culture

buoy-meets-satellite-soulmate-in-love-me

Buoy meets satellite soulmate in Love Me


a postapocalyptic love story about transformation

Ars chats with directors Andy and Sam Zuchero and props department head Roberts Cifersons.

Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun star in Love Me Credit: Bleecker Street

There have been a lot of films and television series exploring sentient AI, consciousness, and identity, but there’s rarely been quite such a unique take on those themes as that provided by Love Me, the first feature film from directors Andy and Sam Zuchero. The film premiered at Sundance last year, where it won the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, and is now getting a theatrical release.

(Some spoilers below.)

The film is set long after humans and all other life forms have disappeared from the Earth, leaving just remnants of our global civilization behind. Kristen Stewart plays one of those remnants: a little yellow SMART buoy we first see trapped in ice in a desolate landscape. The buoy has achieved a rudimentary sentience, sufficient to respond to the recorded message being beamed out by an orbiting satellite (Steven Yeun) overhead to detect any new lifeforms that might appear. Eager to have a friend—even one that’s basically a sophisticated space chatbot—the buoy studies the vast online database of information about humanity on Earth the satellite provides. It homes in on YouTube influencers Deja and Liam (also played by Stewart and Yeun), presenting itself to the satellite as a lifeform named Me.

Over time—a LOT of time—the buoy and satellite (now going by Iam) “meet” in virtual space and take on humanoid avatars. They become increasingly more advanced in their consciousness, exchanging eccentric inspirational memes, re-enacting the YouTubers’ “date night,” and eventually falling in love. But the course of true love doesn’t always run smoothly, even for the last sentient beings on Earth—especially since Me has not been honest with Iam about her true nature.

At its core, Love Me is less pure sci-fi and more a postapocalyptic love story about transformation. “We really wanted to make a movie that made everyone feel big and small at the same time,” Sam Zuchero told Ars. “So the timescale is gigantic, 13 billion years of the universe. But we wanted to make the love story at its core feel fleeting and explosive, as first love feels so often.”

The film adopts an unusual narrative structure. It’s split into three distinct visual styles: practical animatronics, classical animation augmented with motion capture, and live action, each representing the development of the main characters as they discover themselves and each other, becoming more and more human as the eons pass. At the time, the couple had been watching a lot of Miyazaki films with their young son.

“We were really inspired by how he would take his characters through so many different forms,” Andy Zuchero told Ars. “It’s a different feeling than a lot of Western films. It was exciting to change the medium of the movie as the characters progressed. The medium grows until it’s finally live action.” The 1959 film Pillow Talk was another source of inspiration since a good chunk of that film simply features stars Rock Hudson and Doris Day chatting in a split screen over their shared party line—what Andy calls “the early 20th century’s version of an open Zoom meeting.”

Building the buoy

One can’t help but see shades of WALL-E in the plucky little space buoy’s design, but the basic concept of what Me should look like came from actual nautical buoys, per props department head Roberts Cifersons of Laird FX, who created the animatronic robots for the film. “As far as the general shape and style of both the buoy and our satellite, most of it came from our production designer,” he told Ars. “We just walked around the shop and looked at 1,000 different materials and samples, imagining what could be believable in the future, but still rooted somewhat in reality. What it would look like if it had been floating there for tens of thousands of years, and if it were actually stuck in ice, what parts would be damaged or not working?”

Cifersons and his team also had to figure out how to bring character and life to their robotic buoy. “We knew the eye or the iris would be the key aspect of it, so that was something we started fooling around with well before we even had the whole design—colors, textures, motion,” he said. They ended up building four different versions: the floating “hero buoy,” a dummy version with lighting but limited animatronics, a bisected buoy for scenes where it is sitting in ice, and a “skeleton” buoy for later in the film.

“All of those had a brain system that we could control whatever axes and motors and lights and stuff were in each, and we could just flip between them,” said Cifersons. “There were nine or 10 separate motor controllers. So the waist could rotate in the water, because it would have to be able to be positioned to camera. We could rotate the head, we could tilt the head up and down, or at least the center eye would tilt up and down. The iris would open and close.” They could also control the rotation of the antenna to ensure it was always facing the same way.

It’s always a challenge designing for film because of time and budget constraints. In the case of Love Me, Cifersons and his team only had two months to make their four buoys. In such a case, “We know we can’t get too deep down the custom rabbit hole; we have to stick with materials that we know on some level and just balance it out,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, it has to look like an old rusted buoy floating in the ocean.”

It helped that Cifersons had a long Hollywood history of animatronics to build upon. “That’s the only way it’s possible to do that in the crazy film timelines that we have,” he said. “We can’t start from scratch every single time; we have to build on what we have.” His company had timeline-based software to program the robots’ motions according to the directors’ instructions and play it back in real time. His team also developed hardware to give them the ability to completely pre-record a set of motions and play it back. “Joysticks and RC remotes are really the bread and butter of current animatronics, for film at least,” he said. “So we were able to blend more theme park animatronic software with on-the-day filming style.”

On location

Once the robots had been completed, the directors and crew spent several days shooting on location in February on a frozen Lake Abraham in Alberta, Canada—or rather, several nights, when the temperatures dipped to -20° F. “Some of the crew were refusing to come onto the ice because it was so intense,” Sam Zuchero recalled. They also shot scenes with the buoy floating on water in the Salish Sea off the coast of Vancouver, which Andy Zuchero described as “a queasy experience. Looking at the monitor when you’re on a boat is nauseating.”

Later sequences were shot amid the sand dunes of Death Valley, with the robot surrounded by bentonite clay strewn with 65 million-year-old fossilized sea creatures. The footage of the satellite was shot on a soundstage, using NASA imagery on a black screen.

YouTube influencers Deja and Liam become role models for the buoy and satellite. Bleecker Street

Cifersons had his own challenges with the robot buoys, such as getting batteries to last more than 10 seconds in the cold and withstanding high temperatures for the desert shoot. “We had to figure out a fast way to change batteries that would last long enough to get a decent wide shot,” he said. “We ended up giving each buoy their own power regulators so we could put in any type of battery if we had to get it going. We could hardwire some of them if we had to. And then in the desert, electronics hate hot weather, and there’s little microcontrollers and all sorts of hardware that doesn’t want to play well in the hot sun. You have to design around it knowing that those are the situations it’s going into.”

The animated sequences presented a different challenge. The Zucheros decided to put their stars into motion-capture suits to film those scenes, using video game engines to render avatars similar to what one might find in The Sims. However, “I think we were drinking a little bit of the AI technological Kool-Aid when we started,” Andy Zuchero admitted. That approach produced animated versions of Stewart and Yeun that “felt stilted, robotic, a bit dead,” he said. “The subtlety that Kristen and Steven often bring ended up feeling, in this form, almost lifeless.” So they relied upon human animators to “artfully interpret” the actors’ performances into what we see onscreen.

This approach “also allowed us to base the characters off their choices,” said Sam Zuchero. “Usually an animated character is the animator. It’s very connected to who the animator is and how the animator moves and thinks. There’s a language of animation that we’ve developed over the past 100 years—things like anticipation. If you’re going to run forward, you have to pull back first. These little signals that we’ve all come to understand as the language of animation have to be built into a lot of choices. But when you have the motion capture data of the actors and their intentions, you can truly create a character that is them. It’s not just an animator’s body in motion and an actor’s voice with some tics of the actor. It is truly the actors.”

Love Me opens in select theaters today.

Trailer for Love Me.

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Buoy meets satellite soulmate in Love Me Read More »

there’s-not-much-for-anyone-to-like-in-the-star-trek:-section-31-movie

There’s not much for anyone to like in the Star Trek: Section 31 movie

It is, in a word, awful. Which is really a shame!

Putting the “TV” in “TV movie”

Sam Richardson as Quasi, a shape-shifter. Comedy and melodrama coexist uneasily throughout Section 31. Credit: Michael Gibson/Paramount+

The movie explains its premise clearly enough, albeit in a clumsy exposition-heavy voiceover section near the beginning: Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) was once the ruler of the bloodthirsty Terran Empire, an evil mirror of Star Trek’s utopian United Federation of Planets. She crossed over into “our” universe and gradually reformed, sort of, before vanishing. Now Section 31—Starfleet’s version of the CIA, more or less—needs to track her down and enlist her to help them save the galaxy from another threat that has crossed over from the evil universe to ours.

Emperor Georgiou originated on Star Trek: Discovery, and she was a consistently fun presence on a very uneven show. Yeoh clearly had a blast playing a sadistic, horny version of the kind and upstanding Captain Georgiou who died in Discovery‘s premiere.

But that fun is mostly absent here. To the extent that anything about Section 31 works, it’s as a sort of brain-off generic sci-fi action movie, Star Trek’s stab at a Suicide Squad-esque antihero story. Things happen in space, sometimes in a spaceship. There is some fighting, though nearly all of it involves punching instead of phasers or photon torpedoes. There is an Important Item that needs to be chased down, for the Fate of the Universe is at stake.

But the movie also feels more like a failed spin-off pilot that never made it to series, and it suffers for it; it’s chopped up into four episodes “chapters” and has to establish an entire crew’s worth of quirky misfits inside a 10-minute montage.

That might work if the script or the performers could make any of the characters endearing, but it isn’t, and they don’t. Performances are almost uniformly bad, ranging from inert to unbearable to “not trying particularly hard” (respectively: Omari Hardwick’s Alok, a humorless genetically augmented human; Sven Ruygrok’s horrifically grating Fuzz, a tiny and inexplicably Irish alien piloting a Vulkan-shaped robot; and Sam Richardson’s Quasi, whose amiable patter is right at home on Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave but is mostly distracting here). Every time one of these characters ends up dead, you feel a sense of relief because there’s one fewer one-note character to have to pay attention to.

There’s not much for anyone to like in the Star Trek: Section 31 movie Read More »

alien:-earth-will-bring-the-horror-home

Alien: Earth will bring the horror home

Chandler’s character is named Wendy, and apparently she has “the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child.” The eminently watchable Timothy Olyphant plays her synth mentor and trainer, Kirsh, and here’s hoping he brings some space cowboy vibes to the role. The cast also includes Alex Lawther as the soldier named CJ; Samuel Blenkin as a CEO named Boy Kavalier; Essie Davis as Dame Silvia; Adarsh Gourav as Slightly; Kit Young as Tootles; and Sandra Yi Sencindiver as a senior member of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. I think we can expect at least some cast members to end up as xenomorph fodder.

Alien: Romulus was a welcome return to the franchise’s horror roots, and Alien: Earth will bring the horror to our home planet. “There’s something about seeing a Xenomorph in the wilds of Earth with your own eyes,” Hawley told Deadline Hollywood in September. “I can’t tell you under what circumstances you’ll see that, but you’ll see it — and you’re going to lock your door that night.”

As for creature design, “What was really fun for me was to really engage with the creature, bring some of my own thoughts to the design while not touching the silhouette, because that’s sacrosanct,” he said. “But some of the elements as we know, whatever the host is informs what the final creature is. I just wanted to play around a little bit to make it as scary as it should be.”

Alien: Earth premieres on FX/Hulu this summer.

poster art featuring a grinning xenomorph

Credit: FX/Hulu

Alien: Earth will bring the horror home Read More »

3d-printed-“ghost-gun”-ring-comes-to-my-community—and-leaves-a-man-dead

3D-printed “ghost gun” ring comes to my community—and leaves a man dead

It’s a truism at this point to say that Americans own a lot of guns. Case in point: This week, a fire chief in rural Alabama stopped to help a driver who had just hit a deer. The two men walked up the driveway of a nearby home. For reasons that remain unclear, a man came out of the house with a gun and started shooting. This was a bad idea on many levels, but most practically because both the fire chief and the driver were also armed. Between the three of them, everyone got shot, the fire chief died, and the man who lived in the home was charged with murder.

But despite the ease of acquiring legal weapons, a robust black market still exists to traffic in things like “ghost guns” (no serial numbers) and machine gun converters (which make a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic). According to a major new report released this month by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, there was a 1,600 percent increase in the use of privately made “ghost guns” during crimes between 2017 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2023, the seizure of machine gun converters also increased by 784 percent.

Ars Technica has covered these issues for years, since both “ghost guns” and machine gun converters can be produced using 3D-printed parts, the schematics for which are now widely available online. But you can know about an issue and still be surprised when local prosecutors start talking about black market trafficking rings, inept burglary schemes, murder—and 3D printing operations being run out of a local apartment.

Philadelphia story

I live in the Philadelphia area, and this is a real Philadelphia story; I know all of the places in it well. Many people in this story live in Philadelphia proper, but the violence (and the 3D printing!) they are accused of took place in the suburbs, in places like Jenkintown, Lower Merion township, and Bucks County. If you know Philly at all, you may know that these are all west and northwest suburban areas and that all of them are fairly comfortable places overall. Indeed, The New York Times ran a long story this month called “How Sleepy Bucks County Became a Rival to the Hamptons.” Lower Merion is one of the wealthier Philly suburbs, while Jenkintown is a charming little northwest suburb that was also the setting for the long-running sitcom The Goldbergs. Local county prosecutors are more often busting up shipments of fake Jason Kelce-autographed merch or going after—and later not going after—comedian Bill Cosby.

But today, prosecutors in Montgomery County announced something different: they had cracked open a local 3D-printing black market gun ring—and said that one of the group’s 3D-printed guns was used last month to murder a man during a botched burglary.

Mug shots of Fuentes and Fulforth

Mug shots of Fuentes and Fulforth. Credit: Montco DA’s Office

It’s a pretty bizarre story. As the police tell it, things began with 26-year-old Jeremy Fuentes driving north to a Bucks County address. Fuentes worked for a junk hauling company in nearby Willow Grove, and he had gone to Bucks County to give an estimate for a job. While the homeowner was showing Fuentes around the property, Fuentes allegedly noticed “a large gun safe, multiple firearms boxes, gun parts and ammunition” in the home.

Outside of work, Fuentes was said to be a member of a local black market gun ring, and so when he saw this much gun gear in one spot—and when he noted that the homeowners were elderly—he saw dollar signs. Police say that after the estimate visit, Fuentes contacted Charles Fulforth, 41, of Jenkintown, who was a key member of the gun ring.

Fuentes had an idea: Fulforth should rob the home and steal all the gun-related supplies. Unfortunately, the group was not great at directions. Fuentes didn’t provide complete and correct information, so when Fulforth and an accomplice went to rob the home in December 2024, they drove to a Lower Merion home instead. This home was not in Bucks County at all—in fact, it was 30 minutes south—but it had a similar street address to the home Fuentes had visited.

When they invaded the Lower Merion home on December 8, the two burglars found not an elderly couple but a 25-year-old man named Andrew Gaudio and his 61-year-old mother, Bernadette. Andrew was killed, while Bernadette was shot but survived.

Police arrested Fulforth just three days later, on December 11, and they picked up his fellow burglar on December 17. But the cops didn’t immediately realize just what they had stumbled into. Only after they searched Fulforth’s Jenkintown apartment and found a 9 mm 3D-printed gun did they realize this might be more than a simple burglary. How had Fulforth acquired the weapon?

According to a statement on the case released today by the Montgomery County District Attorney, the investigation involved “search warrants on multiple locations and forensic searches of mobile phones,” which revealed that Fulforth had his own “firearm production facility”—aka, “a group of 3D printers.” Detectives even found a video of a Taurus-style gun part being printed on the devices, and they came to believe that the gun used to kill Andrew Gaudio was “one of many manufactured by Fulforth.”

In addition to making ghost gun parts at his “highly sophisticated, clandestine firearms production facility,” Fulforth was also accused of making machine gun converters with 3D-printed parts. These parts would be preinstalled in the guns that the group was trafficking to raise their value. According to investigators, “From the review of the captured cellphone communications among the gun trafficking members, the investigation found that when [machine gun conversion] switches were installed on AR pistols, it increased the price of the firearm by at least $1,000.”

Fuentes, who had initially provided the address that led to the murder, was arrested this morning. Authorities have also charged five others with being part of the gun ring.

So, a tragic and stupid story, but one that highlights just how mainstream 3D-printing tech has become. No massive production facility or dimly lit warehouse is needed—just put a few printers in a bedroom and you, too, can become a local gun trafficking kingpin.

There’s nothing novel about any of this, and in fact, fewer people were shot than in that bizarre Alabama gun battle mentioned up top. Still, it hits home when a technology I’ve both written and read about for years on Ars shows up in your community—and leaves a man dead.

3D-printed “ghost gun” ring comes to my community—and leaves a man dead Read More »

reddit-won’t-interfere-with-users-revolting-against-x-with-subreddit-bans

Reddit won’t interfere with users revolting against X with subreddit bans

A Reddit spokesperson told Ars that decisions to ban or not ban X links are user-driven. Subreddit members are allowed to suggest and institute subreddit rules, they added.

“Notably, many Reddit communities also prohibit Reddit links,” the Reddit representative pointed out. They noted that Reddit as a company doesn’t currently have any ban on links to X.

A ban against links to an entire platform isn’t outside of the ordinary for Reddit. Numerous subreddits ban social media links, Reddit’s spokesperson said. r/EarthPorn, a subreddit for landscape photography, for example, doesn’t allow website links because all posts “must be static images,” per the subreddit’s official rules. r/AskReddit, meanwhile, only allows for questions asked in the title of a Reddit post and doesn’t allow for use of the text box, including for sharing links.

“Reddit has a longstanding commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of association,” Reddit’s spokesperson said. They added that any person is free to make or moderate their own community. Those unsatisfied with a forum about Seahawks football that doesn’t have X links could feel free to make their own subreddit. Although, some of the subreddits considering X bans, like r/MadeMeSmile, already have millions of followers.

Meta bans also under discussion

As 404 Media noted, some Redditors are also pushing to block content from Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta properties in response to new Donald Trump-friendly policies instituted by owner Mark Zuckerberg, like Meta killing diversity programs and axing third-party fact-checkers.

Reddit won’t interfere with users revolting against X with subreddit bans Read More »

hollywood-mourns-the-loss-of-david-lynch

Hollywood mourns the loss of David Lynch

The success of Lynch’s next film, Blue Velvet, helped assuage his disappointment, as did his move to television with the bizarrely surreal and influential series Twin Peaks—part detective story, part soap opera, with dashes of sci-fi and horror. The series spawned a spin-off prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), and a 2017 revival series, Twin Peaks: The Return, that picks up the storyline 25 years later. Many other TV series were influenced by Lynch’s show, including The X-Files, Lost, The Sopranos, Bates Motel, Fargo, Riverdale, Atlanta, and the animated series Gravity Falls.

His final feature films were an LA-centric trilogy—Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire (2006)—and 1999’s biographical road drama, The Straight Story, based on the true story of a man named Alvin Straight who drove across Iowa and Wisconsin on a lawn mower. It was acquired by Walt Disney Pictures and was Lynch’s only G-rated film.

“A singular visionary dreamer”

The director’s filmography also includes an assortment of short films, all bearing his eccentric stamp, including a surrealist short, Absurda, shown at Cannes in 2007, as well as Premonition Following an Evil Deed (NSFW YouTube link), Lynch’s contribution to the 1995 anthology film Lumière and Company. All 41 featured directors used the original Cinématographe camera invented by the Lumière brothers. Lynch was also an avid painter, cartoonist, and musician and directed several music videos for such artists as Moby and Nine Inch Nails. Until his death, he hosted quirky online “weather reports” and a web series, What Is David Lynch Working on Today? He even racked up the occasional acting credit.

Lynch received an Honorary Oscar in 2000 for lifetime achievement at the Governors Awards after three prior nominations for The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive. Deadline’s Pete Hammond called Lynch’s speech “probably one of the shortest for any Oscar acceptance.” Lynch briefly thanked the Academy, the other honorees, wished everyone a great night, then pointed to the statuette and said, “You have a very interesting figure. Good night.” At Cannes, he won the Palme d’Or in 1990 for Wild at Heart and won Best Director in 2001 for Mulholland Drive.

Naomi Watts, who played a dual role as doppelgängers Betty Elms and Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive, said that Lynch put her “on the map” as an actor by casting her. “It wasn’t just his art that impacted me—his wisdom, humor, and love gave me a special sense of belief in myself I’d never accessed before,” she said in a statement. “Every moment together felt charged with a presence I’ve rarely seen or known. Probably because, yes, he seemed to live in an altered world, one that I feel beyond lucky to have been a small part of. And David invited all to glimpse into that world through his exquisite storytelling, which elevated cinema and inspired generations of filmmakers across the globe.”

Hollywood mourns the loss of David Lynch Read More »

the-trailer-for-daredevil:-born-again-is-here

The trailer for Daredevil: Born Again is here

In addition, Mohan Kapur reprises his MCU role as Yusuf Khan, while Kamar de los Reyes plays Hector Ayala/White Tiger. The cast also includes Michael Gandolfini, Zabryna Guevara, Nikki M. James, Genneya Walton, Arty Froushan, Clark Johnson, Jeremy Earl, and Lou Taylor Pucci.

The trailer mostly consists of Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk (now the mayor) having a tense conversation in a diner now that they’ve both, in Fisk’s words, “come up in the world.” Their conversation is interspersed with other footage from the series, including the trademark brutal fight scenes—complete with bones breaking in various unnatural ways. And yes, we get a glimpse of a bearded Frank Castle/The Punisher in attack mode (“Frank! Would you mind putting the hatchet down?”).

Fisk insists that as mayor, his intent is to serve the city, but Matt “can’t shake the feeling that you’re gaming the system.” Matt admits he abandoned his vigilante ways after “a line was crossed.” Fisk naturally believes we all have to “come to terms with our violent nature” and insists that sometimes “peace must be broken and chaos must reign.” As for Matt, sure, he was raised a devout Catholic to believe in grace, “but I was also raised to believe in retribution.” We’re ready for another showdown between these two.

Daredevil: Born Again drops on March 4, 2025, on Disney+.

poster art showing the faces of Fisk and Daredevil, one in gray, the other in red

Credit: Marvel Studios

The trailer for Daredevil: Born Again is here Read More »

bob-dylan-has-some-dylanesque-thoughts-on-the-“sorcery”-of-technology

Bob Dylan has some Dylanesque thoughts on the “sorcery” of technology

We might expect someone like Dylan, immersed as he has always been in folk songs, old standards, and American history, to bemoan the corrupting influence of new technology. And he does offer up some quotes in that vein. For example:

Everything’s become too smooth and painless… The earth could vomit up its dead, and it could be raining blood, and we’d shrug it off, cool as cucumbers. Everything’s too easy. Just one stroke of the ring finger, middle finger, one little click, that’s all it takes, and we’re there.

Or again:

Technology is like sorcery, it’s a magic show, conjures up spirits, it’s an extension of our body, like the wheel is an extension of our foot. But it might be the final nail driven into the coffin of civilization; we just don’t know.

But Dylan’s perspective is more nuanced than these quotes might suggest. While technology might doom our civilization, Dylan reminds us that it gave us our civilization—that is, “science and technology built the Parthenon, the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman coliseum, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, rockets, jets, planes, automobiles, atom bombs, weapons of mass destruction.”

In the end, technology is a tool that can either decimate or stimulate human creativity.

Keypads and joysticks can be like millstones around your neck, or they can be supporting players; either one, you’re the judge. Creativity is a mysterious thing. It visits who it wants to visit, when it wants to, and I think that that, and that alone, gets to the heart of the matter…

[Technology] can hamper creativity, or it can lend a helping hand and be an assistant. Creative power can be dammed up or forestalled by everyday life, ordinary life, life in the squirrel cage. A data processing machine or a software program might help you break out of that, get you over the hump, but you have to get up early.

Getting up early

I’ve been thinking about these quotes over the recent Christmas and New Year’s holidays, which I largely spent coughing on the couch with some kind of respiratory nonsense. One upside of this enforced isolation was that it gave me plenty of time to ponder my own goals for 2025 and how technology might help or hinder them. (Another was that I got to rewatch the first four Die Hard movies on Hulu; the fourth was “dog ass” enough that I couldn’t bring myself to watch the final, roundly panned entry in the series.)

Bob Dylan has some Dylanesque thoughts on the “sorcery” of technology Read More »

it’s-january,-which-means-another-batch-of-copyrighted-work-is-now-public-domain

It’s January, which means another batch of copyrighted work is now public domain

It’s January, and for people in the US, that means the same thing it’s meant every January since 2019: a new batch of previously copyrighted works have entered the public domain. People can publish, modify, and adapt these works and their characters without needing to clear rights or pay royalties.

This year’s introductions cover books, plays, movies, art, and musical compositions from 1929, plus sound recordings from 1924. Most works released from 1923 onward are protected for 95 years after their release under the terms of 1998’s Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This law prevented new works from entering the public domain for two decades.

As it does every year, the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a rundown of the most significant works entering the public domain this year.

Significant novels include Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, the first English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

Many of the films on the list showcase the then-new addition of sound to movies, including the first all-color feature-length film with sound throughout (Warner Bros.’ On With the Show!) and the first films with sound from directors like Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock. Buster Keaton’s final silent film, Spite Marriage, is also on the list. Musical compositions include notables like Singin’ in the Rain and Tiptoe Through the Tulips.

On the Disney front, we get the Silly Symphony short The Skeleton Dance, as well as a dozen more Mickey Mouse shorts. These include the first films to depict Mickey wearing white gloves and the first to show him talking—as we covered last year, it’s only the 1920s-era versions of these characters who have entered the public domain, so each new version is significant for people looking to use these characters without drawing the ire of Disney and other copyright holders.

It’s January, which means another batch of copyrighted work is now public domain Read More »

meet-squid-game-s3’s-new-killer-doll

Meet Squid Game S3’s new killer doll

S2 is set three years later, and by the end of the second episode, Gi-hun has successfully finagled his way back into the game after winning Russian roulette against the game’s recruiter and tracking down game overseer Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) at a Halloween party. The desperate players this time include a YouTuber who launched a failed crypto scam and a couple of victims of said scam bent on revenge. There’s also a compulsive gambler and his mother, a rapper addicted to ecstasy, a loud and neurotic self-appointed shaman, a former Marine, and a transgender woman who once served in special forces.

Meanwhile, Front Man’s police officer brother, Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), has hired mercenaries to track down the island where the game is staged. As in the first season, alliances form and shift as the games proceed, and betrayals abound, culminating in a cliffhanger ending. That’s because series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk conceived of S2 and S3 as a single season, but there were too many episodes, so he split them over two seasons.

Squid Game S3 will premiere on Netflix later this year. Other than the new killer doll, we don’t know much about what’s in store for Gi-hun and his quest to destroy the game other than that it will pick up where S2 left off and will most likely end with a final showdown against Front Man. Is the cynical Front Man right about human nature ensuring that the game will never end?

Meet Squid Game S3’s new killer doll Read More »

the-perfect-new-year’s-eve-comedy-turns-30

The perfect New Year’s Eve comedy turns 30

There aren’t that many movies specifically set on New Year’s Eve, but one of the best is The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Joel and Ethan Coen’s visually striking, affectionate homage to classic Hollywood screwball comedies. The film turned 30 this year, so it’s the perfect opportunity for a rewatch.

(WARNING: Spoilers below.)

The Coen brothers started writing the script for The Hudsucker Proxy when Joel was working as an assistant editor on Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981). Raimi ended up co-writing the script, as well as making a cameo appearance as a brainstorming marketing executive.  The Coen brothers took their inspiration from the films of Preston Sturgess and Frank Capra, among others, but the intent was never to satirize or parody those films. “It’s the case where, having seen those movies, we say ‘They’re really fun—let’s do one!’; as opposed to “They’re really fun—let’s comment upon them,'” Ethan Coen has said.

They finished the script in 1985, but at the time they were small indie film directors. It wasn’t until the critical and commercial success of 1991’s Barton Fink that the Coen brothers had the juice in Hollywood to finally make The Hudsucker Proxy. Warner Bros. greenlit the project and producer Joel Silver gave the brothers complete creative control, particularly over the final cut.

Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) is an ambitious, idealistic recent graduate of a business college in Muncie, Indiana, who takes a job as a mailroom clerk at Hudsucker Industries in New York, intent on working his way to the top. That ascent happens much sooner than expected. On the same December day in 1958, the company’s founder and president, Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), leaps to his death from the boardroom on the 44th floor (not counting the mezzanine).

A meteoric rise

Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) gets a job at Hudsucker Industries Warner Bros.

To keep the company’s stock from going public as the bylaws dictate, board member Sidney Mussburger (Paul Newman) proposes they elect a patsy as the next president—someone so incompetent it will spook investors and temporarily depress the stock so the board can buy up controlling shares on the cheap. Enter Norville, who takes the opportunity of delivering a Blue Letter to Mussburger to pitch a new product, represented by a simple circle drawn on a piece of paper: “You know… for kids!” Thinking he’s found his imbecilic patsy, Mussburger names Norville the new president.

The perfect New Year’s Eve comedy turns 30 Read More »

why-the-long-kiss-goodnight-is-a-great-alt-christmas-movie

Why The Long Kiss Goodnight is a great alt-Christmas movie

Everyone has their favorite film that serves as alternative Christmas movie fare, with Die Hard (1988) and Lethal Weapon (1987) typically topping the list—at least when all you want for Christmas is buddy-cop banter, car chases, shootouts, and glorious explosions. (Massive gratuitous property damage is a given.) I love me some Lethal Weapon but it’s high time to give some holiday love to another great action flick set during the Christmas season: The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), starring Geena Davis as an amnesiac school teacher who turns out to have been a government assassin in her former life.

(Spoilers below for this nearly 30-year-old film.)

At the time, Davis was married to director Renny Harlin, coming off a disastrous showing for their previous collaboration, Cutthroat Island (1995), which remains one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. (It is indeed a pretty bad movie.) But Shane Black’s smart, savvy script for The Long Kiss Goodnight seemed like the perfect next project for them; it was promising enough that New Line Cinema bought it for what was then a record $4 million.

Davis plays Samantha Caine, a small-town school teacher in Honesdale, PA, who has no memory since washing up on a beach eight years earlier with a head injury. Since then, she’s given birth to a daughter, Caitlin (Yvonne Zima) and moved in with a kind-hearted fellow teacher named Hal (Tom Amandes). She’s hired various private investigators to find out her true identity, but only the low-rent Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) is still on the case. Then Mitch’s assistant, Trin (Meloina Kanakaredes), finally finds some useful information—just in time, too, since Sam is attacked at home by a criminal named One-Eyed Jack (Joseph McKenna), who broke out of prison to exact revenge after recognizing Sam during her appearance as Mrs. Claus in the town’s annual Christmas parade.

Why The Long Kiss Goodnight is a great alt-Christmas movie Read More »