Brexit might be one issue the U.K. has yet to figure out, but when it comes to social media, the Brits are putting their foot down. They want to stop terrorist groups and criminal gangs from using social media to spread propaganda and violence. They are also stepping up pressure to stop sexual predators from grooming children online to be exploited. If only the United States could start these actions.
The U.K.
unveiled plans on Monday to vastly increase government oversight of social
media companies, with a first of its kind watchdog that could fine executives
or even ban companies if they fail to block content such as terrorist
propaganda or images of child abuse.
As concerns
mount globally over how to monitor internet material without stifling free
speech, the British proposal reflects a push by some countries – particularly
in Europe but also Australia and New Zealand – to give regulators
more power.
The British
plans would create a statutory “duty of care” for social media companies such
as Facebook and Twitter to protect people who use their sites. The plan, which
includes an independent regulator funded by a levy on internet companies, will
be open for public comment for three months before the government publishes
draft legislation.
“No one in
the world has done this before, and it’s important that we get it right,”
Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright told the BBC.
While the
United States has largely relied on market forces to regulate content in a
country where free speech is revered, governments in Europe have signaled they
are willing to take on the tech companies to block harmful content and prevent
extremists from using the internet to fan the flames of hatred.
Britain will
consider imposing financial penalties similar to those in the European Union’s
General Data Protection Regulation, which permit fines of up to 4% of a
company’s annual worldwide revenue, Wright said. In extreme cases, the
government may also seek the power to fine individual company directors and
prevent companies from operating in the U.K.
Criticism of social media sites has grown amid concerns that extremists like the so-called Islamic State group or far-right political groups are using them to recruit young people, pedophiles are using the technology to groom victims and young people are sharing dangerous information about self-harm and suicide.
Australian
last week made it a crime for social media platforms not to quickly remove
“abhorrent violent material.” The crime would be punishable by three years in
prison and a fine of 10.5 million Australian dollars ($7.5 million), or 10% of
the platform’s annual turnover, whichever is larger.
After the
March 15 mosque shootings that killed 50 and wounded of 50 more, New Zealand’s
Privacy Commissioner wants his country to follow Australia’s lead.
European
Union lawmakers are set to vote later Monday on a legislative proposal
requiring internet companies to remove terrorist content within one hour of being
notified by authorities, or face penalties worth up to 4 percent of revenue if
they don’t comply.
The bill has
been controversial, with some lawmakers and digital rights groups criticizing
the one-hour rule. They say it places a much bigger burden on smaller internet
companies than on tech giants like Facebook and Google, which have greater
resources.
British Home
Secretary Sajid Javid, whose department collaborated on the U.K. proposal
unveiled Monday, criticized tech firms for failing to act despite repeated
calls for action against harmful content.
“That is why
we are forcing these firms to clean up their act once and for all,” Javid said.
Critics say
the end result could be that Google and Facebook end up becoming the web’s
censors. Others suggested the rules could stifle innovation and strengthen the
dominance of technology giants because smaller firms won’t have the money to
comply with such regulation.
“We worry
that this attempt at controlling the Internet will entrench big tech players,
stymie innovation, and lead to press censorship through the back door,” the
London-based Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think tank, said in a
statement.
As
governments press to have the tech giants take on moral accountability, the
challenge for the companies will be to translate that idea into the software,
said Mark Skilton, a professor of practice at Warwick Business School.
Politicians and technical experts need to work on the “shared problem” of
providing guidance and control that is not excessively intrusive, he said.
“Issuing
large fines and hitting companies with bigger legal threats is taking a 20th
century bullwhip approach to a problem that requires a nuanced solution,” he
said. “It needs machine learning tools to manage the 21st century problems of the
internet, combined with the courage and foresight to establish independent
frameworks that preserve the freedoms societies enjoy in the physical world, as
well as the online one.”
Facebook’s
U.K. head of public policy, Rebecca Stimson, said the goal of the new rules
should be to protect society while also supporting innovation and freedom of
speech.
“These are
complex issues to get right and we look forward to working with the government
and Parliament to ensure new regulations are effective,” she said.
Wright
insisted the regulator would be expected to take account of freedom of speech
while balancing against preventing harm.
“What we’re
talking about here is user-generated content, what people put online, and
companies that facilitate access to that kind of material,” he said. “So this
is not about journalism. This is about an unregulated space that we need to
control better to keep people safer.”
Beyonce’s 2018 Coachella festival headlining act is the focus of “Homecoming,” a documentary premiering on Netflix. Timing on this couldn’t be more perfect as it’s sandwiched between Coachella’s 2019 first and second weekends.
It took just
one word for Netflix to send Beyonce fans into a full-on freak out.
The
streaming giant on Sunday posted
on its social media channels a yellow image with the word
“Homecoming” across it. The only other information was a date: April 17. Netflix
teased Homecoming – a nod to the collegiate undertones of the
Coachella performance, including Beyoncé’s Beta Delta Kappa sorority and a full
marching band – on social media on Sunday. Earlier this year, the singer,
through her BeyGood initiative, announced the Homecoming Scholars Award Program.
The tease, which borrows its
yellow color and typography from Beyoncé’s Coachella wardrobe, came days after Us Weekly reported that the superstar teamed with Netflix for a Coachella
documentary; according to that report, the film will feature Beyoncé’s
performance, which live-streamed, as well as unseen footage. (Rolling Stone has not
independently confirmed that any unseen footage will be used in the film.)
That’s when
Netflix is expected to premiere a Beyonce special that may feature her performances
at last year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Though Netflix
declined to share any more information, the font and color and of the
announcement was the same as Beyonce’s was for her Coachella appearance.
Beyonce also
last year launched a scholarship program dubbed the Homecoming Scholars Award
Program.
The singer
is known for debuting new work shrouded in secrecy. No details were announced
before her 2016 HBO special “Lemonade.”
R. Kelly attends a Party at Gold Room on August 7, 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia.
R. Kelly Hits the Club For Money
R&B
singer R. Kelly made a paid appearance early Sunday at a club in Illinois’
capital city, but the fans who each shelled out $50 to $100 for tickets got
only a 28-second performance, followed by a half-hour meet-and-greet.
Hours before
his appearance at the Dirty South Lounge in Springfield, Kelly posted a video on Instagram asking the
media to “take it easy” on him because “this is how I got to get paid now, for
right now.”
Kelly, 52,
was charged in February with 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse that accused
him of assaulting four women during a roughly 10-year period starting in the
late 1990s. Three of the accusers were underage at the time. He has pleaded not
guilty and denied any wrongdoing.
Since his
arrest, the cash-strapped singer has struggled to get work in the U.S., Kelly’s
lawyer Steve Greenberg wrote in a motion last month seeking permission for
Kelly to perform in Dubai and meet with members of the sheikhdom’s royal
family.
Kelly has
been scrambling to pay child support, legal fees and everyday expenses because
of the cancellation of Illinois concerts and a record contract, as well as the
removal of his songs from streaming services, he wrote.
Kelly’s
lawyers later put the motion on hold. Dubai’s government denied that
Kelly had any concerts planned there and the claims that he would meet with
members of the royal family.
About 100
people showed up for Kelly’s appearance at the Springfield club, which has a
450-person capacity, TV stations WICS and WRSP reported. There
was a $100 entrance fee, which was lowered to $50 once Kelly arrived at 1:30
a.m.
Kelly
thanked supporters, sang a line from one of his songs for 28 seconds and spent
about 35 minutes taking selfies, dancing and conversing with fans. The club
closed at 3 a.m.
Some fans
said it wasn’t worth the $100 and that they wouldn’t pay again. Fans also
defended showing up at the event, saying they separate the accusations from the
artist, the stations reported.
Don Lemon with fiance Tim Malone
Don Lemon Makes It Official
CNN anchor
Don Lemon has announced his engagement to New York real estate agent Tim
Malone.
Lemon, who
has two dogs with Malone, posted on Instagram photos of customized canine tags
that read: “DADDY WILL YOU MARRY PAPA?” on Saturday.
Referring to
Malone, the 53-year-old Lemon wrote in the caption: “He gave me a present on
his birthday. How could I say no?” Malone confirmed the engagement on his
Instagram story, posting: “He said YES!”
Other photos
show Lemon and Malone together with friends for Malone’s birthday celebration
at a New York restaurant Friday.
Page Six and
People report the two began dating in 2016. They shared an on-air kiss during
CNN’s New Year’s Eve coverage last year.
Lemon
anchors CNN’s weeknight news show.
Coronation Street Finally Catches Up
The long-running
British TV soap “Coronation Street” is welcoming its first black family in its
59-year history.
The soap
opera is set to introduce the Baileys, a family with two sons. It will explore
themes of racism and homophobia in sport, with a story line featuring one of
the sons, a soccer player, coming out as gay.
The show has
charted the goings-on in the fictional northern England community of
Weatherfield since 1960. It has cast individual black characters but not
brought in a black family together before.
Producer
Iain MacLeod said Saturday he didn’t really know why it has taken so long, but
it “did feel sort of overdue we did this and represented modern Manchester a
bit more accurately.”
Bret Hart Injured By Fan
Wrestler
Bret “The Hitman” Hart was tackled by a spectator Saturday while he
was giving a speech during the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony at Barclays Center in
Brooklyn.
The attacker
was promptly subdued by several people, including other wrestlers, who came to
Hart’s defense. Hart, 61, is OK.
The person
ran toward the ring from the crowd, spectator Alan Fisher told media outlets.
“I couldn’t
believe that the security had missed him in the first place and the next thing
you know there was Shane McMahon and Travis Brown on top of him the crowd was
going crazy booing,” Fisher said. “Everyone was cheering when one of the
wrestlers punched him.”
New York
City Police arrested 26-year-old Zachary Madsen, of Lincoln, Nebraska. He faces
assault and criminal trespass charges. An email to the district attorney
seeking someone who could comment on Madsen’s behalf wasn’t immediately
answered.
Several
shocked onlookers posted footage of the tackle online.
The
induction event resumed, with Hart continuing his speech, after the fan was
taken into custody.
“He should
have never attacked Bret Hart especially at such a special moment in his life,”
Fisher said.
Google was given a headache last week when their newly created AI ethics board created controversy with many of the board members. It wound up having to cancel the board completely, leaving many tech giants wondering how to tackle this issue.
The biggest
tech companies want you to know that they’re taking special care to ensure that
their use of artificial intelligence to sift through mountains of data, analyze
faces or build virtual assistants doesn’t spill over to the dark side.
But their
efforts to assuage concerns that their machines may be used for nefarious ends
have not been universally embraced. Some skeptics see it as mere window
dressing by corporations more interested in profit than what’s in society’s
best interests.
“Ethical AI”
has become a new corporate buzz phrase, slapped on internal review committees,
fancy job titles, research projects and philanthropic initiatives. The moves
are meant to address concerns over racial and gender bias emerging in facial
recognition and other AI systems, as well as address anxieties about job losses
to the technology and its use by law enforcement and the military.
But how much
substance lies behind the increasingly public ethics campaigns? And who gets to
decide which technological pursuits do no harm?
Google was
hit with both questions when it formed a new board of outside advisers in late
March to help guide how it uses AI in products. But instead of winning over
potential critics, it sparked internal
rancor. A little more than a week later, Google bowed to pressure from the
backlash and dissolved the council.
The outside
board fell apart in stages. One of the board’s eight inaugural members quit
within days and another quickly became the target of protests from Google
employees who said her conservative views don’t align with the company’s
professed values.
As thousands
of employees called for the removal of Heritage Foundation President Kay Coles
James, Google disbanded the board last week.
“It’s become
clear that in the current environment, (the council) can’t function as we
wanted,” the company said in a statement.
That
environment is one of increasing concern that the corporate AI ethics campaigns
lack teeth.
“I think
(Google’s decision) reflects a broader public understanding that ethics
involves more than just creating an ethics board without an institutional
framework to provide for accountability,” AI researcher Ben Wagner said.
Google’s
original initiative fell into a tech industry trend that Wagner calls
“ethics-washing,” which he describes as a superficial effort that’s mostly a
show for the public or lawmakers.
“It’s
basically an attempt to pretend like you’re doing ethical things and using
ethics as a tool to reach an end, like avoiding regulation,” said Wagner, an
assistant professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. “It’s a
new form of self-regulation without calling it that by name.”
Big
companies have made an increasingly visible effort to discuss their AI efforts
in recent years.
Microsoft,
which often tries to position itself as an industry leader on ethics and
privacy issues, published its principles around developing AI, released a short
book that discussed the societal implications of the technology and has called
for some government regulation of AI technologies.
The
company’s president even met with Pope Francis earlier this year to discuss
industry ethics. Amazon recently announced it is helping fund federal research
into “algorithmic fairness,” and Salesforce employs an “architect” for ethical
AI practice, as well as a “chief ethical and human use” officer. It’s hard to
find a brand-name tech firm without similar initiatives.
It’s a good
thing that companies are studying the issue and seeking perspectives on
industry ethics, said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial
Intelligence, a research organization. But ultimately, he said, a company’s CEO
is tasked with deciding what suggestions on AI ethics to incorporate in
business decisions.
“I think
overall it’s a positive step rather than a fig leaf,” he said. “That said, the
proof is in successful implementation. I think the jury is still out on that.”
The impact
artificial intelligence can have on society has never been more clear, Etzioni
said, and companies are reacting to studies about the power of recommendation
algorithms and gender bias in AI.
But as
Google’s attempt shows, discussing the issues in the public eye also invites
public scrutiny.
Google
employees have had more success than other tech workers at demanding change at
their company. The internet search behemoth dropped a contract with the Pentagon
after employees pushed back on the ethical implications of using the company’s
AI technology to analyze drone video.
And after
more than 2,400 Google employees signed a petition calling for James to be
taken off the board, Google scrapped the board altogether. Employees said James
has made past comments that were anti-trans and anti-immigrant and should not
be on an ethics panel. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a request for
comment.
Google had
also faced dissent from its chosen councilmembers. Alessandro Acquisti, a
professor at Carnegie Mellon University, announcing on Twitter he was declining
the invitation. He wrote that he is devoted to grappling fairness and inclusion
in AI but this was not the “the right forum for me to engage in this important
work.” He declined to comment further.
One expert
who had committed to staying on the council is Joanna Bryson, associate
professor in computing at the University of Bath. A self-described liberal, she
said before the dissolution that it makes sense to have political diversity on
the panel, and she didn’t agree with those who think it’s just for show.
“I just
don’t think Google is that stupid,” Bryson said. “I don’t think they’re there
just to have a poster on a wall.”
She said,
however, that companies like Google and Microsoft do have a real concern about
liability — meaning they want to make sure they show themselves, and the
public, that they’ve tried their best to build products the right way before
releasing them.
“It’s not
just the right thing to do, it’s the thing they need to do,” she said. Bryson
said she was hopeful Google actually wanted to brainstorm hard problems and
should find another way to do so after the council dissolved.
It’s unclear
what Google will do next. The company said its “going back to the drawing
board” and would find other ways of getting outside opinions.
Wagner said
now would be the time for Google to set up ethics
principles that include commitments they must stick to, external oversight
and other checkpoints to hold them accountable.
Even if
companies keep setting up external boards to oversee AI responsibility,
government regulation will still be needed, said Liz O’Sullivan, a tech worker
who left AI company Clarifai over the company’s work in the Pentagon’s Project
Maven — the same project that Google dropped after its employees protested.
O’Sullivan
is wary of boards that can make suggestions that companies are under no legal
obligation to stick to.
“Every
company of that size that states they’re interested in having some sort of
oversight that has no ability or authority to restrict or restrain company
behavior seems like they’re doing it for the press of it all,” she said.
Warner Bros. is finally proving they can run with Marvel and Disney when it comes to superhero movies. “Shazam!” was the studio’s third comic-book success in a row achieving great critical and audience response.
“We really want these movies to stand on their own, with filmmakers best suited to the characters,” Toby Emmerich, chairman of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group, said Sunday morning. “We’re all feeling deservedly really good.”
Seven films
in, the DC Extended Universe is finally flying with some wind behind its back.
The well-reviewed, relatively modestly budgeted “Shazam!” debuted with $53.5
million in ticket sales over the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday,
handing DC its latest critical and box-office success.
Though one of the oldest characters in DC’s superhero stable, “Shazam!” doesn’t boast the name-recognition of Batman or Superman. But by scaling back to a $100 million budget (about 40 percent less than the average superhero movie) and going for the lighter, comic tone, “Shazam!” steadily built up its word of mouth with stellar reviews. Warner Bros. also showed the film nationwide two weeks before opening, where it made $3 million in advance screenings.
“Shazam!”
came out well ahead of the weekend’s other top draw, “Pet Sematary.” Paramount
Pictures’ remake of the original 1989 Stephen King adaptation opened in a
distant second with $25 million. It’s a solid start for “Pet Sematary,” though
far from the haul that the last big-screen adaptation of King’s conjured up:
“It” opened with $123.4 million in 2017.
Last week’s
top film, “Dumbo,” slid steeply in its second week. Landing in third, the
Disney live-action remake dropped 60% with $18.2 million.
Pitched as ”‘Big’ meets Superman,’” “Shazam!” stars Asher Angel as Billy Batson, a teenage foster kid (played by Asher Angel) who transforms into an adult superhero (played by Zachary Levi). It was made by New Line, the division of Warner that focuses on lower-budget films. Many of these are used as counterprogramming measures.
“New Line always thought that
‘Big’ as a superhero movie was a great idea, a way to make the genre feel fresh
and different,” Emmerich said.
Jeff
Goldstein, distribution chief at Warner Bros., said the studio originally
forecast a $40 million opening. “That was the right number for us,” Goldstein
said. “That’s what we needed to make money on it.”
But expectations grew based on reviews (91% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and audience reaction (an “A″ Cinemascore). The PG-13-rated film attracted an especially young crowd; 45% were under 25.
Warner has spent the better part of a decade trying to get
its act together with movies based on characters from its DC Comics division —
an imperative given the runaway success of rival Marvel Studios and the film
industry’s increasing need for spectacles that audiences see as worth a trip to
theaters. Part of the problem was that Warner stuck for too long with a dark
vision for its superhero universe, set by the filmmaker Zack Snyder, that was clearly not working. That led to creative and financial
messes like “Suicide Squad” and “Justice League.”
But the studio, having largely jettisoned Snyder’s plans and shaken up its executive ranks, including promoting Emmerich, has started to deliver superhero home runs on a consistent basis: “Wonder Woman” from Patty Jenkins, “Aquaman” from James Wan, and seemingly “Shazam!,” which was directed by a relative newcomer, David F. Sandberg.
The result
further validated DC’s pivot following the disappointments of Zack Snyder’s
“Batman v Superman” and David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad.” Warner Bros. has since
steered its comic book adaptions in a different direction, leaning more on
stand-alone entries less predicated on the overall “universe” and more
fluctuating in tone. Following “Wonder Woman” and “Aquaman,” ″Shazam!” makes it
three in a row for DC superhero standalones.
Earlier in
the week, Warner Bros. also teased the DC release “Joker,” with Joaquin
Phoenix, at CinemaCon. An even smaller-budgeted origin story with a similarly
unique, albeit much darker, tone; it was one of the most talked-about movies at
the Las Vegas event.
″‘Wonder
Woman’ was really the start of changing the ship,” Goldstein said. “When you
look at each of these properties, they’re all very different. Their approach is
different. Their tone is different. But here’s the commonality: All good
movies, all well done. I think that’s what you’ll see out of DC is very
specific approaches for that property.”
Overseas,
“Shazam!” grossed $102 million in 79 markets, including $30.9 million in China.
“DC has
really found its groove,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for
Comscore. “They’re really breaking out each character. Shazam and the Joker
could not be two more different characters within the DC Universe. But I think
that diversity of content is going to serve them well.”
The future for “Shazam!” is clouded by Marvel as the impending arrival of “Avengers: Endgame” could take much of the wind from its sails. Marvel has been marketing heavily so expect a box office takeover soon.
Dergarabedian
noted the two most dominant genres in movies right now — superheroes and horror
— swamped theaters over the weekend, taking up four of the top five spots at
the box office. The stiff competition in similar-styled holdovers could have
slightly depressed results for both “Shazam!” and “Pet Sematary.” But right
now, there’s scant room on the calendar between major comic book films and
horror releases.
In fourth
was Jordan Peele’s horror thriller “Us,” which added $13.8 million in its third
week. Its cumulative global total stands at $216.6 million.
Marvel’s
Brie Larson-led “Captain Marvel,” which recently crossed $1 billion in
worldwide ticket sales, took in $12.7 million domestically in its fifth
weekend. Captain Marvel, ironically, was Shazam’s original name when the
character was first crafted, as a Superman knockoff, in 1939. He was relaunched
in 1973 as Shazam after decades of lawsuits and the debut of Marvel’s own
Captain Marvel.
The
weekend’s other wide-release newcomer was STX Entertainment’s “Best of
Enemies,” starring Taraji P. Henson as a civil rights activist and Sam Rockwell
as a Ku Klux Klan leader. It opened with $4.5 million.
In limited
release, Claire Denis’ “High Life,” starring Robert Pattinson, opened with
about $100,000 in four theaters for A24.
Neon’s
Aretha Franklin documentary, “Amazing Grace,” debuted with $96,000 in eight
locations. The film, shot over two days at the New Bethel Baptist Church in the
Watts section of Los Angeles in 1972, was
lost for decades in part because its director, Sydney
Pollack, failed to slate the images, leaving them not synced with the audio.
Before her death last August, Franklin sued several times to prevent its
release.
Shazam, Pet Semetary
North American Box Office
Estimated
ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according
to Comscore. Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday
through Sunday are also included.
1. “Shazam!”
$53.4 million ($102 million international).
2. “Pet
Sematary,” $25 million ($17.3 million international).
3. “Dumbo,”
$18.2 million ($39.6 million international).
4. “Us,”
$13.8 million ($10.3 million international).
5. “Captain
Marvel,” $12.7 million ($14.1 million international).
6. “The Best
of Enemies,” $4.5 million.
7. “Five
Feet Apart,” $3.7 million ($4.1 million international).
8.
“Unplanned,” $3.2 million.
9. “Wonder
Park,” $2 million ($3.3 million international).
10. “How to
Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World,” $2 million.
Worldwide Box Office
Estimated
ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according
to Comscore. Where available, the latest international numbers for Friday
through Sunday are also included.
Twenty-three more Supernatural episodes to go, and counting. Last week’s ‘Game Night,’ written by Meredith Glynn and directed by John Showalter, was the first episode I watched knowing that the Show was coming to an end, so I think I was even more attentive than usual. As in, nobody should say a word to me while I’m relishing every last second of my favorite show for the next solid year!
It wasn’t a perfect episode, but it was a wild rollercoaster of both action and emotion, and that means I enjoyed it – and was grateful to be able to see a new episode. That’s going to be the case from now on in, but I’ll probably still find things to quibble about in the midst of my relishing. Okay, make that definitely.
The ‘Then’ includes Nick, which made me groan because I’m just over that Supernatural story line and the inevitable tie-in to Lucifer (as is about 99.9% of the fandom, but apparently that news has not reached the network). The ‘Now’ begins with someone baking cookies and for a split second I thought it was Dean doing some nesting in the bunker, but nope, it’s Donatello humming and baking in his cozy kitchen.
I really like Donatello so when the doorbell rang I started shaking my head immediately, even before he wound up tied to a table with a gigantic hypodermic needle poking into his neck. (I closed my eyes but his screams were still audible). Ouch.
Back at the
bunker, it’s Winchester Game Night. Dean is fixing his favorite childhood game,
Mousetrap (aww), Jack is making Jiffy Pop on the stove and Mary’s got the
beers. Sammy’s out picking up the pepperoni meat intensive pizzas and one with
pineapple for Jack, over Dean’s objections. It’s a nice domestic scene which
means things are about to go south in a big way.
Sure enough,
Dean gets a phone call pleading for help from Donatello.
Dean: So much for Winchester Game Night…
He tries to
call Sam but there’s conveniently no signal – that’s Show’s favorite way of
splitting characters up, oops, no service suddenly – so he and Mary head off
with instructions for Jack to fill Sam in. (I do love that Sam’s voicemail says
if you can’t reach him to ‘call my brother’ just like John’s always said ‘call
my son Dean’.)
Once Sam
gets back he says what I’m thinking – I should be there with you!
Dean assures
him it’s okay, and Sam takes issue (me too, Sam).
Sam to Dean: Watch your back.
Dean: That’s the plan.
Winchester
for love you, be careful.
Dean and
Mary have a little heart to heart in the car, Mary lamenting that everyone is
stressed and there’s nothing she can do.
Dean: Hey, you’re here.
Mary: I should’ve been here more.
Me: Damn right.
Mary: But I know how I am. I can be closed
off, hard…
Dean: (turning to smile at his mother)
Yeah, that’s where I get it from.
Dean has
made his peace with who his mother is and found the parts of her that he can
identify with and feel good about. He’s said his piece and then forged the
connection that he can, and I can feel the family story line beginning its wrap
up in this episode and the 300th with John. I started to tear up
even before the family theme began to play, at the thought of Show tying up loose
ends before it ends. And I suddenly realize Mary is probably not long for this
world.
Mary: I need you to know, I’m grateful for
every day that I get with you and Sam.
Me: Oh yeah, this is not good. RIP Mary.
I haven’t
loved Mary as a character despite Samantha Smith’s skill in playing her and
what I think has been her hard and successful work in finding a way to
understand Mary as a woman, a hunter, and a mother probably very different from
Smith herself. Like Dean, I’ve come to an acceptance of Mary, imperfect and
sometimes disappointing though she is. It figures that now we’ll probably lose
her, because this is Supernatural,
after all.
Meanwhile,
Smart!Sam figures out that Donatello is speaking Hebrew – and it’s from the
Bible. Something about ‘be vigilant, your adversary the Devil walketh about
seeking whom he may devour.’
Me: Yeah, that can’t be good. Also, goddamnit it, that
means Lucifer! Do not want!
Dean and
Mary get to Donatello’s house and find Nick instead of him, to nobody’s
surprise (well, except Dean and Mary, that is).
Dean is
pissed.
Nick: Oh, angry voice…
He confesses
to poisoning Donatello and says they have a day to find him. But why? What does
he want?
Nick: I wanna talk.
Me: What? This whole thing is just off. You see that,
right, Winchesters?
Nevertheless,
they bring Nick back to the bunker, where we get a fabulous scene of Sam
confronting the man he made the mistake of having sympathy for and let go. (And
the man who looks, and increasingly also acts, like Lucifer). Sam clearly feels
responsible and is furious at Nick for hurting so many people. Jared shone in
this scene – he practically growls, baring his teeth and snarling before
physically attacking Nick and slamming him against the wall. It’s only Dean
knowing Sam so well and Sam trusting his brother that allows Dean to pull Sam
off and push him back.
Dean: Not now. Not yet.
Sam angrily
pushes Dean’s arm down, but listens to him nevertheless. He stalks off, still
fuming. We know that Nick is up to something, but nobody can figure out what.
Dean: Nick wants to talk? Let’s talk.
Sam: Oh yeah, let’s talk!
Dean once
again holds his brother back, telling him not in the condition Sam is in, not
yet. Once again, Sam reluctantly listens.
Mary and Sam
stay behind, Sam obviously distraught.
Sam: I let Nick go. What was I thinking?
Mary: Nick’s choices are his own, just
his. You didn’t know. You gave him a chance because you felt for him. Because
you’re a good man.
Sam scoffs,
but Mary persists.
Mary: You are. It’s one of the reasons I’m
so proud of you.
If I didn’t
think Mary was not long for this world before, that scene convinced me. And
just as I liked what Mary had to say finally!
Dean
interrogates Nick and, as always, it’s way hotter than it should be. Sometimes
you forget how dangerous Dean Winchester is, but then he reminds you. Nick sounds so much like Lucifer in this
scene that it’s confusing to me. I don’t even know if it’s intentional, but
it’s like they’ve completely melded at this point. Nick taunts Dean, just like
Lucifer always taunts people.
Nick: We’re practically brothers, Dean. We
both know what it’s like to be hog tied to a nuclear warhead. You’re never the
same after that, are you?
It’s exactly
what Dean doesn’t want to think about himself. Nick is an expert at taunting,
just like Lucifer.
Eventually
Lucifer/Nick asks to see his son.
Me: His son? Is he really Lucifer then?? So confused…
Dean and
Mary say no, but Sam is silent.
Jack: Sam?
Sam: I mean…
Dean snaps
at him at first, but nobody has a better idea and Jack wants to help Donatello,
so he goes in to talk to Nick. Which of course is going to be a mistake. I’m
not sure Sam would have been the one to push for Jack to do that, but maybe
it’s because he’s the one feeling most guilty about poor Donatello and so the
most desperate to save him before they run out of time.
Nick: Hey sonny boy…
Once again,
Nick sounds just like Lucifer. He dismisses Jack’s insistence that Lucifer was
a monster, saying that everyone is, “even your three dads.”
Nick goads
Jack just as effectively as he has the others, until Jack snaps and head butts
him, getting a bloody nose in the process. Why he did that and didn’t just hit
him, I have no clue. Seems like an ouchy thing to do. Nick looks down pointedly
at the blood on his shirt and uh oh…
I guess Nick
refused to tell them where Donatello is and will only show them, because Sam
and Dean load him into the back seat of the Impala and head out to a deserted
warehouse. This too is clearly a very bad idea but the Impala is beautiful
driving through the snow covered Vancouver landscape – a rarity for British
Columbia and hence for the show.
Dean goes inside
the warehouse to bring Donatello the antidote while Sam stays in the car with
Nick, which also seems like a horrible idea…
Meanwhile,
Jack and Mary go through Donatello’s things, and Jack realizes that the
hypodermic needle wasn’t filled with poison – it was filled with angel grace.
Me: Ooooh the plot thickens!
Love me some
good plot twists!
Mary calls
to give Sam a heads up. Nick is goading him mercilessly, and by this point I’m
having a hard time believing this isn’t Lucifer.
Nick: We’re finally alone. I feel like I never
get to talk to you…
He’s even
singing loudly, just like Lucifer, “Sammy boy Sammy boy…”
I can’t
imagine how awful it is for Sam, being tormented like that in such a similar
way by the same face and voice who traumatized him for decades. No wonder he
gets rattled! Sam gets out of the car, and Nick slips a razor or something that
he’s hidden UNDER HIS SKIN EWWW and picks the lock on his cuffs. Since when is
Nick so resourceful? I guess he’s motivated, that’s for sure.
When Mary
tells Sam about the angel grace syringe, he gets Nick at gunpoint and demands
to know what’s going on. (Dean isn’t the only Winchester who’s scary when he’s
pissed, btw)
Turns out
that prophets are like CB radios, they can be used to communicate…
Oh, the look
on Sam’s face when he realizes that the being that Nick is trying to contact is
Lucifer. Oh Sam. And in fact, Nick has apparently succeeded in waking Lucifer
from the Empty and now knows how to bring him back.
Me: Urgh. This is what we were all so worried about at
the end of last season, that Sam and Dean’s triumph in killing Lucifer would
just be overturned. Urgh. I don’t like
it, Show.
Nick: Nobody stays dead anymore, Sam.
Where do you think I got that angel grace?
Sam tries to
warn Dean that it’s an ambush, yelling “Dean!”
And somehow,
a long way away and inside the warehouse, Dean immediately jerks his head
toward the sound of his brother’s voice. I loved that moment, because who
doubts that the Winchesters are connected like that, after all these years?
Sure enough,
Dean is ambushed by demons and a classic brilliant Rob Hayter and Kirk Jaques choreographed
fight ensues. I sort of loved these parallel scenes and how they were edited,
Dean fighting the demons and Sam fighting Nick. The action cuts back and forth
between the two scenes, and I was sitting on the edge of my chair and biting my
nails the whole time, it was so crazy tense. Jared, Jensen and Mark Pellegrino
were all amazing in both scenes, the fights horribly believable so you could
feel every blow. Sam gets the upper hand and pins Nick, choking him almost to
death (and everyone watching was cheering him on, I have no doubt).
But then his
empathy wins out again and he doesn’t. Which means Nick is able to grab a large
rock and slam it into Sam’s head.
I literally gasped and screamed at that. And Jared then gave a masterful performance as Sam staggers, clearly having endured significant head trauma. Nick throws him against the car, hitting his head again, and Sam goes down. Nick chokes him, clearly not planning to stop – it’s only by managing to get into the Impala that Sam isn’t killed right then and there. He knows he’s in bad shape though, clearly – desperate, he uses Bab to call for help from Dean, hitting her horn.
Dean once
again hears even inside the warehouse in the middle of a fight, redoubling his
efforts to fight off the demons and proving himself a total badass as he does. It
reminded me so much of the scene in the tunnels when Dean is fighting off
multiple bad guys and Sam is being killed and calling out for his brother and
Dean can’t get to him in time. I watched that scene film and it still haunts
me, and this one had the same heartbreaking urgency. The horn blares again and
Dean finally kills the last demon and runs to his brother, only to find Sam
collapsed at the side of the car, still trying to call out “Dean! Dean!”
The look on
Dean’s face when he sees how badly Sam is hurt just about tore my heart out.
Dean: Sam! Hey hey, Sammy….
As I’ve said
many times, it’s what the Winchesters always say when trying to comfort the
other. It’s like a Pavlovian response now, it makes me tear up every time
because as soon as they say it, you know it’s bad.
Dean holds a
cloth to Sam’s head wound, calling Mary and telling her that Nick is trying to
resurrect Lucifer – and that he hurt Sam. Bad.
Dean: I called an ambulance but they said
20 minutes. It’s not good, Mom, it’s really bad….
Me: Ohgodohgodohgodohgod
Jensen and
Jared break my heart in a million pieces in this scene as Dean tries to keep
Sam conscious, asking him to play a counting game. I wonder how many times they
played a similar game as kids, big brother Dean trying to distract Sam from
something frightening or painful….oh my heart. Sam tries, then seems to realize
he’s slipping away. The Winchesters always want to tell each other something
with their last breath, and this time is no exception.
Sam: Dean you… you always, always put me
first. Your whole life…
They’re his
last words.
I sat there
open-mouthed, too in shock to even tear up because it happened so damn fast.
And Show doesn’t even give me time to cope, the action just keeps on rolling
non stop.
Nick steals
a truck and finds an old cabin (all old cabins conveniently have giant boxes of
table salt), so he makes a salt circle and uses his shirt with Jack’s blood on
it to summon Lucifer. In a glob of black goo, Lucifer appears from the Empty,
looking a lot like the Terminator. (Shout out to VFX because the Empty effects
themselves were pretty cool). Nick is ecstatic, telling Lucifer he’s ready to
be one with him again.
But Jack has
sensed what Nick is doing and he and Mary beam in just in time to stop that
from happening. Jack, in a rage, first breaks Nick’s fingers horribly and then
slowly burns him to death, while Mary keeps saying “stop it” (but doesn’t
actually try to stop it.)
My timeline: I don’t think we were supposed to
love Nick’s slow horrible death scene quite this much.
Jack: Mary? I had to.
Mary: (looking a bit horrified) Sam, he’s
hurt. Help him.
It’s the
second time Mary gave Jack explicit permission to use his powers, so nobody
should blame Jack too much for burning off what might have been left of his
soul, right?
I was a bit thrown by Mary’s strong reaction here. She’s a pretty brutal hunter herself and she hates Nick and Lucifer – and Nick just attacked and hurt her son very badly. Would she really be so upset about Jack taking some revenge? I’m not so sure. At first, I thought she was worried about Jack burning off what’s left of his soul, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem. She really is shocked by his brutality – much more shocked than any of us were.
Jack arrives
to find Dean bent over his brother, still vainly holding a cloth to his head, looking
like he’s in shock.
Jack: Dean? Sam!
He touches
Sam’s forehead and Sam wakes up, gasping.
Dean’s eyes
go wide and his breath hitches, because Jensen Ackles can show you exactly what
Dean is feeling in five seconds without any words at all.
He leaps up,
overwhelmed with emotion, and quickly spins around, trying to hide his reaction
and regain some composure. For a second, he’s so unsteady that he has to lean
on his Baby. That small scene, no dialogue at all, just facial expression and
body movement, said SO much. Ackles is so brilliant at showing emotion the way
we all recognize it in each other. It’s not with words or even tears, it’s with
all those instinctive, unconscious reactions. When Dean turns around again,
he’s sniffing back the tears that he refuses to let fall and struggling
mightily to compose himself so no one will know that he was about to fall apart
completely.
That scene
broke me.
It’s two
days later and I’m still tearing up thinking about it.
Jack reassures Sam and Dean,
desperately wanting it to be true: Everything’s gonna be
fine.
Me: Ohgod, we all know what that means.
He beams
back to Mary and tells her the good news that he healed Sam, but Mary isn’t
buying his “everything’s okay”. Jack
desperately needs to hear it from her.
Jack: Tell me it’s okay.
Mary: (sadly) It’s not. You’re not. It’s
not your fault…. But something’s wrong…
Jack: (angry) No! You’re wrong!
He turns
away from Mary, covering his ears and repeating “Leave me alone, leave me
alone.”
For some
reason, Mary doesn’t pay attention, going after him and repeating “Listen to
me,” as Jack’s distress escalates, his ears ringing and his eyes glowing.
Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to get in someone’s face when they’re having a
freak out like that, Mary?
The screen
goes black and we hear Jack’s distraught “Mary?”
I was so
drained I felt like I’d run a marathon! We don’t know for sure what happened to
Mary, but at any rate Show wants us to think that Jack just killed her.
The B story
line was much calmer but was also interesting and well done. Castiel meets with
Anael in a picturesque diner in the snow (I thought it was picturesque, Anael
clearly didn’t. Also, she’s so sassy and I’m here for it.)
Castiel: I need your help. To contact God.
She laughs,
but he persists, saying that she was Joshua’s right hand so maybe she knows
how. Anael is not only sassy but smart, saying that she knows that Cas didn’t
tell Sam and Dean that he was coming to her and that he needs her help because
only God can restore Jack’s soul.
Anael: You reek of ill-conceived lone wolf
desperation.
Me: lol
She
eventually agrees to help him in exchange for some mildly cursed but valuable
earrings, and they go to see Methuselah at his oddities emporium on one of
those really steep little streets in Vancouver. Castiel can be very convincing
when he wants to.
We get a
little of Anael’s backstory as they search for whatever Joshua used to try to
contact God. She was apparently pretty disillusioned with earth and humanity –
and God for not helping them.
Anael: God doesn’t meddle? Well, I do.
She also has
Cas figured out.
Anael: You’re afraid to tell Sam and Dean
that Jack’s soul is gone.
Me: Uh oh.
They’re just
about to leave when Castiel sees something familiar – to us as well as to him.
It’s the Samulet – not the real one, I presume, because the Winchesters have
that. But this one looks mostly the same, and Methusaleh says that Joshua
forged it after the angels fell to try to talk to God. Castiel gives it a try.
Cas: Please. Sam, Dean, we need you,
please.
There’s no
response, which doesn’t surprise Anael at all.
Methuselah: It never worked for Joshua either.
(But would
it work for the Winchesters? It was a bit confusing, because the amulet never
worked like a phone to call God, it was more of a God detector that glowed when
he was close, right? Head scratch.)
Castiel says
goodbye to Anael and says that he’s going home to tell Sam and Dean the truth.
Cas: You’re not always right. Just
because God’s not with us doesn’t mean we’re alone.
Caps by kayb625
Oh Cas, you
shouldn’t say optimistic things like that. Also, a fairly ominous way to end a
story line. The Mousetrap made a good metaphor for this episode, didn’t it?
All the
acting was top notch this week. Misha Collins and Danneel Ackles have some
great chemistry together; the two are good friends in ‘real life’ and it shows
onscreen. I could feel Castiel’s desperation,
trying to find a way to fix Jack without having Sam and Dean worry –
which of course is the worst idea ever.
And Danneel brought just a touch of vulnerability to Anael that makes
you think there’s a lot more to her than meets the eye.
Alex Calvert
and Samantha Smith were also great together. Smith showed us Mary’s concern
about Jack from the very first moments we see of them, and Calvert continues to
make me root for Jack no matter what because honestly, all of this really isn’t
his fault and he’s tried so damn hard. Mary and Jack truly bonded during their
time in the AU fighting together, and she clearly cares about him a great deal.
That makes it extra heartbreaking when everything starts to fall apart. I watch
Supernatural for the relationships,
and all four of those actors made me feel something for their characters.
Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles just about broke me in two inhabiting Sam and Dean in this episode (because sometimes it really doesn’t seem like acting, they just become the characters after all this time). Sam’s rage at Nick (and Lucifer) so informed by all the trauma he’s been through and the way Jared portrays that. The way Sam and Dean know each other so well, the way they communicate with either just a few words or sometimes with no words at all.
The absolute devastation in Dean’s eyes as he watches his little brother slip away, and the absolute devotion in Sam’s as he uses his dying breath to thank his brother for always putting him first. That’s why I watch – to feel how much they care about each other, and to care myself. To get my heart broken and then patched back together again, like this show has done repeatedly over the course of fourteen years. I’m grateful for it, now more than ever. Thank you, Meredith, for that scene and for making me feel, after all this time.
Next week’s Supernatural promo has fandom in an
uproar and I’m unsure if Mary really did die or if that’s just what they want
us to think, but at the very least I’m full of anticipation for next week!
Marvel and the “Avengers: Endgame” cast showed up to do some good for sick kids all over the world. They helped Disney, The LEGO Group, Hasbro, Funko and Amazon donate more than $5M in cash and toys, including $1M in cash from Disney, to the Starlight Children’s Foundation.
Robert
Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Paul Rudd and
Brie Larson helped unveil the donation of money and toys to benefit charities
and children’s hospitals at Disney Resort in Anaheim, California, on Friday.
“More than
any time, it’s a time to give back to these courageous kids who inspire us,”
said Downey Jr., who stars as Tony Stark aka Iron Man.
After the
announcement, several of the “Avengers: Endgame” stars — including Johansson,
Renner, Rudd and Hemsworth — visited
kids from the local Boys & Girls Clubs to play at the LEGO store in
downtown Disney, where toys with their characters’ likenesses were unveiled.
“It’s not a
bad day in the office when you get to come to Disneyland,” said Johansson, who
plays Black Widow. “I’ve been a huge fan of Disney for like forever. I come
from a big, Disney loving family. To be here with my fellow Avengers and all
these kids, it’s just great. It’s such a great way to spend the day.”
Toys and
products from the new Marvel superhero film will be sent to children’s
hospitals throughout the country as well as Give Kids the World, a non-profit
resort in central Florida.
Disney
donated $1 million to the Starlight Children’s Foundation, which brings
entertainment and education to children facing life-threatening conditions in
several countries, including the United States and Great Britain. The LEGO
group, Hasbro, Funko and Amazon collaborated to donate more than $4 million to
children’s hospitals around the country.
Rudd, who
stars as Ant-Man, said he is grateful to be a part of the initiative. The actor
said he has worked closely to help raise money for the Children’s Mercy
Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri.
“I’m
grateful and touched to be a part of this group,” Rudd said. “I work with a lot
of kids and families. It’s not just the kids. It’s the entire family. The
parents, the brothers, the sisters. This is a real honor to give back. I would
like to say the Ant-Man toy is particularly small. So when you’re walking
around barefoot, just be careful. It’s a little bit like stepping on a LEGO.”
CinemaCon Celebrity Movie Roundup
CinemaCon ended on Friday with celebrities
talking about their upcoming movies plus other things.. Linda Hamilton discussed
her “strange” return to the “Terminator” franchise while Jamie Lee Curtis
demanded that Joe Biden apologize to Anita Hill. Jim Carrey talked about his
politically inspired paintings and Taren Egerton downplayed his nude scenes in
the Elton John biopic.
LINDA HAMILTON: PLAYING SARAH CONNER IS “MORE REWARDING NOW”
IN NEW “TERMINATOR: DARK FATE”
Linda Hamilton says returning as Sarah Connor
almost 30 years later in “Terminator: Dark Fate,” is “a little strange.”
“I would say it’s like riding a bicycle but
it’s not,” said Hamilton. “I mean I really worked hard for a year before we
started shooting to just figure out what I’m like, what the character is like
as a woman of a certain age and the way that she moves.
“I mean I worked on her long. I worked on just
my places of deepest sorrows so that I could catch them when I needed to. And
it’s really interesting to transform a woman from a young icon as I played back
then, to this. It was more rewarding to play her now than it’s ever been.”
Hamilton joins Arnold Schwarzenegger as they
return to their iconic roles in the new “Terminator” flick directed by Tim
Miller (“Deadpool) and co-produced by James Cameron.
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” was released in
1991, almost 30 years ago. That story followed Sarah Connor (Hamilton) and her
ten-year-old son as they are pursued by a new, more advanced Terminator.
Hamilton says Connor returns just as fierce as she was before.
“You do these things and you don’t go, ‘I’m a
bad ass. I am a bad ass,’” she said. “That’s not the way it works but actually
this time after I finished, I was like, ‘You know what? I am a bad ass.’ I got
through it, it was really hard.”
“Terminator: Dark Fate” opens in U.S. theaters
November 1.
JAMIE LEE CURTIS IS PUSHING FOR JOE BIDEN APOLOGY
Jamie Lee Curtis is pushing for an apology
from Joe Biden over his treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas
confirmation hearings in 1991.
The politically active actress was at
CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday promoting her murder mystery “Knives Out.”
Biden has expressed regret over the
questioning of Hill by senators when he chaired the hearings, which explored
Hill’s sexual misconduct allegations against Thomas, then a U.S. Supreme Court
justice nominee. Thomas denied the allegations and was later confirmed to the
court.
“Obviously it’s a difficult time. I think what
has dogged him particularly is Anita Hill. And I know her. And there is a point
where if he doesn’t pick up the phone and call her and say this is been way too
long … and I just think he needs to give it directly to her and let her have
the opportunity to receive that,” Curtis said.
Biden, who is widely expected to pursue the
Democratic nomination for president, had faced his own firestorm this week
after at least two women accused him of touching them inappropriately. Biden
apologized in a video for being overly familiar.
Curtis, 60, had less to say about that.
“It’s a shame because he’s a good man and I
think he would make a good candidate, but the Anita Hill thing — problem for
me,” said Curtis, who added that she was currently “window shopping” among the
various Democratic presidential candidates.
Curtis’ “Knives Out” also stars Daniel Craig,
Chris Evans, Lakeith Stanfield, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette and Ana de
Armas. It’s due out later this year.
“DORA” HELPS ISABELA MONER CONNECT WITH PERUVIAN ROOTS
Isabela Moner, who plays the lead character in
“Dora and the Lost City of Gold,” says the film gave her a chance to connect
with her Peruvian ancestry.
The actress and singer said she had to learn
how to speak Quechua, the indigenous language spoken primarily in the Peruvian
Andes.
“There’s a lot of ‘K’s’, there’s a lot a lot
of ‘Q’s,’” she said about the indigenous language. “It’s Iike, really
interesting.
Moner also relished being part of a
predominately Latino cast.
“Eugenio Derbez, Eva Longoria, Michael Peña
and we had this one white guy. The token white guy. It was so fun to be able to
just speak Spanish on set casually and not have anyone to be like ‘What are you
saying?’” she said. “No, it was just a natural environment where we could be
ourselves.”
Eva Longoria plays her on-screen mom. Longoria
said she couldn’t help becoming motherly and over protective of 17-year-old
Moner.
“I was like, ‘Listen to me you are talented,
you are amazing, don’t mess up. Don’t go down the wrong way’ and she’s not.
She’s so elegant and smart and grounded and she has an amazing family. So, I
was so excited to be in her presence. She’s a movie star this little girl.
Nobody could’ve played it Dora except Isabela Moner,” said Longoria.
What the former “Desperate Housewives” star
did not want to discuss was her ex co-star Felicity Huffman’s arrest in the recent
college bribery admissions scandal.
When asked about it, she said she hadn’t
spoken to her and walked away.
“Dora and the Lost City of Gold” opens in U.S.
theaters August 2.
JIM CARREY HAD FUN “BEING OVER THE TOP AGAIN” FOR NEW “SONIC
THE HEDGEHOG” MOVIE
Jim Carrey has returned to his specialty,
physical comedy. He’s back as the bad
guy in “Sonic the Hedgehog.”
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to just be an
arch evil guy and just be completely over the top again and have some fun with
reality, you know. So, I always like that opportunity when it comes along, I am
game for that,” Carrey said at CinemaCon on Thursday.
He plays Sonic’s nemesis, Dr. Robotnik better
known by the alias Dr. Eggman. Ben Schwartz does the voice for Sonic the
Hedgehog.
Carrey didn’t know much about the hedgehog, so
he had to read up and do some research. Some say the character Eggman gets his
name from the Beatles song “I Am The Walrus.”
“I loved the materials and I loved the little
nods to the Eggman and all that stuff. I come from Beatles culture so for me, I
don’t know if that’s a problem for them, but I like the fact that you know,
everything in my life is a Beatles reference of some sort we know,” said Carrey
with a smile.
Carrey also said a few words as to why it was
important to him to continue to draw political cartoons to post on his Twitter
feed.
“Well you know, it’s just a little solace to
me in this odd time of complete capitalism breakdown,” he said. “Just a little
regulation would help, you know. That’s all. It’s just without that, we are
doomed so we are spiraling out of control and its corruption on every level and
every walk of life. It’s all attributed to that, so I really think we need to turn
that around.”
James Marsden stars as Tom Wachowski, the
newly appointed sheriff of Green Hills who befriends Sonic and aids him in his
quest to stop Dr. Robotnik. Just like most of the cast, Marsden is a big Carrey
fan.
“He’s a legend and he’s one of my heroes. One
of my comic heroes,” said Marsden. “So, to see him after 10 years come back and
enjoy doing the thing that he had enjoyed for so long is pretty special and he
crushes and it’s so fun to see.”
“Sonic the Hedgehog” opens in U.S. theaters
November 8.
TARON EGERTON SAYS HIS NUDE SCENES IN THE ELTON JOHN BIOPIC
ARE MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Taron Egerton confirms that he has nude scenes
in the new Elton John biopic “Rocketman,” but the same-sex love scenes are
being overhyped.
“There is a little bit of male intimacy in the
film, but I am sort of getting to the point where I am reluctant to talk about
it because it’s been so talked about and there’s so much to celebrate about the
film,” he said. “But you see a little bit of me, yeah.”
Egerton plays John in the movie, which tells
the icon’s
story through song, dance, and a bit of fantasy. It’s helmed by Dexter
Fletcher, who directed the Freddie Mercury-Queen biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody,”
which won Rami Malek the best actor Academy Award earlier this year.
Egerton got a chance to meet John during
filming, and they’ve become friends.
“I was asked to go and meet him, and I was so
nervous,” said Egerton. “He’s been nothing but lovely and since then I have
gotten to know him rather well.”
“Rocketman” shoots into U.S. theaters May 31.
Dave Bautista The State of the Industry: Past, Present and Future, STX films, CinemaCon, Las Vegas, USA – 02 Apr 2019
DAVE BAUTISTA: DISNEY ‘REALIZED VERY EARLY ON’ THAT FIRING
JAMES GUNN FROM ‘GUARDIANS’ WAS ‘A BAD CALL’
Dave Bautista says Disney “realized very early
on” that firing “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn over years-old
offensive tweets was “a bad call.”
Bautista was at CinemaCon promoting
the action comedy “My Spy.” He had been publicly lobbying to have Gunn
rehired to the Marvel franchise, and Disney announced the reversal last month.
“I think that they realize that it was a very
rash decision. But I think that they thought at that time that they were doing
the right thing. But I think in retrospect they realized they didn’t and they
just didn’t know how to save face and go back on that,” said Bautista, who
stars alongside Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana in the “Guardians” films. “And I
think they finally just said we are going to do the right thing and rehire
James. … I think they realized very early on that it was kind of a bad call.”
Gunn was fired last July over tweets from nearly
a decade ago in which he joked about subjects like pedophilia and rape. Disney
Chairman Alan Horn at the time said Gunn’s words were inconsistent with the
studio’s values.
Gunn has since signed on to write and direct
the next installment of Warner Bros.′ “Suicide Squad” for the Marvel rival DC
Comics. That film is to shoot in the fall and be released in August 2021.
Bautista says he hopes to join that film as
well.
HALLE BERRY READY FOR MORE ‘JOHN WICK’
Halle Berry and “John Wick 3” director Chad
Stahelski say the actress will be back for the fourth
installment in Keanu Reeves’ action franchise.
“I’m going to say yes, because I got the first
job by doing that. So I’m going to say yeah, I’m all over the next one,” Berry
said on Thursday.
“Her character Sofia is not going anywhere,”
Stahelski added.
Berry and Stahelski were promoting “John Wick:
Chapter 3 – Parabellum,” out next month.
The 52-year-old Oscar winner said she relished
her preparation for the role of an assassin who teams up with Reeves’ John Wick
character.
“I got to train really, really hard, harder
than I have ever trained,” she said. “I got to work at these guys one-on-one
personally for five, six months. And that kind of training, you can’t buy. And
you can’t certainly get to the level that I got to in in five months. It takes
two people two or three years. So I got all of this training under the guise of
doing my work. And it was fun! Yeah, I got the intense version and it was
amazing.”
Now that steaming and subscription gaming has gone mainstream with Apple and Google, Snapchat has now jumped in to stay current with users. South Korea bested Verizon by kicking off their 5G mobile networks before them, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook faces more privacy issues yet again. This time, over 500 million users were affected.
Snapchat Got Game
Snapchat is
joining the online-games bandwagon with a new service that lets people play
together on its mobile platform. The company says it wants to make it easier
for friends to play together.
Snap Inc.
also unveiled at Los Angeles event Thursday new products to help companies
advertise on its service, including Snapchat Ad Kit and Snapchat Audience
Network. The tools let businesses send ads both to Snapchat users and people
who don’t use the service, within other apps. The setup is similar to what
Facebook does with its own ad service.
In addition,
Snapchat launched original shows that can only be watched on its service,
including “Can’t Talk Now,” which follows a group of high school kids with the
story told through their phones.
Snap
joins Google and Apple in
launching a gaming platform in the hopes of attracting new users — or at least
keeping existing ones coming back instead of leaving for the wildly popular
Fortnite game.
Snap has
been struggling with declining user numbers and stiff competition from
Facebook’s Instagram. It had 186 million daily active users in the last quarter
of 2018, compared with 187 million in the third quarter.
5G Kicks Off Early In South Korea
South
Korea’s telecommunications carriers turned
on super-fast 5G mobile internet networks abruptly ahead of schedule in an
attempt to ensure the country becomes the first in the world to launch the
services.
The carriers
say 5G-enabled smartphones are capable of downloading data 20 times faster than
existing 4G devices, which in theory would enable users to download movie files
almost instantly. The faster networks would also improve live broadcasts and
streaming services for music and video while allowing for a broader range of
virtual reality services, the companies say.
The 5G
networks of the three South Korean mobile operators went live at 11 p.m.
Wednesday, hours before U.S. carrier Verizon turned on its 5G network in some
areas of Minneapolis and Chicago a week ahead of schedule. The carriers had
initially planned to start their 5G services on Friday, but moved up to stay
ahead of Verizon. The change came hours after a meeting between the carriers
and government regulators, who modified service terms so that the companies
could sign up users earlier.
However, the
South Korean 5G services were initially available only to a few individuals
selected as brand promoters, including figure skating superstar Yuna Kim, who
SK Telecom announced as one of its “first customers.”
Regular
customers in capital Seoul and some other major cities will be able to sign up
for 5G services starting on Friday. The carriers plan to expand their coverage
to 85 cities across the country by the end of the year.
“The
government and private companies came together to achieve the world’s first
commercialized 5G services and this proves once again our country is
undoubtedly the top powerhouse in information and communications,” said You
Young-min, South Korean minister for science and information technology.
The supposed
milestone is widely seen as symbolic. Park Tae-wan, a ministry official, said a
“world’s first” reference could possibly help the mobile industry market’s
know-how.
Facebook Exposed Again
Security
researchers have uncovered more instances of Facebook user
data being publicly exposed on the internet, further underscoring its struggles
as it deals with a slew of privacy and other problems.
The
researchers from the firm UpGuard said in a blog post Wednesday that the data,
which included user names and passwords, came from two different Facebook apps
that stored their data publicly on Amazon’s cloud services. Facebook said the
databases have been taken down.
But the
episode illustrates Facebook’s issues with controlling its users’ data, especially
once it is in the hands of third-party
developers.
Data left exposed by Facebook on Amazon Cloud servers not password protected.
The
databases were from a Mexico-based media company called Cultura Colectiva,
which included more than 540 million records — like user comments and likes —
and from an app called At the Pool. The researchers said passwords stored for
At the Pool were “presumably” for the app and not for Facebook. Still, storing
them publicly could put people at risk if they used the same passwords across
different accounts.
While the At
the Pool data collection was not as large as that for Cultura Colectiva,
UpGuard said it included plain text passwords for 22,000 users. The app itself
shut down in 2014, and UpGuard said it is not known how long the user details
were exposed.
The
discovery comes a little over a year after Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the data
mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump got personal data on millions of
Facebook users.
“As Facebook
faces scrutiny over its data stewardship practices, they have made efforts to
reduce third party access. But as these exposures show, the data genie cannot
be put back in the bottle,” UpGuard wrote in its blog post. “Data about
Facebook users has been spread far beyond the bounds of what Facebook can
control today.”
Facial recognition in gaining mainstream popularity as it creeps into our everyday lives. From your photos on Facebook to police scans of mugshots. MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini noticed a serious glitch in the technology. Some of the software couldn’t detect dark-skinned faces.
This discovery sparked the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher to launch a project that’s having an outsize influence on the debate over how artificial intelligence should be deployed in the real world.
Her tests
on software created by brand-name tech firms such as Amazon uncovered much
higher error rates in classifying the gender of darker-skinned women than for
lighter-skinned men.
Along the
way, Buolamwini has spurred Microsoft and IBM to improve their systems and
irked Amazon, which publicly attacked her research methods. On Wednesday, a
group of AI scholars, including a winner of computer science’s top prize,
launched a spirited defense of her work and called
on Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition software to police.
Her work has
also caught the attention of political leaders in statehouses and Congress and
led some to seek limits on the use of computer vision tools to analyze human
faces.
“There needs
to be a choice,” said Buolamwini, a graduate student and researcher at MIT’s
Media Lab. “Right now, what’s happening is these technologies are being
deployed widely without oversight, oftentimes covertly, so that by the time we
wake up, it’s almost too late.”
Buolamwini
is hardly alone in expressing caution about the fast-moving adoption of facial
recognition by police, government agencies and businesses from stores to
apartment complexes. Many other researchers have shown how AI systems, which
look for patterns in huge troves of data, will mimic the institutional biases
embedded in the data they are learning from. For instance, if AI systems are
developed using images of mostly white men, the systems will work best in
recognizing white men.
Those
disparities can sometimes be a matter of life or death: One recent
study of the computer vision systems that enable self-driving
cars to “see” the road shows they have a harder time detecting pedestrians with
darker skin tones.
What’s
struck a chord about Boulamwini’s work is her method of testing the systems
created by well-known companies. She applies such systems to a skin-tone scale
used by dermatologists, then names and shames those that show racial and gender
bias. Buolamwini, who’s also founded a coalition of scholars, activists and
others called the Algorithmic Justice League, has blended her scholarly
investigations with activism.
“It adds to
a growing body of evidence that facial recognition affects different groups
differently,” said Shankar Narayan, of the American Civil Liberties Union of
Washington state, where the group has sought restrictions on the technology.
“Joy’s work has been part of building that awareness.”
Amazon, whose
CEO, Jeff Bezos, she emailed directly last summer, has responded by
aggressively taking aim at her research methods.
A
Buolamwini-led study published just over a year ago found disparities in how
facial-analysis systems built by IBM, Microsoft and the Chinese company Face
Plus Plus classified people by gender. Darker-skinned women were the most
misclassified group, with error rates of up to 34.7%. By contrast, the maximum
error rate for lighter-skinned males was less than 1%.
The study
called for “urgent attention” to address the bias.
“I responded
pretty much right away,” said Ruchir Puri, chief scientist of IBM Research,
describing an email he received from Buolamwini last year.
Since then,
he said, “it’s been a very fruitful relationship” that informed IBM’s unveiling
this year of a new 1 million-image database for better analyzing the diversity
of human faces. Previous systems have been overly reliant on what Buolamwini
calls “pale male” image repositories.
Microsoft,
which had the lowest error rates, declined comment. Messages left with Megvii,
which owns Face Plus Plus, weren’t immediately returned.
Months after
her first study, when Buolamwini worked with University of Toronto researcher
Inioluwa Deborah Raji on a follow-up test, all three companies showed major
improvements.
But this
time they also added Amazon, which has sold the system it calls Rekognition to
law enforcement agencies. The results, published in late January, showed Amazon
badly misidentifying darker-hued women.
“We were
surprised to see that Amazon was where their competitors were a year ago,”
Buolamwini said.
Amazon
dismissed what it called Buolamwini’s “erroneous claims” and said the study
confused facial analysis with facial recognition, improperly measuring the
former with techniques for evaluating the latter.
“The answer
to anxieties over new technology is not to run ‘tests’ inconsistent with how
the service is designed to be used, and to amplify the test’s false and
misleading conclusions through the news media,” Matt Wood, general manager of
artificial intelligence for Amazon’s cloud-computing division, wrote in a
January blog post. Amazon declined requests for an interview.
“I didn’t
know their reaction would be quite so hostile,” Buolamwini said recently in an
interview at her MIT lab.
Coming to
her defense Wednesday was a coalition of researchers, including AI pioneer
Yoshua Bengio, recent
winner of the Turing Award, considered the tech field’s version of the
Nobel Prize.
They
criticized Amazon’s response, especially its distinction between facial
recognition and analysis.
“In contrast
to Dr. Wood’s claims, bias found in one system is cause for concern in the
other, particularly in use cases that could severely impact people’s lives,
such as law enforcement applications,” they wrote.
Its few
publicly known clients have defended Amazon’s system.
Chris
Adzima, senior information systems analyst for the Washington County Sheriff’s
Office in Oregon, said the agency uses Amazon’s Rekognition to identify the
most likely matches among its collection of roughly 350,000 mug shots. But
because a human makes the final decision, “the bias of that computer system is
not transferred over into any results or any action taken,” Adzima said.
But
increasingly, regulators and legislators are having their doubts. A bipartisan
bill in Congress seeks limits on facial recognition. Legislatures in Washington
and Massachusetts are considering laws of their own.
Buolamwini
said a major message of her research is that AI systems need to be carefully
reviewed and consistently monitored if they’re going to be used on the public.
Not just to audit for accuracy, she said, but to ensure face recognition isn’t
abused to violate privacy or cause other harms.
“We can’t just leave it to companies alone to do these kinds of checks,” she said.
Apple and Google are making it look like the video game industry is entering a brand new world. Gamers will remind them that subscribing and streaming games has been happening for quite some time now with Sony and Microsoft doing this with their PS4 and Xbox consoles. You could buy a subscription and play all kinds of games.
Naturally, now that Apple and Google are rushing in, the mainstream media are going to make a huge deal of it. It will be bigger now and prices should be more competitive with more games to choose from. The big negative is that it leaves us wondering if this will force GameStop to go the route of Block Bluster with stores shutting down as people choose to subscribe rather than buy.
I personally have always loved GameStop, but I’ve noticed my store beginning to feel a lot like Block Buster did in the waning days. I hope not as it’s a great way to get gaming geeks out of the house and into the real world, but as more brick and mortar stores shut down, it’s future is inevitable.
In the past,
you plunked down $60 at GameStop for a copy of Grand Theft Auto or Madden NFL
and played it out — after which you could trade it in or let it gather dust.
Now, you’ll
increasingly have the choice of subscribing to games, playing for free or
possibly just streaming them over the internet to your phone or TV.
Welcome to a
new world of experimentation in an industry that hasn’t been seriously shaken
up since Nintendo launched its home gaming console in the U.S. in 1986 or when
mobile gaming surged in popularity a decade ago.
“We’re in an
environment where people want content and media when they want it, how they
want it,” CFRA analyst Scott Kessler said. “You can play a great video game
with a console or on a computer or with a mobile device and you might not have
to pay anything. That’s a dramatic departure from even a few years ago.”
Of course,
people will still buy and use traditional video games and consoles for years to
come. But as games have become more accessible online and on mobile, it is
becoming harder to convince people to spend a chunk of money upfront, said
Joost van Dreunen, co-founder of research company SuperData.
Game
retailer GameStop’s shares fell Wednesday, a day after it
projected a revenue drop of 5% to 10% in 2019. And major
video game publishers Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard have announced layoffs.
Responding
to changing consumer behavior, video game makers and new entrants like Google
are offering new ways to play.
GAME STREAMING
Big players
are entering the arena: Google announced Stadia,
a console-free game streaming service due out this year. The platform will
store a game-playing session in the cloud and let players jump across phones,
laptops and browsers with Google’s software.
Google
didn’t say how much its new service will cost, whether it will offer
subscriptions or other options, or what games will be available at launch —all
key elements to the success of a new video-game platform. Google will be hoping
to avoid the fate of OnLive, which debuted in 2010 and streamed high-end video
games over the internet. The service had promise, but failed to garner a big
enough user base. It shuttered in 2015.
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Apple
announced a subscription service that some are calling the ”Netflix
of Games.”
Apple Arcade
subscribers will get to play more than 100 games, curated by Apple and
exclusive to the service. Games can be downloaded and played offline — on the
Apple-made iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV. Notably, Apple says players won’t
have to pay for virtual weapons and other extras — something free mobile games
typically charge for. The company didn’t say how much Arcade will cost when it
launches this fall.
FREE-TO-PLAY GAMES
And then
there is Fortnite, a free-to-play game that has become a massive hit with its
“battle royal” mode winning over millions of fans. In this mode, 100 players
battle one another for weapons and armor until only one player is left. Created
by Epic Games, which is backed by Chinese mobile behemoth Tencent, a key aspect
of the game is being able to play it on anything from your phone to a
decked-out gaming PC.
“I like the
interactiveness and being able to play with your friends,” said Patrick
Penfield, a Syracuse University student. “There are infinite possibilities.”
Free-to-play
games such as Fortnite make money from in-app purchases. In Fortnite, for
instance, players use real-world money to buy for their characters outfits,
gear or “emotes” — brief dances that have become a cultural phenomenon
performed on playgrounds, in social media posts and in the scoring celebrations
of professional athletes.
Penfield
loves that Fortnite is free and says he can’t see himself spending $60 again
for a game upfront. He estimates he spends about $10 a month on in-game
purchases — meaning he’s spending twice as much in just one year.
The trend
started a few years ago with Candy Crush and other mobile games that appealed
to casual gamers looking to pass the time on a subway or doctor’s waiting room.
The success of Fortnite shows that this model works with more sophisticated
styles of games, too. Despite being free to play, it raked in an estimated $2.4
billion in 2018, according to SuperData.
And there
are many signs Fortnite isn’t a one-hit wonder. Electronic Arts’ Apex
Legends got
50 million players worldwide in its first four weeks. While
it doesn’t have a mobile component — yet — its style of game play and revenue
model are similar to Fortnite. Meanwhile, Activision Blizzard is working with
Tencent on a mobile version of its popular Call of Duty first-person shooter
franchise.
But it’s a
gamble if users don’t spend enough money in the game itself.
“Even though
we can start to see the shape of things to come, it will take a while before
they come into focus,” van Dreunen said.
According to President Donald Trump, he’s been exonerated and there’s nothing left to see. For supporters, that’s something to be joyous about, but it’s not actually true. Less than two weeks after Attorney General Barr released a four-page letter about Bob Mueller’s 400-page report, the Special Investigator’s team is letting it be known that Trump is jumping the gun.
This has only emboldened Democrats to be more aggressive in demanding the full Mueller report be released to Congress. At first Trump was stating to let the report be released in full, but the president has begun backtracking on those words.
Here’s a breakdown on where things stand now among all the background noise.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW?
The House
Judiciary Committee approved subpoenas Wednesday for special counsel Robert
Mueller’s full Russia report as Democrats pressure the Justice Department to
release the document without redactions.
The
committee voted 24-17 to give Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.,
permission to issue subpoenas to the Justice Department for the final report,
its exhibits and any underlying evidence or materials prepared for Mueller’s
investigation. Nadler has not yet said if he’ll send the subpoenas, which would
be the first step in a potentially long fight with the Justice Department over
the materials.
The
Judiciary panel also voted Wednesday to authorize subpoenas related to five of
President Donald Trump’s former top advisers, stepping up a separate, wide-ranging
investigation into Trump and his personal and political dealings.
The chairman
of a different House committee formally asked the IRS to provide six years of
Trump’s personal tax returns and the returns for some of his businesses as
Democrats try to shed light on his complex financial dealings and potential
conflicts of interest.
The request
by Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal, who heads the tax-writing House Ways and
Means Committee, is likely to set off a huge legal battle between Democrats
controlling the House and the Trump administration. Trump told reporters
Wednesday he “would not be inclined” to provide his tax returns to the
committee.
Meanwhile,
the House Intelligence Committee wants to interview — and has requested records
from — a key planner of Trump’s inauguration, a person familiar with the matter
said Wednesday, adding to a growing list of inquiries into the funding of the
celebratory events.
The
inaugural committee raised an unprecedented $107 million to host events
celebrating Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 but has drawn mounting
scrutiny in recent months. The committee has maintained its finances were
independently audited, and that all funds were spent in accordance with the
law.
DID ANYONE IN
TRUMP’S
CAMPAIGN COLLUDE WITH RUSSIA?
According to
the special counsel, the answer is no. The ‘no collusion’ claims is a semantics
issue as colluding does not imply criminal conduct like conspiracy does. People
in the campaign did actually collude as when Donald Trump, Jr. responded in an
e-mail with “I love it,” and then set up a meeting to get dirt on Hillary
Clinton. That is collusion, but did Bob Mueller’s team find anything illegal in
that? That appears to be a ‘no.’
In his
letter dated March 24, Attorney General William Barr quotes from special
counsel Robert Mueller’s report saying the investigation “did not establish
that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian
government in its election interference activities.”
The letter does
not detail what Mueller learned about a broad range of Trump associates who
had Russia-related contacts during the 2016 presidential campaign and
transition period. It also doesn’t
answer why several of those people lied to federal investigators or
Congress during the Russia probe.
While Trump
has been declaring that he’s fully exonerated, that part is not accurate as Mueller
came to no conclusion when it came to obstruction. It appears he was leaving
that up to Congress to decide, but Attorney General Barr made a decision in his
four-page ‘not a summary.’
ARE TRUMP’S
TROUBLES ALL OVER NOW?
No.
Trump also
plays a central role in a separate case in New York, where prosecutors have
implicated him in a crime. They say Trump directed his personal lawyer Michael
Cohen to make illegal hush-money payments to two women as a way to quash
potential sex scandals during the campaign. New York prosecutors also are
looking into Trump’s inaugural fund.
Congressional
investigations also are swirling around the president. Democrats have launched
a sweeping probe of Trump, an aggressive investigation that threatens to shadow
the president through the 2020 election season.
Shortly after Jon M. Chu proudly stated how he refused handing over his “Crazy Rich Asians” to a streaming service, MPAA CEO and chairman Charles Rivkin was touting bringing Netflix into the fold at CinemaCon.
This is huge for Netflix, who will now benefit from access to China. The streaming giant hasn’t been able to enter that lucrative market with its platform. Donald Trump’s recent on again off again trade war with China has stalled a new set of terms with the MPAA, but they are hoping to find a resolution.
Rivkin stated that Netflix’s addition to the group makes the entertainment industry stronger. “Here is what I know. We are all stronger advocates for creativity and the entertainment business when we are working together…all of us.”
Rivkin’s remarks are a stark contrast to how the streaming giant is usually referenced at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of movie theater owners and distributors, who generally see the streaming service as a threat to their business model.
The MPAA
chairman and CEO kicked off CinemaCon Tuesday morning in Las Vegas with his
annual state of the industry remarks.
“On behalf of the MPAA and its member companies, I am delighted to
welcome Netflix as a partner. All of our members are committed to pushing the
film and television industry forward, in both how we tell stories and how we
reach audiences. Adding Netflix will allow us to even more effectively advocate
for the global community of creative storytellers, and I look forward to seeing
what we can all achieve together.”
Rivkin also
touted the record 2018 box office year. The North American box office reached
$11.9 billion and the global box office hit $41 billion last year.
“At the MPAA, each of our member companies is evolving, too. And thus, how we pursue our mission of promoting and protecting creativity is evolving. Recently, that evolution featured Netflix joining the MPAA, adding to our roster of leading global content creators.”
That growth
was helped by an increase in younger and more diverse audiences.
“Joining the Motion Picture Association further exemplifies our commitment to ensuring the vibrancy of these creative industries and the many talented people who work in them all over the world,” said Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer. “We look forward to supporting the association team and their important efforts.”
CinemaCon,
which runs through Thursday, comes at crossroads for the film business. Disney,
Warner Bros. and Universal will be rolling out their own streaming services in
the coming months in hopes of rivaling the success of Netflix and Amazon Studios.
“There’s no doubt that home entertainment consumption moves toward
streaming more with each passing day. As large media companies look to
establish direct relationships with consumers through streaming platforms — and
the options in the home grow — competition for directors and stars who want
their work seen on the big screen will only intensify,” National
Association of Theater Owners CEO-president John Fithian
said.
“In
this new climate it’s important to ask, how does any given movie stand out
among endless choices in the home? Everyone in this room knows the answer to
that question: a robust theatrical release provides a level of prestige to a
movie that cannot be replicated,” he continued, noting that the global box
office hit a record $41.7 billion in 2018, including a best-ever $11.9 billion
in North America.
Chu — who
sold Crazy Rich Asians to Warner Bros., despite a
higher offer from Netflix — likewise fiercely defended the theatrical
experience when kicking off the morning event. “We knew here was only one
way to present our movie, and that was theatrically. This story would not have
happened without the theatrical experience,” he told exhibitors.
Disney —
which has only increased its leverage with the acquisition of the 20th Century
Fox film studio — has informed theater owners that it has no intention of
breaking windows for its big films. Netflix, however, continues to ignore the
window, although there’s speculation that Martin Scorsese wants a more
traditional, wide release for his star-studded film The Irishman, due out later this year.
Rivkin and
Fithian stressed that theaters and streamers can co-exist and even reinforce
each other, citing an Ernst & Young study showing that consumers who are
frequent moviegoers also tend to stream content more frequently.
“Theatrical and streaming are two completely different experiences that
have their time and place,” Fithian said.
During the
DVD boom, Hollywood studios made numerous titles directly for the home
entertainment market. “We understand that some movies will continue to go
straight to the home and skip theatrical. There is nothing revolutionary about
that idea,” he said.
Fithian and
Rivkin both celebrated the success of the 2018 box office, including a number
of titles that furthered diversity both in front of and behind the camera.
“Box office receipts and attendance rebounded in a big way after a lot of doom and gloom talk in 2017,” said Fithian, “confirming yet again the enduring importance of moviegoing in our culture.”
DOJ Wars Academy Of Collusion With Netflix
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences received a warning from the Justice Department that attempting to block Netflix from Oscar eligibility could be a form of antitrust. This would be a violation of competition laws.
Department of Justice letter to Academy regarding Netflix.
The DoJ letter comes on the heels of Feb. 24’s 91st Academy Awards, at which Netflix’s Roma was nominated for as many Oscars as any film and won three, including best director. Most top pundits expected Roma to win best picture, as well, an outcome that many industry-observers feared would mark the beginning of the end of the theatrical moviegoing experience as we know it. Netflix, a streaming service that first and foremost aims to please its subscribers, refuses to adhere to the 90-day window of theatrical exclusivity demanded by the major theater owners, opting instead to release films for much shorter periods through independent theater chains.
A best picture Oscar win for a Netflix film, in spite of that controversial position, would have been widely seen as the Hollywood community condoning that, which is why, according to media reports, Steven Spielberg, the legendary director and a current representative of the directors branch on the Academy’s board of governors, was planning to call for the full board to implement, at its April 24 meeting, new rules that would lock out of Oscar competition films released in that manner, effectively knocking Netflix out of the Oscars game. Spielberg has since backed away from that position — and allied himself with a competing streaming service, Apple TV+.
Nevertheless, maybe based on old information, the DOJ is weighing in.
“The [Antitrust] Division writes to draw your attention to its concerns that may arise if the Academy implements certain restrictions in a way that tends to suppress competition,” writes Delrahim. “In the event that the Academy — an association that includes multiple competitors in its membership — without procompetitive justification, such conduct may raise antitrust concerns.”
As the entertainment industry struggles to keep up with technology, you can expect more things like this to crop up. As studios continue being swallowed up as Fox was by Disney, less product will be coming out of Hollywood which only leads to more streaming services stepping in to fill the gap.
Barbara Bush knew how to bite her tongue when a Bush was in office, but she didn’t have to worry about that when it came to Donald Trump. She did not like him one bit, and that feeling hadn’t stopped since 1990.
A new biography of the former first lady finds that her disdain for the Republican president, who transformed the party her own family had embodied for generations into his likeness, dates as least as far back as a 1990s diary entry.
She referred to Trump in
the entry as “the real symbol of greed in the 80s.”
Mrs. Bush, who was 92 when she died last April, gave Susan Page, author
of “The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the
Making of an American Dynasty,” access to volumes of her diaries, which she
began keeping in 1948. The former first lady recounts in a January 1990 entry
about reading a news article on Trump speaking at a Los Angeles charity awards
dinner for Merv Griffin. Former President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy,
attended the gala, and Trump needled the former president over pricey speeches
he had given in Japan.
Mrs. Bush later showed a
friend news clips about Trump’s separation from his first wife, Ivana, and
noted that allies of the soon-to-be ex-Mrs. Trump were saying a $25 million
settlement in the prenuptial agreement she signed wouldn’t be enough.
“The Trumps
are a new word, both of them,” Mrs. Bush wrote. “Trump now means Greed,
selfishness and ugly. So sad.”
Her dislike of Trump
spiked more recently over the way he belittled her son, Jeb, when the New York
businessman and the former Florida governor competed for the 2016 Republican
presidential nomination. Trump also had criticized other members of the Bush
clan, including George W. Bush over starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Page, the Washington bureau
chief for USA Today, also reveals that Mrs. Bush blamed Trump for causing her
“angst” during the 2016 election – she called it a “heart attack” – and leading
her to question whether she was still a Republican. Asked in the months before
she died whether she still considered herself a Republican, Mrs. Bush answered:
“I’d probably say no today.”
The book, based also on
five interviews Page conducted with Mrs. Bush, is due in bookstores Tuesday. It
comes nearly a year after the passing of the second woman in U.S. history to be
the wife of one president and the mother of another.
The former first lady had
drafted a tongue-in-cheek letter to send after the November 2016 election
welcoming former President Bill Clinton to the club of first spouses. Clinton’s
wife, Hillary Clinton, was the Democratic candidate, and Mrs. Bush thought, as
did many voters, that she would be the next president.
The letter never saw a
mailbox. She woke up the morning after the election “and discovered, to my
horror, that Trump had won.”
Weeks later, however, she
wrote to Melania Trump. At the time, Mrs. Trump was the subject of intense
speculation over whether she would relocate to the White House from her
family’s penthouse at New York’s Trump Tower. Mrs. Bush encouraged the incoming
first lady to do what was best for her and for the couple’s young son, Barron.
Mrs. Trump attended her predecessor’s funeral.
Until the day she died,
Mrs. Bush also kept on her bedside table a red, white and blue digital clock,
given to her as a joke, that counted down to the end of Trump’s term.
Mrs. Bush, who had been
living in constant pain, fell and broke her back shortly before she died. In
the hospital, after receiving the news that she was dying, she asked her doctor
to keep it a secret. Once back at her Houston home, receiving only palliative
care, she sat in the den holding hands with her husband of 73 years. They had
the longest presidential
marriage in U.S. history.
He gave “Bar,” as he
called her, permission to die, and she gave her then-93-year-old husband
permission to live.
Then they each had a
drink: bourbon for Mrs. Bush, a vodka martini for the former president.
