times.
In another case of lawbreaking, Aleida (Coral Peña) shows Bill Strausser the conspiracy board in her garage, which fingers Margo Madison as a Soviet asset. A mass of print outs, index cards and sticky notes, it has everything but the zig-zagging red yarn. Aleida explains that she discovered the Soviet engine design copied NASA’s; someone has been passing tech secrets. “This is like the lair of a Batman villain,” Bill says, half-admiringly. He agrees to stay and listen to how Margo could possibly be the spy. For another beer.
At Helios Aerospace, Dev (Edi Gathegi) presents his board of directors with a vision for the next 10 years on Mars. They are about to begin production on a new interplanetary ship, Calypso, ready to launch in 1999, which will run on nuclear plasma propulsion. Dev wants to expand operations and colonies on Mars. A spaceport, greenhouses to grow food, dormitories. When a board member points out that the recent Mars mission was a shitshow—three people dead—Dev counters with one of those inspiring speeches (as in the first episode). First settlements are hard, and people die, but we survive and thrive. Just as they did in the first Jamestown—not on the Moon, but America. “We found water,” Dev says with missionary zeal. “Enough to sustain a colony. Of thousands!”
Dubious board member “Dicky” Hillard (Blair Hickey) persists: Helios’ stock price is in free fall, and there may be legal liability due to the fatal landslide (which was druggy Danny’s fault, although no one knows). Dicky announces that the board has agreed to abandon future Mars missions and pivot back to mining Helium-3 on the Moon. Dev asks for more time. Karen (Shantel VanSanten), who has been silent, looks concerned. In a later scene, Dicky tells Karen that the board is going to remove Dev as CEO and offer her the job. Karen’s corporate star continues to rise. We’ll see if NASA accepts her offer of selling them the Phoenix.
Jodi Balfour in For All MankindPhoto: Apple TV+
Next, Bill and Aleida are working their way through a six pack while studying her conspiracy wall. Bill is convinced. “Basically she’s a fucking spy,” he says of Margo. Bill urges Aleida to go to the FBI, but she’s hesitant, especially because of what they did to her father, deporting him on a baseless suspicion of spying on NASA. Later, Bill ambushes Aleida at a bar with FBI agent Victoria Rodriguez (Michelle C. Bonilla). Aleida, her anti-authoritarian instincts kicking in, refuses to play ball. “You’re fucking dead to me,” she tells Bill before leaving the bar. Nevertheless, Bill squealed to the Feds, and they’re going to start investigating Margo.
In Popeye, Danny, Mueller, and Tyler (Robert Bailey Jr) are checking out the rendezvous radar equipment. It’s fried. Without this element, they can’t dock with Phoenix. Kuznetsov reveals that previous Soviet probes that landed on Mars had this element. At NASA, in teleconference with Roscosmos head Lenara Catiche and Bill at Helios, Margo deduces that the Soviets sold the technology to other countries that also sent probes to Mars: Turkey, North Korean, India. Soon, Bill identifies the nearest landing spot of a probe, launched by North Korea. It’s a nine-hour rover drive from Happy Valley. Dani and Kuznetsov are the only ones who can be spared to take a rover and retrieve the equipment.
Back in the garage, a terrified Aleida tears down the papers on her conspiracy wall, weeping. Her father, Octavio (Arturo Del Puerto) enters, to see what the matter is. Crumpled on the floor, sobbing, she can’t say. The father, suffering from dementia, briefly mistakes Aleida for her mother, then comes back to his senses. Nice to see Coral Peña getting to play a wider range of emotions than grim determination and fiery indignation.
At Happy Valley, the Helios analysis of what went wrong with the water drilling operation is d-mailed from Earth. Ed digests its contents in front of the rest of the crew. Danny looks panicked, as if he’s about to be blamed (rightfully) for his catastrophic dereliction of duty. Instead, the report pins the blame on dead Corrado. Ever the child needing boundaries, Danny seems enraged that he’s not being punished, throws a fit and huffs out of the room. Ed and the others basically shrug their shoulders.
Larry has called a last-minute press conference to come out to the world—the only way to protect Ellen—but Ellen preempts him, entering and giving her own speech. She apologizes for lying to the nation and comes out as gay. The media goes crazy. Larry is agog. Watching from home, Ellen’s ex-lover Pam Horton (Meghan Leathers) gets misty-eyed. So does Will Tyler, on Mars, stunned when he learns the President will give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom when he returns. Previously standoffish Rolan Baranov (Alexander Sokovikov) says how proud he is of Will’s bravery and embraces him. Everyone’s happy and ready, like this recapper, for a drink. You know, this would be the perfect time for something to go horribly wrong.
So it does. Ed finds Kelly unconscious in the plant nursery. He screams for Mayakovsky who runs in and finds Kelly’s heart beating too fast. They get her on the sick bay table. She’s diagnosed with preeclampsia (a plot device also used on Downton Abbey season three, episode four).
Mueller radios Dani and Kuznetsov that Kelly’s condition is getting worse and they need to get back right away. The two are arriving at the site of the North Korean probe. As they get out and approach, Kuznetsov sees a boot print in the sand. Before you can say “cliffhanger,” a North Korean astronaut steps forward and points a pistol. Kuznetsov says something in Russian to the effect of “Sonofabitch!” And Dani says, “Don’t shoot!” They raise their arms, leaving us with several dozen questions, such as: When did Korea land on Mars? How was this launch not detected? How did this guy survive? Aren’t we overdue for one of those nifty time jumps, perhaps to the 2000s?
Stray observations
How much radiation can a fetus take? Per the CDC: “Although radiation doses to a fetus tend to be lower than the dose to the mother, due to protection from the uterus and surrounding tissues…exposure at doses greater than 0.5 gray (Gy) can be severe…health consequences can include growth restriction, malformations, impaired brain function, and cancer.”
When the Speaker of the House warns of “homeless encampments spreading across our major cities,” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fans may recall the 1995 two-parter “Past Tense.” Set in 2024, it featured, yes, homeless encampments as a sign of America’s social deterioration.
As Larry and Ellen listen to the incriminating tape and brainstorm how to avoid obstruction of justice charges, I half-seriously expected Larry to leap up and ask, “Wait. Is this being recorded?!”
In case you’re stocking up for next week’s season-finale party: Aleida and Bill were chugging Lone Star Beer (also featured on True Detective and Friday Night Lights).
The reverential placement of Nixon’s portrait between those of Lincoln and Washington is the most surreal sight all season.
Bonus Oval Office detail: Ellen has a football signed by Gene Cernan (1934–2017) that reads “Hell of a Catch.” In our timeline, Cernan was the last man to set foot on the Moon (Apollo 17). In FAMU, did Cernan become a football star?
Amazon Prime Video is activating its Emmy Phase 2 plans, throwing an “FYC Fest” the weekend of Friday, Aug. 12 through Sunday, Aug. 14 to tout its 30 Emmy nominations.
The weekend event will take place in three different locations in the Los Angeles area, including Sherman Oaks, Santa Monica and West Hollywood. The outdoor activations will be inspired by Prime Video’s Emmy-nominated titles, including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” “Lucy and Desi” and “The Boys Presents: Diabolical.”
Among the attractions will be mini golf games, themed to some of Prime Video shows; a target game inspired by “The Boys Presents: Diabolical”; a giant, nominated show-inspired art installation; and design-your-own FYC Fest totes with custom embroidered icons from Prime Video Emmy-nominated shows.
The festival will also include food trucks with food and drink themed to Prime Video’s Emmy-nominated shows; photo opps and a live DJ.
Prime Video’s Emmy noms include 12 for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” six for “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” six for “Lucy and Desi,” two for “Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 3” and single nominations for the 57th Academy of Country Music Awards, “A Very British Scandal,” “Goliath” and “The Boys Presents: Diabolical.”
Admission is free, and no RSVP is required. Click here for more info.
Saturday, August 13: Parking Lot off of 3rd Street Promenade, 123 Santa Monica Blvd, Santa Monica (11 a.m. to 6 p.m.)
Sunday, August 14: Pacific Design Center Plaza, 8687 Melrose Ave, West Hollywood (11 a.m. to 6 p.m.)
The “FYC Fest” is a followup to Amazon’s “The Prime Experience” held in May in Beverly Hills, at an estate that turned into a multi-room experience promoting its Emmy contenders.
Ahead of the release of her new album Takin’ It Back, Meghan Trainor sat down with Billboard News host Tetris Kelly to discuss the inspirations behind the project and how it feels to go viral on TikTok with her 2015 track “Title.”
The singer explained that her past catalog inspired what’s to come on the new record, set for release in October. “I’m taking it back to my sound that apparently I had, because I started writing and one of my co-writers were like, ‘It’s crazy, these artists are coming in saying I want to do Meghan Trainor sound,’” she said. “I have the doo-wop sound. At the same time, ‘Title’ blew up on TikTok. I was like, ‘Wow, universe is talking to me, and I’m listening.’”
Fans will also be delighted to know that Trainor’s collaboration with Natti Natasha has finally come to fruition after teasing it on social media. While the girls have yet to meet in person, the 28-year-old revealed their track came together at the last possible moment: “I haven’t even met her yet! I’ve DM’d her and she’s lovely. We were told, ‘It’s not gonna happen,’ and the day the album was due, vinyl and everything, she recorded her verse that morning. I was like…’She’s down?!?’ So yeah, I just got really lucky.”
Trainor’s back catalog has seen viral success on TikTok recently after her track “Title” made waves on the social media app, seven years after the song’s initial release. Though some artists can feel burdened by posting on TikTok to appease their record labels, Trainor says the app has been a blessing in disguise.
“When you feel uncreative, I can see how that’s annoying, but when you finally hit with a video or when ‘Title’ blew up, I felt like it was my birthday every day,” Trainor says. “I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It’s the quickest way to connect with fans. It’s the best place to get a whole new audience, and now I’m obsessed with TikTok and I’m obsessed with posting. I’m constantly like, ‘What ideas can I do?’ … If a new artist asked me what I should do with music, I would be like, ‘Get a TikTok.’”
Watch Meghan Trainor’s interview with Billboard News in the video above.
Storytelling, and its advancements, has mostly been in the pursuit of making things seem more and more real, to immerse the listener in an experience that seems lived, to have them believe what they see on a screen is actually happening, or can happen. Artworks using Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality often succeed in breaking the fabled fourth wall and helping audiences embody the experience of going through what is on display. Naturally enough, the documentary form—which often seeks to create empathy in viewers—finds a home within these mediums, moving away from traditional 2D formats, where the space between the screen and viewer is often underutilized. If the recently concluded Tribeca Immersive is anything to go by, documentarians are increasingly taking to these formats to lessen the unclaimed space that lies between the audience and the message.
Ashraki Mussa Machano and Steven-Charles Jaffe’s Zanzibar: Trouble in Paradise is about female seaweed farmers in Zanzibar who pivot to sponge farming because of the impact of climate change. It is one of the first holographic films ever produced in the world, and the first ever to be displayed on a Looking Glass display. What this translates to, is that the film of course appears in 3D (without glasses) but also responds to the distance between the screen and the viewer—as one moves, the size and angle of objects change. “We are so confident about the story, the characters, the themes, we know that if this were to be a 2D film, it would have an impact,” explains Jaffe. “But the thing is, The holographic display gives you depth. We were interested in something that could, even if through an illusion, give people a feeling of being in the same space, literally, as the people in a film.” Hindu and Nasiri, the two women in Zanzibar, speak to the camera beginning with, “My mother was a seaweed farmer,” and as one walks closer and further away from the screen, one gets immersed in the depths of the ocean that surrounds them, always under the threat of climate change and exploitation brought in by the booming tourism industry. “Zanzibar is really a paradise,” says Machano, who is from there and has, for years, worked as a photographer, “And these women depend on the ocean, which has provided for their livelihood. We use the ocean as our playground but access to this same ocean has now been denied to us.” Of course this could’ve been another documentary on climate change but Machano insists that this technology was the best means of telling the story of these women in their own words. “Technology is like an ocean,” he says, “It divides people but also connects them. It gives me the chance to tell stories about my community to people in New York.”
Tani Ikeda and Michelle Kumata’s AR project Emerging Radiance, which won the Best Immersive prize, honors the Nikkei farmers who lived in Bellevue, Washington, most of whom had family members being detained in concentration camps during World War II. Using Spark AR Instagram filters over Kumata’s hand-painted murals of three survivors—Toshio Ito, Rae Matsuoka Takekawa and Mitsuko Hashiguchi—Emerging Radiance helps the murals come to life as we hear them (in their own voice) relate memories of World War II and their farms. “It allows the people to speak, allows our community to not just be beautiful background images but also gives people political context to our storytelling, to who we are,” explains Ikeda. The voice recordings are a part of her father Tom’s massive archive documenting Japanese American histories in the country—perhaps the largest one in the world. The people on the murals were people Ikeda’s grandparents knew, people whose predecessors she grew up with. The seed packets that were handed out at the venue all contained heirloom seeds to crops the Nikkei farmers grew. While she works on a related documentary film, Ikeda thought AR to be the best medium for this project because it made the story accessible to folks (especially younger audiences) who already have a basic understanding of the technology through filters on Instagram. “The idea was to have people use the QR code on the murals and experience the stories of our elders, and then share the stories,” Tani Ikeda says. “That way people can interact with the art, remix it, and then recreate with their own experiences. This is a new way of utilizing technology to try and make a lasting impact which people can adapt to.” It is an intergenerational project, a family project rooted in a very specific history but, as Ikeda says, by making the protagonists more “real” to the people, “it brings together people from different communities to share their histories of racism, experiences of incarceration. These stories are deeply interconnected. This project helps me use my community’s resilience to create a roadmap to justice that other communities look at and draw up for themselves.”
“A lot of people call VR the empathy machine,” says Antonia Forster who, with Thomas Terkildsen, created another nonfiction VR project, LGBTQ+ VR Museum, that premiered at Tribeca. For the queer community that has been denied a sense of material history, this project creates a crowd-sourced VR museum of objects that illustrate an important part of people’s personal queer histories—for some, it’s a teddy bear, a James Baldwin book, a pair of wedding stilettos, a bottle of nail polish, and so on. “I have very strong feelings of not overstating that VR can induce empathy,” Forster continues, “But, done carefully and done correctly, it does give you the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes in an almost literal sense. That sense of presence really has a lot of impact on people, and I think you can use that for good.” For Forster, it was important to have the museum be self-curated by the queer community. “It was very important for me not to fall victim to my own bubble. Because I’m white, female, cis-gendered. So, there was a very high statistical risk that I would end up sourcing more stories like mine,” she adds, before explaining the very difficult process of procuring objects (through Facebook groups and Twitter threads), creating 3D scans of them, and then working with the contributor to create a version everyone was happy with–all during a lockdown. As documentaries step into this other reality, it is heartening to notice questions of ethics and duty of care being addressed, organically.
For Thomas, who is a psychologist by training, it was important to be able to measure the viewers’ emotional states through psychophysiological measures. “So I attach a bunch of sensors and then I use that data to teach computers to recognize human emotions. This kind of physical presence and experience of immersion is central to creating emotions and emotional activity in people. It requires that we feel like we are physically there and we have something at stake. And the best way of doing that is putting our actual bodies inside the story,” he adds. As one “walks” through the museum, walking through various exhibits, announcements tell you when the museum is about to shut. If you are too tired of walking around, there is a courtyard for you to “sit.” Although in a parallel world, LGBTQ+ VR Museum is very much a “real” museum, with, as the creators tell me, a rolling roster of exhibits that get changed from time to time. It was even accompanied by a biometric experience that measured the viewer’s emotional quotient in real time. Both the creators are keenly working on taking the Museum to audiences worldwide, and the fact they can shorten or expand the project, depending on logistics and constraints, makes it easily portable.
“I don’t think one technology is exclusively better than another. And none of that is more important than good content. A good story has to be the first and foremost reason you make anything—from painting a photograph to a documentary,” says Jaffe, finding a resonance in Ikeda. “Telling our stories allowed our community to get reparation, so no matter what the medium is, I will continue to solidify my belief that all our stories are valuable,” she adds. Documentaries, and storytelling in general, strive to represent people—like the Nigerian gay man at the LGBTQ+ Museum who cried because he had never seen a tactile representation of Nigerian queer history. Documentaries drive us to draw parallels, connect dots, and then learn from these connections. As long as we continue doing that respectfully, we can never have enough mediums that help us forge these connections.
Bedatri D. Choudhury is Managing Editor of Documentary magazine.
A Russian female commander who boasted about how she enjoyed killing Ukrainians and whose troops fired on civilians in the Donbas region has been killed in a missile strike.
Lieutenant Colonel Olga ‘Kursa’ Kachura, 52, was killed instantly after a Ukrainian missile hit her car as she was driving in the city of Horlivka, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.
Kachura, who is Russia’s first female officer to die in the war in Ukraine, was a colonel of a rocket artillery division which shelled civilians in the Donetsk People’s republic.
Her unit fired on civilians in the Donbas region and Kachura later boasted that she enjoyed killing Ukrainians in interviews on Kremlin propaganda channels.
Kachura, a Ukrainian native who worked in the Horlivka Police department, reportedly defected to the pro-Russian side in 2014 after Putin fomented a rebel uprising in the Donbas.
She would often disguise herself as a member of regular Ukrainian forces to commit war crimes in order to discredit them, according to Ukraine’s armed forces.
‘(Kachura was) guilty of the shelling of the cities of Donbas and the deaths of civilians,’ Ukrainian journalist Denis Kazanskyi said. ‘In Ukraine, she was sentenced to 12 years in prison in absentia.’
Lieutenant Colonel Olga ‘Kursa’ Kachura, 52, was killed instantly after a Ukrainian missile hit her car as she was driving in the city of Horlivka, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine
The mother-of-two, who has been granted the posthumous Hero of Russia honor, was a colonel in the forces of Russian puppet state Donetsk People’s Republic, where she commanded a rocket artillery division deployed against Ukraine
She becomes one of the latest Russian high-ranking officers to be killed in Ukraine amid the Russian president’s brutal on-going invasion of the country, that has seen Ukrainian forces put up fierce defence of their country.
Kachura is the 97th known officer to have been killed in Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Putin granted Kachura the posthumous Hero of Russia honour – the Kremlin’s highest award – ‘for her courage and heroism shown in the performance of military duty’.
Margarita Simonyan, the head of the sanctioned RT network, said: ‘Legendary Korsa died in Horlivka… May she rest in peace…
‘The Chief [Putin] awarded Korsa the title of Hero of Russia. That’s how it’s supposed to be. These are our common heroes.’
Kachura was a career police investigator rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel before switching to the forces of Putin-backed separatists.
She served in the 3rd separate motorised rifle brigade Berkut of the 1st Army Corps of the DPR, and commanded a Grad MLRS division in Horlivka. There were 140 gunners under her command.
The mother-of-two had been wounded several times in previous attacks. She had held the rank of colonel in the DPR forces since 2015.
Putin granted Kachura the posthumous Hero of Russia honour – the Kremlin’s highest award – ‘for her courage and heroism shown in the performance of military duty’
Last year, Ukraine sentenced Kachura to 12 years in prison in absentia with confiscation of property for ‘participation in a terrorist group or terrorist organisation’. It is thought she ordered the shelling of cities in the Donbas which resulted in civilian deaths.
She was head of the powerlifting federation of Horlivka, and an honorary citizen of the city, which was twinned with Barnsley in England.
Mayor of Horlivka Ivan Prikhodko said: ‘A brave and wise woman who was there from the start of the People’s Militia of the DPR has tragically died.
‘Olga Kachura, victorious and unshakeable Korsa.’
Kochura’s death comes after the first female Russian solider killed in Ukraine was buried last month.
Corporal Anastasia Savitskaya, 35, a married mother-of-two said to be a ‘real hero’, was buried on July 13 in her native Volgograd, a city on southwest Russia.
‘The deceased became the first servicewoman who died during the special military operation,’ said Alexander Strukov, the local veterans’ leader.
A friend of Savitskaya said: ‘She had dreamed of serving in the army since childhood, and signed a contract at the age of 18.’ Going to war in Ukraine ‘was her choice,’ they said.
Her bereft husband – a former soldier, not named – said at her funeral: ‘How will I carry on living now? Why did I let you go there? Beloved, beautiful, best.’
Corporal Anastasia Savitskaya, 35, a married mother-of-two said to be a ‘real hero’, was buried today in her native Volgograd, a city on southwest Russia. Pictured: Savitskaya is seen in a photograph during her funeral last month
Pictured: Russian soldiers guard Corporal Anastasia Savitskaya’s coffin at her funeral last month
Unlike some Western countries it remains rare for Russian servicewomen to go to war. Ukraine, for example, has seen several female soldiers join the fighting.
A eulogy at the woman’s funeral said: ‘A female warrior has always been an exception to the rule. But Anastasia, having mastered the ‘home’ front, went without fear to a dangerous special operation, accomplishing a double feat.’
Meanwhile Putin has this week also lost two more colonels in his Russian forces, the latest proof of the devastating toll his high ranks have suffered.
Paratrooper Lt Colonel Ivan Pozdeev served in the Kutuzov Airborne Assault brigade in Ulyanovsk.
Acting Head of Komi Republic Vladimir Uyba said he ‘died as a hero during the special war operation in Ukraine’.
Russia has sought to obscure the number of high-ranking deaths in Ukraine.
It also came to light that Lt Col Denis Sorokin, a married father of two, died near Melitopol earlier in the war.
He was commander of an assault battalion, also awarded the Hero of Russia posthumously.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) agreed Thursday night to “move forward” on the Inflation Reduction Act, clearing the way toward a potential passage of the spending bill if another holdout Democrat does not emerge. ‘
Sinema and fellow Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia were the party’s holdouts on the previous incarnation of the Biden administration’s larger “Build Back Better” bill. Manchin and Sinema were said to be troubled by that bill’s prospects of adding to rampant inflation. Without their votes, and given a solid GOP opposition, the prospects of getting something done in the Senate appeared doomed.
But Manchin changed his mind earlier this week on a $739 billion version of that bill, and Sinema has now gotten her wish list fulfilled and has agreed to support the legislation. A 50-50 split in the Senate vote would throw the decision to VP Kamala Harris, who would presumably agree to it.
“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” a statement from Sinema read.
“Subject to the Parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who convinced Manchin to back the new version, said in a statement the new “agreement preserves the major components” of the spending package.
The final version of the bill – which contains provisions on health care, funding the IRS, and climate initiatives – was expected to be introduced Saturday.
It was another contentious week in the “Big Brother” house as the Season 24 contestants dealt with the aftermath of last week’s surprise back door eviction, and it doesn’t appear that the power shots are slowing down any time soon.
Another major threat was sent home Thursday when the house guests eliminated Nicole Layog. It marked the second week in a row that The Leftovers alliance made a big move to take them all one step closer to the finale.
After sending Ameerah Jones packing last week, the alliance — which includes Monte Taylor, Kyle Capener, Taylor Hale, Michael Bruner, Brittany Hoopes, Matthew Turner, and Joseph Abdin — struggled to decide on a course of action. When Taylor won the Head of Household competition, he decided it best to put festie besties Alyssa Snider and Indy Santos on the block.
At first, the plan was to evict Snider, who has been perceived as a threat for her great social game. However, as time went on, the The Leftovers began to think that maybe it would be best to back door Layog — only that meant they’d have to put Hale back up on the block for the third time.
She wasn’t thrilled about being in such a precarious situation again, but once Capener and his festie bestie Daniel Durston won the power of veto and took Snider and Santos off the block, the alliance moved forward with the plan anyways. Taylor put Hale and Layog on the block, prompting the former to question her trust in The Leftovers alliance.
But they ultimately kept her safe another week when Layog was eliminated in a 9-1 vote, which was more overwhelming than anticipated after multiple house guests outside the alliance surprisingly voted to keep Hale as well.
Layog admitted that she wasn’t all that surprised by her eviction in an interview with host Julie Chen after leaving the house, after beginning to suspect her fellow house guests didn’t quite trust her as much as she initially thought they did. After Layog’s elimination, Hale chose to become festie besties with Santos and Snider.
YouTube is testing a new mobile app feature with its premium subscribers that allows them to zoom in on any video. As noted by 9to5Google, the latest opt-in experimental feature enables a pinch-to-zoom gesture for videos — and it works both in portrait and full-screen landscape view.
According to the company, the zoom feature will remain in testing until September 1st, giving YouTube about a month to gather user feedback and refine things before potentially rolling it out more widely.
You can opt in through the “try new features” section of YouTube’s settings.Screenshot: Richard Lawler / The Verge
To enable pinch to zoom, open YouTube’s settings menu either on your phone or from the website. As long as you’re subscribed to YouTube Premium, there should be a “try new features” section. Right now, the only feature available for testing is the zoom function. It seems there might be a delay between opting in to the test and actually being able to use the pinch gesture, as I was unable to zoom in closer on any videos immediately after toggling it on. But once it’s active, you should be able to zoom in at up to 8x.
There are already ways to zoom in on YouTube’s content with various accessibility functions on Android and iOS, and obviously it’s very easy to do so in a desktop browser. But having it as an optional native feature in the mobile app is all the more convenient. Last month, YouTube finally delivered picture-in-picture mode for iPhone and iPad after first testing it among premium customers; that hugely useful feature has long been available on Android.
This weekend I have … a half-hour, and I like oddball ensembles.
‘Good Grief’ When to watch: Now, on Sundance Now.
In Season 1 of this New Zealand comedy, the sisters Ellie (Eve Palmer) and Gwen (Grace Palmer) inherited a funeral home and its quirky employees, which the more uptight Ellie started to embrace but the more free spirited Gwen bristled at. In Season 2, Gwen has attempted to sow her wild oats as a D.J. in Bali, and she returns home with a fresh, if not always welcome, perspective.
“Grief” obviously has the makings of a sad show, but it is much more “look at all these lovable goofballs; life is short, but we have fun” than “behold the endless chasm of sadness, a darkness so dense no light can escape; death is coming.” Season 2 is streaming now and also airs weekly on IFC starting on Aug. 17.
… a half-hour, and I like food shows.
‘Recipe Lost and Found’ When to watch: Friday, on Discovery+.
There’s an episode of “Friends” in which Phoebe’s grandmother’s secret cookie recipe turns out, after much agonizing, to be the Nestlé Toll House recipe, printed on the bag of chocolate chips. “Recipe Lost and Found” is more or less that, in its most mild and well-meaning form. In each episode, the chef and food anthropologist Casey Corn meets with a family that is trying to reconstruct a beloved but lost recipe, and then Corn sets out to learn about the dish and its cultural influences before amazing everyone with her recreations. It’s a charming premise, even if the episodes made available for review all seem to hinge on obvious, eminently Googleable ingredients.
… several hours, and I like European shows.
‘State of Happiness’ When to watch: Now, on Amazon (Season 1 only) and Topic (Seasons 1 and 2).
This Norwegian drama (in Norwegian and English, with subtitles) starts in 1969, and its characters are connected to the emerging oil industry, as divers, as secretaries, as executives, as farmers in danger of exploitation. Anna (Anne Regine Ellingsaeter) is our Peggy Olsen, straddling class and culture divides to forge a way in the business world.
“State” lands right between “Call the Midwife” and “For All Mankind,” shows about drive and social change, with no real villains but many good costumes. There’s also a refreshing lack of twists or schtick; all the energy and urgency of the show come from relatable human behavior. Incredible! If you liked “Deutschland 83,” the newest season of “Borgen” or PBS shows in which young people hold lambs and fall in love on lush green landscapes, watch this.
Veteran actor Mithilesh Chaturvedi, who has worked in several Bollywood films, passed away today at the age of 68 in Lucknow. He had a heart attack, followed by a cardia arrest. He has worked in TV and OTT as well, and was last seen in Gulabo Sitabo and Scam 1992.
The fourth episode of Koffee With Karan 7 saw Laal Singh Chaddha pair Kareena Kapoor Khan and Aamir Khan. The two opened up about their film, and about everything in general. Karan Johar left Kareena Kapoor in utter shock when he referred to Shahid Kapoor as her ‘ex-husband’ but later corrected it as e-boyfriend.
Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai actor Karan Mehra accused his estranged wife NishaRawal of having an affair with her ‘muh-bola bhai’ of 14 years, Rohit Sathia. He also said that Rohit had done her Kanyadaan during their wedding.
Hrithik Roshan today took to Instagram to share a shirtless picture where he could be seen training. In the photos where he has ditched his shirt, he can be seen running with his trainer to get in shape for his upcoming film Fighter. His rumoured girlfriend Saba Azad, too, took to the comment section to hype up Hrithik. She wrote, “Yes you is you was born ready!! Go ninja!! ”
Shah Rukh Khan was spotted today at the airport, returning from London. The actor looked uber cool, and it was also a rare occasion when he did not try to hide his look from the media, but rather allowed them to click his pictures.
The overwhelming box office success of Paramount’s “Top Gun: Maverick” has trickled down to every sector of the movie theater industry, as premium format company CJ 4DPLEX reports that Tom Cruise’s film has grossed $50 million in combined ticket sales from its 4DX and ScreenX formats.
“Thanks to ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ we have seen unprecedented box office numbers for 4DX and ScreenX that are consistently breaking records worldwide,” CJ 4DPLEX chief executive Jongryul Kim said. “We look forward to continuing the momentum as more and more filmmakers see the value in our premium theatre formats and how they enhance the overall viewing experience.”
“We want to thank Tom Cruise, Joe Kosinski, Jerry Bruckheimer and everyone at Paramount Pictures for creating a film that has reinvigorated the movie theatre experience and reminded audiences what it’s like to see an epic movie.” CJ 4DPLEX America president and CEO Don Savant said. “Together we have proven that our two formats offer a truly unique experience that can only be appreciated in a movie theatre.”
As “Top Gun: Maverick” pushed its box office totals to $650 million domestic and $1.3 billion worldwide, it has driven strong turnout to premium formats like Imax, Dolby and 4DX from moviegoers looking for an elevated version of one of the year’s biggest movie theater spectacles.
4DX is a format in which the theater’s seats tilt and vibrate to the action in the film, while ScreenX expands the screen to include the side walls of the theater, immersing the viewer in a 270-degree screen with the side screens filling in their peripheral view. CJ 4DPLEX worked with “Top Gun: Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski to optimize the presentation of the film in both formats, which combine to form the second-largest premium format network worldwide behind Imax.
“We designed ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ to be seen in theaters and the ScreenX and 4DX versions create an experience that are completely unique,” Kosinski said. “Working with the team at CJ 4DPLEX, I was thrilled that we were able to use the side camera footage from our six-camera cockpit array to fill out both wings of the ScreenX format with real photography. The result is a totally immersive version of our film that can’t be replicated anywhere else.”
The $50 million total for “Maverick” from 4DX/ScreenX includes $11 million from the formats’ American locations, along with $6.7 million in Korea and $1.4 million in Taiwan. In Japan, the company’s 4DX/ScreenX hybrid auditorium in Tokyo has grossed over $430,000 to date, the highest during the pandemic for any Hollywood release.
After 10 weekends in theaters, “Top Gun: Maverick” still has not dropped out of the top 5 of the North American box office charts. While it may finally drop out this weekend with the release of the Sony action film “Bullet Train,” it may get a small boost on August 12 when the film gets an Imax rerelease. When it does, the film will see its Imax grosses pass $100 million, as it currently stands at just over $98 million from the format.
Netflix’s big new fantasy series is here and not only does Sandman looks spectacular but it has a beautifully crafted score from Emmy-nominated composer David Buckley. He is the musical mastermind behind Jason Bourne (2016), Nobody (2021), and various video games such as Call of Duty: Ghosts and Batman Arkham Knight. We managed to speak to him in an interview and gave him 4 of our own questions and 5 questions from the community.
On August 5th, Netflix is bringing us the long-awaited adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s seminal comic, The Sandman; something fans have been waiting for literally decades to finally see in live-action.
The Sandman is a hard story since it jumps between many different genres. One minute we’re watching a historical drama, next it’s a disturbing horror. The story follows Dream — the anthropomorphic personification of dreams — as he goes about his business as the ruler of The Dreaming; the realm we visit when we go to sleep. At the beginning of the series, Dream is captured by a group of occultists and imprisoned for a decade, setting a chain of events that he must amend when he escapes. This genre-hopping extends to the soundtrack too.
We recently got the chance to chat with Buckley about his work on Netflix’s The Sandman. Check out our interview, which includes questions from fans and cast member Mason Alexander Park, who plays Desire in the series!
WoN: How familiar were you with the Sandman comics before working on the TV show?
I was familiar with the character and the story, but I hadn’t read any of the comics. One of the first things I did was download the comics to my iPad and immerse myself into Neil Gaiman’s world.
WoN: How much of a challenge was it to write a score for Sandman? A show as genre-hopping as this must demand a lot of musical styles.
Yes, it was hugely challenging because it does move all over the place. But what initially seemed daunting eventually became pleasurable; the varied landscapes provided fresh musical opportunities. Nevertheless, a big part of what I had to do was provide consistency and a musical through-line so that the score didn’t sound too erratic and jumbled as we move from one story/episode to another.
WoN: What was your creative process for composing the show?
Same as always, really: listen to the showrunner and creators of the show. They have inhabited this world for way longer than me – I’m one of the last people to turn up to the party! It’s not that I am waiting for orders and expect to be told what to do: that didn’t happen, thank god. But it’s super important I hear about their journey and truly understand what they are trying to do and what they are trying to make the audience feel. Then it’s a case of trying ideas, sharing with the team, and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t. There was quite a bit of time on this one, although one could always do with more. It took a while to establish a tone, but when we did there was a general sense of relief that the score was helping with the storytelling and helping to create a specific world for our characters.
Picture: Warner Bros. Television / Netflix
How was the collaborative process between yourself and the rest of the Sandman team?
Allan Heinberg, the showrunner, was my guide, friend, confidant and so much more on this project. He pooled all the notes from the various parties (there were a few) and helped me navigate a way to make everyone happy while also holding onto the vision he and I discussed at the start of the project. I was also helped enormously by Andrew Cholerton, one of the producers, who would share the ups and downs of the composing process during any time of the day or night. The project was vast, in all senses of the word, and having these seasoned and collaborative professionals on my side was truly a blessing.
Questions Submitted by Fans (and a cast member!)
Mason Alexander Park (who plays Desire in the show): How would you describe Desire’s musical motif?
I’d say, dark and a bit sexy. Slightly weird and warped vocals. It’s one of my favorite themes for the show.
Desire in The Sandman – Picture: Netflix
Swirly (@SwirlingThings): Dream can often behave very differently depending on which other characters he’s interacting with. How did you incorporate this into the soundtrack?
Dream has a main theme – a melodic idea. I wrote it knowing it had to operate in many different settings: haunting, dramatic, melancholic, and triumphant being just a few sentiments that immediately come to mind.
Anthro (@Anthrossandman): Do you have specific instruments that you associate with certain characters, and if you do, how did you incorporate that into the soundtrack?
There are some yes. Morpheus is often accompanied by a viola da gamba, doubled with an analogue synth. Desire has processed vocals. The Corinthian has a slightly other-worldly trumpet motif. Johanna has a solo cello melody. But there is a full orchestra there too to utilize when I need a bigger, more cinematic sound.
Jess (@355Jess): Was there a theme, in particular, that was fun to compose?
I really enjoyed writing a theme for some characters in episode 9. The track is called God Tells Me to Do It.
Sharmi (@KeyleenKT): Are there any details that the listeners may not notice, but you would like to draw attention to?
That’s a hard one to answer as I finished scoring this some months ago, and there was a lot of music – I think 8 or 9 hours all in all. There are probably a few things I could comment on here, but I don’t want to give away any spoilers. Ask me again in a few weeks!
All ten episodes of The Sandman are available for streaming on Netflix from August 5, 2022. Want to learn more about who’s starring in the show? Check out our cast guide and get started.
Kevin Bacon runs a gay conversion therapy camp in this queer thriller that’s light on scares and long on self-loathing.
Of the many positive trends “Get Out” ushered forth — the highbrow-ification of horror, irrefutable proof that Black stories can rock the box office — there’s also been a proliferation of socially conscious horror with somewhat mixed results. Studios began to shove political commentary into every horror movie, whether it was “The Forever Purge” pitting Mexican immigrants against gun-toting MAGA gangs, or the latest “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” turning Leatherface into a displaced victim of tech gentrification. Horror fans can sense when films force satire into a bloodbath and it’s annoying: They’re being sold a market trend and usually all they want is good clean bloody fun.
Leading that charge is Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Prods., the prolific banner behind some of the most successful horror franchises of the last decade, including “Paranormal Activity” and “The Purge” as well as “Get Out” and “Us.” But in its rapid expansion, Blumhouse is in danger of becoming the Ryan Murphy of horror: Commercial, vaguely political, and mostly average.
Blumhouse’s new slasher “They/Them” (the slash is pronounced) turns the very real horror of gay conversion therapy into a bloody nightmare. Though it’s an apt setting for a creepy chiller, the simple plot doesn’t leave much room for social commentary. Light on scares and heavy on self-loathing, “They/Them” clumsily apes conventions from the classic conversion camp comedy “But I’m a Cheerleader” and doesn’t even rise to the dreary bar set by conversion therapy dramas “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” and “Boy Erased.” Although a few dedicated performances deliver some intriguing characters, this tepid slasher thriller is a half-baked attempt at queer horror.
The movie begins promisingly, with a roadside murder complete with creepy moose and classic masked killer. The next morning a group of LGBTQ+ teenagers arrive cautiously at Whistler Camp, introduced with a sign that reads “Respect, Renew, Rejoice.” They are greeted by ruggedly handsome camp director Owen Whistler (Kevin Bacon), who delivers a warm welcoming speech, complete with surprisingly respectful language.
“I can’t make you straight. I don’t want to make you straight,” he lectures. “Of course, we hope that in your time here you’ll discover a gender-normative lifestyle that is authentic for you.”
When he points the group to boys and girls’ cabins, unflappable Jordan (Theo Germaine), who is trans and non-binary, is left holding their bag. Owen surprises the group yet again by letting Jordan join whatever cabin that makes them feel most comfortable. It’s only a matter of time before Owen reveals his true colors: When a staff member discovers a trans girl among their ranks in Alexandra (Quei Tann), he is outraged to have been “lied to” and makes her join the boys’ cabin.
The eerie setting sows seeds of unease, but the middle of the movie contains very few frights. Instead we watch Owen’s wife Cora (Carrie Preston) deliver her rather unorthodox “therapy,” calling Jordan a “scared, lonely, ugly little dyke” with a placid chill. The bite of her words feels cruel and unnecessary, and the movie does very little to earn the vitriol. When the group breaks into gendered activities like target practice and baking, the humorless attempt at levity throws it into starker contrast against the brilliance of “But I’m a Cheerleader,” which did it all of this much better more than 20 years ago.
Written and directed by John Logan, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “Gladiator,” “The Aviator” and “Hugo,” the sparse script can only be appears to be a mismatch of talent and material. Logan seems to have underestimated horror, wrongly assuming that anyone who can do historical dramas and James Bond movies can do genre. It’s baffling why someone with such a long career that’s never included horror movies (unless you count “Sweeney Todd”) would choose one for their directorial debut.
Aside from not being very scary, the movie is littered with missed opportunities. Owen and Cora’s guiding philosophy remains a mystery; a spying groundskeeper is thrown into the mix as a very short-lived red herring; and the creepy young convert couple who lust after the kids hardly have enough lines to be necessary.
There is far too little story spread out over far too many characters to feel invested in anything. That’s unfortunate, because with a little more screen time, Jordan (ostensibly the titular character?) could have been a fascinating protagonist.Bacon and Germaine both came ready to play. The power struggle between Jordan and Owen — the gender-fluid hero taking on the old guard of toxic masculinity — now that’s a battle befitting social horror.
Grade: C-
Peacock will release “They/Them” on August 5, 2022.
A Kelowna, B.C., man was snared in an online scheme that traded false friendship for funds, RCMP said.
The man contacted police July 7, explaining that he’d made friends with who he believed to be a woman living in Ontario then, later, an unnamed foreign country.
“The female asked to borrow money to cover debts and unexpected expenses,” RCMP said in a press release.
Alberta woman lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in romance/cryptocurrency scam
Alberta woman lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in romance/cryptocurrency scam – Mar 24, 2022
“The Kelowna man sent a significant amount of money to assist the woman. The victim requested to be repaid and offered the woman to come to Canada. The woman refused and ended the relationship without returning the ‘borrowed’ money.”
“If the basis of the relationship is sending money to help out a person out of country that you have not met, please use caution,” Const. Mike Della-Paolera said.
Police said this is a common internet scheme, making a criminal investigation nearly impossible.
Warning issued about romance scams ahead of Valentine’s Day
Warning issued about romance scams ahead of Valentine’s Day – Feb 13, 2022
That said, there are lessons to be learned. RCMP said warning signs are profiles that seem too perfect, someone unmet professing their love and encouraged secrecy about the relationship. Also watch out for distres following money not being sent.
“You can protect yourself by not giving out personal information, don’t accept friend requests from people you don’t know, don’t invest on platforms you don’t know, protect on line accounts and never send money to someone you haven’t met,” RCMP said.
Jared Leto , a 50-year-old Hollywood actor, recently visited Daria Korchina, a Russian model, in Italy when he was there visiting an American friend who is currently resting. Leto recently appeared in Sardinia on camera with model Kelsey Merritt, age 25.
The couple went rock climbing while on vacation and spent time on a yacht. Leto assisted in perfecting this sport and his buddy because he is an accomplished rock climber.
Media are already actively attributing the novel to the couple, albeit it is unknown what kind of relationship the two have as the actor always keeps his private life a secret.
Living in New York is Kelsey. She was the first Filipino-American to walk the Victoria’s Secret show and appeared in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue.
Olympic champion American swimmer Conor Dwyer was the subject of her liaison. After dating for more than three years, the pair split up earlier this year.
It’s important to note that Summer recently developed strong sentiments for young models. He met Russian woman Valeria Kaufman for a number of years before being interested in Daria Korchina and Kelsey. Only time will tell how far and how long this connection will last.
The brunette stated on Monday that she had tried scuba diving for the first time. She has more than 1.7 million Instagram followers. Additionally, she shared pictures of their lunch at Cala Di Volpe.
Jared has previously been linked to Cameron Diaz, Katy Perry, Lindsay Lohan, Scarlett Johansson, Ashely Olsen, and model Valery Kaufman. It is uncertain if the two are dating.
Conor Dwyer, an Olympian, was her boyfriend from 2018 until their alleged breakup early this year.
Currently residing in New York City, Kelsey was designated the first Filipino-American to walk the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show catwalk in 2018. She was also featured in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.
UPDATED:Visa and Mastercard said they are suspending payment privileges of TrafficJunky, the advertising arm of online porn network operator MindGeek.
The announcements come a week after a judge denied Visa’s request to be removed from a case in which MindGeek is being sued for allegedly distributing child pornography — and which alleges that Visa knowingly facilitated MindGeek’s ability to monetize it.
Visa CEO Alfred Kelly, in a blog post Thursday, said the payment processing giant “strongly disagree[s]” with the decision and that the company is “confident in our position.”
However, the court’s decision “also created new uncertainty about the role of TrafficJunky, MindGeek’s advertising arm,” he wrote. For that reason, Visa will suspend TrafficJunky’s Visa acceptance privileges “until further notice,” according to Kelly. The suspension means that Visa cards will not be able to be used to purchase advertising on any MindGeek-affiliated sites, including Pornhub.
“We have made it clear that acquirers and merchants who are unable to meet our standards and requirements are not welcome on our network,” Kelly wrote.
Mastercard on Thursday also said it was suspending TrafficJunky from its network. “New facts from last week’s court ruling made us aware of advertising revenue outside of our view that appears to provide Pornhub with indirect funding,” the company said. “We have zero tolerance for illegal activity on our network. We will continue to follow this case and take further action, as necessary.”
The plaintiff in the case is Serena Fleites, who alleges that when she was 13 her then-boyfriend shared a sexually explicit video on Pornhub that was then viewed millions of times across MindGeek sites. On Friday, July 29, Judge Cormac Carney of the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California denied Visa’s motion to dismiss the claim it violated California’s Unfair Competition Law.
“Visa knew that MindGeek’s websites were teeming with monetized child porn,” the judge wrote in the decision. “At this early stage of the proceedings, before plaintiff has had any discovery from which to derive Visa’s state of mind, the court can comfortably infer that Visa intended to help MindGeek monetize child porn from the very fact that Visa continued to provide MindGeek the means to do so and knew MindGeek was indeed doing so.”
“Visa is not alleged to have simply created an incentive to commit a crime, it is alleged to have knowingly provided the tool used to complete a crime,” Carney wrote.
Visa’s Kelly noted that in the judge at this stage in the case “must accept as true all allegations made in a lawsuit — even if they are not accurate or proven.” He reiterated the company’s position that Visa’s role, policies and practices were “mischaracterized” in Carney’s ruling.
“Let me be clear: Visa condemns sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, and child sexual abuse. It is illegal, and Visa does not permit the use of our network for illegal activity,” the CEO wrote. “Our rules explicitly and unequivocally prohibit the use of our products to pay for content that depicts nonconsensual sexual behavior or child sexual abuse.”
Visa does not “make moral judgments on legal purchases made by consumers, and we respect the rightful role of lawmakers to make decisions about what is legal and what is not,” Kelly added. “Accordingly, Visa can be used only at MindGeek studio sites that feature adult professional actors in legal adult entertainment.”
In December 2020, Visa and Mastercard both suspended the ability for consumers to make payments to Pornhub and other MindGeek sites that have user-generated content. That came after the New York Times published a lengthy report by columnist Nicholas Kristof that featured Fleites’ story and documented how MindGeek “monetizes child rapes.”
You’ve almost certainly seen work that wouldn’t exist without the efforts of animation pioneer Will Vinton. But it’s just as likely that this is the first time you’ve ever heard his name.
Director Marq Evans (“The Glamour and the Squalor”) is determined to ensure that it won’t be the last. In “Claydream,” he’s made the tribute Vinton deserves, and the introduction most of us need.
As a student at Berkeley in the late 1960s, Vinton planned to go into architecture. But he found himself drawn to the sculptural works of Catalan visionary Antoni Gaudí, which in turn led to his own experiments with modelling clay. Once he combined this new interest with his love of film, he began innovating the seemingly limitless, if eternally painstaking, genre of stop-motion animation.
He and his artistic partner, Bob Gardiner, won an Oscar for their Claymation short “Closed Mondays” in 1975. Despite their messy split, the ensuing decades brought Vinton many more successes. On the film front, he made more Oscar-nominated shorts, early music videos, and interstitial sequences for film and television.
Most prominent, perhaps, were the California Raisins and Domino’s Noid ads, visions of which will spark instantaneous nostalgia in some, and bafflement at their erstwhile popularity in others. The M&Ms characters we still know were born in Vinton’s Oregon studio, as was much of Eddie Murphy’s animated series “The PJs.”
Most important, to nearly every one of this film’s participants, was the studio itself. For many years it was an almost utopian community, an only-in-Portland collective that “felt like art school plus vacation.”
But eventually, capitalism took over like untrimmed ivy. Within the studio, colleagues began to notice Vinton’s limits: his lack of business agility, and his reluctance to share enough — credit, emotions, explanations — with the people around him.
A new, more corporate-oriented CEO was hired to oversee the growing workload, and fellow Portlander Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, was tapped as an investor. And then came the conditions.
First, we learn, Knight insisted that his son Travis (a rapper who went by the name “Chilly Tee”) be offered a job. Eventually, the pair laid claim to more and more of the studio. Once Phil had a controlling share, Travis was put on the board of directors, and Vinton was pushed out of the company he had created.
This is, in other words, an allegory of good and evil — or art and commerce, if you’d rather — much like the ones Vinton himself liked to make. The Knights eventually turned Vinton Studios into Laika, which went on to make acclaimed animated features like “Coraline,” “ParaNorman,” and ” Missing Link.” All of which are, regardless of one’s sympathies, a long way from singing raisins.
Through copious clips of studio work and bittersweet interviews with Vinton, his former colleagues, and his family members, we get a sense of both his strengths and weaknesses. Evans also gives us a clear view of the ways in which personal ambition can simultaneously inspire and obstruct. Ultimately, though, he builds the case that Vinton Studios was a jewel box fantasy, proof of Vinton’s own belief in animation as “magic.”
It’s no coincidence, though, that Evans bookends his tribute with legal deposition scenes between a dismissive Knight and a clearly outmatched Vinton. They’re dispiriting enough that, like Vinton, we’d much rather retreat to the boundless illusion of imaginary worlds.
“Claydream” opens in NYC August 5 and LA August 12.
Quentin Tarantino says he doesn’t normally like to weigh in on current films, but he’s making an exception for Top Gun: Maverick. The director was asked about the film while appearing on the ReelBlend podcast this week with his Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avery. Tarantino began with the caveat that he doesn’t like to talk […]
Starring Brad Pitt, Joey King, Brian Tyree Henry, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Sandra Bullock, Andrew Koji, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Shannon, Bad Bunny and Zazie Beetz. Directed by David Leitch. 126 minutes. Opens Friday in theatres everywhere, with Thursday previews. 14A
The first rule of “Bullet Train” is we don’t talk about the plot of “Bullet Train.”
If you insist, gentle readers, I suppose we could, messing with the silence code of “Fight Club,” which also starred Brad Pitt. But it wouldn’t do any of us a lick of good.
“Bullet Train” is a summer action vehicle where the gas pedal is fully depressed but the brain is set in neutral. Pitt plays a trouble-prone character who is like Bugs Bunny set loose in a speeding rail conveyance full of murderous Elmer Fudds.
This is more of a cartoon than a movie, directed by David Leitch, who specializes in style-over-substance confections like “Atomic Blonde,” the first “John Wick” and the second “Deadpool.” The screenplay by Zak Olkewicz is based on the Japanese novel “Maria Beetle” by Kōtarō Isaka.
What happens in “Bullet Train” means nothing. To whom it happens means a lot in terms of enjoying this brilliantly cast movie, at least until the story outstays its welcome.
The inimitable Mr. Pitt, who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for his comic timing and physical humour, hasn’t had this much fun since he played the mumbling thug in Guy Ritchie’s “Snatch,” one of the many blood-and-banter films that “Bullet Train” resembles.
Here Pitt sends up his superstar status by playing Ladybug, a flaky international spy and assassin in a bucket hat and black-rimmed glasses who is in the midst of re-evaluating his life.
Maybe, he reasons, there’s more to existence than doing “snatch and grab jobs” that invariably result in carnage resembling Grand Guignol theatre. Ladybug now wants to make the world a better place, refusing even to carry his trusty gun.
“You put peace out in the world, you get peace back,” he tells his cynical handler, Maria, played by a delightfully deadpan Sandra Bullock.
Can you tell he’s been doing meditation and reading self-help books?
Maria scoffs. She gave him the new code name “Ladybug,” a joke about his habit of being in the wrong place at the right time and leaving a scarlet puddle in his wake.
Hoping to ease him back into the espionage game, Maria gives Ladybug what looks like a no-brainer assignment: to recover a silver briefcase that’s aboard the world’s fastest train, zooming between Tokyo and Kyoto. (The briefcase is this film’s MacGuffin, a Hitchcockian device to prod action, as is a deadly snake that just happens to have been let loose on the train for added laughs.)
Neither Maria nor Ladybug reckon on him encountering the Looney Tunes assortment of troublemakers who are also on the train, literally along for the ride for the purpose of maximizing mayhem.
First and foremost are two engaging knuckleheads played by Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who go by the names Lemon and Tangerine for the purpose of an eye-rolling running gag. They’re also known as “the Twins,” for an eye-rolling sight gag. (Leitch loves this kind of in-joke nuttiness: a furtive character reads the classic spy novel “Shibumi,” which was also spotted in “John Wick.”)
Lemon and Tangerine have their own designs on that silver briefcase, which they’re transporting to a very mean criminal kingpin known as White Death. Other homicidal characters aboard the train — played by Joey King (“The Princess”), Zazie Beetz (“Deadpool 2,” TV’s “Atlanta”) and the rapper Bad Bunny — have their own reasons for firing a gun, jabbing a needle or waving a knife around.
We learn that the bullet train everybody is aboard has 16 cars. It seems at times as if there are 16 different storylines, including an outrageous continuous product plug for Fuji bottled water.
The film often loses momentum, a weird thing to happen in a tale themed on propulsion. And for all the slapstick stoogery going on, the abundant killing isn’t hilarious and often way over the top. When Lemon and Tangerine argue about whether Lemon has killed 16 or 17 people, Leitch feels obliged to show us all of the hits, in one of the movie’s many rapid-fire montages.
The good news is that Pitt is in most of the stories and he clearly enjoys working under the watch of Leitch, a former stuntman who used to double for Pitt in films like “Fight Club” and “Ocean’s Eleven.”
Leitch can apparently persuade Pitt to do anything, including imitating John Travolta’s cocky walk in “Saturday Night Fever,” set to “Stayin’ Alive,” of course.
I wanted to like “Bullet Train” more than I did, but I liked it well enough as a summer distraction and Brad Pitt attraction to give it a pass. Peace out, as Ladybug would say.
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The Oscar-winning “Citizenfour” director’s latest will screen as New York Film Festival’s Centerpiece selection.
Film at Lincoln Center has announced that Oscar-winning “Citizenfour” director Laura Poitras’s “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” will be the Centerpiece selection for the 60th New York Film Festival at Alice Tully Hall on October 7. Photographer and documentary subject Nan Goldin will design the 60th New York Film Festival poster, which will be revealed at a later date.
The film will weave two narratives, per the synopsis: the fabled life and career of era-defining artist Nan Goldin and the downfall of the Sackler family, the pharmaceutical dynasty Goldin personally took on in her fight to hold accountable those responsible for the deadly opioid epidemic. Following her own personal struggle with opioid addiction, Goldin, who rose from the New York “No Wave” underground to become one of the great photographers of the late 20th century, put herself at the forefront of the battle against the Sacklers, both as an activist at art institutions around the world that had accepted millions from the family and as an advocate for the destigmatization of drug addiction.
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Illustrated with a rich trove of photographs by Goldin, who mesmerizingly narrates her own story, including her dysfunctional suburban upbringing, the loss of her teenage sister, and her community’s fight against AIDS in the 1980s, Poitras’s film is an enthralling, empowering work that stirringly connects personal tragedy, political awareness, and artistic expression.
“I am thrilled to be part of the New York Film Festival with Nan,” said director Laura Poitras. “Her art and activism are deeply rooted in this city. It is an honor to return to the festival, and to do this with Nan is so meaningful.”
“As soon as we watched Laura Poitras’s piercing new film, we knew that Nan Goldin was the right artist to design the official poster for the 60th anniversary of the New York Film Festival,” said Eugene Hernandez, executive director of the New York Film Festival. “Nan’s unflinching bravery in life and in work have made her one of the most arresting visual artists of our time. In designing this year’s poster, she joins a renowned roster of artists who have contributed their work to the festival, beginning in 1963 with Larry Rivers and running up through last year’s poster artist, Kara Walker.”
“One fearless and empathetic gaze meets another in this remarkable portrait of Nan Goldin by Laura Poitras,” said Dennis Lim, artistic director, New York Film Festival. “We are delighted to welcome Poitras back to the festival with All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, an absorbing account of Goldin’s work and activism that shows us how much they both matter.”
Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema and takes place September 30 through October 16, 2022.
Laura Poitras’ “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” has been announced as the Centerpiece selection for the 60th New York Film Festival in October.
The “Citizenfour” director’s new documentary centers around famed New York photographer Nan Goldin, who became the public face of opposition to the Sackler family and their phamaceutical dynasty. After battling her own opioid addiction, Goldin took art institutions bearing the Sackler name to task, and fought for the destigmatization of drug addiction. With Goldin as narrator, the film dives into her difficult upbringing and her community’s fight against AIDS in the 1980s, among other aspects of her life story.
Film at Lincoln Center also announced today that Goldin will design the festival’s official poster, to be revealed at a later date.
“I am thrilled to be part of the New York Film Festival with Nan,” said Poitras. “Her art and activism are deeply rooted in this city. It is an honor to return to the festival, and to do this with Nan is so meaningful.”
“One fearless and empathetic gaze meets another in this remarkable portrait of Nan Goldin by Laura Poitras,” said Dennis Lim, the artistic director of New York Film Festival. “We are delighted to welcome Poitras back to the festival with All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, an absorbing account of Goldin’s work and activism that shows us how much they both matter.”
Poitras previously debuted her documentary “Citizenfour” at the 2014 New York Film Festival. The Edward Snowden film won Best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Academy Awards. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is the first feature-length documentary she has directed since “Risk,” the 2016 film about Julian Assange.
Last week, Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” was announced as the festival’s opening film. Starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, the film will make its North American premiere on Sept. 30 after its world premiere in Venice.
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” will screen at Alice Tully Hall on Oct. 7, 2022.
Wednesday, August 3, 2022 ratings — New episodes: MasterChef, So You Think You Can Dance, Mysteries Decoded, Wellington Paranormal, Big Brother, and The Challenge: USA. Special:CMA Fest. Reruns: Wellington Paranormal, SWAT, Chicago Med, Chicago Fire, and Chicago PD.
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These are the fast affiliate ratings. The percentages represent the change since the previous original episode. (Percentages aren’t given for reruns or specials.) To see past ratings for a particular show, click the show’s link. The show pages are updated with the daily final ratings when they become available. Those pages include season averages to date.
Brittney Griner was sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony Thursday for “smuggling” and storing cannabis oil, sending U.S. politicians, sports journalists and others into a frenzy of heated reaction to the “unacceptable” punishment handed down by the foreign court.
“Anyone who can look at Brittney on the screen and not see the humanity and severity of this situation is sick,” Bleacher Report host Arielle Chambers tweeted, adding that “Brittney Griner should be on US soil. BRING HER TF HOME.”
The Phoenix Mercury player has been in Russian custody since February, when she was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport with vape cartridges that contained cannabis oil, which is banned in the country. The WNBA champion pleaded guilty on drug charges in July, but maintains she did not intend to break the law.
President Joe Biden called the decision “unacceptable” in a statement obtained by ABC News, calling on Russia to “release her immediately so she can be with her wife, loved ones, friends, and teammates.”
Biden has been in contact with Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, after the WNBA star wrote the president a handwritten letter asking him to not “forget about [her] and the other American detainees.” News outlets have speculated that Griner could be exchanged for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Negotiations for such a swap could not begin in earnest, however, until Griner’s sentence was finalized. But even if that outcome were to come to pass, many believe a grave injustice has already been done.
Sports journalist Taylor Rooks shared her disappointment at the decision, tweeting “It’s day 168. even one more day there is too much.”
I pray that these negotiations happen quickly. It’s day 168. even one more day there is too much. That testimony was heartbreaking. Let’s get her home https://t.co/diVBO3RYXO
Read additional reaction’s to Griner’s sentencing below:
Thinking of BG and how much light she relentlessly brought to everyone around her. Even after sentencing is complete I hope @POTUS & @WhiteHouse will continue to do everything in their power to bring Brittney Griner & all other Americans detained abroad home
Anyone who can look at Brittney on the screen and not see the humanity and severity of this situation is sick. Do not come in my mentions to attempt to justify this horrific situation or say she deserves it. Brittney Griner should be on US soil. BRING HER TF HOME.
Brittney Griner has been convicted and sentenced to 9 years in prison for bringing into Russia two cartridges of cannabis oil. Russia is not our friend. It is a hostile foreign adversary preying on an innocent person as a political pawn as trade bait for a prisoner exchange.
Seeing the Justice Department FINALLY charge the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor shortly after we find out a Russian court is sentencing Brittney Griner to 9 years in prison is making me feel some type of way.
— Ernest is at #NABJNAHJ22 (@MrErnestOwens) August 4, 2022
As various cable stations cover the 9 year sentence for WNBA star Brittney Griner in Russia, I cant help think more context is necessary. This isnt a real court with a real sentence, this is just the Russian government deciding what provides them with the most leverage
Almost ten years since Fifth Harmony first became a girl group, it’s incredible to look back at their inception, reception, and now take over as a group and individual artists. The group came at a time when the biggest girl group before them dated back to Destiny’s Child. While Camila Cabello’s departure in December 2016 got attention – more damaging, than non – the artists have gained success far beyond their days on the X-Factor and as a collective. Here is where the ladies of Fifth Harmony are at now.
Fifth Harmony celebrates 10th anniversary
Unknown to many, the girl group actually finished in third place on their season of X-Factor. While the girls did not get enough votes to advance to the Top two, they quickly were signed to a record deal only one month after the season ended.
Multiple AMAs, a Billboard Women in Music award, iHeartRadio Music Awards, MTV Video Music Awards, People’s Choice Awards, and additional awards and sales later, the women continue to rise in the music industry.
Ally Brooke
Ally competed in season 28 of Dancing with the Stars and placed third alongside pro-dancer, Sasha Farber. Shortly after, she released an autobiography titled Finding Your Harmony in October 2020. She signed a new record deal with labels Duars Entertainment and AMSI in August 2021 and is still working on her debut album (which will be an all-Spanish language album).
Normani
Normani is also hard at work on her debut album but has released singles along the way. She released her first solo single, “Motivation” in August 2019 and has released “Diamonds” with Megan Thee Stallion, and “Wild Side”, featuring Cardi B since then. Her duets have found her just as much success. The duet “Dancing with a Stranger”, where she sings with Sam Smith reached the top ten charts in the US and UK. Her first duet, “Love Lies” (2018), with Khalid also topped the charts, reaching number one, and earning a 5× platinum certification.
Dinah Jane
Dinah also has a new record deal under L.A. Reid’s HitCo Entertainment and released her first EP, Dinah Jane 1, on April 19, 2019. She was set to go on tour in January 2020 but it was shortly postponed after the COVID-19 pandemic. No new projects have been announced as of yet.
Lauren Jauregui
Lauren is on tour soon as the opening act for singer Banks. Her debut EP was released on November 5, 2021, with singles that included “Colors” and “Scattered”. She has also experimented with Spanish-language music with the 2020 single, “Lento”.
Camila Cabello
Camila has continued to remain consistent in the music industry since her departure from the group. She released her debut studio album, Camila, in 2018. With help from her first single “Havana”, the album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200. She has collaborated with artists such as Shawn Mendes and Machine Gun Kelly and is a two-time Grammy nominee. She has also done acting and has a position as a judge on The Voice. Her third studio album, Familia, was released on April 8, 2022.
What is your favorite Fifth Harmony single? Sound off below! We’d love to hear from you.
Czech/Slovak documentary-opera “Kapr Code” will receive its Czech premiere at the 26th Jihlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival, which runs Oct. 25-30, Film New Europe reports.
Lucie Králová’s film focuses on the contradictory life of Czech progressive composer and prominent communist Jan Kapr (1914-88). Lightdox is handling world sales.
The director found out about Kapr by chance. “A friend of mine told me about Kapr’s old apartment in Prague where his legacy was being stored. She asked me to digitalize his films, and step by step, I got to know him. His films are really fascinating because they look like small fiction sketches,” Králová explained in a statement.
The subtitle of the film is “Life as a Composition,” because Kapr composed not only his music, but also his life. He is the author of his own story, which he filmed. The doc soundtracks his silent films with his music.
“I asked myself how I could talk about his life using a new perspective. I didn’t want to make a historical film with a closed message. I wanted to ask what is still important today about Kapr. I was inspired by the Czech opera director Jiří Adámek, who doesn’t make classical opera, but new opera. He uses opera principles to deal with contemporary issues and thus he is able to attract a younger audience,” Králová said.
The film is a Czech/Slovak coproduction, produced by DOCUfilm Praha and Mindset Pictures, in coproduction with Czech Television, VIRUSfilm and MagicLab.
The project has been supported by the Czech Film Fund with 40,890 Euros (1 million CZK), the South Moravian Film Fund with 12,267 Euros (300,000 CZK), and the Slovak Audiovisual Fund with 30,000 Euros. The budget was approximately 170,000 Euros (4.193 million CZK), producer Andrea Shaffer from Mindset Pictures told FNE.
Courtesy of FNE
The project is an IMZ Avant Première pitch winner and it also participated in the work-in-progress sidebar at ParisDoc Cinereél as well as dok.incubator.
“Kapr Code” had its international premiere at Vision du Réel in April, in the Burning Lights section. It also screened in the main competition at Filmfest München in June, and won the Best Film Award at the DocMusic Krakow.
This article is published in partnership with online news service Film New Europe, which covers film and TV industry news from across Central and Eastern Europe.
The Valet is a 2022 American rom-com film, where you might think you will find your typical “fake relationship” story. However, the film, which is full of heart, does more than that. It showcases characters who are struggling to get through problems, the way society views the underrepresented, and the importance of not what we are, but who we are.
Courtesy of Hulu
This picture is a remake of the 2006 French film of the same name, directed by Richard Wong. Wong does a great job of capturing moments of seriousness and comedy at the same time. He makes the balance seem effortless. Wong did have some help from a charming cast, some doting cultural concreteness and sunshiny Los Angeles skies. The Valet absolutely proves that remakes can be done in a new and refreshing way that can be enjoyed by everyone.
Courtesy of Hulu
The story begins with the main character — Antonio Flores (Eugenio Derbez) — hardworking valet and unambitious, who tries to make ends meet. Flores lives with his mother that he adores and desperately wants to be back with his ex-wife Isabel. Flores tries his best to be a good father and a role model for his son Marco but finds himself struggling at times.
At the same time, we are introduced to Olivia Alan (Samara Weaving), famous actress, who is preparing for her latest movie premiere. Alan is living the life she is used to, one of no financial worries, living her best life. Alan does spend time at the company she runs, which focused on woman and health. Her only problem is that she deals with paparazzi who are always trying to get that exclusive.
With two characters living such different lives, it would seem impossible that the two would have anything in common. However, as they always say all of us can connect with one another on a human level if we just listen. These two characters stumbled across each other in the most random way possible. In doing so, we find that Olivia is having an affair with Vincent: billionaire, who’s married to another women. So as you can imagine things begin to get complicated pretty quickly.
Courtesy of Hulu
Everything is turned upside down after a small quarrel between lovers, one paparazzi photo and a threat to have all their secrets exposed. In order to protect everyone’s image, all three find themselves involve in a deal — Olivia pretends she’s dating Antonio so that her reputation stays intact and while also preventing Vincents wife from finding out about the affair.
Wong really gives viewers a gift as you find yourself deeply involved in the characters lives and invested in not only how this is all going to turn out but also in learning more about them. You find yourself leaning in to see how difficult it is to be in someone else’s shoes. Derbez, is a pleasure to behold as Flores. His character predisposes the viewer to himself from the first minutes because he is so simple, funny, sincere and warm-hearted. You feel sympathy for this man, as he struggles with so many things including appearing invisible to the world. In one moment he is a regular guy dealing with every day problems and the next he is thrusted into this world of luxury he has never know. Derbez is able to balance out both worlds perfectly and with the charm of an angel. His performance is both astounding and believable.
Courtesy of Hulu
Meanwhile, the same can be said for Weaving who truly embodies Allan. She transforms herself completely making her the idea actor to play this role. Weaving is able to portray all reactions and emotions with a comfortability that makes the audience laugh yet understand her. Weaving also brings life to what could be deemed a “typical” rich girl and humanizes her in a way that makes her both intriguing yet interesting. We learn there is a lot more to her than we originally though when the film begins.
Allan has self-confidence and anxiety which is why she desperately needs someone, who will love her not for her money and fame but for herself which is something she has been struggling to find. It was important to show her mental health issues to provide some depth to a character that everyone watching probably judged within the first few minutes. These additional elements Wong brings in, allows for viewers to change their initial reactions and thoughts. This perception shift parallels exactly what the characters are going through in the film.
Both Derbez and Weaving are able to create a chemistry between them that helps the audience buy into their characters becoming friends and truly getting to know one another. The characters learn from each other and begin to develop an understanding of each others perspectives.
Additionally, it would be impossible to watch this movie without the presence of the supporting cast which includes the rich husband and wife, play by Max Greenfield and Betsy Brandt. Their relationship gives us a peak behind the curtain of their money revealing that while you can feel that you have achieved everything and might possess all you could ever imagine, it will never be enough. As they say, money can not buy you happiness. Greenfield and Brandt are amazing supporting cast members that not only add hilarious moments to the film but are also playing two people so unpredictable it helps prevent the story from being another cliché. Greenfield is funny, charming, and hilarious — he has a real genuine way of acting that just makes you want to see more. Meanwhile Brandt is a powerhouse on screen taking over most scenes she is in dominating the lines and living her character. Both Greenfield and Brandt are forces to be reckoned with and add much needed content to this film.
Courtesy of Hulu
For Wong it’s clear that the main trump card of the film is humor. It’s always on topic and is used in ways to show the struggle and real life issues without pressing too hard on the topic or come off as preaching. He balances the tough with the love, the struggles with the happiness, and the stereotypes with the truth. It’s a job well done for all involved.
While not trying to give too much away, towards the end of the film there is a moment with one of the characters who gives a moving speech. This speech is truly a moment all should hear.
This movie touches so many strings of your soul and is a masterpiece. It is one that is worth multiple watches. The movie is currently streaming now on Hulu.
Lucy and Stephen, played by Grace Van Patten and Jackson White, meet in college and instantly fall into a steamy, addictive relationship. The “honeymoon period” ends fairly quickly and their roller-coaster romance begins to take a turn as secrets and lies begin to build up in the first trailer for Tell Me Lies, which was released on August 4.
Grace Van Patten and Jackson White in ‘Tell Me Lies.’ (Hulu)
Initially, Lucy doesn’t know if Stephen is exactly her type. But it doesn’t take long for these two to fall into each other. The drama escalates very quickly between them. When Lucy’s roommate dies tragically, her world totally shifts. She feels guilty for what happened to her roommate, and her vulnerability draws her closer to Stephen.
However, Lucy soon discovers that Stephen still has a girlfriend. Pulling double duty? Instant red flag. “There’s a lot about him you don’t know,” Lucy is told. Stephen says things are “complicated,” echoing the words of many toxic boyfriends before him. If Stephen’s lying about his girlfriend, what else is he lying to Lucy about?
The official synopsis for the series reads: “Tell Me Lies follows a tumultuous but intoxicating relationship as it unfolds over the course of 8 years. When Lucy Albright and Stephen DeMarco meet at college, they are at that formative age when seemingly mundane choices lead the way to irrevocable consequences. Although their relationship begins like any typical campus romance, they quickly fall into an addictive entanglement that will permanently alter not only their lives, but the lives of everyone around them.”
Grace Van Patten as Lucy. (Hulu)
Tell Me Lies is based on Carola Lovering’s bestselling novel of the same name. The show also stars Catherine Missal, Spencer House, Sonia Mena, Branden Cook, Benjamin Wadsworth, and Alicia Crowder. Emma Roberts serves as an executive producer.
The Hulu series will premiere on September 7 with three episodes. New episodes will stream weekly.
Endeavor Streaming has partnered with AiBUY, an interactive shopping platform that has integrated with Shopify and Salesforce, to allow clients to add a live e-commerce experience to their owned and operated streaming applications.
The UFC and New York Fashion Week: The Shows are signed on as initial launch partners to use AiBUY’s technology, which features a patented overlay that allows consumers to shop for products while still streaming the live content.
“This new interactive feature highlights Endeavor Streaming’s pursuit of platform innovation to ensure we’re offering a best-in-class streaming solution to our clients,” Matt Starker, the svp corporate strategy for Endeavor Streaming, said in a statement on Wednesday.
The full rollout, which is available to clients immediately, comes after Endeavor Streaming had a beta launch with NYFW: The Shows, which is run by Endeavor subsidiary IMG, last year. Though the company has not released revenue figures for the beta launch, Patrick Connors, the svp global brand partnerships for IMG Fashion Events & Properties, said giving the NYFW audience the “opportunity to shop directly from the runway stream is the natural next step in see now, buy now.”
As for the UFC, another Endeavor subsidiary, fans are expected to be able to purchase tickets, merchandise and other products while streaming a match, giving the company another chance to boost sales.
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