After announcing the premiere of the new Miyazaki film, the presence of Wes Anderson and J.A. Bayona, and unveiling the posters paying tribute to Nastassja Kinski and Marisa Paredes, here’s a new guest of Lumière 2023!
Alexander Payne is a major figure of American independent cinema. After making his mark with his first film Citizen Ruth (1996), followed by the satirical comedy, Election (1999) and received acclaim for the poignant About Schmidt (2002), starring Jack Nicholson. Alexander Payne is the winner of two Oscars for Best Screenplay, first for Sideways (2004), then The Descendants (2011), using his trademark razor-sharp dialogue and humor to convey an irony that still brims with emotion. In 2013, the filmmaker directed Bruce Dern in Nebraska; then, in 2017, Matt Damon, Christopher Waltz and Kristen Wiig in Downsizing.
The filmmaker will be among the guests of honour at Lumière 2023. He will introduce the premiere of his eighth feature. The Holdovers (2023) follows a curmudgeonly instructor (Paul Giamatti) at a prestigious American school who is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually he forms an unlikely bond with one of them – a damaged, brainy troublemaker (newcomer Dominic Sessa) – and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).
Tyler “Ninja” Blevins is stepping away from the gaming keyboard — and getting into your earbuds with his first-ever podcast.
The top gaming influencer will host twice-weekly podcast “AFK w/ Ninja,” set to premiere Sept. 12 across all major platforms. New episodes of the show will be available every Tuesday and Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the SiriusXM app and all major podcasts platforms.
“I’m hyped to finally talk about what has been in the works for a long time,” Blevins said in a prepared statement. “I’ve always wanted to blaze new trails, and making my mark in the podcast world gives me the chance to sit on the other side of the table to dish out the questions myself!”
The first of the weekly “AFK w/ Ninja” episodes will feature “fun and wide-ranging conversations” with notable athletes, actors, musicians and (of course) gamers. Initial guests will include Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey, Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff, multihyphenate Steve Aoki and Fortnite streamer Chica Live (Maria Lopez). The second weekly episode will focus on top news, viral happenings — and “everything online and beyond.”
“AFK w/ Ninja” (referencing the chat abbreviation for “away from keyboard”) is produced in collaboration with audio-media company SALT and SiriusXM’s Stitcher Studios. SXM Media has exclusive global ad-sales rights. The podcast is executive produced by SALT’s Nick Panama, Jamie Schefman and Noah Gersh.
“Today more than ever gaming is at the forefront of popular culture,” Panama, SALT co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “There is no one better than Ninja to bring his iconic world to podcast audiences around the world.”
Blevins counts more than 74 million followers across multiple platforms. He was the first gaming streamer to get an exclusive skin in both “Fortnite” and “Raid: Shadow Legends” as a playable champion, and was the first pro gamer to be featured on the cover of ESPN The Magazine. Among his Hollywood credits, Ninja had a cameo in feature film “Free Guy” starring Ryan Reynolds and has had roles in “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania” and Fox’s “Duncanville.” He also is the author of two graphic novels: “Ninja: The Most Dangerous Game” and “Ninja: War for the Dominions.”
Blevins is repped by CAA and Loeb & Loeb. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Chicago.
As Spectrum customers looking to watch ABC, ESPN and other Disney-owned channels remain in the dark due to a carriage dispute, the entertainment giant is urging Charter’s 14.7 million subscribers to ditch the cable giant for Hulu with Live TV.
Disney channels were pulled from Charter stations on Thursday, ahead of the start of college football and the ongoing U.S. Open over the holiday weekend, as Disney and Charter were unable to come to terms on a new deal. Now Disney is pointing upset customers towards its direct-to-consumer service.
Hulu with Live TV, which is available for $69.99 per month, offers 90 live channels that include sports, news, and entertainment. In addition, Disney said its networks and stations are also available through offerings such as DIRECTV Stream, YouTube TV, Sling and Fubo. ABC Owned Television Stations are also available over the air at no cost.
“Disney deeply values its relationship with its viewers and is hopeful Charter is ready to have more conversations that will restore access to its content to Spectrum customers as quickly as possible,” the company wrote in a blog post Monday evening. “However, if you are one of these frustrated customers, it can be infuriating to not be able to access the content you want. Luckily, consumers have more choices today than ever before to immediately access the programming they want without a cable subscription.”
The move comes after Charter held a conference call with analysts on Friday in which they said that Disney offered a traditional long-term deal that insisted on “high penetration payment minimums despite its own a la carte offerings,” forced its channels into packages where they are currently not included, required additional large rate increases by “forcing DTC service inclusion and additional payment to existing linear customers,” and offered “little incentive” to sell DTC apps to broadband customers.
In return, Charter said it offered to accept Disney’s rate increases in exchange for bundling ad-supported streaming apps with packaged linear products and “lower penetration payment minimums” to provide packaging flexibility to customers. It also offered to market Disney’s streaming apps to its broadband customers and a shorter extension to its current contract to continue to discuss its proposal, but said Disney declined.
According to Charter, the multichannel video industry has lost 25 million customers over the last five years, or nearly 25% of its total base. In comparison, Charter’s customer base has only declined about 10% over the same period. The company added that it’s paying roughly $2.2 billion to Disney in annual programming costs, not including the impact of advertising revenue for both parties, and only about 25% of its video subscribers regularly engage with Disney’s content.
“We’re on the edge of a precipice. We’re either moving forward in the new collaborative video model or we’re moving on. This is not a typical carriage dispute. It’s significant for Charter and we think it’s even more significant for programmers and the broader video ecosystem,” Charter CEO Christopher Winfrey told analysts. “We propose the model to Disney that we believe creates better alignment for the industry and better products for customers, a model that can stabilize linear video and create a clear growth path for direct to consumer video with a more customer friendly and financially attractive end state for programmers.”
Disney fired back on Friday, arguing that Charter refused to enter into a new carriage agreement that “reflects market-based terms.”
In a statement, Disney said it offered “the most favorable terms on rates, distribution, packaging, advertising and more” and “proposed creative ways to make Disney’s direct-to-consumer services available to their Spectrum TV subscribers, including opportunities for new and flexible packages where those services become a focal point of what the consumer might choose.”
“Although Charter claims to value our direct-to-consumer services, they are demanding these services for free as they have stated publicly,” Disney added. “Charter is depriving consumers of that content because they are failing to ascribe any value in exchange for licensing those services.”
Disney argued that it offered Charter an extension to keep its networks up during negotiations, but that they “declined in the middle of programming that is important to their subscribers, including the US Open.”
“Charter’s actions are a disservice to consumers ahead of the kickoff for the college football season on ABC and ESPN’s networks. We value our relationship with Charter and we are ready to get back to the negotiation table to restore access to our unrivaled content to their customers as quickly as possible,” the statement concluded.
In a separate blog post, Disney noted that ESPN aired more than half (53) of the top cable 100 telecasts in Charter homes during the past year, citing Nielsen data. It also noted that 71% of Charter subscribers tune into Disney’s networks and stations in the average month and that Charter subscribers watched more than 3.3 billion hours of content on Disney networks and stations over the past year, according to Nielsen.
If the impasse between the two parties is unable to be resolved, Charter says it would look to platforms like Xumo, Apple TV and Roku to create new packages for general entertainment with more flexibility and the ability for consumers to add on a la carte direct to consumer packages as they see fit.
Chief financial officer Jessica Fischer said Charter anticipates a loss to video related revenue as a result of the dispute, due to an expected decline in video customers and any potential credits or adjustments. It also expects reduced advertising revenue from the loss of content, significant reductions to programming expenses and higher costs to handle a large number of customer calls.
Shares of Disney, which are down 7.6% year to date, are up 0.7% during Tuesday’s trading session, while Charter stock, which is up 22% year to date, are down 1.25%.
In 1970s San Diego, a hotshot anchor and his news team work hard and party harder until an ambitious new reporter shakes up the station with her talent.
Certificate:PG-13 Sexual humor, language and comic violence
Year: 2004
Duration: 1hr 35m
Audio: English – Audio Description, English [Original], Spanish
“Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” was produced by Apatow Productions and DreamWorks Pictures with a budget of $26m. With it’s initial release on June 28th 2004 it made approximately $90.57m at the Box Office.
Watch the trailer for “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”
The Hollywood Reporteron Tuesday announced Lori O’Connor as its new senior vp entertainment, digital sales and strategy, effective immediately. O’Connor has nearly three decades in the industry, with diverse experience across media, marketing, sales and data-driven solutions.
“We’re thrilled to add Lori to our team,” said Elisabeth Deutschman Rabishaw, executive vp, co-publisher of The Hollywood Reporter. “Lori’s unparalleled experience in the industry coupled with her deep relationships, skill and passion are evident, and we cannot wait to see what she brings to the role.”
Prior to THR, O’Connor spent eight years as vp and general manager of entertainment at Simulmedia. During her time with the company, she leveraged her strong relationships and knowledge for the market as she worked across the company, including product, science, operations, sales and marketing, to develop best-in-class data-driven solutions for network, studio and streaming partners.
Before Simulmedia, O’Connor was publisher of TV Guide Magazine, where she oversaw advertising sales, research and marketing, leading the charge to push traditional advertising boundaries by creating engaging, organic and authentic experiences for advertisers and readers alike. During her tenure at TV Guide, O’Connor focused on creative, ROI-driven solutions and worked closely with television marketers and PR executives at all networks and studio partners to craft unique, customized multiplatform programs leveraging editorial synergy and driving awareness and engagement.
O’Connor holds a bachelor of science degree in advertising from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and began her career on the agency side with stints at Grey Advertising and Draft FCB before transitioning to marketing and ultimately sales.
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: The owners of the rights to the “Space Jam” theme song are demanding payment for a song that’s been heavily used in internet memes and online mashups; Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion beat a copyright lawsuit over ‘WAP’; Karol G and Tiësto are sued for infringement over a little-known song; and much more.
Want to get The Legal Beat newsletter in your email inbox every Tuesday? Subscribe here for free.
THE BIG STORY: Everybody Get Up, It’s Time To Sue Now
The theme song to the movie Space Jam, performed by Florida hip-hop trio Quad City DJ’s, is a mid-1990s classic, with bass-heavy dance beats that instantly call to mind Michael Jordan and the characters from Looney Tunes squaring off in a basketball game against alien invaders. I know you can hear it now: Here’s your chance, do your dance, at the Space Jammmm….
But it’s also, weirdly, a mid-2000s classic. Somewhere in the hazy early days of social media, the theme embarked on a bizarre second act as a meme – the basis for hundreds or thousands of absurdist “slam remix” videos that combined the song with other audio and video, often inexplicably featuring NBA star Charles Barkley. By the early 2010s, the trend had largely faded away – most memes do. But many slam remixes still exist on YouTube, and whole websites dedicated to the art of slamming are still live in 2023.
Now, that might be something of a problem — because, two decades later, the Space Jam theme song has new owners who are carrying out an increasingly active legal campaign to demand payment from people who used it.
Watson Music Group, a company that bought the rights to “Space Jam” the song in 2019 from its three original songwriters, has filed three federal lawsuits in the last three months, accusing companies of infringing its copyrights by using the song on the internet without permission. It’s also sent legal threats to an unknown number of other alleged infringers, arguing that unauthorized users must pay a “retroactive license” to avoid legal liability.
For more about the legal campaign over the rights to “Space Jam,” go read our full story, featuring details about the latest lawsuit and a response from the company’s lawyer.
Other top stories this week…
CARDI & MEGAN BEAT COPYRIGHT CASE – A federal judge tossed out a lawsuit accusing Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion of stealing the lyrics to their smash hits “WAP” and “Thot Shit” from an earlier track called “Grab Em by the P—-,” ruling that short lyrics like “p—- so wet” were simply too unoriginal to be covered by copyright law.
EARTH, WIND & FIRE NAME LAWSUIT – A tribute band that was sued earlier this year by Earth, Wind & Fire for trademark infringement is firing back with a bold counterargument: That the famed R&B act has actually abandoned any intellectual property rights to its name.
NICK CARTER ABUSE LITIGATION – The Backstreet Boys member, who is facing multiple accusations of sexual assault from the 2000s, was hit with a third such lawsuit, this time from an unnamed woman who claims he assaulted her when she was 15 years old. But Carter also won a ruling allowing him to proceed with a defamation countersuit, which claims he’s victim of “conspiracy” orchestrated by his accusers.
KAROL’S COPYRIGHT CLASH – Karol G and Tiësto were hit with a copyright lawsuit over their song “Don’t Be Shy,” filed by a Cuban-American songwriter (Rene Lorente) who says their track features elements that are “practically identical” to his earlier tune called “Algo Diferente.”
TEXAS DRAG LAW BLOCKED – Following similar rulings in Tennessee and Florida, a federal judge in Texas blocked the state from enforcing a newly-enacted law restricting drag performances, ruling that the law likely violates the First Amendment.
The acting universe is dazzling, demanding, and replete with unexpected events. Numerous individuals dream of becoming actors, enticed by the promise of celebrity, wealth, and the chance to assume various roles on screen and stage. Yet, obstacles and setbacks frequently mark the journey to becoming a triumphant actor. Luckily, several films provide insight into the lives of actors, illuminating the triumphs and challenges of the acting profession. These movies often start with a casting call, the first step from obscurity to stardom and a critical part of an actor’s career.
Best Movies About Being an Actor
1. Birdman (2014) – This Oscar-winning film tells the story of a washed-up actor, played by Michael Keaton, who once played an iconic superhero and is now trying to revive his career by staging a Broadway play. The film explores fame, self-worth, and the desire for artistic expression.
2. La La Land (2016) – A romantic musical about a jazz pianist and an aspiring actress who fall in love while pursuing their dreams in Los Angeles. The film beautifully captures the struggles and rejections faced by aspiring actors.
3. Tropic Thunder (2008) – A hilarious satire about a group of actors who are dropped into the jungle to film a war movie but are mistaken for real soldiers by a group of drug lords. The film pokes fun at the acting industry and the sometimes ridiculous lengths actors go to to get into character.
4. All About Eve (1950) – A classic movie about an aging Broadway star and a young fan who ingratiates herself into the star’s life, only to eventually replace her. The film explores themes of ambition, betrayal, and the price of fame.
How to Become an Actor?
Becoming an actor requires a mix of natural talent, training, and experience. Here are some steps to become an actor:
1. Get Trained: Take acting classes or attend an acting school to develop your acting skills.
2. Gain Experience: Start by performing in local theater productions, student films, or commercials to gain experience and build your resume.
3. Create a Portfolio: Develop a portfolio that includes your headshot, resume, and a showreel showcasing your best work.
4. Find an Agent: Having an agent can help you get auditions and negotiate contracts.
5. Audition: Attend as many auditions as possible. Casting calls for these auditions can often be found on casting websites.
Casting Websites
Casting websites allow actors to find auditions and casting calls for film, television, theater, and commercials. Some popular casting websites include Backstage, Casting Networks, and allcasting.com. These websites allow actors to create profiles, upload their portfolios, and apply for casting calls. It is crucial to have a well-crafted profile with high-quality images and detailed information about your experience and skills.
Conclusion
Becoming an actor is a journey filled with challenges and rejections but can also be advantageous. Watching movies about actors can provide insight into the industry and inspire you to pursue your acting dreams. Remember to get trained, gain experience, create a portfolio, find an agent, and utilize casting websites to search for casting calls and auditions. With hard work, determination, and luck, you could be starring in the next big blockbuster!
While you’re still in the vice-like grip of its multilevel narrative it may not feel like it, but a film like Agnieszka Holland’s bruisingly powerful new refugee drama ultimately comes from a place of optimism. It is optimistic to expect and nurture of a reaction of potentially motivating outrage, when you portray the brutality of which human individuals, at the behest of human institutions, are capable. It is optimistic to believe that, faced with extraordinary cruelty, a viewer’s ordinary decency will be compelled to rise and rebel. “Green Border” is a heart-in-mouth thriller set on the Polish-Belarusian border that wraps its social critique in the razor wire of punchy, intelligent cinematic craft in order to elicit precisely such emotions. If we can feel the horror, perhaps there is hope.
It is 2021 and a Syrian family are fleeing ISIS and their ravaged hometown of Harasta on an airplane bound for Belarus. They are en route to relatives in Sweden, and believe, as mother Amina (Dalia Naous) tells Afghan refugee Leila (Behi Djanati Atai ) that this overland route is “a godsend,” compared to the perils of entering the EU by sea. But she, her father-in-law (Mohamad Al Rashi), her husband Bashir (Jalal Altawil) and their children — one of them still a nursing infant — have been duped, as has Leila and everyone else on this plane. When Belarusian dictator Lukashenko broadcast the promise of safe passage through his nation to the border, it was a trap designed to further antagonize his EU neighbors. When the plane lands, the flight attendants give their passengers roses. But when they get to the Polish border, they’re met with rifle butts and razor wire, robbed and forced to run across no man’s land with only what they can carry.
The GPS on Leila’s phone shows they are, at least, in Poland, but their relief is short-lived. Thirsty, exhausted and drenched in a sudden downpour, the family, of which Leila has by now become a part, are soon picked up by Polish border guards, who despite first appearances prove to be as brutal as their counterparts in forcing migrants back through the wire border fence, back into Belarus. The “tourists,” as they’re nicknamed by their tormentors, are appallingly mistreated, beaten and starved by the soldiers on both sides because this is how the euphemism “migrant pushback” operates on the muddy ground. One man they meet in the makeshift camp reports that he’s been forced through, caught and returned five times already.
Holland’s film, co-written with Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko, is outstanding in its characterization. And the stunningly natural performances from the entire cast, right down to Taim Ajjan and Talia Ajjan, who play Amina and Bashir’s young children Nur and Ghania, make it seem like these are people we know, not simply archetypes of victimhood being used to illustrate a crisis. Grandfather prays while Bashir smokes. Amina berates Ghania when she pees herself. Leila teaches Nur a few words of English: the days of the week; the phrase “I would like to stay in Europe.”
Already Tomek Naumiuk’s superb black-and-white photography is walking a clever line between handheld docu-authenticity and elegantly staged classical composition. There are moments when his dynamic camera almost inadvertently happens upon some off-the-cuff striking visual, like a fleece jacket, ripped by barbed wire, exposing its stuffing. And there are other times when we can be grateful for the small mercy of the aesthetic distance that black-and-white confers, on scenes such as the borderline unbearable instance where a pregnant woman is tossed over the seven-foot fence, and lands with a sickening, dull thump on the other side.
But Holland isn’t even halfway done achieving her film’s intimate yet epic scope. Divided into chapters the movie earns its two-and-a-half-hour runtime by focusing in turn, after Amira’s family, on a different group of people involved in the worsening border situation. Most provocatively, there’s Jan (Tomasz Włosok) a Polish border guard whose pregnant wife Kasia (Malwina Buss) does not believe he participates in the most horrifying of the atrocities, until she sees video evidence of it for herself. Then there are the sisters, Marta (Monika Frajczyk) and Zuku (Jasmina Polak), who despite different philosophies of approach, spearhead an activist organization that ventures as close to the exclusion zone as they can to provide legal advice and supplies — water, food, shoes, bandages, powerbanks to charge failing cellphones. And there is Julia (Maja Ostaszewska) a local psychiatrist who is spurred to join Marta and Zuku’s crew one terrible night when she hears a cry for help from the forest near her house and discovers Leila and an unconscious Nur neck-deep in the swamp.
At one point Jan, distracted by Kasia’s upcoming sonogram, is being drilled by his loutish captain. He bellows at his troupe again and again that the men, women and children scrambling for their lives through the wire and the woods “are not people.” Instead, he likens them to live bullets, being fired into the heart of the country that these young recruits have sworn to defend. It’s dehumanization 101, a process “Green Border,” down to its DNA, is designed to counteract. Here, every character, no matter how minor or how seemingly unworthy, is accorded a degree of private dignity which somehow avoids the pitfalls of both-sides-ism. Instead, as highlighted by an epilogue set in February 2022 at the Polish-Ukrainian border that demonstrates the very different ways refugees can be treated depending on how their (often very similar) stories of displacement are played for political capital, the film persuades us in strikingly cinematic terms, that systemic cruelty is not the rule but the aberration. It is a perversion and a degradation of the far more fundamental human instinct toward compassion, which may lie dormant at times but which, as this desperately moving film proves, is just waiting to be brought roaring back to life.
Pieces Interactive’s upcoming survival horror game, Alone in the Dark, has been delayed to January 2024 in order to avoid the title having to compete with October 2023’s stacked release schedule.
Specifically, Alone in the Dark (which is a reboot of the 1992 horror game with the same name) is now set to release on January 16, 2024, as announced on Twitter. In a statement sent out in a press release, Alan Wake 2 and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 were both mentioned as large games already populating October’s enormous list of game releases, but there’s a plethora of others, too, including Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Lords of the Fallen, and Detective Pikachu Returns. Needless to say, avid gamers are going to have their hands full next month.
“Horror games thrive on the delicate balance of tension, exploiting our vulnerability and the eerie embrace of solitude,” the statement begins. “Envision yourself traversing a dimly lit house in the dead of night, where faint whispers and unidentifiable noises send shivers down your spine. Now, picture this unsettling scenario not alone, but accompanied by a group of 28 intriguing individuals. The fear factor dwindles, doesn’t it? Hence, the anticipated release of Alone in the Dark will gracefully step away from the chaotic October 2023 launch window.”
It continues: “Our intention is to avoid competing with the wake of Alan’s epic release and to evade the dazzling skyline of cities adorned by the graceful swings of Spider-Man. We aim to truly remain as Alone in the Dark as possible. To honor this, the spine-chilling horror game has been rescheduled to unveil its horrors on January 16, 2024.”
The statement says that the delay will not only serve as a way to allow the devs to “meticulously perfect the gaming experience”, but it will also allow everyone to enjoy the “remarkable releases of October”. Given it was originally supposed to land just before Halloween on October 25, Alone in the Dark is now missing out on a rather apt release window, but at least the move will give it a little more room to breathe.
Apple employees will soon stop providing assistance to customers via X — formerly Twitter — as well as YouTube and the Apple Support Community online forum, MacRumors reports, citing anonymous sources.
Apple reportedly plans on getting rid of its social media support advisor roles, including the paid community specialist role for the Apple Support Community, later this year. Over 150 employees will be affected, though MacRumors reports that Apple will offer these workers an opportunity to switch to a phone-based support role.
The changes are supposed to begin going into effect on October 1st. Starting then, users on X will receive automated messages directing them elsewhere for help. Apple will also stop offering assistance to customers in the comments section of YouTube videos on the Apple Support channel.
It’s not clear why Apple would eliminate these roles. It’s possible the tech giant is just trying to cut costs, particularly after X increased API prices in March, thus potentially raising the cost of social media management tools. It could also be that these platforms may not be the most efficient way of offering technical assistance to customers.
In either case, the company’s not the only one in tech reducing how much support it offers via social media. Last year, Sony also stopped offering one-to-one PlayStation customer support via the service then-called Twitter, as did Netflix, which had been operating support on the platform for over a decade. It’s not clear why Sony made the move, but Netflix said it was trying to steer customers toward using company-owned platforms more. Perhaps Apple’s trying to pull off something similar.
Before Beatlemania, there was the distinctive Höfner violin bass — the first guitar that Paul McCartney bought after becoming the bassist for the Beatles.
That bass can be heard on some of the band’s most famous hits, including “Love Me Do,” “She Loves You,” and “Twist and Shout.”
Mr. McCartney picked up the instrument in a Hamburg music store in 1961, and it accompanied the Fab Four as they rocketed to stunning success, becoming the most famous band in the world. But the guitar vanished eight years later.
A new campaign is seeking to find the missing instrument, and hundreds of people have responded, hoping to help solve the decades-old mystery: Where is Paul McCartney’s missing bass guitar?
“It’s a hugely significant instrument in its own right,” said Nick Wass, a semiretired consultant for Höfner, the guitar’s manufacturer, who has joined forces with two journalists to try and track the guitar down. “It’s the bass that made the Beatles.”
“The bass was absolutely at the heart of the origins of the Beatles sound,” said one of the journalists, Scott Jones, who worked for the BBC. “The smallest pieces of information can often lead to the biggest breakthroughs,” he said of their appeal for tips on its fate.
Mr. Jones’s wife, Naomi, is the other journalist behind what they are calling The Lost Bass Project.
The three Beatles fans have urged members of the public to come forward with any information that might help. No tip is too small, they say, and they are promising to keep sources confidential. They say they have already received several credible leads since the project was launched on Saturday.
The instrument’s treasured place in Beatles mythology is intertwined with the band’s story. After the departure of their original bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, Mr. McCartney, who had been playing guitar, switched instruments to replace him during a residency in Hamburg in 1961. For that, he needed a new bass guitar.
“I got my Violin Bass at the Steinway shop in the town center. I remember going along and there was this bass which was quite cheap,” he said in a 1993 interview with Guitar Magazine, adding that he had not wanted to go into debt and could only afford the Höfner, 500/1 guitar at the time. It cost about £30 pounds, or $38, he recalled. “And once I bought it, I fell in love with it.”
Mr. McCartney took the guitar back to Britain, where it accompanied the Beatles through hundreds of gigs — from the band’s early concerts at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where they were spotted by Brian Epstein, who would become their manager, to the recording of their first two albums. It was repaired in 1964, according to the team behind the new search, and then used along with other bass guitars.
But the last confirmed sighting of the instrument was in London in 1969, in video footage of the band members writing their final album, “Let It Be.” Rumors have percolated ever since about what happened to the instrument: The Lost Bass Project suggests that it could have been stolen or lost either from the basement of Abbey Road Studios, or from the Apple Corps recording studio on Savile Row.
A representative for Paul McCartney declined a request for an interview. But Mr. Wass said he understood, from previous communications with Mr. McCartney, that he was keen to be reunited with the instrument. “He calls it the ancient one,” Mr. Wass said.
Among the leads they had received, Mr. Jones said, were suggestions that the instrument could have traveled to the United States or Japan. But he added that all the leads need to be vetted. “Somewhere among that information there is going to be the answer,” he said.
Other iconic instruments have been lost and found over the years — one close example being a Gibson acoustic guitar belonging to John Lennon, which was bought in 1962 and then lost the following year. Half a century later, it re-emerged and was sold at auction in 2015 to an anonymous buyer for $2.4 million.
It is unclear what the market value of Mr. McCartney’s missing guitar would be, but the team behind the search insists that the effort is not for monetary gain, calling the guitar “priceless.”
“We just want to know where it is,” said Mr. Wass.
Pooja Bhatt and Bebika Dhurve became good friends inside Bigg Boss OTT 2 house.
Looks like Pooja Bhatt and Bebika Dhurve recently reunited for a vacation when they decided to dance under a waterfall. Watch the video here.
Pooja Bhatt and Bebika Dhurve met inside the Bigg Boss OTT 2 house and soon turned best friends forever. Almost a month after the show’s grand finale, the two stars reunited but this time for a vacation. On Tuesday, Pooja Bhatt took to her Instagram handle and dropped a video in which she was seen dancing under a waterfall in a black monokini. She was also accompanied by Bebika Dhurve. In the caption of her video, Pooja wrote, “Back to my reality!”
Soon after the video was shared, fans and friends rushed to the comments section to compliment the actress. Actress Sangeeta Bijlani wrote, “So happy to see this”. Pooja and Bebika’s Bigg Boss OTT 2 co-contestant Jad Hadid also dropped red heart emojis. Watch the video here:
Bebika also shared a series of pictures from her outing with Pooja and penned down an appreciation note for the actress. “A mentor. A teacher. A mother figure. My soulmate❤❤ When her vision.. wisdom.. intellect .. intuition read my soul inside out and found the best in me… why would I care what the world thinks …❤❤❤ The BOND STRONGER THAN JAMES BOND… POOJA MAAM KO KOI SUNA NAI SAKTA … BEBIKA KISI KI SUNTI NAI…BEBIKA SIRF POOJA MAAM KI SUNTI HAI @poojab1972 My heart and soul,” she wrote.
Interestingly, both Pooja Bhatt and Bebika Dhurve were among the finalists of Bigg Boss OTT 2. Salman Khan’s show concluded on August 14, 2023. Elvish Yadav emerged as the winner of the show. He took home the trophy and a cash prize of Rs 25 lakh. Abhishek Malhan was the first runner-up whereas Manisha Rani was the second runner-up of the show.
Entertainment Bureau brings you all updates from the world of entertainment — breaking news, Twitter trends, features, movie reviews, exclusive inter…Read More
Sony’s “The Equalizer 3” has finally toppled the six-week reign of “Barbie” atop the U.K. and Ireland box office.
Antoine Fuqua’s action thriller, headlined by Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning, debuted with £2.7 million ($3.4 million), per numbers from Comscore.
In its seventh weekend, Warner Bros.’ “Barbie” slid down to second place with £1.6 million for a mighty total of £92.5 million. It is the highest grossing film of 2023 and occupies seventh position on the all-time charts for the territory behind “Spectre,” which has £95.2 million.
Also in its seventh weekend, Universal’s “Oppenheimer” slid down a spot to third with £960,504. With £55.4 million, it is the second highest grossing film of 2023 and is level with “Bohemian Rhapsody” at No. 34 on the all-time chart.
Angel’s “Sound of Freedom,” a massive success Stateside, debuted in fourth place with £760,060. Rounding off the top five was Paramount’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” which earned £618,912 in its fifth weekend for a total of £9.1 million.
The only other debut in the top 10 was Lionsgate’s “Cobweb,” which debuted in 10th position with £325,904.
The week ahead sees two releases on the Thursday. CinemaLive is bowing opera “Madama Butterfly On The Lake.” Yash Raj Films is opening Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s “Jawan.” The star’s “Pathaan” is the highest grossing Indian film of 2023.
On the Friday, the two wide releases are both sequels. Warner Bros. is opening “The Nun II” and Universal “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” across more than 300 locations each.
Trinity CineAsia is opening Chinese blockbuster “No More Bets,” while Studiocanal is bowing the acclaimed “Past Lives.” Munro is releasing 1MDB saga documentary “Man on the Run,” while Bulldog is bowing another documentary, “A Life on the Farm,” about a filmmaking farmer and the inspiring legacy of his long-lost home movies.
Meanwhile, the future of beloved London cinema Curzon Mayfair is under threat. The venue’s lease will expire in March 2024 and the landlord has threatened its residency at the site. To showcase the cinema this September and October it is hosting a program of films that previously played to great success there, from Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” to Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.”
Kicking off the efforts to save the cinema is a 4K restoration of Max Ophuls’ “La Ronde,” which played a 76-week unbroken run at Curzon Mayfair from April 1951 to October 1952.
The highly anticipated project, which brings back Charlie Cox’sDaredevil and Vincent D’Onofrio’sKingpin, was originally expected to debut its 18-episode season in Spring 2024. However, over the last few months, it’s hit some snags.
For a while, many fans have already started to assume that the streaming series wasn’t going to make its original release window.
Daredevil: Born Again Delayed Indefinitely
Marvel
A new report from The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the upcoming MCU series Daredevil: Born Again was just delayed indefinitely.
The show, which was announced with a Spring 2024 premiere window, has now been taken off of Marvel Studios’ upcoming release calendar—alongside Ironheart and Wonder Man.
If production picks up at the start of next year, fans can expect Born Again to be delayed to approximately Spring 2025. However, that will all depend on when the studios will finally agree to new contracts with both WGA and SAG-AFTRA to end the strikes.
Daredevil Will Be Reborn… Eventually
While many fans will understandably be sad to wait longer for Daredevil: Born Again, at this point, delays for Marvel Studios projects are becoming the norm. Hopefully, when the show does arrive, its quality will be up to par with what fans are expecting—or, at the very least, better than Secret Invasion.
Joining Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio in returning to the MCU will be Jon Bernthal’s Punisher. Sadly, there’s still no concrete word on fans seeing the likes of Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones or Mike Colter’s Luke Cage anytime soon.
Two other actors who didn’t seem to make the cut are Deborah Ann Woll’s Karen Page and Elden Henson’s Foggy Nelson. While anything could still happen, plentiful rumors seem certain that both characters were not included in Born Again.
In the meantime, fans should expect to see Daredevil pop up briefly in Echo, which just moved from its November release to January 2024.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has always been full of powerful supervillains and superheroes. With aliens, androids, and wizards, the MCU has proved time and again that it is a large place. Yet, regardless of how many new characters have been introduced, they never came anywhere near a god’s level of power. This seems to be changing, as Phase Four of the MCU has prominently featured higher beings, more so than any phase of the Infinity Saga.
Update September 5, 2023: This article has been updated to reflect recent changes within the MCU.
Lokiintroduced the Time Variance Authority (TVA) that existed outside of space and time, but the TVA was still comprised of human beings who did not have any superpowers. The MCU has gods that are immortal, standing over any Avenger, Master of the Mystic Arts, or Guardian of the Galaxy. Here are the gods that have been featured in the Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far.
Asgardians
Paramount Pictures
First inhabiting Asgard in another of the Nine Realms, the Asgardians moved to Earth following their original home’s destruction. The Asgardians impressed the Norse people with their abilities and shared with them their language and culture. This led to the Asgardians being worshiped as gods. However, while Asgardians possessed magic and advanced technology, they were more like aliens who looked human than actual gods.
Odin, the former king of Asgard, even said that Asgardians are not gods in Thor: The Dark World. He told Loki that Asgardians live and die “just as humans do.” The Asgardians were never immortal as, while they can live thousands of years, they still have a finite lifespan. Thor as the “God of Thunder” and Hela as the “Goddess of Death” were both more fancy titles than official positions. Yet their existence, and Thor being a prominent Avenger, has made people in the MCU rethink how the universe works.
Khonshu and the Egyptian Gods
Marvel Studios
Moon Knight has a direct connection with Khonshu, the Egyptian God of the Moon and the Night Sky. Khonshu was a former member of the Ennead Council, a group led by Osiris that included Hathor, Horus, Isis, and Tefnut. Unwilling to leave humanity to its own devices, Khonshu was banished for getting overly involved with human affairs. He called upon Marc Spector to be a Moon Knight, his “fist of vengeance.”
The Egyptian Gods (Ennead) were shown in Moon Knight to be just as capable of infighting as human beings. Khonshu directly opposed and battled against Ammit, who killed anyone she believed would one day commit evil. Ennead did not appear to be invincible, as Ammit was imprisoned and seemingly died inside Arthur Harrow’s body. The people of Wakanda worshipped the Ennead, crediting the Egyptian goddess, Bast, with leading the first Black Panther to the Heart-Shaped Herb. The Goddess Bast was also seen in Thor: Love and Thunder.
Olympians
Marvel Studios
Thor: Love and Thunder introduced a whole new pantheon into the MCU: the Greek Gods. While Eternals like Thena share a name similar to the Greek goddess Athena, it appears the two live alongside one another. Thor: Love and Thunder featured Zeus (played by Russell Crowe), who resides in Omnipotence City, the world of the gods. Zeus appears to be the most powerful of the gods and is the one whom the others listen to. The film’s end-credit scene also showed Hercules (Brett Goldstein) setting up his role in the MCU.
All the Gods Appearing in Thor: Love and Thunder
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Thor: Love and Thunder, a movie based around a villain known as Gorr the God Butcher, featured a whole host of gods and goddesses in the MCU. Various culture’s gods are glimpsed in the film, including Rapu, an egotistical God who is killed by Gorr after he does not answer his prayers.
When Thor and the gang reach the Council of Godheads to ask for their help, the scene depicts a plethora of gods that excites the fans. These included Gods like Bast, Dionysus, Minerva, Artemis, an unnamed Goddess of Death, a Kronan god, and even Bao- the god of dumplings.
Talokan Gods
Marvel Studios Disney
Even though he is technically not a God in the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Namor, the king of the Talokan, is referred to as K’uk’ulkan, or the Feathered Serpent God, by both his people and also by M’baku. He is a mighty powerful being who rules his people underwater as they have all gone through mutation, which gave them blue skin and gills that stop them from breathing on the surface. Namor, unlike the other Talokanil people, does not have blue skin, making him even more deity-like in the eyes of his people.
K’uk’ulkan is actually a Mesoamerican deity referred to as the Serpent God who was worshiped by the Yucatec Mayans. Interestingly enough, a lot of fans think that the actual K’uk’ulkan appeared in a scene in Thor: Love and Thunder. Fans are excited about what this could bring to the franchise in the future. The film also reveals the Mayan god Chaac, who is the god of rain and abundance, guided Namor’s tribe to the heart-shaped herb that would allow them to breathe underwater. This means that the Mayan pantheon exists within the MCU.
The High Evolutionary
Marvel Studios
The High Evolutionary is not a god in the traditional sense, yet due to him being the creator of a variety of alien races, including the Sovereign, there are many corners of the galaxy that worship him as a god. He seems to have a god complex as he doesn’t believe there is a god, which is why he stepped in. He was constantly looking to create the world in his own twisted image at the cost of many lives.
Uatu the Watcher
Marvel Studios
Omniscience has been commonly associated with gods, and that trait has been best represented in the MCU with the Watchers. The Watchers were briefly seen in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 when Rocket and Kraglin jumped between planets, as well as in the final post-credits scene of the film. A Watcher named Uatu was also featured in the animated series What If…? From his place in the Nexus of All Realities, Uatu watched events unfold across the Multiverse.
All Watchers had to swear to an oath that prevented them from interfering with any events. Uatu, however, was unable to abide by the oath when an alternate-reality Ultron controlled all the Infinity Stones and threatened the Multiverse. The Watcher called upon heroes from different realities to stop Ultron, forming the Guardians of the Multiverse. The team included a version of Captain Carter, King Killmonger, Doctor Strange Supreme, T’Challa Star-Lord, Party Thor, an alternate Gamora, and a post-apocalyptic Black Widow.
Arishem and the Celestials
Marvel Studios
Eternals was not the most positively-received MCU movie, but it was massive in terms of scale. From the beginning of the film, the opening text dives into themes of life and creation. The Celestials were revealed to have existed before the Infinity Stones and the “dawn of creation.” It was the Celestial Arishem, per Polygon, that created the sun and brought “light to the universe.” He used the World Forge to create life, which included the Eternals and Deviants, as well as a repository for storing memories.
As Celestials were around even before the Big Bang, this makes the Celestials the oldest race in the MCU. They were capable of creating and manipulating life, planets, and stars. Eternals revealed that planets across the cosmos were seeded with Celestials that would rise during an Emergence. Arishem created the Eternals and the Deviants for the specific purpose of the birth of a Celestial. However, Arishem’s creations proved to be capable of free will as both Eternals and Deviants disobeyed Arishem’s orders. The defiance did not go over well with Arishem, who announced that he would return to judge whether humans were worthy of living. It is hard to ague that the Celestials are certainly the gods of creation in the MCU.
Today Colossal Order and Paradox Entertainment released another trailer of the upcoming city builder Cities: Skylines II, focusing on music and sounds.
Showmax CEO Yolisa Phahle is leaving the African streamer after nearly two decades.
The CEO of Showmax parent MultiChoice Calvo Mawela announced Phahle’s exit with “mixed emotions” in a note to staff. Marc Jury became interim Showmax CEO on September 1 as a search for the full-time successor is found.
Phahle will provide “full time advisory support” to Jury for the next six months. From March 2024, Phahle will continue to consult for another 12 months, reporting to Jury, who will lead both Showmax and MultiChoice’s South African operations.
“In what could be characterised as the end of an era defined by a solid career and almost two decades with the Group, it is with mixed emotions to announce that our Showmax CEO, Yolisa Phahle, is making her way into the next chapter of her career,” wrote Calvo.
“Discussions have been underway with an understanding that she will be entering the retirement phase of her career in the near future, thus the need for a seamless transition.”
Phahle joined MultiChoice network M-Net in 2005 as General Manager of Channel O and worked her way up to Channels Director for Local Channels in South Africa, where she launched the popular Mzansi Magic networks. She became M-Net CEO in 2015 and then moved to lead pan-Africa streamer Showmax, where she has led a push into originals and kept the platform competitive with the likes of Netflix and Prime Video.
Given how much the role-playing game genre, as a whole, owes its existence to Dungeons & Dragons—with early titles like Wizardry and Ultima serving, in no small part, as efforts by their creators to bring the tabletop experience to the computer monitor—it’s not surprising to see official Dungeons & Dragons games popping up as early as 1988. But while the “Gold Box” and “Silver Box” games created by SSI and U.S. Gold in the 1980s remain fascinating as historical objects and relics, they’re also brutal to the point of nigh-inaccessibility. They’re interesting, beautiful in their own way—but only really “fun” for those prepared to meet them far more than merely halfway.
The same cannot be said, though, for Westwood Studios’ Eye Of The Beholder, an early exercise in adding just a touch of action to the D&D on PC formula. Lifting liberally from FTL Games’ Dungeon Master, the game puts you in control of four heroic adventurers who move as one, traveling space by space through a grid-based series of ingenious labyrinths. (If you’ve played the far more modern Legend Of Grimrock games, you’ll recognize the shared DNA here.) Colorful, bright, and occasionally brain-bending, Eye Of The Beholder and its sequels drop some of the number crunching of earlier D&D games in favor of a much smoother, and more exciting experience. 22 years later, they still remain eminently playable adventures.
“Evil Does Not Exist,” the title of the latest film from “Drive My Car” director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, is a bold statement to make in the year 2023. As it turns out in this eerie and elusive ecological tone poem about man, nature, and man’s nature, the statement is not necessarily something the Japanese filmmaker believes.
This made-in-secret and gently lilting film set in a bucolic village on the outskirts of Tokyo seems like a call for compassion on the surface — it centers on how the village’s inhabitants tangle with a corporation trying to set up a glamping site in their forest, only for the two opposing sides to eventually find common ground. But that entente proves a foil for a much darker twist Hamaguchi pulls in the film’s last act.
Long a humanistic filmmaker of festival fare blending fantastical imagination with languid character study, Hamaguchi saw his meteor rise far beyond his grasp two years ago with the awards season sensation of “Drive My Car.” That film was a three-hour relationship drama about a theater director trying to mount an adaptation of “Uncle Vanya” while tangling with his own grief and emotional culpability over the death of his wife. Hamaguchi, who speaks little English, found himself being ponied around the awards circuit and taking meetings in Hollywood.
The alienation of that experience — he’s admitted to never wanting to get too much bigger than his box as an independent filmmaker of small movies — led him to “Evil Does Not Exist.” The film began as footage for a performance piece in collaboration with “Drive My Car” composer Eiko Ishibashi before Hamaguchi realized the material had potential as a narrative feature.
“Evil Does Not Exist” is set in Mizubiki Village, an isolated forest community of modest means that’s hardly a tourist destination, until a corporation rolls in to propose building a glamping resort that will inevitably offset the harmony its villagers have created. Takumi (Hitoshi Omika, previously an assistant director on Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy”) and his small eight-year-old daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) live a quiet life among the trees, splitting wood, gathering wild wasabi, and collecting water from a stream to be used for the village’s beloved udon restaurant. But the disintegration of their idyllic way of life is already preordained even before the threat of the resort — gunshots are heard in the distance as hunters close in on the local deer population, and Takumi forgets to pick up Hana from school, an ordered existence now beginning to fall out of rhythm.
The Tokyo tourism company sends a pair of in-over-their-heads publicists to field questions from the villagers regarding the glamping proposal, and they begin to doubt what they are doing as the residents insist that a proposed septic tank will sully their water supply and crush their own economy. Hamaguchi leisurely unfolds a town hall meeting in which everyone gets a chance to speak, but no resolutions are achieved. Later, the publicists share a long car ride while headed for a second visit to the village in which they talk about their dating lives, injecting humor into the screenplay while also humanizing the people representative of a supposed “evil.”
Hamaguchi makes no moral judgments on anyone, but as this emotionally evasive film unwraps, it becomes clear that anyone is capable of evil or wrongdoing — even the people living in the village. Takumi warns the interlopers that a three-foot fence would be needed to keep deer out of the glamping site; they can jump over two feet, and that starts to feel like a bad omen indeed when Hana stumbles upon the carrion of a deer, flies buzzing out of frame.
“Evil Does Not Exist” is a slow-moving film with few epiphanies and no answers to the questions it posits. The film’s reverence for nature and those maintaining its cycles reflects in its unhurried capturing of the village’s flora and fauna, long takes gazing upward at the topiary of the forest bookending the movie, Eiko Ishibashi’s accompanying score a mix of plaintive strings and discomfiting electronic background noise. “Evil Does Not Exist” is hesitant to reveal itself — until an ending reminiscent of Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning,” also centered on a man who decides he can take no more. This is slow, patient cinema that on its surface seems as serene as a Kelly Reichardt film, but has a darker, less hopeful attitude about life lived in a purer world the deeper you go.
Grade: B+
“EvilDoes Not Exist” world premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival. Janus and Sideshow will release it in the U.S. next year.
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Richard Linklater’s Hit Man debuts out of competition in Venice this evening, and while the story follows a professional killer, the filmmaker told the press corps today, “I’m pretty sure movies invented hitmen, they aren’t real.”
His theory, “Have you ever heard of a hitman being arrested? You hear of people soliciting hitmen all the time, but they don’t exist. Mobs, drug cartels yes… but this idea, that couldn’t be more clear. Like, there’s no such thing that you meet someone that you’ve never met that you just pay like you’re paying them to mow your lawn to kill someone… It would be so easy to arrest them.”
The film aims in part to deconstruct the notion of the gun for hire. Linklater added, “The more interesting thing is why we love that character so much. It goes with cinema, there’s so many great hitmen. Next year there will be three more hitmen movies here.”
Hit Man centers on Glen Powell’s Gary Johnson, the most sought-after professional killer in New Orleans. To his clients, he’s like something out of a movie: the mysterious gun for hire. But if you pay him to rub out a cheating spouse or an abusive boss, you’d better watch your back — he works for the cops. When he breaks protocol to help a desperate woman (Adria Arjona) trying to flee an abusive boyfriend, he finds himself becoming one of his false personas, falling for the woman and flirting with turning into a criminal himself.
The story is loosely based on a true crime article Linklater came across about 20 years ago in the Texas Monthly. The film, he has said, “is attempting to hit a lot of notes — comedy, noir, thriller, psychological study — while examining most of all the concept of identity and how fixed our personalities may or may not be.”
Speaking to the theme of identity, Linklater related it to the issues of today. “We’re swimming in misinformation and created characters and there are a lot of opportunities for people to represent themselves as they aren’t. The movie is reflective of the f*cked-up-ed-ness of our times.”
Can people change is also “the core of what we’re exploring… It gets more interesting in this age. That’s what everybody should be striving for as a human being. We all want to be better… I hope that’s an empowering message.”
While it’s a serious film on one level, it’s also got a screwball comedy element. “I love making movies,” the Oscar nominee said, “cause you work with people and we laugh a lot.” When hiring actors, his two main criteria are that they be “smart and funny, that’s a good start.”
This is the fourth project Linklater and Powell have worked on together following Fast Food Nation, Everybody Wants Some!! and Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood. Linklater today called the actor “smart, funny and charming. He’s obviously a star.”
Amid the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, however, the cast of Hit Man was not in attendance. Asked to comment on the situation, Linklater said, “Everyone’s feeling it I think, no one’s happy. But that’s kind of the problem when you’re in an industry and suddenly no one’s happy, it’s time to recalibrate and come forward with some things that (will) be fair to everyone. I think something’s gotta give. I’m not really in the middle of it so much. I think it’ll it’ll be resolved… Every now and then, there’s time to do a correction for the future. We’re all feeling our way through it, rolling with it best we can.”
Of his Merrily We Roll Along, which began production in 2019 and is a 20-year project, Linklater said, “Eighteen years from now we might be done. We’re shooting again pretty soon if we can. I’m hopeful like everyone that the strikes will be resolved by then, I think they will.”
Sean “Diddy” Combs is about to become an icon! The 53-year-old hip hop mogul and famed producer will be receiving the Global Icon Award at the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards later this month.
Diddy will accept his award with an epic performance spanning his decades in the industry. It will be his first performance on the VMAs stage since 2005.
In addition to his heavily awarded career, Diddy is also nominated for four other awards at this year’s VMAs including two for Best Collaboration as well as Best Rap and Best R&B for his work on “Creepin (Remix)” and “Gotta Move On.”
Diddy made his first VMAs appearance in 1997 to perform “Mo Money Mo Problems.” He also hosted the VMAs in 2005. Throughout his career, Diddy has won two VMAs.
Coming up, Diddy is preparing for the release of his upcoming album, The Love Album: Off the Grid, on Sept. 15. It marks his first album since 2010’s Last Train to Paris.
Featuring an all-new voice cast, “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” follows Ginger (Thandiwe Newton), as she sets up a peaceful sanctuary far from the human world having recently escaped from the evil Tweedy farm. Finally, with the hatching of Molly (Bella Ramsey), Ginger and Rocky (Zachary Levi) seem to have their “happily ever after.” But, unknown to them, outside their peaceful world chicken-kind faces a new and terrible threat.
Newton takes over the role of Ginger from “Absolutely Fabulous” actor Julia Sawalha while Levi steps in for Mel Gibson, who voiced Rocky in the first movie. One voice actor who will be returning is Miranda Richardson (“Good Omens”), who is back as arch villain Mrs Tweedy. She will be joined by comedian Peter Serafinowicz, making his “Chicken Run” debut as hapless businessman Reginald Smith.
The new trailer gives fans a first look at the challenges Ginger and Rocky will face as they battle to take down Mrs Tweedy’s evil operation.
Miranda Richardson returns as fowl nemesis Mrs. Tweedy in “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” (courtesy of Netflix)
“They say a movie is only as good as its villain and Ginger’s nemesis, Mrs Tweedy is one of the all-time greats,” said director Sam Fell. “Now she’s out to take industrial-scale revenge on all chicken-kind with the ‘Dawn of the Nugget.’ Miranda has a unique understanding of drama and comedy, making you laugh while scaring the pants off you in the exact same moment. Also rounding out our fantastic cast is Peter Serafinowicz playing Reginald Smith, a slightly bemused businessman visiting Mrs Tweedy’s giant nugget factory.”
Joing Richardson and Serafinowicz in the film are Jane Horrocks, Imelda Staunton, Lynn Ferguson, Josie Sedgwick-Davies, David Bradley, Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays and Nick Mohammed.
The original “Chicken Run” was conceived by “Wallace and Gromit” creator Nick Park and Aardman Animations co-founder Peter Lord. Aardman Animations’ first feature, “Chicken Run” grossed over $225 million at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time.
“Chicken Run 2,” which will premiere on Dec. 15, resumes the original story over 20 years later. It was written by Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell and Rachel Tunnard. Steve Pegram and Leyla Hobart serve as producers alongside executive producers Lord, Park, Kirkpatrick and Carla Shelley.
Also coming from Aardman is the first “Wallace and Gromit” full-length feature, which is set to premiere on Netflix around Christmas 2024.
Watch the first official trailer for “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” below:
Manitoba politicians are set to hit the campaign trail, with Premier Heather Stefanson expected to call an election Tuesday.
Stefanson, whose Progressive Conservatives are seeking a third consecutive majority government, became the province’s 24th premier in November 2021 — the first woman to hold that role in Manitoba history.
The vote, already scheduled for Oct. 3, is expected to be a tight race between Stefanson’s Tories and the opposition NDP, led by Wab Kinew. If he wins, Kinew would become Manitoba’s first First Nations premier.
Recent opinion polls put the NDP ahead, especially in Winnipeg, and suggest the Tories took a hit in support during the COVID-19 pandemic — but the NDP’s lead in popularity has narrowed in recent months.
The Manitoba Liberal Party, led by Dougald Lamont, hopes to increase its number of seats in the legislature from its current three.
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Stefanson will make a campaign announcement Tuesday morning, where she is expected to officially launch the 28-day election campaign.
The financial impact of ongoing actors and writers strikes as a number on it now as Warner Bros. Discovery said today it’s looking at a hit of $300 million to $500 million in adjusted EBTITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) for 2023.
In a filing this morning with the Securities and Exchange Commission, WBD said “it is expecting lower adjusted EBITDA for the full year in the range of $10.5 to $11 billion, reflecting the company’s assumption that adjusted EBITDA will be negatively impacted by approximately $300 to $500 million, predominantly due to the impact of the strikes.”
Free cash flow goes the other direction. The company raised its free cash flow expectations for the full year to at least $5 billion. It expects to exceed $1.7 billion in free cash flow for the third quarter of 2023, in part due to the strong performance of Barbie as well as incremental impact from strike-related factors.
The company led by CEO David Zaslav said in the SEC filing it will continue to update its assumptions “based on the timing and any additional impacts of the eventual resolution of the strikes.”
“WBD continues to prioritize and work diligently with other industry leadership to resolve the current WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in a manner that is fair and values the important work of, and partnership with, the writers and actors,” the filing said.
Zaslav will be speaking at a Goldman Sachs media conference tomorrow.
WBD execs indicated on a qarterly earnings call in August that their full-year financial guidance numbers assumed the strikes would be resolved by early September. With no resolution in sight, it is revisiting that guidance now.
“The Company noted on the earnings call that if the strikes were to continue through the end of the year, it expected incremental upside to free cash flow and incremental downside to adjusted EBITDA due to the strikes’ impact on timing and performance of the remainder of the 2023 film slate, as well as the Company’s ability to produce and deliver content. While WBD is hopeful that these strikes will be resolved soon, it cannot predict when the strikes will ultimately end. With both guilds still on strike today, the Company now assumes the financial impact to WBD of these strikes will persist through the end of 2023.”
A group of roughly 20 people chanted outside the premiere of Woody Allen’s “Coup de Chance” at the Venice Film Festival Monday. While those inside Palazzo del Cinema watched the movie, the group yelled a variety of slogans, such as “no spotlight for rapist directors” and “the alpha male doesn’t exist.”
Film and TV reviewer Luke Hearfield shared a flyer from protestors on Twitter. Bolded text reads, “You would never let those involved in the Palermo, Caivano, and Milano violences walk the red carpet” in reference to a series of gang rapes that have rattled Italians in recent weeks.
The flier also states, “Patriarchal society believes the genius artist and not those who were sexually assaulted.”
Protesters have rallied together at #Venezia80 to “turn the spotlight off rapists”. This protest just took place during the premiere of Woody Allen’s new film Coup de Chance. pic.twitter.com/cpG94nzrK6
Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow accused the director of sexually assaulting her in 1992. He denies the allegations to this day. The alleged sexual abuse has divided Allen’s fans and critics in the decades since, and Allen himself has accused his ex-wife Mia Farrow of coaching their daughter to speak against him.
In 1993, the judge in Allen and Farrow’s custody case ruled the children should live exclusively with their mother and accused therapists who interviewed Dylan of being “colored by their loyalty to Mr. Allen.” The director continues to be supported by a number of friends in the entertainment industry, including Diane Keaton, as well as Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem.
“We denounce today the culture of places such as the Venice International Film Festival,” the flier concludes, “which should convey consent culture, respect, and belief in those who have been sexually assaulted but which choose instead to continue to legitimize rape culture.”
The protestors formed a line and took off their shirts before beginning their chants as Allen walked the red carpet. Authorities escorted the group away from the premiere minutes later.
This year’s festival has been rocked with controversy. In addition to Allen’s latest work, the festival also screened Roman Polanski’s newest film “The Palace.” Polanski has evaded American charges of unlawful sex with a minor since 1976.
On Saturday, Polanski’s collaborator and producer Luca Barbareschi defended the director. “I don’t think he ever raped anybody,” Barbareschi said. “He was a very sexy man and women were chasing him.”
The rapper and producer, who just made headlines Monday for his decision to reassign the publishing rights of Bad Boy Records back to the artists he’s worked with, will also return to the MTV stage for a live performance the night of Sept. 12, his first since 2005.
A legend in the music industry, Combs was chosen for the award due to his global success in the music industry as well as his “unparalleled career,” according to a press release from MTV.
Over his more than three decades in the industry, the performer has released two albums that have reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 as well as five No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100.
As well as receiving the Global Icon Award, Combs has been nominated for four categories in this year’s VMAs: twice Best Collaboration with “Gotta Move On” — which features Bryson Tiller, Ashanti and Yung Miami — and Metro Boomin’s “Creepin’” — which also features the Weeknd and 21 Savage. The rapper is also up for Best Hip Hop for “Gotta Move On” and Best R&B for “Creepin’.”
Originally part of MTV’s Europe Music Awards, the Global Icon Award honors the artist or band whose “unparalleled career and continued influence have achieved a unique level of global success in music and beyond.” (Combs, coincidentally, hosted the European awards show in 2002.)
Last Monday, MTV also announced that Shakira would be the recipient of the Video Vanguard Award, which honors artists who have had a “profound impact” on both music videos and pop culture.
Though Combs is the recipient of one of highest honors the VMAs has to offer, it’s Taylor Swift who has been dominating the conversation around this year’s awards show. The pop icon led the nominations pack with eight nods, including Video of the Year for “Anti-Hero.” If Swift wins this award, she will break her own record, becoming the first artist to win the honor four times. The singer set the record just last year with her win for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version).”
The 2023 VMAs will air live from New Jersey’s Prudential Center on Sept. 12 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
This long-running Adult Swim comedy is streaming on Max, and there’s no better time to catch up on it than now. The Venture Bros. follows super-scientist Dr. Rusty Venture, his goofy teenaged sons, and their personal bodyguards. If it sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is. Set in a world where superheroes and villains are constantly at each other’s throats, The Venture Bros. is a high-octane comedy driven by an unflagging sense of humor. The series was unceremoniously canceled in 2020 after Season 7. But it was revived for one final farewell in the 2023 feature-length finale, titled The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is The Blood Of The Baboon Heart, that finally started streaming on Max recently.
Bazawule’s first hire was actually the choreographer Fatima Robinson, a veteran who has worked with everyone from Michael Jackson to Mary J. Blige, and who choreographed the 2006 movie musical “Dreamgirls.” Bazawule recalled watching her videos for Aaliyah, his friends stopping the tape over and over to copy the moves, when he was a teenager in Accra. “She’s always had such a regal reverence and a curiosity about dance from all over the world,” he said.
Her hip-hop and R&B pedigree is evident in neck swivels and shoulder shimmies that connect TikTok dances to their 20th-century lineage. Some of the songs were sped up to match her moves, Sanders said. Bazawule also had her choreograph narrative scenes and help with the way the camera moves around the actors. “It’s always in a ballet with the narrative,” he said.
Bazawule is a multihyphenate who started as a painter, then became a hip-hop performer; he records as Blitz the Ambassador. (His given name is Samuel; his stage name, he said, had a lot to do with his production style: “very fast and very glitzy.”) But even he had trouble with the basic structure of a movie musical, incorporating songs into the action. “The biggest challenge was to figure out, how do you take this very sprawling music and turn it cinematic?” he said.
He separated the score into its three root genres — gospel, blues and jazz. And he brought in new arrangers for each: Ricky Dillard, Keb’ Mo’ and Christian McBride. (The original Broadway numbers are by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray, pop and R&B songwriters.) He also wrote songs for the movie, including a beat-driven work anthem for Harpo, Mister’s son (Corey Hawkins). “The goal was to make sure that the music was always talking to each other,” he said, and to have it be in tune with a contemporary soundtrack.
His ambitions were evident from his first pitch to the producers, when he showed them a full storyboard he had pencil-drawn himself. During Bazawule’s presentation — via video during the height of covid — “I literally texted Oprah,” Sanders recalled. “I went, ‘Oh, my God, this is the guy.’ And she wrote back, ‘Yes, he is!’”
The latest chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) will unfold this November when The Marvels arrives in theaters.
The film will bring together Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau/Photon, and Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel to form the MCU’s newest team — the Marvels.
With just over a month to go until the film’s release, anticipation is really building. Today, Marvel released a new trailer for The Marvels that looked back on each of the three main characters’ journeys and gave a glimpse into where they could be heading.
Carol Danvers
Carol Danvers was originally introduced in 2019’s Captain Marvel. An ex-U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, Danvers received superhuman strength, the ability to fire energy, and the ability to fly from exposure to Tesseract energy.
Despite her immense powers, Danvers initially remembers little of her life prior to gaining her powers and joining the Kree military until she reunites with her best friend Maria Rambeau and her daughter Monica.
Photo: Entertainment Weekly
In the new trailer, Danvers seems to be coming to grips with her forgotten past and struggling with the lonely life that she lives in space.
Monica Rambeau
Monica Rambeau aka Photon originally appeared in Captain Marvel as a young child who grew up looking up to her “Aunt Carol.”
At the end of the 2019 film, Danvers promised Rambeau that she would return soon, a promise she did not keep.
Monica, meanwhile, grew up to be a member of S.W.O.R.D. after becoming a captain in the United States Air Force.
While taking her mother to her cancer treatments, Monica became a victim of the Blip. When she returned, she discovered that her mother died during the years that she was gone.
Eventually, Rambeau is sent to investigate the town of Westview, New Jersey, which Wanda Maximoff had surrounded in a CMBR field nicknamed the Hex. After forcing herself through the field multiple times, Monica obtains the power to detect electromagnetic radiation and absorb energy. The Marvels will see her reunite with Danvers for the first time in years.
Kamala Kahn
The third and final member of The Marvels is Kamala Khan, who starred in the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel. An enthusiastic teenage girl, Kamala idolizes Captain Marvel.
Photo: Marvel
During the events of Ms. Marvel, Kamala obtains a magical bangle that unlocks her mutant ability to harness cosmic energy and create “hard light.” In the upcoming film, Kahn will finally meet her hero — for better or for worse.
Watch The Trailer
In The Marvels, Danvers, Rambeau, and Kahn will have to find a way to work together to stop a cosmic threat after their powers become intertwined. If you haven’t seen the film’s new trailer watch it now!
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A Mandalorian Jedi created the Darksaber, but Mandalorians don’t have to be Force-sensitive to use that iconic weapon. Despite not having Force abilities, both The Clone Wars‘ Pre Vizsla and The Mandalorian‘s Bo-Katan wielded that one-of-a-kind lightsaber with deftness. That’s what Sabine Wren was learning to do on Star Wars Rebels before she gave the Darksaber away. But the first episodes of Ahsoka raised new questions about whether Sabine is actually a Force-user. It seems she did not merely resume her lightsaber training under Ahsoka Tano years ago, she briefly studied to become a Jedi. Does that mean Sabine Wren is Force-sensitive or that a non-Force user can become a Jedi?
Star Wars’ history doesn’t provide a definitive answer to either. What it does provide are intriguing possibilities for Sabine’s story that could change how we think about both the Jedi and the Force forever.
Was Sabine Wren Force-Sensitive on Star Wars Rebels?
Lucasfilm
Nothing on Star Wars Rebels indicated Sabine Wren is Force-sensitive. At least not the way Jedi and those like them are. The series seemed to confirm, in fact, that she is not Force-sensitive.
After she found the Darksaber, Sabine reluctantly agreed to train with it. Jedi Knight Kanan Jarrus and his Padawan Ezra Bridger taught Sabine how to use her special lightsaber. It wasn’t easy. Kanan started her training with practice wood swords. That slow approach frustrated Sabine. When Kanan and Hera Syndulla discussed his decision to proceed cautiously, Hera questioned why he would use wooden swords with Sabine when he never did with Ezra. Hera asked if the difference was because Kanan didn’t believe Sabine could learn “because she doesn’t have the Force.”
Kanan’s reply appeared to confirm Sabine is not Force-sensitive and he was merely teaching her how to use a lightsaber, not to become a Jedi. But his response also touched on an intriguing idea George Lucas made part of Star Wars lore from the very beginning.
Can a Non-Force User Still Use the Force?
When Hera questioned whether Kanan’s training methods had to do with Sabine not having Force abilities, he said no. But not for the reason you might expect. Kanan said of Sabine, “The Force resides in all living things, but you have to be open to it.”
That did not mean Sabine was/is Force sensitive. Kanan—who recognized Ezra’s strong Force-sensitivities instantly—was talking about a well-established concept that dates back to the franchise’s first film. In A New Hope Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke the Force is “an energy field created by all living things” that “surrounds us and penetrates us.” The Force “binds the galaxy together.”
Everyone and everything has the Living Force inside of them. Unlike everyone else, Force-users (thanks to high midi-chlorian counts) can access, control, and manipulate the Living Force. That ability is what gives Jedi their powers.
As Kanan’s answer implied, non Force-users like Sabine Wren can still connect with the Force. George Lucas himself has said as much as far back as 1981. He once compared the Force to (of all things) yoga, saying anyone can use it. In 2015 Dave Filoni further explained this idea when he said everyone is Force-intuitive. As an example of what that means practically, he pointed to Han Solo. What Han called “luck” while flying was him “tapping” into the Force unconsciously. Turns out you don’t survive an asteroid field on just chance and skill alone, because everyone can use the Force. They simply can never be as adept or as powerful doing so as a Force-sensitive, high midi-chlorian count individual.
Lucasfilm
Filoni also provided a comparison that explains this concept better than Lucas’ yoga analogy. Filoni likened this idea to someone who trains as a martial artist. They might earn a black belt, but they’ll never be Bruce Lee because they don’t have the natural traits needed to reach those heights. (He said Anakin is Bruce Lee when it comes to the Force.)
Have Any Non-Force Users Used the Force in Star Wars History?
Lucasfilm
The sequel trilogy and Rogue One both featured characters who exemplify this idea. Maz Kanata and Chirrut Îmwe seemed capable of low-level connections with the Force despite not being naturally Force-sensitive like Luke Skywalker or Rey. But, as Filoni said in 2015 when discussing Rebels, the franchise has “only scratched the surface” of what this means.
All of this brings us back to the main question raised by Ahsoka about Sabine Wren’s potential Force abilities. Did Ahsoka Tano train Sabine as a Jedi Padawan because she is Force-sensitive? Or because you don’t need to use the Force to become a Jedi? Star Wars Rebels pointed towards the latter, but the live-action series gave us reason to think Sabine is innately imbued with Force capabilities.
Did Ahsoka Prove Sabine Wren Is Force-Sensitive?
Lucasfilm
Just as Kanan once said Sabine wasn’t “open” to the Force, Ahsoka walked away from Sabine’s training for the same reason. She told Hera that Sabine “wasn’t ready” to become a Jedi. Ahsoka made no mention of whether Sabine has innate Force abilities she won’t/can’t access, but training her as a Padawan in the first place would suggest Sabine might truly be Force-sensitive even if Sabine says she “doesn’t feel it.” Training Sabine as a Jedi without her having any chance of using the Force would seem reckless of Ahsoka otherwise. It’s hard to imagine a non-Force using Jedi defeating a Sith Lord, for example. (The not-fully-trained Sabine losing a duel to Shin Hati showed why.)
The centuries-old Jedi lightsaber building droid Huyang also seemed to indicate Sabine has some Force-sensitivity. He told her in Ahsoka episode two that her “aptitude for the Force would fall far short” of every other Jedi Padawan he ever knew. Not what any student wants to hear, but that comment at least means Sabine has some aptitude for the Force. That would explain why Ahsoka took her on as Padawan. (It might also explain why Sabine can slide under a parked E-Wing on her speeder Akira-style at roughly 500 mph.)
Lucasfilm
That circumstantial evidence is obviously far from definitive proof, though. Not when Star Wars, George Lucas, and Dave Filoni have established anyone can access the Force on some level. ( Without dark science, at least.) And Ahsoka‘s third episode also raised more questions about exactly what Ahsoka Tano hopes to accomplish with Sabine’s training. While she admitted “talent” has a lot to do with using the Force, she didn’t say a lack of talent was an impossible obstacle to overcome for Sabine. Focus and discipline are important, too. Ahsoka even cited Kanan’s comments about the Force living inside all things as a way to encourage her apprentice.
Except, something she told Huyang—who says the Jedi never would have accepted Sabine Wren as an apprentice—indicates she might not even be trying to train Sabine as a Jedi. Ahsoka Tano said she doesn’t need Sabine to become a Jedi; she needs her “to be herself.”
Lucasfilm
What exactly does that mean, and what does it have to do with Sabine’s Force capabilities? While we don’t yet know the level (or absence) of natural Force proclivities in Sabine Wren, whatever the answer to that question, it will be more important than any one character.
Why Does Sabine Wren’s Jedi Training Matter So Much?
Ahsoka wouldn’t train Sabine as a Jedi if she didn’t believe Sabine could join the ranks or at least learn to use the Force. So unless she’s flat-out wrong about what’s possible for a non-Force using Sabine to accomplish, there are two explanations for taking why she’d take her on as a Padawan.
Lucasfilm
If Sabine Wren has small levels of natural Force-sensitivities it lowers the threshold for who might become a Jedi someday. That could prove vital in a galaxy where the Order has only a handful of potential members, both now on Ahsoka and after Luke Skywalker’s death.
If Sabine has none but can still learn how to use the Force and become a Jedi (or something similar), it means anyone in the galaxy far, far away might be able to do the same. And if that’s true, the Force will no longer be the special purview of select individuals lucky enough to be born with high midi-chlorian counts. It will mean the Force will truly belong to everyone. Just as Obi-Wan Kenobi told us it does when we first heard about it.
Originally published on August 22, 2023.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter and Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.
The United States has made continual efforts to limit China’s chip production, but it might not do much good. China plans to launch a fund in hopes of bolstering its semiconductor industry, Reuters reports. The state-backed endeavor is the third from the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund and aims to raise 300 billion yuan ($41 billion). The previous two funds raised 138.7 billion yuan ($19 billion) in 2014 and 200 billion yuan ($27 billion) in 2019.
About 60 billion yuan ($8 billion) is expected to come from China’s finance ministry. The other contributors aren’t yet known, though past backers included China Telecom and China National Tobacco Corporation. Much of the fund itself will specifically focus on creating instruments for chip manufacturing.
The news comes only a few days after Huawei, a Chinese electronics company, announced its new smartphone, the Mate 60 Pro, complete with homegrown chips. Huawei partnered with chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) to create a new Kirin 9000s chip, according to a report from analysis firm TechInsights. SMIC’s high-level 7nm technology appears to provide the Mate 60 Pro with download speeds beyond those seen in typical 5G phones.
The QCinema International Film Festival in the Philippines has beefed up its industry program by introducing a project market strand, QCinema Project Market (QPM). It acts as a networking and funding platform for Filipino and Southeast Asian projects in advanced development.
With the support of the Quezon City Film Development Commission (QCFDC) and the Quezon City local government, QPM will award over $300,000 in grants to selected projects.
To be eligible, the director must have at least a draft of the full script of a feature-length fiction film project, and the film must not yet be completed by the time QCinema 2023 commences and must not yet be fully financed. Southeast Asian directors with at least one short feature film may apply.
“In recent times, this region has showcased remarkable advancements in its cinematic endeavors, boasting production values that rival international benchmarks. This is clearly evident in the diverse collaborative film ventures between the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations, as exemplified by acclaimed works like ‘Autobiography by Makbul Mubarak’ (Indonesia-Singapore-Philippines), ‘In My Mother’s Skin’ (Philippines-Singapore-Taiwan), and ‘Arnold is a Model Student’ (Thailand-Philippines-Singapore),” said Liza Dino-Seguerra, the newly appointed executive director of the QCFDC.
“With QPM, we now have the opportunity to nurture and endorse similar projects from this region, facilitating access to funding avenues and exclusive networking prospects. This, in turn, will amplify the presence of these narratives on the grand cinematic stage.”
Diño-Seguerra previously served as the chairperson and CEO of the Film Development Council of the Philippines. There she was involved in the creation of the country’s first national film incentives through the FilmPhilippines program.
This town is big enough for both Sydney Sweeney and Lili Reinhart, and the two blonde starlets have zero bad blood. In fact, they’re double dating.
Before you argue Reinhart and Sweeney’s Venice hangout is a PR move to cover up their recent red carpet drama, please consider that rumors of their rumored feud are based on literally nothing. I mean it, nothing happened. Very recently, a video circulated on TikTok that showed Reinhart with a serious expression on her face after hugging the Euphoria star at an Armani Beauty event and viewers invented an entire narrative about it. That’s it. You can watch the video here and see the comments for yourself.
Basically, the Riverdale actor rested her face after greeting Sweeney and the internet decided there was beef. And while it might not look like it on the surface, this is misogyny in action! Pitting two women against each other because one of those women didn’t smile enough? My darlings, that’s not reading body language, that’s just the patriarchy playing games with your mind. Okay, off my soap box!
Thankfully, the two actors had zero interest in fueling the fire, instead opting to go out for dinner together…kinda. According to People, Sydney Sweeney and fiancé Jonathan Davino linked up with Lili Reinhart and her boyfriend Jack Martin at the Miu Miu Women’s Tales Committee party at Cipriani during the Venice Film Festival on September 3. The event in question? Oh, just a celebration of Miu Miu’s new women-directed short film series. See!? It’s possible to be a woman and support other women! Crazy but true.
While taking in the sunset over the water, the women also posed for a selfie together, which Reinhart posted to her Instagram Stories with the message, “We’ll be over here if you need us.” Sweeney later posted it to her Stories as well. Consider those feud rumors subtly acknowledged and debunked.
First ordered by Netflix in July 2021, we’ve had two seasons of the adult-animated comedy series Chicago Party Aunt, but will we be getting more episodes? It looks like the series has quietly ended, but Chicago Party Aunt still lives on away from Netflix.
Based on a Twitter account run by Chris Witaske, Chicago Party Aunt followed the antics of a usually drunken Chicagoan called Diane, who’s loud, inappropriate, and a big partier.
The series featured the voices of Lauren Ash, Rory O’Malley, Witaske himself, Bob Odenkirk, and Jon Barinholtz.
Chicago Party Aunt Not Expected to Return for Season 3
In case you’re unfamiliar with animation, you usually find that Netflix (and other studios, for that matter) give large upfront orders of episodes because of how production differs from live-action scripted shows.
That was the case here, with 16 episodes ordered upfront that would be split across two parts (or seasons, as we’re referring to them). The first eight episodes dropped in September 2021, and the second season a year later in December 2022. In the press release for season 2, there was no mention of it being the final season.
Will the show return to Netflix for a third season, then? It looks unlikely.
We’ve been digging into the CVs of dozens of people who worked behind the scenes on Chicago Party Aunt either at Titmouse or Netflix Animation, and all have moved on to other projects, suggesting the show has ended after it exhausted those initial episodes.
In fact, most of the work on seasons 1 and 2 looks to have been completed by the middle to end of 2021.
As a result, we suspect that Netflix opted not to renew the show for any additional seasons in 2021/2022. Given the show hasn’t been officially canceled, it’s likely the show is among Netflix’s “ghost-canceled” series that remain in limbo indefinitely.
Twitter Account for Chicago Party Aunt Remains Active
Despite all this, the main Twitter account on which the show is based is still very much alive and kicking, occasionally Tweeting out some quippy remarks, talking about Chicago landmarks or public figures, and even often replying to those praising the show:
How well did Chicago Party Aunt perform on Netflix?
Much like Netflix’s other output in the animated sitcom space in recent years, no shows have really become big Netflix hits with the exception of Big Mouth and Bojack Horseman.
The show has only ever featured in the daily top 10 lists in four countries, with it only featuring in the US top 10s for three days across its two seasons.
Reviews weren’t particularly strong either from critics or IMDb, with it sitting at a 5.6/10 at the time of publishing. The Michigan Daily put out a scathing review at the time of publishing, stating:
“The Chicago Party Aunt Twitter account thrives because of its short, comedic tweets that allow followers to form their own picture of the woman behind the handle. Ultimately, Netflix fell short when it came to executing the new animated series: The jokes don’t hit, the storyline is nonexistent and the main character is difficult to relate to.”
Are you disappointed it doesn’t look like Chicago Party Aunt is returning for a third season?
Zoe Roellin’s VR animation “Perennials” – presented at Venice Immersive and produced by Meta – will hit the VR Animation Player next.
“It makes me very happy, because it will be available to practically everyone with a VR headset,” says the Swiss artist, based in Italy, opening up about her collaboration with Ryan Genji Thomas and Goro Fujita.
“They approached me because they liked my work with [painting and animation software] Quill and asked if I wanted to pitch a project to Meta. They thought ‘Perennials’ would be a great addition to their catalog, with it being this grounded piece directed at an older audience. I just didn’t expect it to happen so early in my career.”
Sarah Malkin and Yelena Rachitsky executive produce, while Dren McDonald is responsible for the soundtrack. Joe Zieja, Natalie Miller and David Olano round up the voice cast.
“I was looking for people who could be really genuine and convey small nuances through dialogues, because a lot of this story is really low-key. It’s more about the things they are not saying,” adds Roellin.
In 17-minutes-long “Perennials,” an uncle and his young niece go to their family’s abandoned vacation home after the death of his father. They are confronted with the state of the house, but also with their own conflicting feelings.
“It’s a story about the things we pass on, generation to generation. This house seems to be crumbling and they have to figure out what to do. When I was writing the script, during the first year of the pandemic, I often felt like the world around me was slowly degrading. So how do you tackle that?”
Zoe Roellin
“This girl, Emi, goes on her own personal journey. Just like her uncle Elias. I thought it was a very interesting dynamic between two people who are trying to seem more grown-up than they are. At first, Elias is trying to replicate the way his father acted with him, but then he manages to break out of that circle. When he finally shows vulnerability and insecurity, that’s when they connect.”
Roellin also went personal when developing the project, inspired by “real events and a real place” and trying to express her “washed-out memories” through its hand-drawn look.
“My grandparents had a vacation home in Italy. My grandpa bought the land and built this place from scratch, and now they are too sick to go there. When I was in college, I went back after a long time and felt such a potent mix of emotions. It was already falling apart, but it was also a symbol of what their generation got to have. I will probably never own a house,” she says.
“I thought I could use some of VR’s strengths, like the immersion and the sense of really being somewhere. This story is all about this place and the emotions tied to it.”
Roellin, who has been developing VR for four years, is thinking beyond the festival circuit.
“It can be tricky, because in Switzerland, many people are curious about what I do, but they also don’t entirely understand it,” she says, praising the support of Virtual Switzerland director Laetitia Bochud.
“This film is very personal, but I think many people can relate to the story. Still, in the future, I don’t necessarily want to go broader. I want to get more specific, talk to niche communities and explore my identity as a queer person,” she adds.
Everyone knows the Jonas Brothers and the band seems to be everywhere right now. It’s only right as the band embarked on The Tour.
With the release of The Album, a lot of us anticipated a tour and the band even started off with 2 nights back-to-back at Yankee Stadium. That was huge and a great way to start the tour off with a bang.
Since the band is set to perform a lot of songs, some were curious about if JB had someone opening for them or not. I mean 5 albums worth of songs is a lot of songs and frankly, a lot of hours of singing.
Whether you’re headed to a concert soon or just want to know the details, we’ve got the scoop on if the Jonas Brothers have an opening act for the tour.
Who is opening for the Jonas Brothers on The Tour? (2023)
For The Tour, the Jonas Brothers are keeping it in the family. They decided to have Lawrence open for them. Similar to the brothers, the band is made up of two siblings: Clyde and Gracie Lawrence along with their band. Aside from the siblings, the band actually features 6 musicians. Lawrence has also worked with Jon Bellion in the past and even on some songs featured on The Album.
While Lawrence might seem like an unlikely choice, the connection to Jon Bellion and them being siblings had to play a major role. Regardless of why they chose Lawrence, at least we all know who is opening for this massively exciting tour. Plus this is a question I see floating around a lot especially in some of the Jonas Facebook groups I’m apart of.
If you’re headed to see the Jonas Brothers on The Tour, you might want to check out one of Lawrence’s songs which I’m adding below. If you’ve already been to the see The Tour, then I’d love to know what you thought of Lawrence and how they did opening up for the Jo Bros.
The Jonas Brothers and Lawrence are currently on tour together. You can buy tickets here.
Did you know the Jonas Brothers had an opener for The Tour? Let us know in the comments!
The screenplay for Founders Day, by director Erik Bloomquist and his brother Carson Bloomquist, feels like a reaction to the ever-growing political divisiveness in the United States. In the town of Fairwood, the mayoral election is heating up. Incumbent Blair Gladwell (Amy Hargreaves) and rival Harold Faulkner (Jayce Bartok) are in a dead heat. The pressures of the campaign put a strain on their families as well. Lily (Emilia McCarthy) and her governor mother don’t talk much, and the politician often forgets about lunch dates and the like.
Mind you, Harold is not much better, using his wife, Nancy (Arun Storrs), and two kids, Adam (Devin Druid) and Melissa (Olivia Nikkanen), as mere props for the cameras. One night, tensions peak, so Melissa storms off to see her girlfriend, Allison (Naomi Grace). While walking on the bridge, someone violently attacks Melissa, leaving Allison reeling in horror. In the aftermath of the murder, Commissioner Peterson (Catherine Curtin) and Deputy Miller (Adam Weppler) interview everyone and pray the bodies don’t pile up. At school, only Mr. Jackson (Michael Douglas William Russ) offers Allison any genuine sympathy. At home, her dad (Andrew Stewart-Jones) tries to comfort her but doesn’t know what to do. Why was Melissa the victim and not both she and Allison? Was this a random occurrence, or is the killer planning something much bigger?
Erik Bloomquist has been steadily directing shorts and features for roughly a decade. Founders Day is a testament to everything the filmmaker has learned. The sheer scope of the camera movements, editing, and use of music is grander than anything the man has attempted before. After Melissa is slain, Allison runs into the downtown area where citizens parading for their preferred campaign are yelling back and forth. These two factions can’t even agree on who gets to “claim” the traumatized youth as they encircle her. The camera is looking straight down in a medium shot. As the group causes her to panic more and more, the camera pulls back and begins rotating. This is more horrifying than the preceding death via masked killer. And that is precisely the point. Politics gets in the way of everything nowadays, even a tragic and senseless death.
“…Commissioner Peterson and Deputy Miller interview everyone and pray the bodies don’t pile up.”
To say more would be spoiling all the fun. Suffice to say, the themes aren’t subtle but work thanks to strong characterizations and a sense of urgency and fun. Moments of very dark humor land because audiences sympathize with what’s happening to Allison, her dad, and (some of) the others. A scene featuring troublemakers recreating the attack in school is both amusing and shocking.
The cast of Founders Day really helps viewers buy into everything. Grace is charming and sweet as the frustrated and grieving teenage lead. Stewart-Jones is commendable and daring as her father. Hargreaves sells the public persona and private one of the politician believably. Bartok is easy to hate and feel bad for at the same time. Russ does such a fantastic Michael Douglas impression that one could easily mistake him for that cinematic legend. Yes, that does mean he steals every scene he’s in, no matter how briefly. Weppler is as fun as ever as the overworked deputy.
Founders Day does hit a few cliches associated with the slasher genre. But that doesn’t mean the film offers nothing new or enjoyable. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Erik Bloomquist’s direction has never been leaner or meaner. The screenplay has a lot it wants to say and does so in a fun, murderous way lined with wicked humor. All the actors understood the assignment and successfully pull off their roles. Bloomquist definitely has many more productions in him, but as of right now, this is one of his best.
Meri Brown is a key figure in TLC’s ‘Sister Wives.’
She parted ways with polygamist Kody Brown in December of 2022.
Fans now think she may have a new boyfriend.
Meri Brown and Kody Brown, two of the stars of TLC’s Sister Wives, were married in 1990 — and Meri stands out among the Sister Wives in that she was his first wife. They married in 1990 and welcomed one child together, Leon, during their 32-year union. After their split, which rocked the very foundations of the reality hit, Meri has remained quiet — and she appeared to be single.
But an August 20 Instagram post changed all that. In the photo, the TV personality snuggled up to a mystery man for a very cozy selfie. He appeared to pull her close while smiling and flashing a “hang loose” gesture. “One of my favorite moments from the weekend was hanging out with one of my favorite people!” she captioned the pic. “This guy is kind, genuine, and authentic, a true friend. If you don’t have one of these humans in your life, one that has your back, one that no matter what time passes, it’s like no time passed at all, you should get yourself one! See you on your stomping grounds next @navjd !!”
So who is the buff man standing next to Meri in the recent post? Find out what we know below.
He goes by ‘JD’
Meri’s tag led fans straight to his personal account, which is private. But Meri’s mystery man is in fact Jon-David “JD” Crawford.
JD lives in Hawaii
Eagle-eyed fans looking for info on Meri’s handsome potential boyfriend discovered that he lives in Hawaii! Additionally, he heads up a dance studio called Destination Dance Hawaii, where dancers train in the art and participate in dance competitions.
He’s educated
According to his LinkedIn profile, JD studied humanities and humanistic studies and science management, obtaining Bachelor’s Degrees in both! His profile claims he completed his studies at the University of Hawaii-West Oahu.
While Meri hasn’t confirmed her relationship status in regards to JD, fans seem convinced. “Please tell me you’re more then just friends. He’s hot! You deserve such happiness in your life,” a follower wrote on her IG post with JD. As for her own goals moving forward, Meri was clear in a February 2023 IG story. “Relationship Status: committed to inner peace, growth, self love and gratitude,” a quote read. A second quote read, “If your life just got a little harder, that probably means you just leveled up.”
When lawmakers began investigating the impact of social media on kids in 2021, Zamaan Qureshi was enthralled.
Since middle school he’d watched his friends struggle with eating disorders, anxiety and depression, issues he said were “exacerbated” by platforms like Snapchat and Instagram.
Qureshi’s longtime concerns were thrust into the national spotlight when Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen released documents linking Instagram to teen mental health problems. But as the revelations triggered a wave of bills to expand guardrails for children online, he grew frustrated at who appeared missing from the debate: young people, like himself, who’d experienced the technology from an early age.
“There was little to no conversation about young people and … what they thought should be done,” said Qureshi, 21, a rising senior at American University.
So last year, Qureshi and a coalition of students formed Design It For Us, an advocacy group intended to bring the perspectives of young people to the forefront of the debate about online safety.
They are part of a growing constellation of youth advocacy and activist organizations demanding a say as officials consider new rules to govern kids’ activity online.
The slew of federal and state proposals has served as a rallying cry to a cohort of activists looking to shape laws that may transform how their generation interacts with technology. As policymakers consider substantial shifts to the laws overseeing kids online, including measures at the federal and state level that ban children under 13 from accessing social media and require those younger than 18 to get parental consent to log on, the young advocates — some still in their teens — have been quick to engage.
Now, youth activists have become a formidable lobbying force in capitals across the nation. Youth groups are meeting with top decision-makers, garnering support from the White House and British royalty and affecting legislative proposals, including persuading federal lawmakers to scale back parental control measures in one major bill.
“The tides definitely are turning,” said Sneha Revanur, 18, another member of Design It For Us.
Yet this prominence doesn’t necessarily translate to influence. Many activists said their biggestchallenge is ensuring that policymakers take their input seriously.
“We want to be seen as meaningful collaborators, and not just a token seat at the table,” Qureshi said.
In Washington, D.C., Design It For Us has taken part in dozens of meetings with House and Senate leaders, White House officials and other advocates. In February, the group made its debut testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“We cannot wait another year, we cannot wait another month, another week or another day to begin to protect the next generation,” Emma Lembke, 20, who co-founded the organization with Qureshi, said in her testimony.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who chairs the panel and met with the group again in July, said that Lembke “provided powerful testimony” and that their meetings were one of “many conversations that I’ve had with young folks demonstrating the next generation’s call for change.”
Revanur said policymakers often put too much stock in technical or political expertise and not enough in digital natives’ lifetime of experience and understanding of technology’s potential for harm.
“There’s so much emphasis on a specific set of credentials: having a PhD in computer science or having spent years working on the Hill,” said Revanur, a rising sophomore at Williams College. “It diminishes the importance of the credentials that youth have, which is the credential of lived experience.”
Revanur, who founded the youth-led group Encode Justice, which focuses on artificial intelligence, has met with officials at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), urging them to factor in concerns about how AI could be used for school surveillance as they drafted a voluntary AI bill of rights.
The office’s former acting director, Alondra Nelson, who led the initiative, said Encode Justice brought policy issues “to life” by describing both real and imagined harms — from “facial recognition cameras in their school hallways [to] the very real anxiety that the prospect of persistent surveillance caused them.”
In July, Vice President Harris invited Revanur to speak at a roundtable on AI with civil rights and advocacy group leaders, a moment the youth activist called “a pretty significant turning point” in “increasing legitimization of youth voices in the space.”
An honor to join @VP (alongside @WHOSTP & @neeratanden) for an AI roundtable with civil society leaders. Never before has a young person had a voice in federal AI policy!
We discussed ChatGPT in the classroom, algorithms & youth mental health, risks from advanced AI, & more. pic.twitter.com/MI0KeONOHG
There are already signs that those in power are heeding their calls.
Sam Hiner, 20, started college during the covid-19 pandemic and said that social media hurt his productivity and ability to socialize on-campus.
“It’s easier to scroll on your phone in your dorm than it is to go out because you get that guaranteed dopamine,” said Hiner, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Hiner, who in high school co-founded a youth-oriented policy group, worked with lawmakers and children’s safety groups to introduce state legislation prohibiting platforms from using minors’ data to algorithmically target them with content.
He said he held more than 100 meetings with state legislators, advocates and industry leaders as he pushed for a bill to tackle the issue. The state bill, the Social Media Algorithmic Control in Information Technology Act, now has more than 60 sponsors.
Last month, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the duke and duchess of Sussex, awarded Hiner’s group, Design It For Us and others grants ranging from $25,000 to $200,000 for their advocacy as part of the newly launched Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund. Hiner said he received a surprise call from the royals minutes after learning about the grant.
“As a young person who … has a bit of a chip on my shoulder from feeling excluded from the process traditionally, getting that … buy-in from some of the most influential people in the world was really cool,” he said.
Youth activists’ lobbying efforts are also bearing fruit in Washington.
This summer, Design It For Us led a week of action calling on senators to take up a bill to expand existing federal privacy protections for younger users, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, and another measure to create a legal obligation for tech platforms to prevent harms to kids, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
Great to meet young activists with @DesignItForUs this afternoon.@JudiciaryDems are on a mission to protect kids online. These youth advocates have experienced the ills of social media firsthand.
— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) July 18, 2023
A Senate Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations, said the advocates played a key role in persuading lawmakers to exclude teens from a provision in KOSA requiring parental consent to access digital platforms. It now only covers those 12 and younger.
Dozens of digital rights groups have expressed concern that the legislation would require tech companies to collect even more data from kids and give parents too much control over their children’s online activity, which could disproportionately harm young LGBT users.
“We were focused on making sure that KOSA did not turn into a parental surveillance bill,” said Qureshi.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the lead sponsor of the bill, said their mobilization “significantly changed my perspective,” calling their advocacy a “linchpin” to building support for the legislation.
Qureshi and other youth advocates attended a White House event in July at which Biden surprised spectators by endorsing KOSA and the children’s privacy bill, his most direct remarks on the efforts to date. Days later, the bills advanced with bipartisan support out of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Hiner and other youth advocates said they have worked closely with prominent children’s online safety groups, including Fairplay. Revanur said her group Encode Justice receives funding from the Omidyar Network, an organizationestablished by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar that is a major force in fueling Big Tech antagonists in Washington. Qureshi declined to disclose any funding sources for Design It For Us, beyond its recent grant from the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund.
Some young activists argue against such tough protections for kids online. The digital activist group Fight for the Future said it has been working with hundreds of young grass-roots activists who are rallying support against the bills, arguing that they would expand surveillance and hurt marginalized groups.
Sarah Philips, 25, an organizer for Fight for the Future, said young people’s views on the topic shouldn’t be treated as a “monolith,” and that the group has heard from an “onslaught” of younger users concerned that policymakers’ proposed restrictions could have a chilling effect on speech online.
“The youth that I work with tend to be queer, a lot of them are trans and a lot of them are young people of color, and their experience in all aspects of the world, including online, is different,” she said.
Studies have documented that prolonged social media use can lead to increased anxiety and depression and that it can exacerbate body image and self-esteem issues among younger users. But the research on social media use is still evolving. Recent reports by the American Psychological Association and the U.S. Surgeon General painted a more complex picture of the dynamic and called for more research, finding that social media can also generate positive social experiences for young people.
“We don’t want to get rid of social media. That’s not a stance that most members of Gen Z, I think, would take,” said Qureshi. “We want to see reforms and policies in place that make our online world safer and allow us to foster those connections that have been positive.”
EXCLUSIVE: Malaysian Chinese filmmaker Chong Keat Aun has returned to feature filmmaking with the Venice Days title Snow In Midsummer, which Deadline can share a first look clip from above.
A collaboration between Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore, Snow In Midsummer revolves around a Cantonese street opera troupe during a turbulent period in Malaysia’s political history in the late 1960s.
The full synopsis reads: On 13th May 1969, while Eng and her mother are watching the Chinese opera at a Temple in Kuala Lumpur, her father Kooi and brother Yeow are at the Majestic Theatre. Amid post-election tensions a violent riot takes place, and Eng loses contact with her father and brother, as the Prime Minister declares a national state of emergency. On 13th May 2018, Eng comes across the Chinese opera chief who confronted the local government on that same day 49 years ago. Together they share a moment of powerless remembrance of a more peaceful period in time.
Cast features Wan Fang, Pearlly Chua, Rexen Cheng, Pauline Tan, Peter Yu, and Alvin Wong. Producers are Kew Soon Wong, Gene Yao, Wai Thong Chow, and Jennifer Jao. Exec producers are Jment Lim, Chow Wai Thong, Zoey Teng, and Albert Yao. The film received support from the 2020 Taipei Golden Horse Film Project Promotion, The French National Centre of Cinema, the Singapore Film Commission, the Penang State EXCO Office for Tourism And Creative Economy, and Penang Global Tourism.
Chong Keat Aun is best known for his debut feature, The Story of Southern Islet, which picked up the Best New Director award at the 57th Golden Horse Awards in Taipei.
From the start, it’s obvious that this is not a regular Kaiju movie. The genre, in which gigantic beasts à la Godzilla lay waste to cities and swaths of countryside, is not known for restraint, but “Shin Ultraman” is completely, unpredictably off the wall.
Captain Tamura (Hidetoshi Nishijima, from the radically different “Drive My Car”) leads a task force dedicated to fighting the big monsters that turn up with clockwork regularity. “For some reason, Kaiju only appear in Japan,” someone quips about the creatures’s absence elsewhere in the world. But even this elite squad is flabbergasted when a mysterious helmeted giant clad in a superhero-like red and silver bodysuit shows up. Called Ultraman (a popular character who has been the subject of many iterations since its introduction in 1966), the newcomer helps the overwhelmed team battle aliens like Mefilas (Koji Yamamoto).
Both a reboot and a riff, “Shin Ultraman,” which was directed by Shinji Higuchi and written by Hideaki Anno (the pair also collaborated on “Shin Godzilla” in 2016), is a surreal trip. It’s hard to oversell the eye-popping invention and droll humor on display here, but it’s Higuchi’s mise en scène that stands out, packed with odd angles and seemingly arbitrary shots, as when a character opens a computer file and the movie cuts to her feet under her desk. Shiro Sagisu’s score is equally bonkers and disruptive, incorporating 1960s pop, thrash riffs, chamber suites and jazzy noodlings. It all amounts to pure joy.
Chances are you haven’t heard of Deborah Install’s “A Robot in the Garden” (2015), unless you live in Japan, where the novel has been adapted into a radio play, a stage musical and now this charming kid-friendly movie.
Ken (Kazunari Ninomiya) has a terminal case of arrested development, whiling away his days playing elaborate virtual-reality games and avoiding any hint of household work. One day, a rusty, taped-up robot turns up in the garden, offering its name as Tang. Shortly thereafter, Ken’s fed-up wife, Emi (Hikari Mitsushima), kicks him out of their house. So he sets out for Atobit Systems, the company that manufactured Tang, to trade that old model for a brand-new one, which he will then give to Emi to get back in her graces.
The latest from the prolific director Takahiro Miki (“The Door Into Summer”) does not revolutionize the cute-robot genre, but it is very effective. Naturally, Ken will change for the best, thanks to Tang — whose mysterious origin and initial purpose are at the heart of the story — but this utter predictability is a feature, not a bug, and is embraced as such by the film. Young viewers are likely to clamor for a toy version of the adorable bot, while their parents are more likely to be interested in the movie’s awfully believable near-future, in which delivery drones crisscross the sky and robots are absolutely everywhere in our daily life.
‘Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out’
When the Levan family moves to a quaint Western town, the teenage Itsy (the excellent Emma Tremblay) is not especially pleased: She is now living in the middle of nowhere, plus being singled out as the new kid is never fun. Maybe that’s why she immediately connects with her new classmate Calvin (Jacob Buster, a charmer bound to resurface in bigger-budget projects), who is ostracized as the local weirdo. Calvin is a heartthrob in nerd clothing — more specifically in a spacesuit, which he is prone to wear to school — and is on a quest to find the parents (Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell) he hasn’t seen in 10 years. He is convinced they were taken by aliens one fateful night and has been searching the skies ever since. Itsy pretends to befriend him for a journalism project, though it’s clear she’s actually taken by Calvin’s quirky sincerity, and perhaps even by his far-fetched story about extraterrestrial creatures secretly visiting Earth whenever a certain comet gets close.
Jake Van Wagoner’s film is a throwback to 1980s family-friendly fare, and it nicely captures the formula’s basic elements, down to the presence of a smart-aleck little boy (Itsy’s brother, Evan, played by Kenneth Cummins), an unironic embrace of the cutesy and the cheesy in equal proportions and, perhaps most important, a general good nature.
Carl (Adam Weber) lives in his grandparents’ rec-room-like basement, seems to survive on power bars and takeout, and watches old black-and-white movies on an ancient-looking TV set. The only other living presence in that den is Vetro (voiced by Kory Karam), an animatronic head with enormous blue eyes sitting on Carl’s desk. A computer programmer, Carl is ambitious: “You are to become human,” he informs his creation. To that end, Vetro has been endowed with the ability to generate “new expansions.” In other words, he is sentient and can upgrade himself. One of his first moves is to give himself a new “multilayered emotional matrix,” and it doesn’t take long for Vetro to exhibit somewhat cunning traits — he can be both obsequious and creepy.
The writer-director Christopher Morvant’s most distinctive spin on the thriving A.I. genre was to make Vetro a cartoonish animatronic/puppet character that looks goofy yet comes across as unsettling, especially since Morvant often shows him in startling close-ups. The movie is, admittedly, overlong, especially since it’s essentially a talkathon between Carl and Vetro, and the writing is not quite strong enough to sustain the more complex philosophical issues it raises. But “Life Cycle” does have a few surprises in store, and Morvant’s sui generis world nimbly juxtaposes technologies that feel pulled from completely different eras. Pretty good for a movie shot in a garage in a month.
Set in an impoverished Sol Nascente, in Brazil, Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’s film is tough to categorize. “Dry Ground Burning” follows the activities of a women’s gang, led by Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), that steals oil and resells it as gas to groups of bikers. Add to that mix the re-entry into society of Chitara’s half sister, Léa (Léa Alves da Silva), who is newly released from prison. In conventional hands, these could be an action-packed thriller’s starting point. Pimenta and Queirós go down a completely different road, both in form and in content.
We are in a dystopian pamphlet targeting the far-right policies of Brazil’s authoritarian former president Jair Bolsonaro, which were devastating for the poor, the minorities and the outcasts at the movie’s heart. All of this is put together with a documentarylike matter-of-factness, increased by the fact that the cast is made up of non- or semiprofessional actors. When scenes set during, say, a raucous bus trip or a religious ceremony hypnotically go on and on as if in real time, you might wonder if Frederick Wiseman had suddenly gone to Brazil. Tip: Go with the flow — you can’t rush life, politics or this film.
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At first Naomi Klein thought it was kind of funny. More and more people were confusing the prolific capitalism critic with Naomi Wolf, the author of “The Beauty Myth” and erstwhile feminist star who has become a fount of conspiracy theories on everything from Ebola (The U.S. wanted to spread the virus and launch a military takeover!) to COVID-19 (The vaccines can shed! The government is eavesdropping through your vaccine passports!).
“It was a periodic annoyance, no big deal,” Klein said in a recent video interview. “It didn’t happen all that much. I’d stumble across somebody online who was very angry at me for something, and it took me a minute to realize that it wasn’t me they were angry at.”
Then, gradually, the social media echo chamber grew deafening. The pandemic quarantine meant more hours online for just about everyone, including both Naomis. Wolf and her easily agitated cadre, which now included right-wing firebrands Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, were hitting the COVID conspiracies hard, and describing a dark fantasy version of real-world crises. Millions seemed to be buying it. This, Klein realized, was serious. On both a personal and a political level, the Naomi conflation went from periodic annoyance to existential dilemma.
So Klein, the author of liberal calls to action including “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine,” did what she does: She wrote a book about it. “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World” isn’t about Klein’s Naomi Wolf problem per se; as Klein says, “She’s like the white rabbit who I follow down the rabbit hole, and the book is really about the rabbit hole.”
More specifically, it’s about the “mirror world,” a place inhabited not just by the conspiracy-mongers, willfully taking advantage of public confusion and anxiety, but potentially by all of us. We all live in a world of social media, after all; we constantly risk warping ourselves, changing our personae as circumstances shift, infecting our children with fears and dreams that aren’t their own.
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
“The doppelganger provides a lens that lets you look at a bunch of different things that I think are quite interesting,” Klein says, “including the way we create doubles of ourselves in order to perform ourselves online, whether it’s in a video game as an avatar or an idealized beautiful person on Instagram or a mom influencer. We’re partitioning ourselves up and we’re creating this double and we’re polishing it and we’re burnishing it.”
In short, to borrow the title of a doppelganger movie Klein examines in the book, “Doppelganger” is about “Us.”
As Klein writes, we live in “a culture crowded with various forms of doubling, in which all of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgangers — virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others … a doppelganger we perform ceaselessly in the digital ether as the price of admission in a rapacious attention economy.” In this economy, the one with the most clicks wins, and the one with the most outlandish take gets the most clicks.
That helps explain the supply side of the world we live in, where talk of Maui space lasers, 5G vaccine surveillance and blood-sucking pedophile rings is pounding on the gates of mainstream thought. But the demand side is trickier — and perhaps more troubling. What makes consumers with nothing tangible to gain subscribe to woo-woo theories? The way Klein sees it, when reality is too much to bear, many escape into fantasy. The illusion of control, or at least comprehension, is often more tolerable than the chaos that increasingly surrounds us.
“We are in a moment of multiple and difficult reckonings, and COVID brought a lot of it into focus,” Klein says. “There’s the way we treat our elders, the way the working class is mistreated, and the mirror that was held up to the lockdown class — the people like me who were able to stay home. The only reason we were able to stay home and stay safe was because other people were out there with very, very little protection delivering food, working in slaughterhouses, Amazon warehouses and nursing homes. And suddenly the veil was pulled back on how our world actually works.”
Like Klein’s other books, “Doppelganger” is an in-depth critique of what late-stage capitalism hath wrought. But it’s also much more. Klein wields her polymathic expertise like a sword, slicing through the mirror world via political theory; tech anxiety (she shudders at AI’s potential); literary criticism (she warms up to former nemesis Philip Roth through his doppelganger novel “Operation Shylock”); and films famous (Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”) and obscure (Henrik Galeen’s silent oddity “The Student of Prague”).
The results might put the reader at risk of splitting in two. You can’t help but be invigorated by Klein’s intellectual synthesis and dexterity, even as her gimlet eye makes you want to run screaming into the night.
Much of it comes back to the woman Klein calls “the other Naomi” and the strange bedfellows she has embraced. It pains Klein to see Bannon, Wolf and company co-opt legitimate concerns, like internet privacy and government-mandated COVID school closures, and convert them into science-fiction theories. She places some of the blame on the left’s instinct to dismiss outright anything emanating from the right-wing echo chamber, instead of working harder to find common ground in reality.
“The conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong, but they often get the feelings right,” she says. “The feeling of living in a world with shadow worlds. The feeling of having important truths hidden from you. And then the other thing they offer is a sense of community and belonging. Sometimes they seem to be having a lot of fun.” And that can be vital at a time of growing societal isolation and “deaths of despair.”
There’s a lot going on in “Doppelganger,” yet somehow Klein ties it all together into what we seem to be lacking as individuals: a cohesive whole. “Doppelganger” is both timely and timeless, a work in a grand tradition. “Things fall apart,” W. B. Yeats wrote in his 1920 poem “The Second Coming,” “the centre cannot hold.” Nearly 50 years later, Joan Didion referenced his verse in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” a tour through the existential crisis of the 1960s. Now we have another spirited guide — a source of fact-based understanding, if not always solace.
In Marvel Comics, Zaniac (a parasitic entity from the Dark Dimension) is actually a Thor villain.
Loki Season 2 Trailer Features Best Look at Zaniac’s Billboard
Marvel Studios officially released a new trailer for Loki Season 2, showcasing fresh looks at the titular God of Mischief, Sylvie, and Zaniac’s billboard.
At the 0:16 second mark of the trailer, the best look yet at the villain’s movie billboard was unveiled:
Marvel Studios
The brief look showed glimpses of the character’s design in the MCU series.
Marvel Studios
Part of the billboard was previously seen in Loki Season 2’s first trailer:
Marvel Studios
In Marvel Comics, Zaniac made his debut in Thor 319 in May 1982, an entity that possesses a human to act as Dormammu’s agent.
After leaping from host to host, the parasitic entity eventually possessed an actor named Brad Wolf while working on a film titled “Zaniac!.”
The movie is about a serial killer who targets women as his path for revenge against his mother who abused him when he was a child.
Marvel Comics
While being infected with the entity during filming, Brad was caught in a nuclear explosion from the Manhattan Project, leading to his transformation as Zaniac. After attacking different women, Thor eventually stopped the villain.
The trailer also unveiled another look at Rafael Casa’s Brad Wolfe, the actor who was possessed by the entity from the comics.
It is unknown if Wolfe will transform into Zaniac in Loki Season 2, but the fact that the TVA appears to be chasing him suggests that they are aware that he is a threat to the timeline.
It’s possible that this will be Loki and Mobius’ first mission back together as TVA agents, and this task could be the reason why the latter will eventually trust the former in his pursuit of He Who Remains and his Variants.
There’s also a chance that Zaniac is being used as a means to an end by Victor Timely, with the character serving as a distraction from the true villain’s nefarious goals.
Loki Season 2 will begin streaming on Disney+ on October 6.
George Lopez was not the original choice for the role of Rudy Reyes in Blue Beetle, but his performance brought both heart and comedy relief to the character.
The bond between Jaime Reyes and his family is a key element of Blue Beetle, setting him apart from other heroes and providing support and motivation.
Lopez’s portrayal of Rudy Reyes adds an infectious excitement and love for the legacy of Blue Beetle, making it difficult to imagine anyone else in the role.
Blue Beetle concept artist Phil Boutte reveals that George Lopez was not who the creative team anticipated to play Rudy Reyes. In Blue Beetle, an ancient alien artifact, the Scarab, unexpectedly chooses Jaime Reyes, a recent college graduate, to be its new host. Through this symbiotic relationship, Jaime steps into the role of superhero Blue Beetle, gaining a near-indestructible exoskeleton suit along with a number of other abilities. However, Victoria Kord has much darker intentions for the Scarab, and Jaime must fight to protect his family and the world from her violent ambitions.
In an exclusive interview with Screen Rant for Blue Beetle, Boutte revealed that Lopez’s casting was a surprise. He shared what the team was initially envisioning for the character, but also that Lopez still worked. His creative partner, Mike Uwandi, jumped in to praise Lopez in the role. Check out Boutte’s full quote below: Note: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and the movie covered here would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors in both unions.
Phil Boutte: Actually one of the things that was a surprise for us was George Lopez. Lopez, they had him in mind, but it wasn’t initially him. It was going to be somebody that was skinnier and wiry.
His look, the mullet and all that? Just imagine an aged Mexican rocker. And then George came in, and then Mayes was doing the fittings with him and everything and going back and forth and they were finding his character. Those elements strangely still worked and it was just hilarious.
Mike Uwandi: Yeah, he killed that role.
Note: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and the movie covered here would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors in both unions.
How The Family Is The Key To Blue Beetle
Superhero origin stories have become a common staple of the genre. However, the key to any movie or series is figuring out how to make the hero and their story stand out from others. The key to Blue Beetle is the Reyes family. Jaime’s bond with his family and their willingness to help immediately set him apart from other heroes, many of whom either have tumultuous relationships with their families or hide their superhero identities.
Lopez’s performance as Rudy Reyes brings both heart and comedy relief to Blue Beetle, which helps break the tension in some of the scenes. His intelligence and love for Jaime motivate his actions, and his excitement upon discovering that Ted Kord was the previous Blue Beetle is infectious. While he wasn’t the initial choice, it’s hard to imagine anyone else filling this role.
Although he’s reluctant to step into the role of hero, that choice is taken from him very quickly when he learns his bond with the Scarab will be something he contends with for the rest of his life. The best parts of Jaime, including his heroic heart and desire to do good, clearly stem from his family. Showing how he has been influenced by them and their continued support, along with how they consistently work together, makes Blue Beetle stand out from other superhero origin stories.
NetEase Games has announced that it will reveal a new game for consoles and PC at this year’s Tokyo Game Show.
The publisher will be attending Tokyo Game Show for the first time this year, and will be showing 12 previously announced games at the show.
However, it will also be showing a “completely new game”, which it will be revealing at a presentation at the NetEase booth on the show floor.
While it hasn’t provided any more information on the game, NetEase did share a blurred image from it. Although it’s difficult to make out, the image appears to show a white rabbit standing next to a mech vehicle.
As well as the new game, NetEase will also be showing 12 other titles at the Tokyo Game Show, all of which have previously been announced.
These include the first three titles in Quantic Dream‘s indie label Spotlight – Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior, Dustborn and the recently released Under the Waves.
This year’s Tokyo Game Show will be held for four days from Thursday, September 21 to Sunday, September 24, and will be accompanied by a series of online streams and presentations (though none of these will be hosted by NetEase).
– English Audio Description
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