#and that's on amazon but i found one on david jones and even that's american like asdjsdjf you're an australian shop?? like seriously? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

princess-of-the-worlds · 4 years

Note

Do you know where I can listen to the Torchwood audios?

Of course! So there’s the Torchwood BBC audio plays, which you might be able to find through Audible or BBC iPlayer if you’re in the UK. There’s also the Torchwood audiobooks which you can purchase or find through your local library maybe.

The ones I believe you might be refering to are probably the Big Finish Torchwood audios, which you can purchase right here on their website. Their monthly audios are reasonably priced - when I say reasonably, I say that considering all the effort and hiring costs and the pay for the writers and directors and sound mixers and graphic designers that should be considered before even the actors get paid - at $8.99 USD for digital downloads (and more expensive if you buy the physical CD), which I believe is also something like 7.99 euros but I might be wrong there, as I am American.

There are also the occasional special release, including an audio set that includes the full original cast, along with a range for Torchwood One, featuring Yvonne Hartman and Ianto Jones. Plus, there’s also other collections, like one centric on Captain John Hart and a whole range of boxsets devoted to Jack called the Lives of Captain Jack.

THEN, there’s Seasons 5 and 6, all great audios of 12-13 episodes a piece, featuring Jack and Gwen and a whole range of new but wonderful and interesting characters set closer to the modern day. The lack of Ianto, Tosh, and Owen may deter you at first, but I assure you, from my experiences still going through Season 5 and from reviews from my friends who have heard both seasons, that the new seasons are phenomenal. Some argue they may even be the best seasons of Torchwood, but that’s for you to determine.

Of course, if you’re worried about price, I would advise, as I do, to either pre-order the audios when they are at their cheapest or wait for a sale, during which their prices do go down a bit, but keep in mind that the sales are not too frequent. Still, sometimes, you’ll get lucky.

But what you shouldn’t do, and what I beg, beg, beg of you not to do is, PLEASE DO NOT PIRATE BIG FINISH.

They are a small company of creatives, and it’s not cheap to keep hiring John Barrowman or Eve Myles or Gareth David-Lloyd or Naoko Mori or Burn Gorman. These are individual people, not the BBC. These are writers and directors and soundmixers and graphic designers and actors for whom this is their livelihood or part of their livelihood, and they deserved to get paid. If you pirate Big Finish audios instead of buying them, you take money away from Big Finish as well as proof of purchase that we want these audios and we want Big Finish to keep making them. Money sells.

You don’t want Big Finish to lose the Torchwood license and stop being able to make audios, do you? (Rhetorical question, because no one should want that.)

Plus, on that note, it’s also better to buy directly from Big Finish rather than Amazon because of the exact reasons listed above. Also, it just doesn’t feel right or feel ethical.

So basically. Tldr: The Torchwood audios you are most likely refering to are the Big Finish audios, which can be found on their website. There are many varieties and ranges you might enjoy. Above everything, don’t pirate Big Finish or you’ll make a lot of fans angry. Additionally, in conclusion, I hope this post helped you, I’m sorry about the length, and I hope you enjoy the audios if you are able to purchase them!

#nik answers asks #torchwood #torchwood big finish #big finish #don't pirate big finish y'all #elwenn-dreaming

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watusichris · 4 years

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Leon Russell Au Naturel

When Les Blank’s A Poem is a Naked Person, his long-suppressed feature about Leon Russell, was finally exhumed some years back, I wrote about the film for the Night Flight web site. The story has since been scoured from the web. The film is airing Monday on TCM at the ungodly hour of 7:15 a.m. PT, as part of its Labor Day music movie marathon, so I decided to dig up my old piece and re-post it to supply some back story. It’s quite a picture, but it is not for the impatient or the squeamish. ********** Virtually unseen for more than 40 years, A Poem is a Naked Person, Les Blank’s portrait of Leon Russell, receives a formal Los Angeles premiere on July 8 with a screening at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel; a week of showings at Cinefamily, under the auspices of Allison and Tiffany Anders’ Don’t Knock the Rock Festival, commences on July 10. The reason for the picture’s long suppression is simple: Russell and his Shelter Records partner Denny Cordell commissioned Blank to make a promotional movie, and he gave them an art film, and not a flattering one at that. Therein lies a very interesting rub.

Some slightly convoluted back story is necessary. By 1972, when Blank was hired to create his portrait of the musician, guitarist-keyboardist-songwriter Russell had risen to a position of commercial eminence after years as one of L.A.’s top studio guns. Graduating from work in the house band of the weekly TV rock showcase Shindig! and record dates with such diverse clients as Phil Spector, the Byrds, and Herb Alpert, the Tulsa-born musician moved into the spotlight as musical director for Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett’s stomping R&B- and gospel-infused group and Joe Cocker’s huge, circus-like Mad Dogs & Englishmen unit.

Dubbed “The Master of Time and Space,” Russell began a fruitful label partnership with British producer Cordell with the inauguration of Shelter in 1970, a year before a high-profile appearance in the house band at George Harrison’s Concert For Bangla Desh. He bumped into the U.S. top 20 with his second solo album in 1971, but the 1972 LP Carney soared to No. 2 and spawned the No. 11 single “Tight Rope,” which was animated by Russell’s rolling keyboard work and rough yet affecting singing. The three-LP concert collection Leon Live would reach the top 10 and cement his position as a solo star in 1973.

Russell and Cordell doubtlessly envisioned a conventional feature surveying the musician’s stage show and sessions for a forthcoming country album when, on the recommendation of the American Film Institute, they commissioned Blank. By then active in Northern California for a dozen years, the director had made his rep with earthy short features about a pair of Texas musicians, bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins (The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1968) and songster Mance Lipscomb (A Well Spent Life, 1971).

For nearly two years, Blank and his collaborator Maureen Gosling set up shop at Russell’s home and studio complex on a lake outside Tulsa, where they filmed the performer at work and play, and also cut their footage of Louisiana zydeco musicians Clifton Chenier and Boisec Ardoin into the pungent short films Hot Pepper and Dry Wood. The filmmakers humped their gear to gigs in Anaheim, New Orleans, and Austin, and to studio rehearsals at Bradley’s Barn in Nashville for the album Hank Wilson’s Back, the sincere and soulful 1973 country project that bewildered his core fans, essentially marking the end of Russell’s tenure as a top-flight rock attraction.

After an abortive attempt to screen A Poem is a Naked Person at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival – the print wasn’t ready – Russell and Cordell basically put the feature on semi-permanent ice, allowing it to be screened only by permission, with Blank in attendance. It remained an elusive commodity until the director’s death in 2013. At the urging of Blank’s son Harrod, Russell reconsidered the matter of its availability; a screening at this year’s South By Southwest Film Festival prefaced a national theatrical release, and a DVD from the Criterion Collection, distributor Janus Films’ home video line, is anticipated.

Russell has long been mum about his reasons for keeping the picture out of circulation; queried in recent interviews, he has glibly replied, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t remember.” But it seems obvious that the producers’ intentions and the filmmakers’ execution were widely divergent. If Russell and Cordell thought they were going to get a puffy documentary that would push their product, they were sorely disappointed.

A Poem is a Naked Person bears a striking resemblance, in style if not entirely in content, to a pair of quite radical contemporaneous films. The most obvious analog is Cocksucker Blues, Swiss-born photographer and indie filmmaker Robert Frank’s notorious backstage look at the Rolling Stones’ 1972 U.S. tour; a jumpy saturnalia of sexual escapades, heroin abuse, and hotel-room boredom, with occasional concert footage, it scandalized the band, who have enforced restrictions similar to those imposed on Blank’s movie upon its exhibition. Photographer William Eggleston’s long-gestating Stranded in Canton, which features pianist Jim Dickinson and musician/bank robber Jerry McGill among its cast of Memphis and New Orleans weirdoes and eccentrics, was shot on portable video equipment ca. 1973 and finally cut into something resembling finished form by Bluff City writer-documentarian Robert Gordon in 2005. It’s an incandescent rebel depiction of life on the distant fringes of art and music.

Frank’s and Eggleston’s highly personalized, jaggedly edited, impressionistic features, brimming with often appalling extra-musical incident, don’t fit the description of what we’ve come to call “music documentaries,” and neither do Blank’s pictures. The best-known films the director made before his encounter with Russell, though they boast musicians (Hopkins and Lipscomb) as their central figures, likewise operate well beyond the parameters of conventional music docs. Though there is a good deal of music-making and ass-shaking in them, they are at heart about the communities in which the music was made, with their indigenous landscapes, customs, cuisines, and spiritual concerns. An observer of folklife at heart, Blank was an unlikely, even incongruous, candidate to make a movie about a rock star – essentially, an industrial film for music consumers.

Like the subjects of Blank’s earlier films, Russell is witnessed at home a good deal, and the director slathers his film with super-saturated images of local color shot in and around the musician’s Oklahoma base – a pow-wow of the Tulsa Indian Club, a tractor pull, a holiday parade, a literal wild-goose chase, the implosion demolition of Tulsa’s ancient (and perfectly named) Bliss Hotel. But Russell – prematurely gray, long-haired and bearded, always bearing a glazed, slightly stoned mien -- appears before us as a man without a country, almost an alien, dislocated from his roots, ferried to his far-flung gigs in long limousines as black as hearses.

As a protagonist, Russell most resembles the central figure in a later Blank production, 1982’s Burden of Dreams. That unsettling feature follows the chaotic production of German director Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon. The reckless and megalomaniacal filmmaker is seen slowly coming apart as, cut off entirely from civilization, he single-mindedly pursues his quixotic and extremely hazardous project, which entails the climactic hauling of a 20-ton boat up a steep incline; by the film’s end, Herzog appears as mad as the lunatic hero of his saga, who longs to build an opera house for Enrico Caruso in the middle of the jungle. Though Russell is never depicted in extremis, as Herzog is, Blank implies that, unlike the Southern musicians the director depicts so affectionately and respectfully, the Oklahoman is like Herzog also a man who has drifted too far from his native shore.

Music plainly is what brings Russell alive; it is at the heart of A Poem is a Naked Person, and it is often splendid, a saving grace. There are lovely cameos by George Jones (playing “Take Me” solo in Russell’s home studio) and Willie Nelson (essaying “Good Hearted Woman” at a gig in Austin, and accompanying fiddler “Sweet” Mary Egan on “Orange Blossom Special”). Several truncated yet forceful performances by Russell’s road band – augmented by a gospel-styled quartet, Blackgrass, led by Rev. Patrick Henderson – are on view. In one simple yet eloquent sequence, Russell’s deeply felt cover of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” plays under footage of clouds drifting across the face of the moon, as they do in Williams’ lyrics; it’s obvious, but nonetheless affecting.

One of the bleaker streaks in the film can be found in some of the sequences shot during the sessions for Hank Wilson’s Back in Nashville. These scenes are not totally bereft of a certain joy: Russell takes obvious delight in the expertise of his A-Team accompanists. One delicious scene finds him in an awed duet with Charlie McCoy, a secret hero of Bob Dylan’s Nashville-based albums from Blonde On Blonde to Self Portrait; the bespectacled McCoy looks like an accountant on his way to a tee time, and he plays and sings his ass off. But some of the other Music City studio gunslingers’ envy of and contempt for their contractor – like themselves a session guy, but one who has hit the jackpot – is scarcely concealed. Hotshot pianist David Briggs – whose obscene rendition of the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” was expurgated in later prints of the film at Russell’s insistence – says at one juncture, in a blatant dig at his session boss, “I’m the guy they call when you can’t do your own fucking piano work.”

There is also an ugly confrontation in the Nashville studio with folk singer-songwriter Eric Andersen, who was apparently barred from entering the facility for his own session by Russell’s security staff. Russell belittles and insults Andersen with an arrogant rocker’s noblesse oblige, drily telling him, “You write some very beautiful goddamn songs,” which prompts the reply, “You’re jiving.” For his part, Andersen voices skepticism about the legitimacy of Russell’s onstage thunder: “I couldn’t tell if you’re a revivalist man, trying to put something over, where it was coming from.” You find yourself asking if Blank may not harbor the same doubt.

Blank ladles further darkness, grotesquerie, and bile over the proceedings throughout. Using non-linear, densely layering techniques pioneered in the ‘60s by French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard – whose ironic quote, “The day of the director is dead,” is seen on the film’s concluding title card, below Blank’s credit – the filmmaker atomizes the action, or comments on it, using a vocabulary of startling jump cuts, head-spinning juxtapositions, and dialog rendered as on-screen legends (“GET THOSE GOD DAMN CAMERAS OFF US”).

Thus, in one extraordinary sequence, footage of a wasted concertgoer being ejected from one of Russell’s gigs is intercut with shocking shots of a boa constrictor killing and devouring a baby chick. (The snake is the “pet” of artist Jim Franklin, who is seen elsewhere adorning the bottom of Russell’s swimming pool, after coolly collecting scorpions off its walls.) In another scene, a snippet of fiddler Johnny Gimble improvising a lively solo in the studio is abruptly interrupted by the screaming freakout of a bare-chested young man on a very bad acid trip in an unidentified hotel room.

Blank seems to imply that for all the tambourine shaking and Chautauqua-tent fervor of his sound, Russell makes music that only mimes the spiritual core of its sources. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a ragged jump cut from minister-musician Henderson playing at a Pentecostal church service to his group Blackgrass rocking the praise at one of Russell’s shows. The first performance, Blank suggests, is about true religion of the most devout order – the real thing, as it were -- while the second is no more than entertainment.

In the end, Blank says without a flinch, this music is about the dollars. At one point he trains his camera on a teenage hitchhiker outside one of Russell’s shows; with a guitar slung on his back and a cardboard sign reading, “Oklahoma City” in his hand, the deluded kid says, “I wanna make it in Hollywood like Leon does – make a million dollars playin’ gee-tah.” The most damning exchange in the entire picture comes when an acquaintance poses a question to Russell after his performance at a friend’s wedding. Russell repeats the question – “If I didn’t get paid for singing, wouldn’t I sing?” – and leaves it hanging in the air, unanswered.

One can easily understand why Russell and Cordell were mortified, even horrified, by Blank’s film and sat on it for four decades. A Poem is a Naked Person used the language of cinema to subvert the film’s intended purpose as a self-glorifying sales tool. Instead, it ended up being a probing and dialectical work that used Russell’s music much as Godard himself employed the Rolling Stones’ music (far less effectively or coherently) in his Sympathy For the Devil. As it often has over the course of time, great art – and Blank’s movie definitely qualifies as such – operates at cross-purposes to a patron’s wishes.

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viscommaggi · 4 years

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Research in Reaction to chosen briefs (Google/HMCT)

Having narrowed down to two brief that we were torn between working on we decided to do further research into the briefs as well as the companies behind them to really understand what we wanted to achieve.

Google/HMCT Brief

WHO

Anyone

A justifiable group, no stereotypes, highlighting a cause

WHAT

Find a genre or song or musical movement that can represent a cause through typography using google fonts

WHY

Empowerment of music.

Shows that Google is staying relevant and HMCT is getting itself seen in a positive and impactful way.

About HMCT as a company

Category

one of the Big Four technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.

Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

Such a large company that they do not face many challenges as they have little competitors

Competitors

Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook

Channels

Website/search engine and Apps

Unique areas: Chrome, maps, YouTube, photos, docs, calendar, contacts, translate, Duo, Assistant, etc.

Benefit: international company

Company

Ethos: ‘Our mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’

https://about.google/commitments/

Research for our idea

We started researching the LGBTQ community and discovered how it isn’t globally accepted so wanted to create a campaign to empower the community and encouraging those who are LGBTQ to speak up and take action.

While popular music has always included LGBT artists, the increasing social tolerance of the late 20th and early 21st centuries allowed such artists to come out publicly. Early examples of this arose with the sexual liberation movement, with artists such as Elton John, Village People, Sylvester,[14]Tom Robinson,[14]Jill Sobule, Indigo Girls, k.d. lang, Queen, David Bowie,[9]Little Richard, Esquerita, Melissa Etheridge, Janis Ian,[14]The B-52's, Cher, Kylie Minogue, Grace Jones and Marc Almond, among others.

Many openly LGBT musicians have become successful, such as Elton John, who has the best-selling single in Billboard of the 1990s ("Candle in the Wind 1997"), and Will Young, who's single "Anything is Possible"/"Evergreen" was the best-selling single of the decade in the 2000s.[15] Country singer Ty Herndon came out as gay in 2014, after three number one hits on Billboard Hot Country Songs.[16]

The 1970s Disco Culture was the first rise in music where it offered a multitude of platforms for expression for gender and sexual non-conforming individuals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_music

The rise of Disco in the 1970s had an enormous cultural impact on the American audience. It was the music they heard on the radio, the music they danced to. It affected fashion. It affected club culture. It even affected film.

Disco's roots were multiple. It had connections to R&B and Funk, but it was also born out of the urban gay culture in New York City.

The vibrant sound and energetic dance moves of

Disco provided young people with an escape from what film critic Roger Ebert called “the general depression and drabness of the political and musical atmosphere of the seventies.”

https://teachrock.org/lesson/the-rise-of-disco/

Possible song choices from the disco era which are supportive of the LGBTQ community

-Sylvester, You Make me Feel (1978)

-Gloria Gaynor, I will survive (1978)

-Sister Sledge, We are Family (1979)

-Diana Ross, I’m coming out (1980)

-Gloria Gaynor, I am what I am (1974)

-Carl Bean, I was Born this Way (1977)

We began to look into visuals that represent this time as well as possible font choices from googlefonts.

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achraf1149 · 4 years

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14 BOOKS TOTALLY WORTH THE HYPE

I love hyped books. Whenever could be a} new book abuzz around that everyone's demand is a should scan, I am unable to wait to urge my hands thereon and check it out for myself. however generally they do not perpetually live up to the hype; as each true book slut is aware of, that is such a bummer. Here are eighteen books wholly well worth the promotional material. We've scanned all and they've received our hyped-up seal of approval. you'll be able to dive into these rest assured that you are sure a good read!

I love, love, love hyped books. Whenever there’s a brand new book abuzz around that everyone’s demand could be a should scan, I can’t wait to urge my hands thereon and check it out for myself. however generally they don’t perpetually live up to the promotional material and as each true book slut is aware of, that’s such a bummer.

Here are eighteen books wholly well worth the promotional material. We’ve scanned all and they’ve received our hyped-up seal of approval. you'll be able to dive into these rest assured that you’re sure a good read!

Just a heads up, this post contains affiliate links—that means that I buy a tiny low commission of any sales made of the links below, however, the worth is that the same for you whether or not you buy via my link or directly from Amazon 🙂

1. the foremost FUN we tend to EVER HAD

AUTHOR: Claire Lombardo

GENRE: up to date Fiction | Family adventure story | returning old-time

SUMMARY: the foremost Fun we tend to Ever Had is that the story of the Sorensons—a Chicago-based family with four adult daughters, Wendy, Violet, Mugil liza and Gracie, and their still-madly-in-love oldsters, Marilyn and David.

The Sorensons perpetually assumed their family’s issues were pretty run-of-the-mill—potential torrid romances, serious overdoses, and personality disorder kids. however, once a long-buried secret emerges, the complete family needs to question “normal” they extremely ar.

Diving into the gritty, and infrequently dark, histories of every loved one, this book is an associate degree interesting story of the pain we tend to bring back those that love the US the foremost.

2. stuff you SAVE during a fireplace

AUTHOR: Katherine Center

GENRE: up to date Fiction | Romance

SUMMARY: stuff you Save during a fireplace is that the story of scented wattle, a feminine shielder United Nations agency prides herself on her ability to remain calm within the face of catastrophe, because of her rough and unemotional behavior. however once scented wattle accidentally lets her feelings get the higher of her, associate degree uncharacteristic moment changes the flight of her entire career, aka, her entire life.

In a moment of force, scented wattle agrees to depart her beloved capital of Texas, TX fireplace station—and home—to move to the capital of Massachusetts to require care of her poorly, and semi-estranged, mother.

Cassie believes she’ll be simply fine in her new male-dominated, non-progressive atmosphere attributable to her ability to follow the foundations. Thankfully, her previous fireman armed her with everything she must understand her new job—never allow them to see you cry, be stronger than everybody, and never, ever get entangled with a fellow shielder.

She’s got it within the bag—she’ll straightforward be her sometimes hardcore, rule-abiding self times 1,000,000. that's till she encounters The Rookie—another recruit United Nations agency stirs one thing in her she’s ne'er knowledgeable before. Before she even understands what happens, all her rules—and all her control—has gone right out the window.

3. MRS. EVERYTHING

AUTHOR: Jennifer Weiner

GENRE: Historical Fiction | returning old-time | LGBTQ

SUMMARY: Mrs. Everything is that the story of Jo and Bethie playwright, 2 sisters returning old-time within the ’50s and ’60s. Growing up, Jo and Bethie got on well, despite their variations. Jo was flashy, smart in class and harboring a secret that caused her to create significant walls around herself. Bethie was girly, felt alive within the center of a stage and would visit any length to appear the part of the glamorous star she believed she was meant to be.

But as time passes, Jo and Bethie grow apart.

Jo finds herself conformist to any or all the ideals and expectations of girls in trendy society, despite her earlier waster years. when fighting therefore laborious to remain out of the kitchen utensil mildew, pure exhaustion leads her to fall right within the middle of it.

Bethie finds herself lost, virtually and figuratively. when devastating and traumatic expertise, Bethie wanders the planet, sleeping on park benches, feeding no matter food she will be able to realize and roaming farther and farther removed from the idyllic life she’d perpetually wished.

But because the sisters become older they each begin to understand that there’s ne'er a time once one should stop trying—it’s perpetually potential to alter your circumstances. rather than property, their lives happen to them, they finally understand that it’s their responsibility to mildew their experiences into the lives they honestly wish.

4. the nice ALONE

AUTHOR: Kristin Hannah

GENRE: Historical Fiction | returning old-time

SUMMARY: the nice Alone is that the story of the Allbrights, a family on a perpetual seek for happiness. Leni, a sensible and lonely lady, is at the constant mercy of her parents—her broken prisoner of war father and her naive and over-trusting mother.

When Leni’s father, Ernt, uproots and moves the family to yet one more location, he’s convinced this point is different—Alaska’s the solution to any or all their issues.

Unprepared and unequipped, the Allbrights realize solace within the individuals of AK United Nations agency teach them how their new and wild home and share theirs provides.

Although Leni and her mother find out how to safeguard themselves from the hazards lurking outside their little wood cabin, they can’t find out the way to share what’s within their home, notably, Ernt’s demons.

Ernt’s temper turns volatile and out of management every winter because the cold and dark ascend, threatening to destroy everything Leni and her mother have found, and built, in Alaska.

5. huge very little LIES

AUTHOR: Liane Moriarty

GENRE: up to date Fiction

SUMMARY: In huge very little Lies, things don't seem to be as calm and innocent in the residential area state capital as they appear. when a dramatic and eventful college trifle night, somebody has aroused dead.

The book flashes back to 6 months before the murder, once young mother Jane and her son Ziggy initial move to the city. Jane is taken below the wing of Madeline, a lady United Nations agency is aware of everything regarding everybody. Jane quickly becomes a part of her cluster, growing getting ready to Madeline and her attractive succor Celeste.

As their friendships grow, Jane learns that she’s not the sole one who’s haunted by personal demons—Madeline and Celeste’s lives ar even additional tormented than her own.

6. GONE GIRL

AUTHOR: Gillian Flynn

GENRE: Psychological adventure story

SUMMARY: In Gone lady, Amy Dunne has gone missing. because of the investigating progress, it becomes additional and additional evidence that her husband, Nick Dunne, could have had an outsized half in her disappearance.

The story is told from alternating perspectives—Nick’s gift day account and Amy’s diary chronicling the year leading up to her disappearance.

Getting a glimpse into Amy’s diary lets the US fall loving along with her sweetness, straightforward quality, and humor. however the Amy we expect we all know presently becomes way more complicated than we tend to may have ever anticipated.

7. wherever THE CRAWDADS SING

AUTHOR: Delia Owens

GENRE: up to date Fiction

SUMMARY: wherever the Crawdads Sing could be a coming-of-age story a couple of ladies named Kya Clark United Nations agency grows up within the marsh of the North geographic region.

Left by her mother once she was solely six, her brothers and sisters the years following, then eventually her father, she has no selection however to work out the way to do life utterly secluded and on her own.

Despite solely getting to college in the future in her entire life, Kya is sensible and sensitive. She has sharp insights regarding the planet and other people. She’s been abandoned, ridiculed, and on the receiving finish of prejudices no one—especially a child—should be got to endure, however, she’s still fascinated by life.

Kya could be a sensible character United Nations agency can soften your heart. And simply once you suppose you’re getting down to perceive her, she throws you for a loop when loop.

8. a lady is not any MAN

AUTHOR: Etaf Rum

GENRE: up to date Fiction

SUMMARY: during a lady is not any Man, 3 generations of Arab-American girls tell their story, one thing that’s ne'er been exhausted their culture before.

Fareeda is that the family matriarch, running the family in Brooklyn, big apple when she and her husband shake Palestine, their horrific motherland. Fareeda could be a disciplinarian for tradition and name, ensuring to let her new relative-in-law Isra acumen a lot of she’s property the family down by solely transfer baby women into the planet and no boys.

Isra moves to the borough from Palestine once she marries Fareeda’s son Adam in associate degree organized wedding. Eager at the concept of a brand new beginning in America and freedom to be her person, Isra’s hopes are destroyed once she quickly discovers that America is hard as dyspneal as Palestine, however, currently, she’s encircled by strangers move as a family.

Deya, Isra’s female offspring, has approached the age wherever she’s meeting with suitors, however, despite her gran Fareeda’s urging, she objects to the wedding and solely needs to line her specialize in school. once a mysterious alien shows up trying to find her, Deya begins to grasp why she feels therefore rebellious and what her past recollections extremely mean.

9. flower JONES & THE SIX

AUTHOR: Taylor Jenkins Reid

GENRE: Historical Fiction

SUMMARY: flower Jones & The Six is that the story of however one in all the foremost disreputable rock n’ roll teams rose to final fame within the ’70s.

Of course, it’s jam-choked with sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, however at its heart could be a tender story of sacrifice, love, and loss.

The Six was a rock n’ roll band United Nations agency was creating awe-inspiring music and having a good time doing it. flower Jones was an attractive and wild lady, partying her method through the glamorous world of Nineteen Sixties Hollywood.

When a music producer realizes that the mixture of flower Jones and also the Six could be a formula for warranted success, nobody says no to the smell of potential fame.

It seems the producer was right. once flower Jones joins The Six, they become the foremost far-famed dance band of that age. however, with fame comes responsibility they aren’t equipped to handle. The cluster lands up cacophonic up at the peak of their fame. And nobody is aware of specifically why, until now.

10. we tend to WERE LIARS

AUTHOR: E. Lockhart

GENRE: Young Adult Fiction | Psychological adventure story

SUMMARY: we tend to Were Liars is that the story of Cady, a really unhappy and broken lady. She’s conjointly sick, forced to remain home, sick-abed and within the dark, to wear down the enfeebling headaches she’s been obtaining since that summer.

The story shuffles back and forth between Cady’s gift day and a past summer spent within the Northeast along with her family several years before. Cady now not partakes in her family’s decadent summers spent on their island, her gramps, her mother, and each of her aunts every with their mansions.

As Cady’s story of that summer is told, we tend to learn of her love for her cousins and an in-depth family friend, the cluster deemed the “The Liars”.

During that summer, the Liars devise an idea to interrupt down the grand rule of Cady’s gramps. Except, the set up doesn’t go something as they hoped. And worst of all—Cady can’t bear in mind any of it.

11. ELEANOR OLIPHANT is FINE

AUTHOR: Gail Honeyman

GENRE: up to date Fiction

SUMMARY: Eleanor Oliphant is Fine is that the story of a socially awkward woman, on the face of it mediocre, and stuck during a life-sucking routine.

But because the book goes on, Eleanor starts to reveal her quippy {and extremely|and terribly|and intensely} humourous temperament and her strange—and very interesting—views on life and other people.

Moved by the concept of potential love, Eleanor starts to interrupt out of her routine. In doing, therefore, she gains such a lot quite she could’ve ever anticipated. however, shaking up her everyday routine conjointly stirs up a number of her past and brings it to the surface.

The characters during this story are unbelievably crafted and multi-dimensional and also the pace and also the anticipation of the approaching plot ar even as amazing!

12. 3 girls

AUTHOR: Lisa Taddeo

GENRE: prose | Human sex

SUMMARY: 3 girls is that the prose account of 3 completely different Yankee women’s sex lives—Maggie, Lina, and Sloane.

Maggie’s story follows her from her high school days to the current, the six years between tied along by an equivalent torturing event—an illicit affair along with her married teacher once she was seventeen. Maggie has spent her entire life feeling lost and broken, till she gets a style of hope brought on by the eye of Aaron, additional unremarkably referred to as a man. Knoebel, her teacher. Desperate for his love, Maggie agrees to stay their relationship a secret, solely human activity with him through secret conferences and cloak-and-dagger encounters. however once Aaron suddenly takes his love away, cutting her aloof from her salvation, she can’t recover. Six years when their affair, Maggie decides to press carnal abuse charges. She takes him to court, her “troubled” word against his Teacher of the Year one.

Lina’s story conjointly begins in highschool wherever she meets a fellow schoolfellow United Nations agency appears to be everything she’s unreal a man can be. however once Lina is raped by 3 boys in one night, the atrocious rumors that follow cause her dream boy to run away. Years later, on the face of it through fate, she runs into him on Facebook. By currently Lina could be an old mother of 2 and married to a person United Nations agency shrinks away at her bit, feat her life sexless and mirthless. Through desperation, she reignites the candle she perpetually controls for her past man, hanging up an exhilarating and illicit extracurricular affair.

Lastly, we've got Sloane, a lady United Nations agency appears to own it all. She’s thin, beautiful, rich, and co-owns a thriving eating house along with her husband United Nations agency adores her. although everything in Sloane’s world appears pristine and wholesome, what happens in her marital relationship is something, however. Her husband, Richard, likes to see Sloane have sex with different men, explanation pleasure from selecting his wife’s partners then looking at as they create love ahead of him.

13. THE KISS QUOTIENT

AUTHOR: Helen of Troy Hoang

GENRE: up to date Fiction | Romance

SUMMARY: The Kiss Quotient could be a gender-swap version of Pretty lady. Stella, an associate degree unfit lady with a giant brain and a good larger heart, hires archangel, knowledgeable male-escort, to show her how of the chamber.

Of course, it’s not as straightforward as that. Despite Stella’s rigorous lesson plans, she begins to fall for him. And not simply fall—obsess.

But archangel has some problems with his own—he incorporates a treacherous past and is continually living below the worry that he may be turning into his father, a very, terribly dangerous man.

This is a horny and fun amorous story that’s distinctive and refreshing.

14. to any or all THE BOYS I’VE adored BEFORE

AUTHOR: Jenny Han dynasty

GENRE: Young Adult Fiction | Romance

SUMMARY: to any or all the Boys I’ve adored Before is that the story of Lara Jean and also the love she’s unbrokenly buried deep during baggage.

Each time Lara Jeans falls loving, rather than confessing her feelings to the boy at the opposite finish, she writes an earnest letter. She pours her soul onto the page, then tucks the letter safely away, knowing it'll ne'er to be seen once more. Except, somehow, all of her letters realize their thanks to their never-intended recipients.

While mortifying, the general public reveals of her feelings wouldn’t be that dangerous, except that her sister’s freshly ex-boyfriend taunt received one.

To save face and take a look at to revive a number of her dignity, Lara Jean makes wear down Peter K., the school’s resident matinee idol.

As Lara Jean and Peter move their pretend relationship, she starts to understand perhaps she doesn’t have the sentiments for taunt she thought she had. And Peter isn’t in any respect like she thought he was.

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weekendwarriorblog · 5 years

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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND August 30, 2019 - Labor Day Blahs

I was trying to decide whether to do one of these this week, because it’s Labor Day weekend, and this is likely to be a particularly short column because I HAVEN’T SEEN ANYTHING! In fact, I’m not even doing my regular Box Office Preview column over at The Beat, because there just doesn’t seem to be much point to it. There used to be a time when studios would release movies over the four-day holiday weekend but not so much anymore, and this is a particularly weak Labor Day with no new movies opening in 1,000 theaters or more. No, it’s more about reexpanding movies already in theaters like Spider-Man: Far from Home in order to try to make more money before the summer is over. But if this is boring, you can also read my 2019 Summer Box Office wrap-up over at The Beat.

The only new “wide” release is BH Tilt’s latest release DON’T LET GO, a thriller directed by Jacob Estes (Rings) and starring David Oyelowo and Storm Reid from A Wrinkle in Time, and it’s not even opening in 1,000 theaters. It might not even get into the top 10. Apparently, BH Tilt is now going as “OTL Releasing” but I don’t think this movie has as much buzz as Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade, released by Blumhouse’s distribution branch in June 2018 to make $4.7 million opening weekend and $14.4 million total domestic. I don’t see Don’t Let Goopening that big as its plot is far vaguer, and I think if this make more than $4 million over the four-day holiday, it would be considered a coup since it’s only playing in less than 1,000 theaters. Who knows? I might even go see it on a lark.

Interestingly, there are two foreign language films from other countries (because as hard as it might be to believe, they speak other languages in other countries!) getting moderate releases this weekend: Sujeeth’s Bollywood action-thriller SAAHO (Yash Raj Films) and from Mexico, Ariel Winograd’s Spanish language TOD@S CAEN released by Lionsgate’s LatinX division Pantelion Films. I will be the first to admit that I’m not the best person to gauge interest in either movie because they’re not my communities, so I rarely see much marketing for these films.

Opening on Thursday, Saaho actually looks pretty cool, and if I can find three hours of time over Labor Day, I might actually check it out. It’s being released in three languages versions: Hindi, Telugu and Tamil, all with English subtitles, and that seems very groundbreaking, and it will also be in IMAX theaters. This could be another hit for Yash Raj ala the “Dhoom” series—Dhoom 3 opened with $3.4 million in 239 theaters in 2013 -- and possibly the studio’s widest release since 2018’s Thugs of Hindostan.

Check out the Hindi trailer below:

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(Oddly, Saaho was supposed to be released on India’s Independence Day August 15, but then was pushed back to American Labor Day. Bollywood films tend to get day and date releases nationwide to avoid piracy.)

Tod@s Caen (pronounced “todos caen” – don’t yell at me! It wasn’t my idea!) stars Omar Chapparo, the hot Mexican star from Pantelion’s hits No manches Frida and its sequel plus How to Be a Latin Lover. No manches Frida grossed about $11.5 million after its $4.6 million opening over Labor Day in 2016 while the sequel opened slightly bigger this past March but grossed less. Latin Lover was a huge crossover success for Chapparo and Pantelion, grossing $32.1 million. This is likely to be more in the former category and opening in 365 theaters, it probably can make around $3 million or more.

STREAMING AND CABLE

There aren’t many movies I can recommend, but at least I can recommend the new Netflix series THE DARK CRYSTAL: THE AGE OF RESISTANCE, which is a prequel to the 1982 Jim Henson movie that was made quite lovingly using the same puppeteering techniques as well as some of the same designers from the original movie. Plus the series has an absolutely brilliant voice cast that includes Taron Egerton, Helena Bonham-Carter, Anya Taylor-Joy, Alicia Vikander, Sigourney Weaver, Natalie Dormer, Lena Headey, Jason Isaacs, Theo James, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Simon Pegg and many, many more. As someone who wasn’t really a fan of the original movie, I found myself quite wrapped up in this series, having watched the first five episodes so far, and I think fans and non-fans alike will dig it.

You can read my interview with the writers over at The Beat.

(Netflix is also releasing a movie called Falling In Love, starring Christina Millan and Adam Demos... but that title... I just can’t!

Amazon Prime will begin streaming its own fantasy series, the very different Carnival Row, starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne, on Friday. It’s a steampunk noir crime series in which Bloom is an inspector trying to solve some Jack the Ripper style murders of the city’s fae and puck population, fantastical creatures who act as the city’s slave labor. I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as it just doesn’t feel like my kind of thing even though I do love Victorian era stuff usually. I think it just hasn’t found its footing in the couple episodes I’ve seen. I also interviewed a few of the actors which will be on The Beat later today.

LIMITED RELEASES

Okay, I definitely lied as I’ve also seen Kim Farrant’s ANGEL OF MINE (Lionsgate), an amazing psychological drama starring Noomi Rapace as a woman whose daughter died but whom thinks that her neighbor’s daughter is actually her own. Also starring Yvonne Strahovski, Luke Evans and Richard Roxburgh, this mostly Australian film is actually a little like the recent After the Weddingin terms of the strangeness of its premise but it’s handled more like a thriller and Rapace gives another stirring performance. It will be in select cities starting Friday, and I recommend checking it out, especially if, like me, you’re a long-time fan of Ms. Rapace.

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Never got around to seeing Gavin Hood’s new movie OFFICIAL SECRETS (IFC Films), because I’m such a fan of Keira Knightley, and in this one she plays Katharine Gun, a British intelligence specialist handling classified information in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003. She receives a shocking memo from the NSA seeking help in collecting information on UN Security Council members to blackmail them into supporting an invasion of Iraq.

Hannah Pearl Utt’s BEFORE YOU KNOW IT (1091) stars the co-writer/director as stage manager Rachel Gurner who lives in her childhood apartment with her sister Jackie (Jen Tullock), father Mel (Mandy Patinkin) and preteen niece Dodge (Oon Yaffe) above the theater they own and operate. After a tragedy, the two sisters find out their mother, long thought dead (Judith Light) is still alive working on soap operas and they need to come to terms with that. The movie also stars Mike Colter and Alec Baldwin and it opens in select cities.

Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst also has a new movie as director, a thriller called THE FANATIC (Quiver Distribution), starring Devon Sawa from Final Destination and John Travolta. Travolta plays movie fan Moose who is obsessed with his favorite action hero Hunter Dunbar, played by Sawa. With the help of his paparazzi photographer friend Leah (Ana Golja), Moose tries to find Moose as his interactions with the celebrity become more dangerous as Moose becomes more obsessed.

Liam Hemsworth from “The Hunger Games” stars in Malik Bader’s Killerman (Blue Fox Studios) as a New York money launderer who wants to find answers after waking up with no memory and with millions in cash and drugs, as he’s chased by a team of dirty cops. The movie also stars Emory Cohen, Diane Guerrero (“Orange is the New Black”) and Suraj Sharma from Life of Pi, and it’s getting a small theatrical release in select cities.

Now playing at New York’s Film Forum is Marjoline Boonstra’s doc The Miracle of the Little Prince (Film Movement) which looks at the sustained global popularity of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in the eight decades since it was first published.

Opening in IMAX theaters Thursday and then nationwide Sept 6 is the Chinese animated film Ne Zha (WELL Go) about a young boy with superpowers who must decide between good and evil.

There’s a couple other things but I’m so behind for the weekend that I’m done.

REPERTORY

A few rep things to mention before we get to the regular theaters. The Wachowski’s original The Matrix will be celebrating its 20thanniversary with a rerelease across the nation in Dolby theaters, so I’ll be seeing that Thursday night. The Alamo in Brooklyn is also screening a special 70mm print of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and that’s where I’ll be on Saturday.

METROGRAPH (NYC):

On Friday, the Metrograph will begin screening a 35mm print of Eric Roehmer’s 1986 film Le Rayon Vert, but there lots of series continiung through the weekend including the “Shaw Sisters” series which is fairly interesting so far. Angie Chen’s Maybe It’s Love (1984) plays again on Thursday evening –that’s a weird one—and Ann Hui’s Starry Is the Night (1988) will play tomorrow and Sunday and a few others. If you want to see a weird and really bad but very funny horror film, you have to check out Angela Mak’s The Siamese Twins on Saturday night, plus there’s a few more I haven’t seen. The Metrograph has also expanded its “Godard/Karina Late Nights” series so that you can see Alphaville (1965) and Pierrot Le Fou (1965), both beloved classics, through the weekend, as well as this weekend’s offering to the series, 1962’s Vivre Sa Vie. This week’s Late Nites at Metrograph is Leo Carax’sHoly Motors (2012) and Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue but you can also see the late Japanese filmmaker’s excellent Paprika (2006) through the weekend, as well. This weekend’s Playtime: Family Matinees is another Ray Harryhausen classic, 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

The New Bev ends its month of mostly showing Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood before returning to repertory fare next week, but its Weds. matinee is the 1953 Western comedy Calamity Jane, this weekend’s KIDDEE MATINE is Disney’s The Ugly Dachsund (1966) starring Dean Jones, and then on Monday, you have two chances to see Michael Mann’s 1995 crime-thriller Heat, although you’ll have to see it at 9:30AM cause the usual 2pm matinee is sold out.

AERO (LA):

Thursday begins a “Sellers and Southern Double Feature” series (?) of Dr. Strangelove (1964) with The Magic Christian (1969), Friday is a double feature of 1999’s Office Space with Kevin Smith’s Clerks(1994) and then on Saturday is a Mad Max TRIPLE Feature of the first three movies: Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1982) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). Sunday is a special screening of Thom Anderson’s 2003 film Los Angeles Plays Itself, and Monday begins Aero’s “Heptember Matinees” series as in Katherine Hepburn, and it kicks off with 1940’s The Philadelphia Story.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

Marty and Jay’s Double Features runs through next Thursday and there are one or two of these double features every day with a mix of classics and esoteric and rare stuff. You can click on the link to see all that’s playing.

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER (NYC):

“Make My Day: American Movies in the Age of Reagan” continues up at Lincoln Center through Tuesday with highlights like Robocop, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and The Last Temptation of Christ, Conan the Barbarian, First Blood and more.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

This week’s Weekend Classics: Staff Picks Summer 2019 is the original, classic King Kong, while Waverly Midnights: Staff Picks Summer 2019 is Office Space (1999) and Russ Meyers’ Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). Late Night Favorites: Summer 2019 is Aliens, Suspiria and Eraserhead, just in case you missed any of those the dozen other times they’ve been shown.

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

Saturday’s “Beyond the Canon” offering is a double feature of Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadja from 2012 and Wim Wender’s 1974 film Alice in the Cities. BAM is also showing the second part of its “Programmers Notebook: On Memory” with offerings like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (of course) and more!

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

“See It Big! 70mm” will screen Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One on Friday and Saturday evenigs but ALSO, they’re showing one of my favorite comedies It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) in 70mm on Saturday afternoon.

ROXY CINEMA (NYC)

Tonight and Sunday, the Roxy is showing the 1965 film Juliet of the Spirits. On Saturday, the theater is showing Agnes Varda’s 1965 film Le Bonheur.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

This week’s Friday night midnight film is Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.

This weekend, the Egyptianin L.A. is taken over by the Cinecon Classic Film Festivaland you can find out what that consists at the official site.

Next week, New Line releases It: Chapter Two, which I probably will have seen by the time you read this but probably will still be under embargo.

#WhatToWatchThisWeekend Movies Streaming Repertory

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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New story in Politics from Time: How Far-Right Personalities And Conspiracy Theorists Are Cashing In On The Pandemic Online

On the evening of Feb. 6, as U.S. news networks reported the death of a doctor in Wuhan, China, who had warned of a deadly new virus, thousands of Americans were tuning in to a different kind of show.

“The good news is I heard actually that you can’t get this if you’re white,” Nick Fuentes, a far-right political commentator, told viewers on his “America First” channel on the streaming platform DLive. “You’re only really susceptible to this virus if you’re Asian,” Fuentes continued. “I think we’ll be O.K.”

Fuentes, 22, a prolific podcaster who on his shows has compared the Holo-caust to a cookie-baking operation, argued that the segregation of Black Americans “was better for them,” and that the First Amendment was “not written for Muslims,” is doing better than O.K. during the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s part of a loose cohort of far-right provocateurs, white nationalists and right-wing extremists who have built large, engaged audiences on lesser-known platforms like DLive after being banned from main-stream sites for spreading hate speech and conspiracy theories.

The model can be lucrative. Viewers pay to watch the livestreams through subscriptions and donations, and the platform allows the content creators to keep most of the revenue. Fuentes appears to have earned more than $140,000 off his DLive streams, cementing himself as the most viewed account on the platform, according to calculations provided to TIME by a livestreaming analyst who was granted anonymity because of their work tracking these accounts. Fuentes is hardly alone. Eight of the 10 top earners on DLive this year as ranked by Social Blade, a social-media analytics website, are far-right commentators, white-nationalist extremists or conspiracy theorists.

The social disruption and economic dislocation caused by the virus–as well as the nationwide protests and civil un-rest that followed the death of George Floyd in late May–has helped fuel this growing, shadowy “alt tech” industry. As public spaces shut down in March, millions of Americans logged online; the livestreaming sector soared 45% from March to April, according to a study by software sites StreamElements and Arsenal.gg. As people became more socially isolated, many increasingly turned to pundits peddling misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech. And even as mainstream platforms cracked down on far-right propagandists, online audiences grew. Over the past five months, more than 50 popular accounts reviewed by TIME on sites like DLive have multiplied their viewership and raked in tens of thousands of dollars in online currency by insisting COVID-19 is fake or exaggerated, encouraging followers to resist lockdown orders and broadcasting racist tropes during the nationwide protests over police brutality. Many of these users, including Fuentes, had been banned by major social-media platforms like YouTube for violating policies prohibiting hate speech. But this so-called deplatforming merely pushed them to migrate to less-regulated portals, where some of them have attracted bigger audiences and gamed algorithms to make even more money. In addition, clips of their broadcasts on less-trafficked sites still frequently make it onto YouTube, Twitter and other mainstream platforms, essentially serving as free advertising for their streams elsewhere, experts say.

As social-media giants like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook target hate speech and misinformation, sites like DLive seem to be turning a blind eye, former users and employees say, recognizing that much of their traffic and revenue comes from these accounts. “They care more about having good numbers than weeding these people out,” a former employee of DLive, who was granted anonymity because he still works in the livestreaming sector, tells TIME. (DLive did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Which means ordinary users on gaming and streaming platforms, many of them teenagers, are often one click away from white-nationalist content. Many of these far-right personalities allege they are being unfairly censored for conservative political commentary or provocative humor, not hate speech. Most of these viewers won’t respond to streamers’ often cartoonish calls to action, like the “film your hospital” movement in April meant to show that no patients were there, thus “proving” that COVID-19 was fake. But this murky ecosystem of casual viewers, right-wing trolls–and the occasional diehard acolyte–creates a real challenge for technology companies and law-enforcement agencies.

And it doesn’t take much to trigger a tragedy. Over the past two years, terrorists inspired by online right-wing propa-ganda have livestreamed their own deadly attacks in New Zealand and Germany. In March 2019, a Florida man who had been radicalized by far-right media and online conspiracy theorists pleaded guilty to sending more than a dozen pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Donald Trump. A month later, a gunman armed with an AR-15 shot four people, killing one, in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., after allegedly posting a racist and anti-Semitic screed on the site 8chan. About three months later, a man killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, after posting a racist manifesto online, according to authorities.

With COVID-19 continuing to surge in parts of the country, ongoing protests over racial injustice and the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election, the next few months promise to offer fertile ground for bad actors in unmoderated virtual spaces. Far-right propagandists “are really capitalizing on this conspiratorial moment,” says Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard University Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project. “Everyone’s locked inside while there is what they refer to as a ‘race war’ happening outside their windows that they are ‘reporting on,’ so this is prime content for white-nationalist spaces.”

The migration of far-right personalities to DLive illustrates how, despite mainstream platforms’ recent crack-downs, the incentives that govern this ecosystem are thriving. Anyone with an Internet connection can continue to leverage conspiracy theories, racism and misogyny for attention and money, experts say.

The outbreak of COVID-19 arrived during a period of reinvention for far-right propagandists in the aftermath of the white-nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. Over the past three years, social-media giants, which had endured criticism for giving extremists safe harbor, have increasingly attempted to mitigate hate speech on their sites. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as payment processors like PayPal and GoFundMe, have all shut down accounts run by far-right agitators, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In late June, YouTube removed the accounts of several well-known figures, including David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist. Reddit, Facebook and Amazon-owned streaming site Twitch also suspended dozens of users and forums for violating hate-speech guidelines.

But these purges hardly solved the problem. Many online extremists were on main-stream platforms like YouTube long enough to build a devoted audience willing to follow them to new corners of the Internet. Some had long prepared for a crackdown by setting up copycat accounts across different platforms, like Twitch, DLive or TikTok. “These people build their brand on You-Tube, and when they get demonetized or feel under threat they’ll set up backup channels on DLive or BitChute,” says Megan Squire, a computer scientist at Elon University who tracks online extremism. “They know it’s going to happen and plan ahead.”

While the suspensions by social-media companies have been effective at limiting the reach of some well-known personalities like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was banned from YouTube, Facebook and Apple in 2018, others have quickly adapted. “Content creators are incredibly adept at gaming the systems so that they can still find and cultivate audiences,” says Becca Lewis, a researcher at Stanford University who studies far-right subcultures online, describing these efforts as a “game of whack-a-mole.” Many white-nationalist accounts have tied their ban to the right-wing narrative that conservatives are being silenced by technology companies. For platforms like DLive, becoming what their users consider “free speech” and “uncensored” alternatives can be lucrative. “More speech also means more money for the platform, and less content moderation means less of an expense,” says Lewis.

The prospect of being pushed off main-stream social-media, video-streaming and payment platforms has also prompted extremists to become more sophisticated about the financial side of the business. While Twitch takes a 50% cut from livestreamers’ earnings and YouTube takes 45%, platforms like DLive allow content creators to keep 90% of what they make. And as many found themselves cut off from mainstream payment services like PayPal, GoFundMe and Patreon, they began to embrace digital currencies.

DLive was founded in December 2017 by Chinese-born and U.S.-educated entrepreneurs Charles Wayn and Cole Chen, who made no secret of their ambition to build a platform that rivaled Twitch. They described the site as a general-interest streaming platform, focused on everything from “e-sports to lifestyle, crypto and news.” But two things set it apart from its competitors: it did not take a cut of the revenue generated by its streamers, and it issued an implicit promise of a less moderated, more permissive space.

DLive’s first big coup came in April 2019 when it announced an exclusive streaming deal with Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie. In just two months, DLive’s total number of users grew by 67%. At the time, Kjellberg was the most popular individual creator on YouTube, with more than 93 million subscribers and his own controversial history. In 2018, he came under fire for making anti-Semitic jokes and racist remarks, and more than 94,000 people signed a Change.org petition to ban his channel from YouTube for being a “platform for white-supremacist content.” The petition noted that “the New Zealand mosque shooter mentioned PewDiePie by name and asked people to subscribe.”

DLive’s community guidelines theoretically prohibit “hate speech that directly attacks a person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity.” But it soon became apparent to both employees and users that executives were willing to ignore venomous content. By early 2019, “political” shows were gaining traction on the site. Those programs devolved into “streams dedicated to white pride and a lot of anti-Semitism, entire streams talking about how Jewish people are evil,” says the former DLive employee who spoke to TIME, adding that moderators acted much more quickly when it came to copyright concerns. “Your stream would be taken down faster for streaming sports than saying you hate Jews.”

The employee recalls raising the matter with Wayn, noting how off-putting it was for new users coming to watch or broadcast streams of popular video games. According to the employee, Wayn explained that the company “didn’t want to get rid of these problematic streamers because they brought in numbers.” The founders knew they had to keep viewers because, as Wayn noted in a 2019 interview, if they wanted to “compete with Twitch on the same level and even take them down one day, DLive needs to match its scale.” Wayn did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

By June 2020, DLive seemed to be openly cultivating a right-of-center audience. On Twitter, it briefly changed its bio to read “All Lives Matter,” a right-wing rallying cry in response to Black Lives Matter. The site has increasingly become a haven for fanaticism, says Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “Before, on YouTube, some of these people would do a dance with the terms of service,” she tells TIME. “But on DLive, the gloves are off, and it’s just full white-supremacist content with very few caveats.”

On the night of June 29, Fuentes had 56% of the site’s total viewership at 10 p.m., according to the review of the site’s analytics provided to TIME. An additional 39% was viewers of 22 other extremist personalities streaming their commentary. At one point on the night of Aug. 10, just 176 of the more than 15,000 viewers on the top 20 channels on the site were not watching accounts linked to far-right figures. Popular programming in recent months has included alarmist footage of racial-justice protests, antivaccine propaganda, conspiracies linking 5G networks to the spread of COVID-19 and calls to “make more white babies while quarantined.”

The company may be even more reliant on those accounts now. Some users have left the site, complaining publicly about the virulent racism and anti-Semitism spilling over into regular channels and game streams. “DLive is a safe-haven for racists and alt-right streamers,” one user wrote on Twitter on June 22. “Seems to me DLive is the new platform for white supremacists,” wrote another, echoing complaints that it’s a “literal Nazi breeding ground” and “the place where racists don’t get deplatformed.”

The migration of hate speech to far-flung corners of the Internet could make it harder to track, increasing the risk that it spills into the offline world. Experts say law-enforcement and national-security agencies are still unprepared to tackle right-wing extremism. They lack expertise not only in the rapidly evolving technology but also in the ideological ecosystem that has spawned a battery of far-right movements. The recently repackaged white-nationalist youth movement, with new names like “America First” or the “Groypers,” looks more like “gussied-up campus conservatives,” as Friedberg of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center puts it, “so they are not triggering the same warning bells.”

Recent incidents show how this online environment that blends political commentary and hate speech can be dangerous. An 18-year-old accused of firebombing a Delaware Planned Parenthood clinic in January was identified through his Instagram profile, which contained far-right memes reflecting popular beliefs in the young white-nationalist movement, according to BuzzFeed News. In June, Facebook deactivated nearly 200 social-media accounts with ties to white-nationalist groups rallying members to attend Black Lives Matter protests, in some cases armed with weapons.

Analysts who track extremist recruitment online also warn that the pandemic may have long-term effects on young people who are now spending far more time on the Internet. Without the structure of school and social activities, many children and teenagers are spending hours a day in spaces where extremist content lurks alongside games and other benign entertainment, says Dana Coester, an associate professor at West Virginia University who researches the impact of online white extremism on youth in Appalachia. It’s common, she notes, to see teenagers sharing Black Lives Matter messages alongside racist cartoons from popular Instagram accounts targeting middle schoolers. “So many parents I’ve spoken with say their kids are on devices until 3 in the morning,” she says. “I can’t begin to imagine how much damage can be done with kids that many hours a day marinating in really toxic content.”

Analysts warn that both U.S. law enforcement and big technology companies need to move quickly to hire experts who understand this new extremist ecosystem. Experts say the mainstream platforms’ recent purges are reactive: they patch yesterday’s problems instead of preventing future abuses, and focus on high-profile provocateurs instead of the underlying networks.

One solution may be to follow the money, as content creators migrate to new platforms in search of new financial opportunities. “[White supremacists] have become particularly as-siduous at exploiting new methods of fundraising, often seeking out platforms that have not yet realized how extremists can exploit them,” said George Selim, senior vice president of programs of the Anti-Defamation League, in testimony before a House subcommittee in January. “When a new fund-raising method or platform emerges, white supremacists can find a window of opportunity. These windows can, however, be shut if platforms promptly take countermeasures.”

On the evening of Aug. 11, Joe Biden’s pick of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate dominated the news. “She hates white people,” Fuentes told viewers on DLive. “She is going to use the full weight of the federal government … to destroy conservatives, to destroy America First, anybody that speaks up for white people.” NBC and ABC News–which have a combined 13 million subscribers on YouTube–had an average of 6,100 concurrent viewers watching their coverage. Fuentes’ show had 9,000.

–With reporting by ALEJANDRO DE LA GARZA/NEW YORK

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santatapes-blog · 4 years

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John K & Who’s To Say

Who is John K & Who's To Say?

Drawing on influences from many iconic artists and producers—including Prince, David Bowie, Quincy Jones, Max Martin, Beck, Queen, Paul McCartney and John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Billie Joe Armstrong, Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Tom Petty, and even Antonio Vivaldi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven—John Kay & Who's To Say use their skills to manifest genre-defying alternative pop songs that are fun to sing out loud, easy to remember, and super-relatable. Blessed with musical inclinations and talents at a young age—along with the gift of crafting catchy, heartfelt and memorable songs—American musician, songwriter and producer John Kay has been creating, producing and performing original music spanning several styles for over two decades.

In 2018, he debuted his most ambitious effort yet: John Kay & Who’s To Say.

With a long-term vision at the heart of the group’s core focus, JK&WTS positively impacts and unites people by delivering undeniable sensory experiences.

Kay (vocals, guitars, drums, keys) has partnered with Steve Lupinski (bass, keys, vocals), and both individuals live out the same core values: sacrifice, measurable growth, accountability, a reputation for excellence, time, energy, and respect.

Detroit's best-kept secret won't be hidden for much longer...

*What made you decide to write Christmas songs? Does ‘Santa’s Workshop’ have a story behind the song?

The simple story of how “Santa’s Workshop” came to be starts with John and his family…

John had it in his mind for some time to write his own Christmas song. Many people complain about Christmas music, but to John, Christmas music has always reminded him of going to his Grandma’s house and eating great food and being with family, and some holiday songs are really well written and stand the test of time.

John’s family takes an annual October trip to Tombstone, Arizona, which always ends the same: dinner in Tucson at El Charro Café. John’s parents found the restaurant by chance a decade ago, and because of how amazing the food is—El Charro happens to be the oldest Mexican restaurant in the country continually operated by the same family—it has since become a yearly tradition.

During dinner this year, John asked a question of everyone at the table.

“Hey, I’m wondering if you guys can maybe help me. I’ve been wanting to write and produce a proper Christmas song for a while, but I don’t want to base it on a subject that’s been written about before. What hasn’t been done?”

Within a few seconds, his brother said,

“You could write a song about the elves who make the toys, I don’t think that’s been done.”

The only elf-related song John could recall was from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer CBS special, but other than that, he couldn’t think of a popular Christmas song that featured the elves at Santa’s workshop. With that, the theme was decided, and the song was soon composed, keeping kids in mind.

In 2018, he debuted his most ambitious effort yet: John Kay & Who’s To Say. mastered by John’s friend, renowned engineer Mass Giorgini, who said, “This may be influenced by being a dad, but it’s already among my favorites you’ve done.” 

Did you find that the writing process was different from a non holiday themed song?

Not really. Once John decides the central theme of a song, the writing process usually flows the same as it does for each song he writes. 

How did you get into music?

John’s dad worked in radio since before John was born, so John grew up attending shows with his dad and meeting the artists backstage. Needless to say, John fell in love with music at quite early, and began playing drums at the age of two. 

Your have several songs up for streaming, do you have a favorite, or one that really means a lot to you?

When JK&WTS writes and produces songs, they are doing so to tell their authentic stories. After working on their music in the studio, creating and refining for a certain amount of time, once the music is released it doesn’t belong to them anymore; it belongs to the audience, to the world. This is all to say that, after the baby birds have been pushed out of their nest, so to speak, John and Steve don’t have any particular attachment to them, and therefore their favorite material is the new material they are producing. 

Are you currently working on any new music?

Absolutely—JK&WTS will be releasing a single with a B-side on Friday, February 21 across all major streaming platforms, and they are generally working in John’s studio if they aren’t rehearsing or performing. 

Where can people find your work

Official website Spotify Apple Music Artist page

Amazon Music Artist page Deezer Artist page

Where can fans connect with you on social media?  

JK&WTS is most active on Facebook and Instagram…

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter — https://twitter.com/jkwhostosay

Fan club/Patreon

John Kay & Who's To Say http://JKWTS.com Email - [email protected] Booking: Henry Alan ([email protected])

#christmas #xmas #holiday #music #carols #independent #independantartist #singer #singersongwriter

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biofunmy · 5 years

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DealBook Briefing: Could the Trade War Spread to Wall Street?

Good Wednesday. (Want this by email? Sign up here.)

The next trade battle: China’s access to Wall Street?

Both inside and outside the White House, there are growing calls for a weakening of China’s links to U.S. financial markets, Keith Bradsher and Ana Swanson of the NYT report.

• “Some trade experts and others urging the Trump administration to keep a hawkish stance are discussing whether the White House should curb China’s access to Wall Street.”

• A bipartisan group of senators urged the administration last month to increase disclosure requirements for Chinese companies listed in the U.S. if they pose national security risks or are complicit in human rights abuses.

• Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, has said that a lack of transparency about the ultimate owners of Chinese companies is problematic.

• “The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq are breaching their fiduciary responsibility to institutional investors, the pension funds of hardworking Americans,” Mr. Bannon said. “It’s outrageous. All of it should be shut down immediately.”

Adding urgency to the news: Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, is now considering listing shares in Hong Kong, five years after its hugely successful I.P.O. in New York. (Its shares would trade in both markets.) The company has long considered that option, and unidentified sources told the NYT that geopolitical worries were not the driving force for considering the listing.

It’s not clear if Mr. Trump wants to block China from U.S. markets. And for now, Chinese companies can still go public in America: Two weeks ago, Luckin Coffee, a Chinese rival to Starbucks, surged in its trading debut in New York, though its shares have since fallen.

But China has a nuclear option: Sell some of its $200 billion worth of U.S. stocks, which would throw markets into turmoil. But that could also hurt the investment return on China’s assets.

Huawei doubles down in its fight with the U.S.

The Chinese technology company is ramping up its legal challenge to a freeze-out by Washington, as it continues to favor public spats over quiet negotiations, Paul Mozur of the NYT writes.

• “The Chinese telecommunications giant filed a motion on Tuesday in the United States to accelerate its lawsuit against the White House.”

• The lawsuit argues that a ban on U.S. government agencies buying its hardware “is unconstitutional because it singles out Huawei as a danger without giving it any chance to appeal.”

• “The request for summary judgment could expedite an outcome without the costs and time of a full trial, including avoiding handing over sensitive corporate information during the discovery process.”

• “It also could give the company a chance to present its arguments publicly in front of a judge in just a few months rather than wait for a trial to unfold.”

It embarked on a media campaign, outlining its thinking in a WSJ op-ed and at a news conference at its headquarters in Shenzhen, China. This isn’t a new tactic: “Huawei has repeatedly turned to the American court system and press” in recent months, Mr. Mozur notes, including by offering “carefully managed and regularly scheduled interviews” with its founder, Ren Zhengfei.

But so far Huawei has little to show for its aggressive approach, Mr. Mozur writes.

More: South Korea is caught between the U.S. and China over the Huawei fight. Huawei’s biggest selling point: Its 5G prices are basically irresistible. And Mr. Ren said of speaking with Mr. Trump: “If he calls me, I may not answer.”

Nissan’s worries about Fiat-Renault

Fiat Chrysler’s proposal to merge with Renault has been lauded by investors and analysts. But Nissan, Renault’s Japanese partner, appears to be less enthusiastic.

Renault executives kept Nissan in the dark about their talks with Fiat until days before the proposal was announced, the NYT reports. That probably aggravated existing tensions between the two companies over their alliance, which came to light after the arrest of their former mutual chairman, Carlos Ghosn.

Nissan has long complained that Renault dominates their alliance, despite becoming the bigger partner. Nissan sold 5.5 million cars in its most recent fiscal year; Renault sold fewer than 4 million.

A merger with Fiat could give Renault even more leverage over Nissan. The combined European carmakers would have nearly double the sales of Nissan, the FT reports.

“It’s hell” for Nissan’s C.E.O., Hiroto Saikawa, whether he says yes or no to the Renault-Fiat deal, the analyst Koji Endo told the FT.

But Nissan could benefit. It would have a 7.5 percent voting stake in a combined Renault-Fiat, versus its current 15 percent nonvoting stake in Renault. And Fiat and Renault would want the Japanese company’s electric-car technology and strong presence in China.

So Mr. Saikawa may have some negotiating power. One unnamed investor told the FT: “What Nissan may have lost is a chance to be a dominant force in the merger, but they can preserve their independence.”

The global slowdown divides corporate America

While the U.S. economy is resilient, the picture overseas is gloomy, and profits at companies focused on the rest of the world are suffering, Stephen Grocer of the NYT reports.

“A wide divide has developed in the performance between the companies with the most exposure to the rest of the world and those that are mostly focused on the United States.”

• “At companies in the S&P 500 that draw more than half their revenue from abroad, first-quarter profits fell about 12 percent.”

• “By contrast, earnings at firms that generate most of their sales within the United States grew about 6 percent.”

The earnings slide was greatest for those with the largest exposure to the global economy and the escalating trade war between Beijing and Washington, including tech companies like Apple and semiconductor manufacturers.

“The split could persist as the Trump administration ratchets up the trade war,” Mr. Grocer adds. “Wall Street analysts now expect profits at companies with the most overseas exposure to fall 1.4 percent in 2019, compared with a 6 percent increase for domestically focused companies. At the start of the year, analysts forecast that profits for those two sets of companies would grow 6.9 percent and 8.4 percent.”

MacKenzie Bezos pledged her fortune to charity

The novelist and ex-wife of Jeff Bezos is one of the latest signatories of the Giving Pledge, to which the rich promise to donate most of their wealth to charitable causes.

Ms. Bezos will own a roughly 4 percent stake in Amazon once her divorce from Mr. Bezos is finalized in July. That’s worth about $36 billion as of yesterday’s close.

“I have a disproportionate amount of money to share,” she wrote in a letter explaining her decision. “My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.” (Mr. Bezos praised the move, tweeting, “Go get ‘em.”)

Her decision highlights how little Mr. Bezos gives. The Amazon founder has drawn criticism for donating little to charitable causes compared with peers such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg. (His biggest donation to date: $2 billion last year, to help homeless families and preschoolers, which was made with Ms. Bezos.)

And it reignited criticism of the Giving Pledge itself. Signatories have no legal obligation to follow through on their promises, and it’s hard to track their charitable donations.

Other new additions to the Giving Pledge this year:

• The WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton

• The hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones

• The British financier David Harding

• The Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong

Who is the savior of G.M.’s Lordstown plant?

President Trump proudly announced earlier this month that a buyer had been found for a shuttering G.M. plant in Lordstown, Ohio. But Nelson Schwartz, Matt Goldstein and Neal Boudette of the NYT write that there’s a lot of uncertainty about the factory’s potential savior.

• The would-be buyer is a company affiliated with Workhorse, an electric vehicle maker. It would have to raise at least $300 million to get the plant up and running again.

• But the head of the company, Steve Burns, wouldn’t tell the NYT whether he had raised any money or secured financial backers. “It’s a gargantuan task,” he said.

• “Workhorse, which would have a minority stake in the entity, is barely hanging on. It had just under $3 million in cash at the end of March,” Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Boudette write.

• “Between its founding in 2007 and the first quarter of 2019, Workhorse lost nearly $150 million. It has produced a total of 365 vehicles since its inception, fewer than Lordstown can churn out in a day.”

• “I have a lot more questions than I have answers,” Arno Hill, the Republican mayor of Lordstown, told the NYT. “Who is going to be underwriting all of this?”

Revolving door

Loretta Lynch, the former attorney general under President Barack Obama, has joined the law firm Paul Weiss as a litigation partner.

France is campaigning for Michel Barnier, who led the European Union’s negotiations over Brexit, to become the next president of the European Commission.

Walmart hired Suresh Kumar, a former executive at Google, Microsoft and Amazon, as its new technology chief.

Goldman Sachs promoted three executives to its management council: Beth Hammack, its treasurer, and James Paradise and Todd Leland, its co-presidents for Asia (excluding Japan).

Twitter is hiring a “tweeter in chief.”

The speed read

Deals

• Naspers plans to list its huge technology investment arm on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange on July 17. (Naspers)

• Sprint could reportedly collect up to $3 billion by selling its Boost Mobile prepaid wireless brand as part of its proposed merger with T-Mobile. (Reuters)

• Big investors in technology unicorns are starting to sell their stakes earlier than expected. (Axios)

• Short bets against Uber have risen to $1.5 billion. (Business Insider)

• Toyota is reportedly considering a $550 million investment in Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-hailing company. (Nikkei)

Politics and policy

• Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao promised to sell off her holdings in a major construction company. She hasn’t. (NYT)

• The Senate’s majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said that he would fill a Supreme Court vacancy in an election year, despite denying President Barack Obama that option in 2016. (WaPo)

• Netflix became the first major U.S. movie studio to threaten to move production out of Georgia over the state’s new anti-abortion law. (Business Insider)

Trade

• China’s state planning agency has suggested using limits on rare earth mineral exports as a weapon in the trade war with the U.S. (FT)

• The U.S. has again refrained from labeling China a currency manipulator. (CNBC)

• Cowen predicts that Apple’s profit could fall by 26 percent if China banned iPhone sales there. (Bloomberg)

Tech

• Citigroup reportedly pulled out of talks to partner with Apple on the tech giant’s forthcoming credit card because the bank thought it could never make money on the deal. (CNBC)

• Amazon is reportedly planning a purge of its small suppliers, though it denied that there is a “large-scale” plan to do so. (Bloomberg)

• Qualcomm asked a federal judge for a stay on the provisions of her recent antitrust ruling against the company while it appeals the decision. An F.T.C. commissioner was critical of the ruling: “I am dismayed that the judge took this opportunity to create new legal obligations” and “undermine intellectual-property rights.” (Reuters, WSJ op-ed)

• Hackers had access to Flipboard’s internal systems, including customer information, for more than nine months before they were spotted. (ZD Net)

Best of the rest

• Inside the race to succeed Larry Fink as the head of BlackRock. (Institutional Investor)

• Investors increasingly think that the Fed could cut rates twice this year. (FT)

• Jamie Dimon said that Wells Fargo was “irresponsible” for ousting its C.E.O. without a replacement in place. (FT)

• How the WikiLeaks of soccer is bringing down the sport’s most famous teams and players. (New Yorker)

• Wynn Resorts paid a record $35.5 million in fines to Massachusetts for failing to disclose allegations of sexual misconduct against its founder, Steve Wynn. (CNBC)

• Changes to pilot training could determine how soon Boeing’s 737 Max jets are back in the air. (FT)

• How Brexit could ruin the full English breakfast. (WSJ)

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.

We’d love your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].

Sahred From Source link Business

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petelanemoviereviews-blog1 · 6 years

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The Shape of Water (2017) Review

The Shape of Water (2017)

Review Date 3/15/18 “When he looks at me, the way he looks at me... He does not know, what I lack... Or - how - I am incomplete. He sees me, for what I - am, as I am. He's happy - to see me. Every time. Every day. Now, I can either save him... or let him die.” Many people have or will come away believing this film is solely about a woman falling in love with a fish-man. Oh, how wrong they are. Guillermo del Toro has created yet another beautiful masterpiece. Premise: Set in the early 1960’s, a mute night janitor at a top-secret research facility forms a bond with an amphibious man-like creature. The film tells how people only see what is on the surface, not what is underneath. Our main protagonists are a mute woman who everyone thinks is mentally handicapped, and African American housewife, a closeted gay man,..and a fish guy. This is set during a time of intense racism and misunderstanding. We’re still suffering from those same things today. It shows one of humanity’s greatest faults; the failure to come together because of our differences and our refusal to try and understand. Like its fellow Academy Awards Best Picture nominee; ‘Get Out’, The Shape of Water is a social commentary. I think most of the same people that liked Get Out will enjoy this as both films aren’t that ‘turn-your-brain-off- and- enjoy' type of experience. The film is considered a horror, as it shows at times the cruelty of man. We’re the monsters in this film. People have said that the film promotes bestiality. I’ve heard that a lot. A little side note is that the film does kind of make fun of these people but making to where they don’t know it. I don’t remember hearing that (much) about Beauty and the Beast, which is what this film essentially is. I wouldn’t call it a rip-off as I see Beauty and the Beast as a template. There are a few scenes where Elise and the Amphibian Man are ‘together’ but they are all artistically done. There’s even a very ingenious one that is arguably one of the best shots of the film. Doug Jones and Sally Hawkins are fantastic together. Their characters communicate with each other through body language. To be honest, every actor and actress is fantastic when paired with another. I loved the relationships between the main character Elise and her friends Giles and Zelda. Jenkins and Spencer were rightly nominated for their performances. Elise completely understands them, and they completely understand her. Along with the creature, they all form this little circle that supports each other as all of the main characters are victims in some fashion or another. Some which are very on the nose, some which are not. The characters are among the most fleshed out I’ve seen in recent memory. There are many subtle gestures and actions they do that allude to a certain trait never shown but letting the audience know about them. They’re ostracized in some way and there are scenes depicting their struggles. Even our antagonist; Strickland, while outside the circle is somewhat a victim, in my opinion, is given a thorough backstory. He has a loving wife (also a victim here) and two children. He’s a sadist at times but there are also times when he’s shown to still be human. His life is also in danger and he’s doing what he thinks is right and if he screws up, he’ll be killed for it. I have asked this just about every time I find out Jones portrayed a creature or monster in a film; Where’s his Oscar nod?! The man uses his body to act and many times despite not having a line, he outshines the actors that do. I hate even mentioning this movie because it was so terrible, but he was even good in The Bye Bye Man. Yes, he’s had speaking roles in a number of movies; Hellboy 2 (David Hyde Pierce provided the voice of Abe Sapien in the first one but gave it to Jones in the second one), Falling Skies, and Star Trek: Discovery just to name a few. I’ve always been a sucker for practical effects. Humanoid CGI monsters for the most part just don’t do it for me in most cases. I like for there to be a living person in that suit, on set, interacting with the actors. You don’t get the same emotion from them when you just have a ball on a stick or a guy in a suit with dots to later be generated over. That’s why I loved the original Alien movies. Alien: Covenant disappointed me in this area. Sure, there are some shots that can’t be done with a guy in a suit and that’s fine. Covenant did use the guy in a suit thing, but it didn’t do it that often, so a lot of the shots looked a bit cheap and cartoony. It’s easier nowadays to do something like that on a computer. I’m not saying there isn’t a craft to it, but I think it requires more effort and time to create an amazing costume. Gollum from Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Na’vi in Avatar and a few others get a pass as there was just no way for an actor to wear such a costume. Those two films along with District 9 blew me away with their effects. Here in this film, that’s Doug Jones in roughly 90% of the scenes the creature is in. Again, there are some shots in the movie that would be impossible to do but for the most part, you’re seeing this beautifully and intricately designed suit. I felt like what I what was seeing was a living, breathing thing. Like the first couple of the Alien films, you feel the creatures’ presence. In the live action version of Beauty and the Beast, I didn’t feel that with the Beast. Again, the CGI just looked cheap to me. But here, it’s absolutely amazing. The creature’s first full reveal isn’t portrayed as shocking as in most movies involving monsters. There’s a strange normalcy to it. Elise isn’t scared. She’s curious just as the creature is to her Now yes, the first time the audience is slightly introduced to him a few scenes before this is somewhat of a jump scene. I’ve always loved del Toro’s dark fantasy atmosphere. Many of his films show a seemingly normal world with much more going on than humanity realizes. He’s said he’s been very inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. One of the biggest things he borrows from the author is that there are simply things out there that humanity is not meant to understand. It is stated that the creature came from the Amazon (a clear homage to one of del Toro’s favorite films, The Creature from the Black Lagoon) but there’s another fantastical element present in the film that I won’t spoil, although telling you that kind of spoils it itself. The opening shot shows that del Toro should be the only choice to direct the film adaptation of the video game Bioshock. There are parts of the film where it does feel like you’re playing the game, wandering through the underwater city of Rapture. Heck, if I were to flip channels and come across this movie at the right time, I probably would think I was watching said adaptation. Paul D. Austerberry, Jeffery A. Melvin, Shane Vieau rightfully won the Academy Award for Best Production Design and I’d love to see them work on the adaptation as well. Something that I’ve always noticed in del Toro’s films (one of his motifs if you will) is that there is often a short burst of unexpected graphic violence here and there. But the thing about this is that in his films is that it’s meant to drive a point across. Not trying to nitpick here, but no one in this top-secret research facility noticed the janitor opening a coded entry, vault-like door and having lunch with something that is obviously…well ‘top secret’? No one thought of having a guard posted there 24/7? I let a lot of things slide and even I’ll let this as well, but I just wanted to point that out. If there were a guard or didn’t let the janitors in there, there would be no movie. There are a few times where the film’s minor faults are shown. The writing is amazing but every now and then there will be a line or plot aspect that just seems a bit lazy. Again, they’re very minor and miniscule to the rest of the film, but a keen observer will be able to spot them. It does drift into the realm of cliché here and there, but I sort of expected that. Some of them are clearly homages to classic monster movies though. Still, we have seen the ‘tortured-creature-befriended-by-a-kindhearted- human’ shtick’ more than enough times. Before concluding, I must explicitly state that the film has nothing to do with del Toro’s film adaptation of Hellboy. The Amphibian Man is in no way related to Abe Sapien despite their many similarities. Some have suggested that Abe is the son of the Amphibian Man and Elise. This cannot be true. In the graphic novels, Abe was a human scientist in the Victorian Era born Langdon Everett Caul. He was transformed into the creature due to an arcane ritual gone wrong. In conclusion, yes there are a lot of people who see this movie as promoting bestiality. As I said before, it makes fun of them for only seeing what’s on the surface, when there’s a much deeper meaning behind it. It is as if the film is saying; “Hey, you’re part of the problem that is discussed here. You’re the whole reason why this movie was made! But you fail to see it.” That’s what I found most amusing about this film after watching it. These people fail to see the beauty underneath. For those that do explore the film’s depths, they’ll find true beauty. Score: 8.8/10

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dainiaolivahm · 6 years

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How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

In July 2016, Unilever shocked the business world. They were purchasing Dollar Shave Club—a startup dreamed up just five years earlier by an improv comedian named Michael Dubin— for $1 billion.

Reporters were baffled. Similar e-commerce subscription startups like Birchbox, Trunk Club, and Stitch Fix had failed to attract anywhere near the same interest. Plus, Dollar Shave Club sold blades that paled in comparison to the high-tech razors that brands Gillette and Schick were famous for. Heck, it didn’t even make its own razors! It just bought them wholesale from manufacturers in China and resold them. The billion-dollar price tag was also five times Dollar Shave Club’s expected 2016 revenue—a near-unprecedented multiple for a retail startup.

So why did Unilever pay such an unprecedented price tag? As forward-thinking analysts began to explain, it wasn’t about revenue. It was about the company’s relationships—with customers, and consumers at large. Relationships that began with possibly the greatest startup launch video of all time.

Dollar Shave Club’s Origin Story

In 1990, a group of comedians that included Amy Poehler, Adam McKay, Ian Roberts, and Horatio Sanz had created an improv group called The Upright Citizen’s Brigade (UCB). Before long, the UCB had its own Comedy Central TV show and served as a talent pipeline to Saturday Night Live. As class offerings expanded, it became the destination for the thousands of young creatives who stumbled out of their college acting classes and into the bright lights of New York City each year.

In the early 2000s, Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin was one of those young creatives. For eight years, he honed his craft at UCB while working in various television and marketing jobs. In December 2010, he found himself at a Christmas party talking to one of his father’s friends. The conversation took an unexpected turn, and before long, the family friend was asking him for help selling 250,000 razors he had acquired from Asia. (We’ve all been there, right?) The conversation would have weirded a lot of people out, but it gave Dubin an idea. What if he started a service that would eliminate the expense and hassle of selling razor blades? What if they just showed up at your door each month for $1 each?

Faced with the challenge of getting the startup off the ground and attracting investors, Dubin knew that he had to speak to men like him. Men who were fed up with a razor monopoly that forced them to pay more than $20 for just a few blades. And so he bet big on what he does best. He created a hilarious video to connect with his target audience and cast himself as the protagonist in the Hero’s Journey of his own brand.

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“Are our blades any good?” Dubin asks in the beginning of the video. “No, our blades are fucking great.”

What follows is 90 seconds of absolute absurdity that nonetheless touts all of the features of Dollar Shave Club’s razors. There’s a toddler shaving a man’s head, polio jokes, a machete, a clumsy bear, a giant American flag, and perhaps the best “make it rain” scene of all time.

The rough cut of the video convinced former Myspace CEO Michael Jones to sign on as Dubin’s partner. When the video was released on March 6, 2012, it went viral. The startup got more than 12,000 orders in the first 48 hours.

What Dollar Shave Club Got Right About Content Creation

Dollar Shave Club’s origin story highlights something powerful: The economics of marketing are changing quickly, with great content as the ultimate currency. As a result, brands that embrace great storytelling can achieve an incredible advantage over their competition.

The principles behind Dubin’s success aren’t new. Companies have always told stories to drive sales. From the very first barters made to the present day, that hasn’t changed. But everything else has. The sheer pace of technological change in how we are able to communicate our stories to each other—from the birth of radio a century ago to the hurricane of social media apps that mark the 2010s—can be daunting for brands.

On one hand, it presents a huge opportunity. Content is being published everywhere, and consumers are now immersed in stories everywhere they go. Per comScore, time spent with digital media tripled between 2010 and 2016. At last count, 65 percent of all time spent with digital media occurred on mobile devices, consumed primarily via social networks. As a result, companies that excel at storytelling can reach their target customers more effectively and at greater scale than traditional advertising ever offered—all at a fraction of the cost.

On the other hand, there’s more content now than ever. At a conference in 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that we create as much information every two days as we did in human history up until 2003, a figure that’s only increased since.

As a result, brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Half-baked content simply has little chance of breaking through on social or search.

“There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary,” SEO and content analyst Rand Fishkin, who also founded Moz, told us. “Ask: If they’re searching for an answer to a question, would they rather reach your piece of content than anything else on the internet right now? Unless the answer is a slam dunk, ‘Yes, this is 10 times better than anything else out there,’ I’m not necessarily sure it’s worth publishing.”

But when you do create something amazing that stands out? The results are staggering.

Especially when you keep doing it over time.

Brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Click To Tweet How Dollar Shave Club Scaled Its Storytelling

Dubin and Dollar Shave Club continued to crank out hilarious videos that their target audience watched millions of times and shared enthusiastically. One of the best follow-ups, “Let’s Talk about #2,” introduced their new butt wipes product and made more jokes about bears pooping than you ever thought you’d see in a brand video.

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It also started shipping The Bathroom Minutes, a small comic newspaper, with every order. And in late 2015, it launched MEL, one of the most ambitious editorial sites ever launched by a brand.

As Contently managing editor Jordan Teicher wrote in The Content Strategist: “MEL is a great example of how ambitious storytelling can stand out if brands stop trying to play it safe. It’s the only place you can read articles like ‘I Went Shark Fishing and Accidentally Caught a Kilo of Coke’ or watch short documentaries about subjects like former Harvard graduates who become medieval fighters.”

In total, these videos helped build an incredibly strong brand and lasting relationships with consumers. Moreover, they helped Dollar Shave Club achieve a financial exit that seemed impossible just a few years before.

As David Pakman, a partner at Venrock and an early investor in Dollar Shave Club, explained: “There are two things that drive multiples: the financial metrics and the story.”

As Dollar Shave Club proved, the right story can make those financial metrics look five times as good.

This is an excerpt from the Amazon #1 New Release, The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming Into the Void, and Make People Love You by Joe Lazauskas and Shane Snow. Order it today to take advantage of some awesome bonuses, and sign up for the free storytelling course based off the book.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Contently and Convince & Convert.

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#How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

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byronheeutgm · 6 years

Text

How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

In July 2016, Unilever shocked the business world. They were purchasing Dollar Shave Club—a startup dreamed up just five years earlier by an improv comedian named Michael Dubin— for $1 billion.

Dollar Shave Club’s Origin Story

youtube

“Are our blades any good?” Dubin asks in the beginning of the video. “No, our blades are fucking great.”

What Dollar Shave Club Got Right About Content Creation

As a result, brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Half-baked content simply has little chance of breaking through on social or search.

But when you do create something amazing that stands out? The results are staggering.

Especially when you keep doing it over time.

Brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Click To Tweet How Dollar Shave Club Scaled Its Storytelling

youtube

It also started shipping The Bathroom Minutes, a small comic newspaper, with every order. And in late 2015, it launched MEL, one of the most ambitious editorial sites ever launched by a brand.

As David Pakman, a partner at Venrock and an early investor in Dollar Shave Club, explained: “There are two things that drive multiples: the financial metrics and the story.”

As Dollar Shave Club proved, the right story can make those financial metrics look five times as good.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Contently and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2o2R3Io

#How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

0 notes

conniecogeie · 6 years

Text

How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

In July 2016, Unilever shocked the business world. They were purchasing Dollar Shave Club—a startup dreamed up just five years earlier by an improv comedian named Michael Dubin— for $1 billion.

Dollar Shave Club’s Origin Story

youtube

“Are our blades any good?” Dubin asks in the beginning of the video. “No, our blades are fucking great.”

What Dollar Shave Club Got Right About Content Creation

As a result, brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Half-baked content simply has little chance of breaking through on social or search.

But when you do create something amazing that stands out? The results are staggering.

Especially when you keep doing it over time.

Brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Click To Tweet How Dollar Shave Club Scaled Its Storytelling

youtube

It also started shipping The Bathroom Minutes, a small comic newspaper, with every order. And in late 2015, it launched MEL, one of the most ambitious editorial sites ever launched by a brand.

As David Pakman, a partner at Venrock and an early investor in Dollar Shave Club, explained: “There are two things that drive multiples: the financial metrics and the story.”

As Dollar Shave Club proved, the right story can make those financial metrics look five times as good.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Contently and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2o2R3Io

#How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

0 notes

fairchildlingpo1 · 6 years

Text

How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

In July 2016, Unilever shocked the business world. They were purchasing Dollar Shave Club—a startup dreamed up just five years earlier by an improv comedian named Michael Dubin— for $1 billion.

Dollar Shave Club’s Origin Story

youtube

“Are our blades any good?” Dubin asks in the beginning of the video. “No, our blades are fucking great.”

What Dollar Shave Club Got Right About Content Creation

As a result, brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Half-baked content simply has little chance of breaking through on social or search.

But when you do create something amazing that stands out? The results are staggering.

Especially when you keep doing it over time.

Brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Click To Tweet How Dollar Shave Club Scaled Its Storytelling

youtube

It also started shipping The Bathroom Minutes, a small comic newspaper, with every order. And in late 2015, it launched MEL, one of the most ambitious editorial sites ever launched by a brand.

As David Pakman, a partner at Venrock and an early investor in Dollar Shave Club, explained: “There are two things that drive multiples: the financial metrics and the story.”

As Dollar Shave Club proved, the right story can make those financial metrics look five times as good.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Contently and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2o2R3Io

#How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

0 notes

kraussoutene · 6 years

Text

How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

In July 2016, Unilever shocked the business world. They were purchasing Dollar Shave Club—a startup dreamed up just five years earlier by an improv comedian named Michael Dubin— for $1 billion.

Dollar Shave Club’s Origin Story

youtube

“Are our blades any good?” Dubin asks in the beginning of the video. “No, our blades are fucking great.”

What Dollar Shave Club Got Right About Content Creation

As a result, brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Half-baked content simply has little chance of breaking through on social or search.

But when you do create something amazing that stands out? The results are staggering.

Especially when you keep doing it over time.

Brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Click To Tweet How Dollar Shave Club Scaled Its Storytelling

youtube

It also started shipping The Bathroom Minutes, a small comic newspaper, with every order. And in late 2015, it launched MEL, one of the most ambitious editorial sites ever launched by a brand.

As David Pakman, a partner at Venrock and an early investor in Dollar Shave Club, explained: “There are two things that drive multiples: the financial metrics and the story.”

As Dollar Shave Club proved, the right story can make those financial metrics look five times as good.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Contently and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2o2R3Io

#How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

0 notes

mercedessharonwo1 · 6 years

Text

How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

In July 2016, Unilever shocked the business world. They were purchasing Dollar Shave Club—a startup dreamed up just five years earlier by an improv comedian named Michael Dubin— for $1 billion.

Dollar Shave Club’s Origin Story

youtube

“Are our blades any good?” Dubin asks in the beginning of the video. “No, our blades are fucking great.”

What Dollar Shave Club Got Right About Content Creation

As a result, brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Half-baked content simply has little chance of breaking through on social or search.

But when you do create something amazing that stands out? The results are staggering.

Especially when you keep doing it over time.

Brands can’t create mediocre content and expect to stand out. Click To Tweet How Dollar Shave Club Scaled Its Storytelling

youtube

It also started shipping The Bathroom Minutes, a small comic newspaper, with every order. And in late 2015, it launched MEL, one of the most ambitious editorial sites ever launched by a brand.

As David Pakman, a partner at Venrock and an early investor in Dollar Shave Club, explained: “There are two things that drive multiples: the financial metrics and the story.”

As Dollar Shave Club proved, the right story can make those financial metrics look five times as good.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Contently and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2o2R3Io

#How Storytelling Turned Dollar Shave Club Into a Billion Dollar-Brand

0 notes