For a limited time IndieGala is giving away this PC game for free! Extreme Racing on Highway is a racing game that usually costs $9.99 but you can download it for free for Windows PC today!
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What’ll likely become one of the best Skyrim mods has just had its first piece of content released, as a team of dedicated designers has completely overhauled the Saints and Sinners creation club content in the Bethesda RPG game to make it more fleshed out, with the project set to tackle the full open-world game next.
RELATED LINKS: Skyrim mods, Play Skyrim, Games like Skyrim
DirectX Vulkan or DXVK 2.0 was released yesterday and was feature-rich, with significant changes to utilize the newest Vulkan support. Dynamic Rendering, Null Descriptors, and Extended Dynamic States had to be altered and updated to not use the original paths for older drivers that initially supported these features.
Looking at D3D9 changes, DXVK 2.0 improves memory management, especially in 32-bit games in D3D9. DXVK 2.0 uses explicitly mapped files to allow the system to collect shadow texture copies. For the user, they can free large amounts of address space to access "several hundred megabytes" of memory access that was previously inaccessible. The developer does note that this memory management modification will not work on games that are 64-bit, D3D10, and D3D11 APIs. The "render target feedback loops" in D3D9 are improved for new AMD hardware while requiring driver workarounds. One game affected by this issue is GTA IV, as noted by the developer of DXVK 2.0. Games using the option "d3d9.alphaTestWiggleRoom" have been removed, allowing the games to work more effectively.
DXVK 2.0 so far is really awesome!
It fixes the glitches on D3D9 that were present with 1.10.3 (on Intel Arc) and improves comp. stutters a lot from case to case. Great work @phys_ballsocket
Issues found:
RTSS Overlay is currently not working (@guru_3d )#dxvk #rtss— Löschzwerg (@Loeschzwerg_3DC) November 11, 2022
In D3D10, both the d3d10.dll and d3d10_1.dll files were shipped incompletely but not installed by default. Version 1.6 was the last time the files were used in a default manner, especially in the wine version. The wine implementation provided additional essential features for compatible games and the Effects framework. Since the two DLL files are not included, the DXVK API will still support D3D10 API through the d3d10core.dll file.
DXVK 2.0 will begin to utilize D3D11's Feature Level 12_1 feature support, bringing tiled resources and conservative rasterization up to Tier 3, and rasterizer-ordered views.
The new support is directed at game launchers and several games that require D3D11 support. The dev team notes that in games that do not require support, there is a chance of incompatibility during use. Intel and AMD cannot currently support the level 12_0 feature, which is not included in the Intel ANV and AMD Vulkan drivers. Intel's ANV support is limited to the previous level 11_1 and applies to DXVK and vkd3d-proton.
The ID3D11DeviceContext implementation has been altered to allow immediate contexts and deferred contexts not to rely on "common entry points," similar to behaviors seen in the Windows operating system. It should also increase the compatibility with third-party libraries and modifications that focus directly on "D3D11 immediate context." The processor is now capable of running more efficiently with less power drawn. This new implement assists gamers playing Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed: Origins and Sony's God of War.
Drivers supporting the VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library will now have the shaders compiled simultaneously with the D3D shaders, reducing hiccups in the shader compiler.
For more information about the new DXVK 2.0, check out the project's wiki and download the newest driver on the project's GitHub page.
The post DirectX Vulkan ‘DXVK’ 2.0 Improves Performance, Adds Various Fixes Through Vulkan 1.3 Graphics Driver by Jason R. Wilson appeared first on Wccftech.
Grief is a common thread in many horror films. It often plays a minor role in the film, or as you'll see from our list, grief lies at the heart of a film's emotional core. It drives the story forward and grounds the character(s) in realism when spooky things start to happen. In dealing with the supernatural, the occult, a masked killer, or any manner of other genre foes, the protagonists learn how to finally process their grief and slay their demons. The external forces are sometimes the least of their worries.
For the sake of our list, we take a look at grief as a direct response to death. Grief, as we know, can result from any sort of loss, from the death of a pet to a lost friendship. Below, we picked through decades of films to compile the 14 best titles depicting grief, each possessing a mood and approach all their own. It's time to pull up a seat and grab a box of tissues.
In "The Final Girls," script writers M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller pull from their own emotional experiences with film. Miller, whose father Jason Miller played Father Karras in "The Exorcist," found it "haunting, strange, confusing, and a little bit unnatural to see your parent constantly die in a film," he said in an interview. Through writing the script, the creative team sought to "deconstruct what the effects of that would be, as well as what it would be like if you had a second chance."
With direction by Todd Strauss-Schulson, "The Final Girls" digs deep into these ideas. The story centers around Max Cartwright (Taissa Farmiga), who tries to keep her life together after the death of her mother Amanda (Malin Åkerman) in a car accident. During a midnight preview of "Camp Bloodbath," in which Amanda starred as Nancy, a fire breaks out, and Max and her friends find themselves plopped right into the film. Not only must Max survive the inevitable slayings at the hands of Billy Murphy (Daniel Norris), but she learns a valuable lesson about death, grief, and loss. No matter how hard she tries, she can never replace her mother, even if her visage has been immortalized in film.
While dealing with such heavy themes, "The Final Girls" brings lightheartedness in the process, commenting on slasher conventions, tropes, and character archetypes. Through Max's powerful story, you'll never hear Kim Carnes' iconic hit "Bette Davis Eyes" the same way again.
When their youngest child is killed by a speeding semi-truck, the Creed family is ripped apart in their grief. Gage (Miko Hughes) was a light in the world snuffed out too soon, and any attempts to recover from his death fail. "Sometimes dead is better," neighbor Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne) tells Louis (Dale Midkiff) upon showing him a burial site behind their newly-purchased home.
After the family cat was buried in the pet cemetery, only to return as a deranged version of itself, Louis decides to bury his son in the same ritual site. It naturally doesn't bring about the result he hoped for, and Gage goes on a murderous rampage, slaying Jud and his own mother Rachel (Denise Crosby). The part of Gage that made him so special has wilted and given way to a ravaging and mindless killing machine.
In many ways, resurrected Gage is a manifestation of grief and the heaviness of loss in our lives. Death is an inevitable part of life; we all must go through pain. While the suffering someone endures can feel overwhelming, keeping a loved one alive in photos, videos, and in spirit may be far better than raising them from the dead. This raises the biggest question of the story, though: Would you have done what Louis did if the grief became too much?
Ari Aster's 2018 film "Hereditary" relies on the psychological breakdown of one family following the death of its matriarch. Annie (Toni Collette) struggles to cope with her mother's untimely passing and pours herself into her work as a miniatures artist. When she's managed to find her footing again, she suffers another emotional blow with the loss of her daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), due to an unfortunate car incident perpetrated by her son Peter (Alex Wolff).
Annie spirals further out of control and even constructs her daughter's death as a miniature. It's morbid, but there's accounting for how everyone grieves differently — this is simply Annie's way of dealing with and processing death. Joan (Ann Dowd) befriends Annie upon meeting her during a grief support group and invites her over for tea and companionship. Joan suggests seeking healing elsewhere, perhaps by reconnecting with Charlie in the afterlife.
In her grief, Annie takes Joan's recommendation and conjures up Charlie, or at least her likeness, in front of her husband (Gabriel Byrne) and son. "Hereditary" involves a bit of witchcraft, yet its emotional backbone hinges upon the lengths someone will go to keep a dead loved one alive. Annie was just doing what she thought was best for her family, whose story ends even more brutally.
Elderly couple Audrey (Sheila McCarthy) and Henry (Julian Richings) want desperately to resurrect their dead grandson Jackson (Daxton William Lund). Their grief hangs like black smoke in the air, and they turn to Satanism for answers. In their spiritual exploration, they uncover an ancient spell that'll invoke a reverse exorcism. All they need to do is capture a pregnant person so they can perform the ritual, allowing them to transfer Jackson's essence into the fetus.
Throughout the film (directed by Justin G. Dyck), it's their anguish that is most heartbreaking. Their intentions are pure, but their actions raise significant moral questions about life, death, and how grief can blind you to reality. After holding one of Henry's patient's hostage, they tie her to a bed as part of their preparations. Almost immediately, Jackson's presence is made known to all involved and begs the question about the very thin veil separating worlds.
When it comes time to recite the spell, Audrey and Henry unintentionally open a fiery portal to purgatory and a host of other entities emerge from the darkness. It's a symbolic gesture about the futility of controlling grief and the frequency at which it can often dictate our lives, even if we don't even realize it.
After her husband and daughter die in a tragic car crash, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is left in deep mourning. A year later, her friends Juno (Natalie Mendoza), Beth (Alex Reid), Sam (MyAnna Buring), Rebecca (Saskia Mulder), and Holly (Nora-Jane Noone) invite Sarah along for a spelunking adventure in the Appalachian Mountains. She could use a distraction.
Writer-director Neil Marshall uses the claustrophobic setting to force Sarah to come to terms with her grief. Not only that, but her friendships are tested until someone snaps. There's betrayal, resentment, and revenge, all wound tightly around a story about cave-dwelling monsters with an insatiable bloodlust. Sarah works through and finally lets go of the past, emerging as the film's triumphant heroine.
"The Descent" literally and metaphorically combs the recesses of the human condition, alighting upon ideas about how to process death, cope, and allow yourself to live again. Sarah's entire arc leans into these themes, and it makes her ultimate victory all that more satisfying.
David Bruckner's "The Night House" is a soul-crusher of a film. When her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) kills himself, Beth (Rebecca Hall) is left to pick up the pieces of her life. Everything is in shambles, and she also contends with revelations about his secret double life.
As she unravels the mystery, she learns some dark truths about his urges to strangle and kill women. Beth has been put through enough, so her grief is now intertwined with anger and confusion about who Owen really was. Her best friend Claire (Sarah Goldberg) frequently reminds her that none of it matters in the end; what's most important is his unwavering love for her. But Beth can't let sleeping dogs lie and continues to dig deeper into her husband's hidden skeletons.
What makes "The Night House" a vital horror film is also its dissection of mental health, depression, and suicidal ideation. As Beth admits to a group of friends, she's long suffered from dark thoughts. With Owen's death, she grapples with her own mental health in a way she never had before. Grief and depression often go hand-in-hand when dealing with the worst parts of living. With help from Claire, Beth wrangles both in the end. They may never be totally vanquished, but she has at least taken over the reins.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
In Jennifer Kent's "The Babadook," Amelia (Essie Davis) wrestles with being a single parent to her six-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) underneath the weight of knowing her husband died when he drove her to the hospital while in labor. She blames herself, and that exacerbates her grief tenfold.
One night, Samuel asks his mother to read from a new pop-up book that's appeared on his bookshelf. It's titled "Mister Babadook" and contains the most ghastly, chilling imagery. It becomes clear it's not just a children's book as weird things begin to happen. Samuel hallucinates about the Babadook and lashes out, his behavior erratic and aggressive. Additionally, Amelia discovers glass fragments in her food and doors mysteriously opening and closing on their own. Try as she might, ripping the book apart doesn't seem to solve the problem. It reappears on her front steps fully intact.
From his pointy hands to the top hat, The Babadook embodies Amelia's grief. Through experiencing his wrath, Amelia slowly, bit by bit, learns how to accept her husband's death. The shadowy monster forces her to relive his last moments, and only when she processes her guilt and grief can she then harness the Babadook. It'll never completely go away, and in fact, she keeps it locked up in the basement and feeds it earthworms from time to time. That's the trouble with grief: it'll always be with you. You just get better at handling it.
Dani experiences a 1-2-3 sucker punch with the murder-suicide of her sister and parents. Leave it to writer-director Ari Aster to bowl you over in the first 20 minutes, setting up the emotional stakes to make the rest of the film carry greater weight. Mostly containing disturbingly bright cinematography, "Midsommar" looks at grief as a pressurized slow-cooker ensnaring your entire existence. You dream about death, and your every waking moment feels as though the walls are closing in.
To make matters worse, her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) is a textbook sleazeball. He's emotionally manipulative and gaslights her about concerns over her sister's mental illness and their broken relationship. With family tragedy, Christian can't possibly end things anytime soon. Dani's grief becomes the last thread in their relationship, and it's barely hanging on.
Over summer break, Christian, Mark, and his other friends plan a trip to a commune in Sweden, where their friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) is originally from. Begrudgingly, they invite Dani along. She could use an adventure anyway. When they arrive, things are immediately off about the place, yet there's something weirdly comforting about chosen family and the catharsis in experiencing and exorcizing someone else's pain and grief. While her friends are bumped off one by one, Dani is crowned the May queen and accepted by the community. They say fire is cleansing, and the film's fiery end certainly bestows Dani with a fresh start, renewed spirit, and the strength to forge ahead with her life.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
"Antichrist" delves into the darkest parts of humanity. When their young child tumbles out of an open window to his death, the Man (Willem Dafoe) and Woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are thrown into a whirlwind of fevered emotions, running from guilt to resentment. Thinking it best to escape city life, the couple venture into the wilderness to a cabin located in the woods known as Eden.
Woman harbors a great fear of nature, and Man hopes to immerse her in psychotherapy as a way to heal and deal with her demons. Together, they reconnect on a deep emotional level, but things quickly go off the rails and lead to a monstrous series of events, as their inner turmoil soon becomes a war between each other. Violence mingles with primal sex; quite the volatile concoction. What could possibly go wrong?
While writing the film, writer-director Lars von Trier spent time hospitalized to treat severe depression and anxiety. This backstory further adds to the film's emotional center and casts greater darkness over the story and tragedy. "Antichrist" highlights what happens when pain and grief are never properly addressed, and those sufferers are left to their own devices, igniting their ultimate downfall.
If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie star in Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now," another film depicting the unimaginable loss of a child. When outside playing along a countryside estate, a young girl named Christine (Sharon Williams) falls into a nearby pond and drowns. Her parents John Baxter (Sutherland) and Laura (Christie) are obviously grief-stricken. Despite his emotional state, John takes a position restoring an old church in Venice. John hopes the work can squelch the pain coursing through his chest.
However, John experiences visions of his daughter in her bright red raincoat. He sees his supposed daughter around every corner. He can't seem to escape her, much like his grief that follows him wherever he goes. No manner of distraction can wash away the misery. Meanwhile, Laura has turned to two sisters and self-proclaimed psychics who attempt to help Laura reach out to the other side for contact with Christine.
"Don't Look Now" suggests that people will seek out different avenues to cope and process their grief. John pours himself into his work, and Laura explores clairvoyance. While these things may not solve the deeper emotional issues, they are valid responses in their own right.
Writer, director, and actor Mark O'Brien tangles issues of faith and redemption with overwhelming grief. In "The Righteous," Frederic Mason (Henry Czerny) and his wife Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk) grieve the recent death of their adopted daughter Joanie. Their pain is so fresh Frederic believes it best to seal off their daughter's room. They compartmentalize their grief rather than deal with it head-on.
When an injured man named Aaron (O'Brien) arrives on their front lawn, Frederic boards him for the night so he can recuperate. Little does he know, Aaron is someone from his past, a past he had long buried and for which he sought forgiveness. Frederic's grief is reopened, and Ethel takes Aaron under her wing, finding Aaron's warmth to be necessary for bringing joy back into their home.
In the end, Ethel and Frederic finally process their grief and confront Frederic's seedy past. While a priest, he sexually assaulted a woman, and the reprehensible act led to her pregnancy. He then abandoned the child, who turns out to be Aaron. Aaron represents both their grief and a long-awaited reckoning. With the flashing meteors pummeling toward earth, Frederic pays the biggest price of all: with his life.
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
Peter Medak's "The Changeling" supplies an emotional throughline to your typical haunted house story. George C. Scott plays John Russell, a composer living in New York City. After the deaths of his wife and daughter, he decides to leave the city behind and move out west to Seattle. He moves into a rustic mansion with a dark, twisted history.
Immediately, strange things begin to happen, from loud banging to the appearance of a red ball. It's initially unclear whether these occurrences are real or simply manifestations of his grief. When consulting Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere) from the local historic society, it's revealed that the house has been vacant for over a decade. Together, they unravel the mysteries of the house and discover a series of grisly deaths in and around the property. Their research suggests that the peculiar goings-on are very real.
"The Changeling" works on two levels. First, it excels as a spooky haunted house tale, brimming with thrills and chills that'll give you nightmares. Second, it works as a rich excavation of one man's grief, his failure to properly deal with it, and the idea that grief never really leaves you alone. It's always there, and you'll never be totally rid of it.
Also known as "Full Circle," 1977's "The Haunting of Julia" stars Mia Farrow as Julia Lofting, a woman who accidentally kills her daughter after performing a tracheotomy when she chokes one morning. As one might expect, the death tortures Julia; she may never recover from the guilt and grief she feels.
Julia separates from her husband and moves into a furnished home in central London. With a new location, she hopes it'll be enough to alleviate the pain, or at least make it bearable. In true haunted house fashion, unusual occurrences begin taking place. Soon, the lines between Julia's perception and reality are blurred, giving the film an extra layer of insight into her psyche. After inviting friends over for a welcome party, she meets a psychic who holds a seance, during which she receives a warning that Julia should not stay in the house any longer.
Julia doesn't heed the medium's advice as she should and decides to stay. Over the following days, those around her start dying. Their deaths are always surrounded by peculiar circumstances, hinting at something far more sinister. As a result, Richard Loncraine's film explores the notion that grief not only affects the direct family and friends but those around the person, too. It's the outward ripples that can wreak just as much havoc.
Anne (Barbara Crapton) suffers a deep depression following the death of her son Bobby. Along with her husband Paul (Andrew Sensenig), she moves to New England for a fresh start. Upon arrival, Anne claims she can feel her son's presence in the house, and you wonder if she is actually experiencing something supernatural or if it's simply a trick of her grief.
In search of answers, Anne invites her spiritualist friends May (Lisa Marie) and Jacob (Larry Fessenden) to further investigate the residence. One afternoon, while Anne and May head to the grocery store, Jacob suggests to Paul that they hold a seance to contact the spirits inhabiting the home. What they uncover, however, is something far more devilish than even Jacob could have anticipated.
The original tenants, the Dagmar Family, were burned and sacrificed to the evil beneath the house when it was exposed that they were selling corpses and burying empty caskets. Their souls were never put to rest, so their charred forms return to Earth to take what is rightfully theirs. Writer-director Ted Geoghegan delivers all the frights you so desire but gives the film a raw emotional tone that grounds it in reality. "We Are Still Here" depicts how grief can often swallow you whole if you're not too careful.
Read this next: The Best Cosmic Horror Movies That Will Make You Hate The Unknown
The post The 14 Best Horror Movies About Grief appeared first on /Film.
There are few movies quite like "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer." It's a grim, gruesome horror film loosely based on the real-life serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole. The movie was given an X rating upon its release in 1986 for its intense, unrelenting violence, but it managed to become a cult classic on VHS. The film would introduce the world to filmmaker John McNaughton and lead actor Michael Rooker, but it would also help inspire an entire generation of horror filmmakers. Along with other grimy horror movies like the 1980 film "Maniac," "Henry" served as a response to the supernatural silliness of many of the decade's popular slasher franchises. It is a brutal, stomach-churning experience that almost feels like it's obscene, like you shouldn't be watching it.
In an interview with RogerEbert.com to celebrate the film's 30th anniversary in 2016, McNaughton was asked about the origins of this disturbing bit of cinema. It turns out that the whole situation was somewhat serendipitous, and "Henry" happened almost by happenstance.
McNaughton explained that the creation of "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" happened by means of destiny. He went in to meet with a former associate, producer Waleed Ali, with whom he made a documentary called "Dealers in Death," and Ali presented him with a proposition:
"I had gone in to see Waleed about doing another documentary and something happened—some confusion and a switching of monies asked for—so they decided not to do it. On that particular day, Waleed said 'Remember that dream we had, John, that we would one day make a movie? I'll give you $100,000 to make a horror film,' because they could sell a horror film at that time."
While that wasn't exactly the offer of a documentary that McNaughton had originally hoped for, being offered 100 grand to make a horror movie is a pretty great situation to find yourself in. Horror, especially low-budget horror, was huge in the mid-1980s, so it's not a big surprise that Ali was interested in banking on the genre's popularity. McNaughton was generally more of a documentary filmmaker, but he knew just who to talk to for ideas.
While McNaughton wasn't sure about the direction to take his new film in, he had an old friend nearby who knew plenty about the macabre:
"I left the office and down the hall was an old friend of mine who was always into weird stuff and who had an office there—he collected weird stuff for them and they would figure out how to make money off of it. I said 'Gus, Waleed just gave me $100,000 to make a horror film.' He asked what I was going to do and I told him I had no idea."
Gus had a great idea, however, and he put in a VHS tape of a "20/20" segment on serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. It was the first time McNaughton ever heard the term "serial killer," which had only been coined a few years earlier by the FBI, and he was fascinated with the idea. Lucas was a shocking story because he had confessed to somewhere around 600 murders during his lifetime, though he was only originally convicted of three murders.
McNaughton drew from the true story of Lucas and his friend and fellow serial killer Otis Toole, though certain elements were dramatized or changed. Some of these changes were in service of making a better horror film, while others were a matter of necessity because the reality of some of the story was just too grim. (For example, Henry's "love interest" was aged up significantly, because in real life he became obsessed with her when she was only 10 years old.) In the end, "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" is one of the most harrowing horror films ever made, even if it's not exactly "true" crime.
When it came to casting, McNaughton felt like certain things were predestined as well. When he first saw actor Michael Rooker, then a relative unknown, he knew that he had found his lead:
"Certain things are destiny, like when he [pointing at Michael] showed up at the door for his first audition—I opened the door and thought "Henry's here." It was not a process of sifting through ideas and going through things that I had thought of over the years. When I left the building that day, there was a 7-11 down the street and I went there and bought some lottery tickets because I figured this was my lucky day."
McNaughton and Rooker both ended up having serious Hollywood careers, with McNaughton going on to direct episodes of "Homicide: Life on the Street" and numerous movies, including the salacious thriller "Wild Things." Rooker skyrocketed to fame as Merle Dixon on "The Walking Dead" and broke everyone's hearts as the big blue daddy Yondu in James Gunn's "Guardians of the Galaxy" films. Without the stroke of fate that got "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" put into production and kicked off their careers, these two greats might have taken a lot longer to be discovered.
Read this next: The Horror Movies We Can't Wait To See In 2022
The post A Moment Of 'Destiny' Led To The Creation Of Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer appeared first on /Film.
Kouta Hirano's action-horror manga "Hellsing" begins 100 years or so after Abraham Van Helsing defeated Dracula. Contrary to the account of Bram Stoker, the Lord of Vampires was not slain, merely cowed, and became the Helsing (eventually Hellsing) family retainer. Abraham's descendant, Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, leads an eponymous ghoul-hunting organization. Her top agents are the rechristened Alucard and his newly sired protégé, Seras "Police Girl" Victoria.
Hellsing's enemies are two-fold. First, there's Iscariot, the Vatican's vampire slayers who rival the Protestant Hellsing; Father Alexander Anderson is particularly dead-set on killing Alucard. Second, there's Millennium, a Nazi remnant who experimented with the occult and still intends to bring about a thousand-year Third Reich. If you're not much of a manga reader, don't fear, for "Hellsing" has been adapted into an animated series. However, if you're looking to watch the "Hellsing" anime, you'll have to decide: Which one? That's right, there are two adaptations. The first series is simply titled "Hellsing," while the more faithful adaptation was correctly named "Hellsing: Ultimate."
The two versions are not connected beyond the common source material and some overlapping English dub actors, as they were created by different studios boasting different stories and styles. In my humble opinion, the reinterpretation of the manga was warranted, and "Ultimate" is definitely the superior of the two series. That said, if you watch anything from the first "Hellsing" anime, make sure it's Yasushi Ishii's incredible opening theme: "Lagos Naki World" aka "A World Without Logos."
First, let's talk about the different versions of "Hellsing." Kouta Hirano's original "Hellsing" manga was published in the seinen magazine "Young King OURs," running for 11 years between 1997 and 2008. In the fourth year of its run, animation studio Gonzo produced the 13-episode "Hellsing" anime. Despite some impressive talent, including scriptwriter Chiaki J. Konaka (of "Serial Experiments Lain" and "Digimon Tamers"), Gonzo's "Hellsing" is pretty mediocre. The animation is stiff and betrays a low budget. While running out of source material doesn't necessarily doom an anime (see 2003's "Fullmetal Alchemist"), it unfortunately did for "Hellsing."
Gonzo's "Hellsing" broke away from the manga after episode 7 (roughly chapter 12 of the manga) and then failed to craft a compelling conclusion on its own terms. One plot thread is resolved via epilogue card in the finale, while others are left unrealized. Particularly glaring is the lack of a final battle between Alucard and Anderson or an explanation of who was creating the new vampires (since the manga hadn't reached that battle or introduced Millennium yet). The anime's original villain, Incognito, is aptly named, because he's nothing, presented more like a video game boss than a character.
"Hellsing: Ultimate," on the other hand, boasts lush and kinetic animation. The writing isn't masterful, but with the whole manga to adapt, it's at least cohesive. "Hellsing: Ultimate" was released not as a conventional TV series but as a series of Original Video Animations (OVAs) from 2006 to 2012. The short films were animated by three different studios (Satelight for episodes 1-4, Madhouse for episodes 5-7, and Graphinica for episodes 8–10). While the episodes all had unique ending credits, "Hellsing: Ultimate" was in need of an instant mood-setter like "A World Without Logos," but there was no opening theme song.
Both of the "Hellsing" animes came with different moods. "Hellsing: Ultimate" is straight-up action with a truckload of gore, while Gonzo's "Hellsing" is slower and restrained, substituting bombast for the gothic. While a lot of that goes back to the limits of the animation, the music at least sells the illusion of tone. "A World Without Logos" (Logos as in logic, not advertising) mixes jazzy instrumentals with gloomy voice work for a unique composition, perfectly complementing the series' mood. The song also opens with a drum beat before transitioning into the mix, which carries the song to its conclusion. True to "Without Logos," the lyrics are gibberish. See a sample below:
"Oh down, down, wish it's just a revelationTake me once, take me to the revolutionDown, down won't ya hear the vibrations?Take me home, and I'll look to return"
However, Yasushi Ishii's vocals sound so cool and mysterious that this doesn't disturb the smooth rhythm at all. Instead, the words fade into the instrumentals and create a catchy, harmonious beat.
The title sequence accompanying the song has some of the most memorable images in the first adaptation of "Hellsing." The title begins and ends with a demonic dog representing Alucard, as the vampire is Hellsing's hound, after all. Cue a zoom-in through the dog's eye then match cut to Integra slamming her hand on her desk, the camera zooming out and circling around her. As Alucard grasps his guns crossed against his chest, Anderson holds two swords in a cross as well, his bible pages swirling around him. Alucard and Anderson, both concealed in shadow, rush toward each other. The white void of this shot is one case where the series' stark backgrounds add to the mood.
While her master has fearsome foes to face, Seras' conflict is internal; must she give into her new vampiric nature? Representing this, the titles include a monochrome shot of her holding a knife just below her outstretched tongue. Only the blood on the knife is colored, and Seras is clearly tempted by her hunger. The song returns to the dog, now walking away from a pile of dead ghouls; one corpse holds a crucifix necklace dangling from its hand. The visual is an apt representation of Alucard's good works.
If the "Hellsing: Ultimate" series had reused "A World Without Logos," it would have truly been the ultimate "Hellsing" anime.
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The post The One Advantage The First Hellsing Anime Has Over Ultimate appeared first on /Film.
Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the Iranian man whose life story inspired Steven Spielberg's film "The Terminal," died Saturday at the airport he had previously called home, according to NBC News. Nasseri, who was also known as Sir Alfred Mehran, lived in Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for eighteen years before leaving in 2006, and reportedly had taken up residence there again in the weeks before his passing.
Nasseri's story is a complex and ambiguous one, though by all accounts, he began his airport residency in 1988 when a lack of residency papers -- for both the country he was trying to leave, and the one he was trying to enter -- landed him in a sort of legal purgatory. Eventually the paperwork issues were ironed out, but Nasseri chose to continue living at the airport. As of publication time, there doesn't seem to be a clear reason for his recent return, but NBC reports that the septuagenarian former refugee died of a heart attack in the airport's Terminal 2F on November 12, 2022.
There was a lot about Nasseri's life that wasn't clear, and journalists attempted to capture his reality to varying results over the years. In 2004, Spielberg's film "The Terminal" obviously borrowed from and whitewashed Nasseri's story by casting Tom Hanks as a man from a fictional country called Krakozhia, who lives at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport. "The Terminal" was neither among Spielberg's most successful nor his most acclaimed films, and it failed to engage with the heavier elements of Nasseri's life, instead crafting a lighthearted rom-com-like story.
The details of Nasseri's own story were sometimes tough to crack, though many, including filmmaker Paul Berczeller, tried. In a Guardian profile published in 2004, Berczeller describes the time he spent shooting a film called "Here To Now" with Nasseri in the airport, and the facts he learned about the man in the process. While Nasseri claimed that he had been subject to torture by the Iranian ministry of security, his brother Cyrus told Berczeller that Nasseri's displacement could be traced back to his involvement in a student strike at Tehran University in 1970. Berczeller also reported that Nasseri was given a check of several hundred thousand dollars for his life story, but remained in the airport even after acquiring the means to leave.
Regardless of his origins and motivations, Nasseri apparently lived a life of dignity, intention, and well-worn habit in his airport home during his initial stay of nearly two decades. "He lived in the basement shopping mall of Terminal 1," Berczeller wrote. "Alfred's red bench was the only anchor in his life. It was his bed, living room and corporate headquarters." Nasseri was thought to be approximately 76 years old at the time of his passing.
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An article published by Igor's Lab confirms that NVIDIA's Frame Generation technology is applied at the tail end of the frame processing pipeline and perfectly compatible with FSR 2.0 and Intel XeSS AI Up-scaling pipelines. While there isn't any real advantage to doing this, it didn't stop Igor from taking some pioneering benchmarks of what the numbers would be like and surprisingly, it seems that FSR + Frame Generation can actually beat DLSS + Frame Generation in pure performance figures.
Let's begin with some context. Frame Generation is a technology that is part of NVIDIA's DLSS 3.0 stack which generates artificially created frames between two frames generated by DLSS' AI implementation. Think of these frames like padding between two computationally generated frames. As it turns out, if you are an NVIDIA 4000 series GPU owner, you can actually use NVIDIA frame generation with frames that re being computationally generated by Intel XeSS or AMD FSR 2.0.
The picture quality between AMD FSR 2.0 + NVIDIA Frame Generation and DLSS + Frame Generation seems fairly comparable although NVIDIA Frame Generation and Intel XeSS appear to be on the softer side of things. So without any further ado, here are the benchmarks from all three configurations:
Keep in mind fps numbers only tell part of the story, to get a full idea, we would encourage you to head over to Igor's Lab and read up on frame times, variations and percentile figures of the three systems but for now, lets focus on the maximum fps achievable. With DLSS and FG (Frame Generation), you are looking at a maximum value of 224 fps. Pretty decent right? Keep in mind even this value may be seriously software bottle necked due to frame time limitations in the game engine.
Up next, we have AMD FSR chugging out the frames in the back end and NVIDIA Frame Generation being used to fill in the gaps. The maximum achievable FPS here in Spider-Man Remastered is 231.4 fps, which is slightly higher than the native approach of using DLSS. That said, this does seem to be a software bottleneck situation because other metrics are actually fairly comparable to the DLSS based implementation.
Finally we have the Intel XeSS + NVIDIA Frame Generation based run which yields a maximum achievable fps of 203.9 - which does not seem to be a software bottleneck. As noted above, Intel XeSS is also slightly softer in the picture quality department than either FSR 2.0 or NVIDIA DLSS.
One thing is for sure though, further testing in titles that support this will be required to check if FSR might actually increase performance when coupled with NVIDIA Frame Generation on RTX 4000 series GPUs - in a title which does not run into software bottlenecks. Cross vendor compatibility between up scaling technologies is something pretty exciting and could result in a best of both worlds outcome for consumers.
The post NVIDIA Frame Generation Tech Benchmarked With XeSS and AMD FSR Pipelines by Usman Pirzada appeared first on Wccftech.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Over the past few days I’ve had some fun with a codebase again. Similar to the time when I tried to get my Direct3D engine running on very early CPUs and GPUs. Except that codebase was in C++, and this time it was (mostly) .NET and C#.
This time it was triggered by our Operations department. They tried to upgrade some client devices to the latest version of our software, and couldn’t get it to install. It was one of those occasions where you had to read the small print: our codebase was upgraded to .NET 4.8 a few years ago, as it runs on Windows 7 SP1 and higher. Or does it?
For regular desktop users, it more or less does. That is, if you’re still on Windows 7, and have installed SP1, then you can run .NET 4.8. Nobody uses Windows 8 or 8.1 (or at least, they have opted for the free upgrade to Windows 10), so we can disregard them in practice.
Windows 10 then… if you run a regular desktop version (e.g. Home or Pro), you get periodic updates, and you are persuaded to install them. So if you’ve upgraded to at least Windows 10 1607 (Anniversary Update), you’re fine as well. So again, in practice you’ll be fine, as you should be reasonably up-to-date, enough anyway to get .NET 4.8 running.
However, our machines are installed with Windows 10 Embedded images, also known as Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB). And if you have Windows 10 2016 LTSB or newer, you’ll be fine, since the 2016 version is based on Windows 10 1607, and will support .NET 4.8.
But, apparently this particular customer had some machines that somehow slipped through the cracks: they had Windows 10 2015 LTSB installed, which is based on the original RTM release known as 1507. We had overlooked the fact that this is the only LTSB release that does not support .NET 4.8, and that in fact a small number of machines we had supplied in the past, had this version of the OS installed, rather than either a Windows 7 Embedded, or a Windows 10 2016 LTSB or newer.
This particular 2015 LTSB release of Windows 10 only supports up to .NET 4.6.2. And a characteristic of these LTSB versions is that they cannot be updated to a newer version, unlike the regular Home/Pro editions. So you cannot upgrade a Windows 10 LTSB 2015 to 2016 or newer. You would actually have to buy a new license and do a new install to upgrade such a machine, while these machines are “Beyond Economic Repair”.
However, if we look at the small print, Windows 10 2015 LTSB is still in its extended support lifecycle, which ends on Oct 15, 2025. And .NET 4.6.2 is also still supported, up to Jan 12, 2027. So we are looking at two supported products here.
This may be a good time to mention that I also overlooked this in my earlier article on .NET 6. That is, I correctly stated that .NET 6 has the exact same system requirements as .NET 4.7+, which is true. But this means it also has the same small print: it doesn’t support Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 1507 and 1511, which in turn also means no Windows 10 2015 LTSB. It’s a strange, and somewhat illogical situation that Windows 7 is supported, followed by an unsupported hole from Windows 8, before support takes up again with Windows 10 1607. Oddly specific.
So going back to what I said before:
I don’t like to think in terms of “This machine/OS is too old to bother to support”, but rather: “Is it theoretically possible to run this code on such a machine/OS, and if so, how much effort is required for that?”
In theory we can get the latest version of our application working on Windows 10 2015 LTSB if we downgrade it from .NET 4.8 to .NET 4.6.2. So how much effort is required?
As it turns out, there was only one issue with downgrading all projects from .NET 4.8 to .NET 4.6.2. We didn’t use any specific APIs from the newer framework. And language features aren’t directly dependent on the version of .NET that you target.
Perhaps it’s good to give a short explanation of how that works, because this is somewhat different from C++ and native code. Or actually, it’s similar, once you understand how the two relate to eachother.
For the intents and purposes of the topic at hand, we can distinguish three levels of abstraction in a native C++ environment:
This is purely the language itself, the syntax, the keywords, the grammar. Different C++ compilers will support different versions and dialects of the programming language. Newer C++ compilers will generally support newer versions of the C++ standard. So the code you write will have to be within the limits of the language support of your compiler.
This layer consists of the interface between the programming language and the underlying machine and OS. This is where your APIs live, your headers, libraries, runtimes, frameworks, SDKs, middleware and that sort of thing. The code you write has to be within the limits of the various definitions (dataypes, functions, constants etc) of what is available to you in terms of programming interface and underlying OS, runtime libraries, drivers and such.
At the lowest level we have the actual hardware: the CPU, memory and related devices that make up a working system. A CPU implements a specific instructionset. Usually the CPU will be a certain revision of a family of CPUs, which use the same basic instructionset, but with different versions, revisions and extensions available. Your code will have to be within the limits of the instructions that your hardware supports.
Commonly, .NET is referenced by a single version number, such as .NET 4.6.2. However, there is more to it than meets the eye. In fact, the .NET environment has basically the same three layers as the native C++ stack described above:
Just like C++, there are various revisions of the C# language, and newer compilers will support newer revisions. It is possible to use a later revision of the C# language for an older .NET framework target. For example, .NET 4.0 was officially introduced in Visual Studio 2010, with C# language v4.0. But later versions of Visual Studio can still target .NET 4.0. This allows you to use the newer language features while still targeting the same older installations. That is especially useful in this case: we can downgrade the target, but since we can keep using the same build tools, we can stick to the same language version. Which means we don’t have to rewrite code that uses language features that weren’t available when .NET 4.6.2 came out, when C# version 6 was the latest.
In .NET parlance, the version number indicating the version is actually describing the framework version (eg .NET 4.8 means that you are using the framework version 4.8), where ‘framework’ is essentially all the standard included APIs from Microsoft. By extension, if you use any third party packages, they too will target a minimum framework version.
Since .NET runs on a virtual machine, we don’t have any actual hardware. However, this virtual machine still has a CPU with an instruction set, even though it is not a physical one. This is where it gets interesting with .NET.
In .NET parlance, such a machine is known as a “Common Language Runtime“. There are essentially 4 different CLRs in the classic .NET world (disregarding the .NET Core branches), each supporting one or more versions of the .NET Framework:
So this means that technically, only the APIs have been updated since .NET 4.0, but the underlying virtual hardware environment is still exactly the same. It’s like an upgrade of the OS on the same machine. It also means that the move from .NET 4.6.2 to .NET 4.8 is very small. And in effect, if you install .NET 4.8, and then run a .NET 4.6.2 application, it will technically run in the same 4.8 environment as a ‘native’ .NET 4.8 application would.
This might be a good place to point out that the .NET CLR is still actually just a native (Windows) application. So technically, a .NET environment has more than 3 layers. The CLR will have been written in a native language such as C++, and it still runs on a native OS and physical hardware. If you look at it this way, you can actually count 5 or 6 layers, depending on how you count: There’s the three ‘virtual’ layers from C# language, .NET Framework and CLR, and then the three native layers inside the CLR from C++ language, Windows API and physical CPU and other hardware. I say 5 or 6, as it depends on whether or not you count the CLR layer twice.
And this leads is back to Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions. One could argue that with Windows 10 2015 LTSB we have already run into a leaky abstraction: A system that runs .NET 4.6.2 will have CLR of version 4.0, which fits the requirement of .NET Framework 4.8. However, something inside the .NET 4.8 package apparently uses some parts of the native environment that are not supported by all systems. You cannot just retrofit the newer APIs onto a .NET 4.6.2 installation, even though you have the required CLR.
But in general it can also hold for your own code: Sometimes you need more than what the standard .NET Framework supplies, so you call native functions directly from your .NET environment (known as Platform Invoke or P/Invoke). Or indirectly: you are using a third-party .NET assembly which calls native code internally.
So downgrading to older environments could also make you run into such native dependencies, which may make it more difficult to get the code to run.
A special case of issues in .NET comes from the so-called NuGet package manager. It has the usual pros and cons of package management systems. It’s convenient to be able to just add a package to your project, have it download and install automatically, and then just forget about it. Or to upgrade installed packages easily.
Obviously the achilles heel of such a system is that you depend on the repositories for the availability of packages. Entire repositories can go down, and older packages may get removed as they are no longer supported. So you may run into the situation that you can no longer build older projects, because the NuGet packages you require can no longer be downloaded.
Another problem that is related to NuGet packages is that each package has minimum requirements for the .NET version. In the case that you want to downgrade the .NET version, you may have to also downgrade the versions of certain NuGet packages to versions that are compatible with the lower .NET version.
As it turned out, I only ran into one problem when I downgraded all projects to .NET 4.6.2. And that was a NuGet package: NAudio.WinForms. The 2.x version requires at least .NET 4.7.2. There is no 1.x version of it. Why not? Well, NAudio used to be a single NuGet package, which included everything. For 2.x, it was split up in a number of sub-packages, of which NAudio.WinForms is one. The mess here is that the only sub-package that has the .NET 4.7.2 requirement is NAudio.WinForms. All the other 2.x packages target the .NET Standard 2.0, which includes .NET 4.5 and higher, so they work with .NET 4.6.2 out-of-the-box.
So, one way to get the code to work is to rework all the NuGet package references back to the old 1.x layout. However, NAudio is open source, so there is another possible way: modify it to work with .NET 4.6.2 and build it myself.
I figured the best way to fix it was to keep it as close to the .NET 4.8 version as possible, which would mean that I would prefer having NAudio 2.x over 1.x. So I downloaded the NAudio sources, and tried to modify the NAudio.WinForms project to reference .NET 4.6.2 instead of .NET 4.7.2. Somewhat to my surprise, this didn’t break the code at all. It just built right away. So the conclusion seems to be that there’s no specific reason that it references .NET 4.7.2. Which is especially strange, given that this is the only NAudio package that has this specific requirement, for all 2.x versions. With the main NAudio package, the .NET 4.7.2. requirement was added in version 2.1.0, but the 2.0.1 version still targeted .NET Standard 2.0, which means .NET 4.5 and higher.
So I ended up using a custom build for NAudio.WinForms, and I downgraded NAudio from 2.1.0 to 2.0.1. And that was enough to get my application working in .NET 4.6.2. Only a very minor step, with no practical limitations for our application. The main changes in 2.1.0 appear to be automated sample rate conversion. We weren’t using that anyway, as our code has its own sample rate conversion logic. It is trivial to add with the provided NAudio conversion interfaces anyway.
I have created an issue for NAudio.WinForms though, as I don’t understand why there’s a .NET 4.7.2 requirement for all releases, while that does not go for any of the other packages. Perhaps the author can make a special 2.x-release of this package to enable support for .NET 4.6.2 at least (and possibly all versions under .NET Standard 2.0, like the rest of NAudio 2.x), given that it is still a supported version of .NET, on certain OSes that are still in support, and cannot upgrade to higher versions.
Well yes, this fix turned out to be relatively painless. So painless in fact, that I questioned why we even moved to .NET 4.8 at all? Although I suppose NAudio already answers that question more or less: Using a recent .NET version gives you access to certain libraries that you would otherwise be locked out of, or at least, would require you to go off the beaten path.
At the same time… now that we DID fix the issue, and nothing was keeping us from targeting .NET 4.6.2 even with the latest version of the codebase, should we revert our main release from .NET 4.8 to .NET 4.6.2?
Tempting, but no. After all, so far we only know of a handful of machines that run on Windows 10 2015 LTSB. Our installed base is hundreds of machines, where we’ve been installing the .NET 4.8 version on new machines for a few years now, and have updated many older machines in the field to .NET 4.8 as well, by now. So .NET 4.8 is our tried-and-tested version at this point. It doesn’t make sense to take unnecessary risks by going back to an older version, only for a handful of machines.
What DOES make sense however, is to keep on this custom .NET 4.6.2 build in a special release branch. Since the code changes are so minor, it’s trivial to merge the latest changes from the .NET 4.8 branch onto the .NET 4.6.2 branch and create a custom build, if we ever need to upgrade the Windows 10 2015 LTSB machines again. So that would be the best of both worlds.
Anyway, at this point the professional part of the job was done, and it had moved into the realm of interest as a hobbyist. Because, .NET 4.6.2, wasn’t that also available on some other OSes…? Like, Vista? Stay tuned for the next part.
Okay, picking up where we left off last time: we have an application that now runs on .NET 4.6.2. So far it’s only tested on Windows 7 and Windows 10 platforms, which the .NET 4.8 version was targeting anyway. But .NET 4.6.2 is also supported on Windows Vista, so let’s find out where the abstractions leak.
To “well, actually” myself here right away: officially .NET 4.6 is the last version of .NET to be supported by Vista. However, .NET 4.6.1 and .NET 4.6.2 are minor updates, which I apparently have installed on all the Vista installations I have kept around. It’s been years so I don’t know exactly how I got them on there, but I believe it was an installation package that was officially targeted at Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, but silently installed on Vista as well. So my theory is that they just ‘unofficially’ work on Vista, but are not advertised as such (I vaguely recall that I also tried to get .NET 4.7 and newer versions on Vista, but those would crash because of missing imports). I suppose for all intents and purposes, I could also have retargeted to .NET 4.6. But since I verified that .NET 4.6.2 was actually installed on my Vista systems (two x64 ones and one x86 one, so it was no coincidence), and they ran .NET 4.6.2 applications, I decided to stick to that. For the intents and purposes of this article, it doesn’t matter whether I would have targeted .NET 4.6 or .NET 4.6.2, the main point is to have a working .NET environment on Vista in which to run the application targeted to Windows 7 and newer.
The first thing I’d like to point out here is that .NET 4.6.2 was introduced with Visual Studio 2017, which does not run on Windows Vista. And even if we would target a version of .NET that was actually supported by tools that do run on Vista (which would be Visual Studio 2010, which supports .NET 4.0), we would run into the problem that I already mentioned last time: newer tools allow you to use newer versions of the C# language. The codebase would not actually compile in the Vista environment. I would have to rewrite various parts of the code to work around that. So making the code work in Vista is one can of worms, but making the code build on Vista is yet another can of worms.
This was not an area I was willing to explore. As I said, I was happy that the .NET 4.6.2 codebase was so similar to the .NET 4.8 codebase that a merge from .NET 4.8 to .NET 4.6.2 was trivial. If I were to rewrite the code to support an older language version, I would lose that advantage. Or, I would have to merge these changes back into the .NET 4.8 branch as well, in which case I would lose the advantage of using a newer language altogether.
Which means that I would actually be cross-developing: write, build and debug the code on a modern Windows in a modern Visual Studio, and then test on Vista. This would also mean that you can’t easily debug and single-step through the code on the Vista machine itself. So you may have to resort to remote debugging between a Vista and a modern Windows machine, or just do it the oldfashioned way: run the code on Vista with enough logging built in so you can figure out what the problems are, and make clever use of various tools to pinpoint problems.
Browsers… Notoriously bad in being backwards-compatible. When you integrate a browser into your own code, such as CEF (or in this case, technically CefSharp), it is no different. CEF is the Chromium Embedded Framework, which is based on Chromium, which you may know as the browser engine that powers Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, among others. And as you may know, Chromium/Chrome stopped support for Vista years ago. Accessing the web on an unsupported/outdated OS is generally the most annoying part of using an old OS. You cannot get access to a recent browser that supports recent web standards, and at the same time most websites require a recent browser. So the browsers you can get to work on your outdated OS, won’t be able to open most webpages.
So, the problem here is that I cannot get a recent version of CefSharp to work on Vista. A clear case of a leaky abstraction, as CefSharp relies on native code, which in turn has dependencies on Windows 7 or newer. With the current build, the application would crash immediately on startup, as it failed to initialize the underlying CEF browser process. I could rollback to an earlier version of CefSharp that still supports Vista, but that would be so old that it wouldn’t be able to display most current webpages anyway. Aside from that, I’d have to go so far back that the CefSharp interface is significantly different, and lacks various features that we require. So any way I’d slice it, it would be a half-baked implementation.
Web views aren’t essential to our application. They can be used optionally, but you can just use regular text, images and videos to create content. So I decided to *really* make it optional: don’t crash the application when CefSharp is not available, but just run the application without the optional functionality.
The beauty of .NET is that any native DLL that is referenced, is loaded dynamically. With regular native code, you generally import DLL functions via the PE import table. That means that dependencies have to be resolved directly when your binary is loaded (a good point to mention the excellent Dependencies tool, with which you can debug missing imports, itself a spiritual successor to the old Dependency Walker tool).
With .NET you don’t have to worry about including functions and libraries that aren’t supported on the platform. Your code will still run, and there’s no problem as long as you avoid calling these functions specifically. And even then, there will ‘only’ be an exception, which you can catch and handle inside your application. So it’s much easier to make your application robust against missing imports.
In this case I decided to just make my code robust against a non-loading CefSharp. This seemed to be a good idea, that should have been in the codebase anyway, so I integrated this fix it into the main codebase. Now the application could start and run on Vista, under the condition that web views and other CefSharp-based things could not be used.
Well, that’s what I wrote many years ago. Or does it? The thing is that the Direct3D 11 I wrote about back in 2009 is not the same it is in 2022. There have been a few revisions over the years, adding new functionality and new versions of certain interfaces, the latest being 11.4. Of course these updates were never received by Vista. So you have to be careful not to use any of the new functionality, but stick only to the bare Direct3D 11.0 API.
Aside from the API itself, there’s also the drivers that are outdated. Vista support was dropped by GPU vendors many years ago, which can also mean that certain features, texture formats and such are not supported under Vista, even when they are supported on the same hardware with a newer OS/driver.
I ran into one specific problem with this, on an old Intel GM965 system (with an integrated X3100 GPU, Intel’s first DirectX 10 GPU). This was an issue I had run into before, with my own Direct3D10/11 engine. Namely, when you create a swap chain, you have to specify the pixel format. But, something strange happened with the move from DX9 to DX10. Namely, in DX9 only a small selection of formats was allowed for swap chains. They were all in RGB-order, and the basic variations were in number of bits per component and with or without alpha. So your choices were very limited, and it was basically impossible to pick the wrong one.
In DX10, the low-level management of buffers was split off into a separate DXGI layer. And DXGI introduced a lot more pixel formats. Most notably, there is no longer just a single go-to format for 32-bit RGB. There are now differences in pixel order as well. So for example, you have both DXGI_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM and DXGI_FORMAT_B8G8R8A8_UNORM. It’s somewhat strange that you would actually have to specify the pixel order, as the buffers for a swapchain cannot be accessed by the CPU. And for the shaders, the order does not matter, as the output of your shaders is into a datatype with r, g, b and a components, which will always be mapped correctly to the rendertarget, regardless of pixel order.
In practice, this usually isn’t a problem, as most GPUs and drivers support both formats anyway (this is actually a requirement for WDDM 1.1+ drivers). So whichever one you choose is fine. In fact, it seems that even the Direct3D team thought it was a bit silly, so they added a D3D11_CREATE_DEVICE_BGRA_SUPPORT flag. But on really old drivers and runtimes that may not be supported. And Vista on an Intel GM965 seems to be such a case: if I specify the BGRA flag, the device drops down to feature level 9_1, instead of 10 when I don’t specify the flag. And of course the format that the code picked, happened to be the unsupported one in DirectX 10 mode.
Funnily when I ran into that issue years earlier, I found that different Intel GPUs would support different formats. So one family only supported RGBA, and another only supported BGRA. I think that may be because the GM965 is a really early DX10 GPU, so it has an early DX10-level driver, with basic DXGI support, and WDDM 1.0. So DX11 runs on top of DX10 and the native DXGI here. The other Intel GPUs I tried were DX9, so you would instead run DX11 via the DX9 interface instead of the DX10 interface, and DXGI may be part of that interface. So Microsoft may be mapping to the hardware via the DX9 interface, and somehow the pixel format in the DX10 interface from Intel has the inverse pixel order. At least, that explanation makes the most sense to me. The GPUs are close relatives, so I would find it unlikely that Intel suddenly switched the pixel order around between GPU iterations. It may also explain why the device dropped to level 9_1 when forcing the BGRA-flag: only the Microsoft translation layer can support BGRA, the native DXGI interface can not.
A simple fix was to just use the CheckFormatSupport() method to try to find a format that has the D3D11_FORMAT_SUPPORT_DISPLAY flag set, to indicate that it can be used for a swap chain. Since this code merely makes the application more robust, I decided to also push this fix to the main codebase.
The Windows Imaging Component Framework (WIC) has been available since Windows Vista. So we should be good there, I suppose? Well, not entirely. Like with Direct3D 11, it has been updated over time. As it turned out, I was using IWICImagingFactory2 in my code somewhere. According to MSDN, this was introduced in Windows 8. However, this code runs without issue in Windows 7, so apparently it was added in a later update. Ah yes, another one of those Platform Updates.
Anyway, this interface is not available on Vista, not with any update. So I had to downgrade it back to the regular IWICImagingFactory. Apparently the code was not using any specific functionality from the newer interface at this point, so other than changing the type and instantiation of the interface, no changes were required.
Or does it? Well, it depends on how you look at it. Media Foundation was first introduced with Vista, so yes, it has some level of support. However, much like Direct3D 11 and WIC, Media Foundation has received various updates over time, which haven’t all made it back to Vista.
It’s time to make a context switch here. So far we were only talking about C# code. The application was originally written with SlimDX. Since this had no support for Media Foundation, the implementation for that part was done with C++/CLR. So it’s still .NET code, but there’s native code involved, because once again our abstraction is leaking. The application has since been migrated to SharpDX, as SlimDX has been abandoned (and by now SharpDX has also been abandoned). But although SharpDX does offer interfaces for Media Foundation, the C++ code was never rewritten. So this next part deals with C++, not C#, and focuses mostly on the native interfacing with Media Foundation.
Microsoft made a bit of a mess of things here. Unlike Direct3D, there’s no clear versioning system in Media Foundation. So there’s no simple way to interface with a specific version of Media Foundation, or to check for optional features and APIs. What’s more, their own SDK makes it difficult to use.
For starters, where Direct3D uses a factory pattern, so you only need to include a few basic factory functions to create the required objects, and then go from there with QueryInterface and such, Media Foundation has a lot of functions that you link to directly. And if you happen to link to a function that is only supported in Windows 7 or higher, you will get the problem that your entire binary will fail to find the imports, and as such will fail to load. So you have to manually import these functions via LoadLibrary()/GetProcAddress() to avoid issues on older systems.
In my case, I found that a call to MFTRegisterLocalByCLSID was breaking my application. This function is only available on Windows 7 and newer. Not a problem until now. But when running on Vista, I need to remove the import. So I converted it to load dynamically. The call wasn’t specifically required for the video decoder anyway, so I did not have to make a workaround at this point.
The annoying part here is the SDK. As you may know, Microsoft allows you to specify a target Windows version, and the SDK headers will filter out any function definitions, data types, constants and such that are not supported on the target Windows version. But that doesn’t help us much here. I can target Vista, and then the MFTRegisterLocalByCLSID function is not defined at all. Sure, I can’t reference it, so I can’t break my code either. But that also means I can’t conditionally use it on a higher version of Windows that DOES support it. So that means I need to leave the target at Windows 7 or higher.
Anyway, after fixing the missing import, our code will run now, right? Well, yes and no. That is, my DLL now actually loaded correctly, so its code could be called. But it immediately failed on the MFStartup() call. Did I mention the Media Foundation versioning is a mess? Well, the thing is, you pass a constant to the MFStartup() call, which defines the version you want to initialize. This is a constant in the SDK, defined as MF_VERSION. So it basically doesn’t say which version you want to initialize specifically, but it is implicitly set to the version that your SDK supports.
Or well, it isn’t really. Because if we look at how MF_VERSION works, it looks like this:
#if !defined(MF_VERSION)
#if (WINVER >= _WIN32_WINNT_WIN7)
#define MF_SDK_VERSION 0x0002
#else // Vista
#define MF_SDK_VERSION 0x0001
#endif // (WINVER >= _WIN32_WINNT_WIN7)
#define MF_API_VERSION 0x0070 // This value is unused in the Win7 release and left at its Vista release value
#define MF_VERSION (MF_SDK_VERSION << 16 | MF_API_VERSION)
#endif //!defined(MF_VERSION)So this boils down to there being only two possible values for MF_VERSION: Vista or Windows 7. These are controlled via the target version system in the SDK that I mentioned above.
This fails in two ways:
Why does it fail? Because Vista received Platform Updates, that’s why. Specifically, in 2011, Vista received the Platform Update Supplement. And it says this:
This update enables the playback of MP4 files, H.264 files, and AAC files by using the Source Reader component.
That is just one line, but it is a very significant update. This enables the new IMFSourceReader interface, and supports a number of file formats that weren’t previously available. It brings Media Foundation mostly on par with Windows 7. My code actually uses the IMFSourceReader interface, and we mainly use it to play back MP4/H.264 content, so this is very significant.
But, MF_VERSION. There is nothing between Vista and Windows 7. There is no way to configure the SDK to target Vista with the Platform Update Supplement installed. If you target Windows 7, you get the IMFSourceReader interface, but MF_VERSION will make MFStartup() fail. And if you target Vista, you can’t use the IMFSourceReader.
So I figured I would try a workaround: what if I target Windows 7, and get access to the IMFSourceReader, but I won’t use MF_VERSION, but instead manually construct the correct value for Vista?
I came up with this:
#define MF_SDK_VERSION_WIN7 0x0002
#define MF_SDK_VERSION_VISTA 0x0001
#define MF_VERSION_LATEST MF_VERSION
#define MF_VERSION_WIN7 (MF_SDK_VERSION_WIN7 << 16 | MF_API_VERSION)
#define MF_VERSION_VISTA (MF_SDK_VERSION_VISTA << 16 | MF_API_VERSION)While it is not entirely clear to me what the significance of the version is in practice (using MF_VERSION_VISTA seems to work fine on every platform), I figured I could try to just call MFStartup() with the MF_VERSION_LATEST first, which would be the highest that the SDK can target. And if that fails, I can try calling it again with a lower version. Then you always initialize MFStartup() against the highest possible version on the platform.
And indeed, MFStartup() now worked on Vista, so the rest of my code could now finally be executed as well. And the Platform Update Supplement did what it said on the tin: the IMFSourceReader was supported on Vista, and it could play MP4/H.264 content. Excellent!
Again this bit of code seemed to only improve compatibility and robustness, so I merged it into the main codebase as well.
There was just one small glitch left: I had assumed that NV12 texture support was available. On most hardware/drivers it is, but again the GM965 was an exception. So that requires a small workaround, by specifically testing for format support, like the above RGBA/BGRA issue. And again, that is a bit of code that just makes the application more robust, so it doesn’t hurt to merge that into the mainline. There actually was a // TODO-comment in the code there, but it wasn’t relevant to fix it at the time, as we could simply assume that all the target hardware supported NV12 anyway.
At this point I became curious… How much further can we downgrade this code? Would .NET 4.0 be possible? Could we even get it to work in some form on Windows XP? The small print on the MFStartup()-page was intriguing:
This function is available on the following platforms if the Windows Media Format 11 SDK redistributable components are installed:
- Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) and later.
- Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with KB900325 (Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005) and KB925766 (October 2006 Update Rollup for Windows XP Media Center Edition) installed.
Wait? Does it say… XP? Media Foundation… on XP?
So, the score so far is: it runs on Vista, with everything still supported and working, with the exception of CefSharp. Let’s wrap the .NET 4.6.2/Vista part up here, and next time, let’s look into .NET 4.0 and Windows XP.
Modder ‘H3llBaron’ has released a brand new version of the Essential HD Pack Mod for id Software’s controversial horror Doom game, Doom 3. This mod aims to significantly improve the graphics of this game, and we highly recommend downloading it. Going into more details, version 2.0 features numerous QOL improvements. Moreover, it packs AI-upscaled textures … Continue reading Doom 3 Essential HD Pack V2.0 is available for download →
The post Doom 3 Essential HD Pack V2.0 is available for download appeared first on DSOGaming.
An elderly couple go out to the wilderness for one last campout in the cold, like old times.
Trauma is different for everyone affected. It can look different, and the person can wear it differently. He Fucked the Girl Out of Me doesn’t overtly say this but seems to understand trauma like, well, someone who has dealt with it for a long time.
Selected by the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam for their DocLab exhibition, He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is both difficult and important to talk about. Part of the difficulty is it’s an 18+ game with an F-bomb in the title. It gets filed right next to the games about big-breasted androids. Any site that reports on it runs the risk of getting a weird look from the robots that run the internet (breast-size unknown).
It’s a free game, so developer Taylor Mccue isn’t going to lose any money on it, but writing about trauma is difficult in itself. You don’t want to send it out into the world to die and not be seen.
You may ask yourself, “why would I want to play a game that makes me feel bad?” Although I may opine tragedy as a dead art, I also think it’s a fair enough point. There’s something to be said about keeping your head in the sand, but it’s another thing to pull it out and stick it in a termite mound instead. Indeed, I had my own concerns when I went into the game, but I felt the subject matter was one I needed more perspective on.
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is presented as a semi-autobiographical recount of the author’s experience as a trans woman in the sex trade. While it doesn’t pull any punches, it’s not a pornographic game. At the same time, it goes out of its way to show what happened in a way that’s free of judgment and blame. It presents itself as a perspective on these particular traumatic events. One person’s trauma is another person’s kink. This is what happened. It happened because things happen. Just try to understand why it hurt so badly.
The story is told earnestly as a collection of memories linked up as best they can be. While control is handed over to the player at times, generally, the only option is to walk the way it wants you to and interact with something before it proceeds. While it impressively comes packed as a Game Boy ROM, it’s more of a narrative than a game.
My concerns about playing He Fucked the Girl Out of Me proved to be on the money. I did my playthrough the night before doing this write-up and lost considerable sleep. Although my experiences aren’t directly comparable with what’s depicted, it seems to have unlocked a memory my brain repressed. On the positive side, it’s one that my therapist has been probing to find, so I’m sure she’ll be… well, “happy” about it is definitely not the right sentiment. Relieved that we can now address the issue is likely more accurate.
Where He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is important is in how it can help you understand trauma. Not just the kind experienced by other people, but quite possibly your own. It’s a subject that is incredibly difficult to both explain and wrap your head around, to the point where a lot of people don’t even try. And that’s to the world’s detriment.
We, especially as gamers, tend to relate maturity with violence, swearing, and nudity, which is funny because those are concepts that we learn to understand as children. Tackling and understanding heavy topics like trauma is a truer measure of maturity. It allows us to grow beyond the lessons learned in childhood and become better people, both for ourselves and others.
If there’s one last thing I need to say about He Fucked the Girl Out of Me, it’s simply: be careful. Trigger warnings are discussed before the game is started, but even if you’re not susceptible, you should be prepared for what you’re getting into. You need to understand that the game is a bummer, and even if it explains another person’s important life experiences and gives perspective on mental trauma, you also need to take care of yourself.
I don’t regret having played it. At the same time, I’m not happy that I did. I just knew I had to, and I did my best to prepare myself for the consequences. So this isn’t exactly a recommendation. This is merely me trying to say, “Here’s this thing. It should be appreciated.”
The post He F—ed the Girl Out of Me is both important and difficult to talk about appeared first on Destructoid.
Microsoft-owned code hosting platform GitHub has announced the introduction of a direct channel for security researchers to report vulnerabilities in public repositories that allow it.
I never thought I would be saying this so soon, but revered voice actor Kevin Conroy has died at age 66. The man who so many looked up to as "Batman" for decades has left us, and the world feels a little dimmer without him. As the stories about working with him continue to flood in, the common throughline shows industry-wide respect for a wholeheartedly kind individual. It's never easy to watch people who have contributed to the entertainment you've grown up with pass on, but it's even harder when they're as treasured as Conroy was.
For over 30 years, Conroy had been the Caped Crusader's definitive voice, whether in the guise of Bruce Timm's "Batman: The Animated Series" or the "Arkham" video games. Among the sea of talented folks who have donned the cowl, Conroy struck this perfect balance, where the imposing stature of Batman is molded from the hidden melancholy of Bruce Wayne.
Although "The Batman" is my favorite live-action adaptation, it's hard to argue that "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" is anything other than one of the best representations of the character in any medium. The film may have underperformed when it was first released to theaters in 1993, but in the time since, it has been rightfully acclaimed as a benchmark in the DC character's legacy.
Batman is shown as a protector, a path forward, and more hauntingly, a curse, especially as Bruce finds love at a critical moment in his life. Everything with Mark Hamill's Joker and Dana Delany's Andrea Beaumont is brilliant stuff, but there's one scene that best exemplifies just how fitting Conroy was in the role.
The graveyard scene in "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" comes at a critical point in the film, where Bruce Wayne has started to fall for Andrea just as he's attempting to reconcile with his place in the world as Gotham's protector. Prior to this scene, his innate sense of moralism leads the hero-in-training to confront a motorcycle gang causing trouble. As Bruce, he gets the wind knocked out of him. Later in the evening, he has a personal reckoning with who Bruce was and who Bruce is becoming, as he visits his parents' tombstone. As Bruce gets on his knees, he confronts the promise he made so long ago:
"Please! I need it to be different now. I know I made a promise, but I didn't see this coming. I didn't count on being happy."
Batman has always been deconstructed throughout his many adaptations, but the confusion and sorrow in Kevin Conroy's voice is devastating here. The Caped Crusader is no stranger to brooding confrontation, but Conroy unleashes something different than anything we'd seen before. We want him to live a happy and fulfilling life with Andrea, but knowing that we're watching one part of a long flashback, it hurts, even more, to see the sun on the horizon that could have been under different circumstances.
The scene is also a great parallel to when Batman sees Andrea visiting her father's grave earlier in the film. He stares at the Wayne tombstone, not with the mournful disorientation of Bruce, but with the cold acceptance of Batman. Conroy's performance on both ends of the Caped Crusader is legendary, but this scene remains a special part of his history. If this scene gives you the feels, know that it was just as harrowing for Conroy to record.
In Vulture's oral history of "Batman: The Animated Series," there's a section where voice director Andrea Romano reminisces on the day they recorded his dialogue for the graveyard scene. Once Conroy had finished speaking the dialogue that ended up in the finished film, she needed to take a breather to process where he had taken his performance:
"I was crying so hard. I was absolutely devastated, in a good way, by his performance there. I've always said that I will never ask an actor to do something I'm not willing to do myself. So actors trust me to take the ride with them and Kevin knew that he could open up during that scene and, in doing so, I was right there with him, but I literally could not speak to continue on."
Being vulnerable in front of another human being can take a lot out of you, and if the person listening to your words has never seen you in that state before, it can be a deeply emotional experience for both parties. Bruce is always trying to mask his internal pain through the protective actions of Batman. You rarely see him this bare, let alone when it comes to loving someone. For a character whose appeal is fighting bad guys while dressed in a spandex costume that resembles a human bat, it's a shockingly heavy scene that gets to the heart of Batman's humanity.
When it came to bringing out this rarely seen side of the Caped Crusader, Kevin Conroy knew he had to pull this out of him from within, as he simply couldn't manufacture that kind of emotion (via Variety):
"That was the time I realized fully that you can't fake Batman. You can't just make a deep, husky sound with your voice. You have to base it in the pain of his childhood each time or it doesn't sound right"
The recording booth had been stunned into silence, as Conroy saw the ripple effects unfold, especially with Romano. In her tears, he saw the true effect he had behind the microphone as Bruce:
"She could see I really, really went emotionally to the place that he goes to. Boy, I was proud of it and I loved it and I think that's the day I realized, This is really going to be an acting experience that I'm going to be really proud of."
Nearly three decades later, this scene holds up immensely well as a reflection of why Conroy's considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, interpretations of Batman ever put to the screen. In the span of 76 minutes, you get to see almost every shade of the DC superhero in one emotionally resonant performance. Conroy considered playing Batman as one of the greatest pleasures of his life, which makes it that much more devastating that he was taken away too soon.
In reflecting on how Conroy masterfully brought Batman to new places, I couldn't help but reflect on a similar moment from his comic earlier this year.
Less than five months ago, Kevin Conroy released "Finding Batman," a comic commissioned for DC Pride that details his experience in the industry as a gay man. As you travel from panel to panel, you're witness to a man who saw the death of his friends at the height of the AIDS epidemic, all while the industry mocked him for being openly queer. It's a devastating, yet inspiring read that illustrates just how much he wanted to be accepted by his peers in an unforgiving world that didn't love him back. As I reached the end, I saw a parallel to the graveyard scene from "Mask of the Phantasm."
Conroy's father was a destructive alcoholic, while his brother suffered from schizophrenia, both of whom shunned him in their own ways. In the comic's final panels, it shows him going in for the audition that would change his life. To channel Batman, Conroy envisioned cradling the bodies of his loved ones, while trying to reconcile with the happiness that would come from this incredible career opportunity. Much like Bruce in that scene, he alternated between how Batman would feel versus what was going on internally.
But unlike Bruce, who tragically fell into his role as the shadow of Gotham, Conroy was instead granted the role of a lifetime. Love won. Out of his pain came the voice of the character he was destined to play. With the wound still feeling fresh, we now mourn a significant loss, not only for the death of a great Batman, but for Conroy, a man whose heart was bigger than himself.
"Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" is currently streaming on HBO Max.
Read this next: Batman Movies Ranked From Worst To Best
The post Let's Talk About Kevin Conroy's Greatest Batman Moment appeared first on /Film.
The excitement is starting to swell for the Jenna Ortega starring Netflix series "Wednesday," debuting one day before Thanksgiving on Wednesday (clever!), November 23, 2022. Ortega's casting as the titular character is absolutely inspired, and it will be fascinating to see just how similar her take will be to the classic deadpan delivery that Christina Ricci made so memorable in both "The Addams Family" and "Addams Family Values" in the early '90s. The first season of the macabre new series is set to run for eight episodes with a story revolving around Wednesday's high school years where she will attempt to harness newly discovered psychic powers.
The weird and wonderful Tim Burton directed the first four episodes, which should help to set Wednesday Addams down a path that feels in line with Ricci's indelible performance without doling out a retread of the dark humor and impeccable comedic timing the character is remembered for. In a fun twist, Ricci is set to play Miss Thornhill, one of Wednesday's teachers at Nevermore Academy, the institute where her parents Morticia and Gomez met as teenagers. Interview Magazine recently paired the two actors together to talk about the differences between their interpretations of Wednesday Addams, a gruesome girl often hailed as one of the original outsiders. Ortega was skeptical to take on the part at first, telling Ricci that the last thing she wanted was to just do a cookie-cutter copy of the Wednesday people know and love.
Christina Ricci officially conducts the interview with Jenna Ortega, following the trend of one-on-one conversations about the craft that have grown increasingly common with shows like Variety's "Actors On Actors," which usually occur around awards season. It's rare, however, when the two performers participating have played the same character in completely different decades across film and television. In their talk, Ortega got the chance to tell Ricci about the first time she saw the hit Barry Sonnenfeld films from the mid-'90s. "I was eight or nine and loved them," she tells Ricci. "You don't always see it, but I have a very dry sense of humor to the point where I get myself in trouble because everyone thinks I'm serious." Ortega says she'd been compared to Wednesday Addams a lot throughout her life and she deems the comparison "the greatest honor."
Describing the new series as "Nancy Drew-esque," the kooky procedural direction that "Wednesday" seems to be going in does sound a little too similar to Netflix's witchy mystery "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina." But Ortega touches on a crucial point that feels very Tim Burton-esque as well, saying that Wednesday "remains an outcast in a sea full of outcasts." That point-of-view could imbue Ortega's version of Wednesday with a little more pathos as a loner among weirdos, which will hopefully set her apart from Ricci's turn as Wednesday:
"I'm just saying you are who people see as Wednesday, and that's just the truth. I feel like the script was very reminiscent of '90s Wednesday. It was really important to me that I wasn't doing a knockoff of your performance, and it was different."
Having an entire season of television to develop a slightly older, more complex version of the character could be a blessing, but there's also a risky pitfall of allowing Wednesday's biting wit to become too mean-spirited and lose sight of the overall emotional arc over multiple episodes. In an insightful exchange between Jenna Ortega and Christina Ricci, the duo talked about how hard it is to walk that line when playing such an extreme character. "Another thing is every time we've seen Wednesday, she's been 5 years old, 10 years old," Ortega points out. "So when someone is saying really dark, twisted things out of a place of pure honesty and innocence, that naive aspect of a child, it's a bit different when you get older and become a teenager because then you just sound like a b****. You don't want her to be nasty."
Ricci could completely relate, remembering, "That happened to me when we came back to do the second 'Addams Family.' The note back from rehearsals was now that she's a teenager, it just sounds nasty and bratty." After her Emmy-nominated role on Showtime's highly addictive series "Yellowjackets," Ricci's experience playing the extreme, rampaging character Misty Quigley seems to have keyed her into the struggle of staying consistent while acting on a TV show with so many moving parts. Relating to Ortega, Ricci said:
"I found with a character like this, sometimes when they're written in such an extreme way, it can be difficult to move a traditional narrative along because the emotional reactions aren't where people expect them to be — especially when you're dealing with different directors and different people's takes on such an extreme character."
For a show like "Wednesday" that seems so inherently fun, the conversation between Christina Ricci and Jenna Ortega is especially enlightening, particularly when Ortega talks about how stressful and overwhelming the job was. That may be a sign that some deeper meaning can be mined in the series, making it act as more of a lighthouse for kids and adults who may feel like outsiders themselves. One possible worrying sign, unfortunately, is when Ortega points out a little snippet about Tim Burton's directing style. "Tim did not want me to have any expression or emotion at all," she told Ricci. "He wanted a flat surface, which I understand. It's funny and great except when you're trying to move a plot along, and Wednesday is in every scene."
That director preference is probably purely intended to be a humorous starting point for Ortega's stab at Wednesday, or maybe it's because the original idea for Burton's version of "The Addams Family" was intended to be a stop-motion animated project. In that scenario, the eccentric filmmaker could have fixed the expressions on clay faces to his liking. The emotionless quality could also be a way for all the outcasts watching to transfer their feelings over to Wednesday as some kind of goth avatar.
After diving into this interview, I'm more curious about "Wednesday" than ever before and personally can't wait to see if Ricci's involvement as Miss Thornhill will amount to anything more than a glorified cameo. Here's hoping that Ricci plays an integral part because, with these two actresses at their peak, two Wednesdays are definitely better than one.
Netflix is dropping the entirety of "Wednesday" season 1 on November 23, 2022.
Read this next: Horror Roles That Changed Actors Forever
The post Jenna Ortega Didn't Want Wednesday To Be A 'Knockoff' Of Christina Ricci appeared first on /Film.
When you need someone to narrate the history of the universe — and Mel Brooks is busy — you might as well go with Morgan Freeman. Not only has Freeman played God in "Bruce Almighty" and "Evan Almighty," but he's also told "The Story of God" and "The Story of Us" for National Geographic.
In "Our Universe," Freeman is lending his voice to a new six-part nature documentary series for Netflix. As the title implies, this series is even bigger in scope than "The Story of Us." It's looking back at the whole history of the universe and how 13.8 billion years have led us to this moment.
Freeman also narrated the Oscar-winning documentary "March of the Penguins," and while I'm not a wildlife expert, I think you might spot some brown penguins in the "Our Universe" trailer. For anyone who enjoyed seeing cosmic events recreated with special effects in Terrence Malick's "Voyage of Time," but wished the movie had been narrated by Detective Somerset instead of Detective Mills (as in, Freeman and Brad Pitt's "Seven" characters), this Netflix series might be right up your alley. Check out the trailer for "Our Universe" below.
"In the lives of every creature on Earth," Freeman narrates, "there are echoes of events that occurred a long, long time ago, events of unimaginable scale and violent beauty that connect all living things." And in the life of every TV or movie synopsis, apparently, there are echoes of previous taglines.
Netflix's official synopsis for "Our Universe" evokes the tagline for "Jurassic Park," billing it as, "An epic tale 13.8 billion years in the making." It sees your "adventure 65 million years in the making," Steven Spielberg, and is ready to sweeten the pot from millions to billions. Here's the synopsis in full:
Narrated by Academy Award-winner Morgan Freeman, comes an epic tale 13.8 billion years in the making. Blending stunning wildlife footage with eye-popping cosmic special effects, this six-part series takes viewers on a fascinating adventure to explore the connections that drive our natural world. From the birth of the Sun to the birth of a sea turtle, Our Universe uses groundbreaking animation to dramatize the spectacular celestial forces that generated our solar system, while modern camera and CGI technology bring the audience up close and personal with some of the most iconic, charismatic animals on Earth.
"Our Universe" is coming to Netflix just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, on November 22, 2022.
Read this next: 20 Movies About Time Travel Ranked Worst To Best
The post Our Universe Trailer: Morgan Freeman Narrates The History of Everything appeared first on /Film.
In some ways, the second season of "The White Lotus" is exactly the same as the first. We once again have signed on for a stay at the titular resort where we'll spend 7 weeks watching the filthy rich guests spiral into madness, verbally spar with one another, and put their very worst selves on display. All the while, their so-called peaceful getaway will become a nightmarish stay that ends with at least one dead body. But the difference is in the details. We have a new crop of guests and with them, series creator Mike White is taking his scathing commentary in a slightly different direction.
Instead of skewering the wealthy elites through the lens of tourism and colonization, season 2 has set its sights on sexual politics — a thorny subject matter no matter which way you approach it. So naturally, "The White Lotus" needed a bit of a makeover — and I'm not talking about the switch from Hawaiian paradise to sun-soaked Sicily. Mike White has dubbed this new chapter "a sex comedy with teeth," and made sure to pair it with an elaborate opening sequence that befits the season's horny and murderous tendencies. So if you're looking to understand this show to its core, then look no further than the first 90 seconds of every episode — all the secrets of "The White Lotus" season 2 are hidden in the opening credits.
The opening visuals of "The White Lotus" season 2 were created by Katrina Crawford and Mark Bashore, the same masterminds behind season 1's lavish sequence. Where the Hawaiian excursion offered tropical-themed wallpaper adorned with rotting fruit and blood splatters, the second outing of "The White Lotus" embraces its Sicilian roots with Italian frescoes. But artistic flourishes and detailed portraits are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this artwork — these frescoes are uniquely depraved.
Much like the White Lotus guests, the surface-level beauty is just for show. When the 90-second segment opens, we're treated to a stunning composition from Cristobal Tapia de Veer, a twist on the season 1 opener that purposely emulates an Italian opera. Meanwhile, the accompanying imagery — a Romanesque fresco — seems to present us with the tale of romantic courtship. But spend a moment longer in this world and you realize what lies beneath the surface: cracks in composure, festering darkness, and yup, even some bloodshed. Is that a villa burning in the distance? A hunter murdering a boar? And who is that in flagranté behind a column?
By the time the opening reaches its feverish, chaotic high, the melodic soprano ad her accompanying harp are nowhere to be found. The vocals have become distorted and the pace has accelerated.
But here's the kicker: every image — and particularly their timing to the actors being credited — is purposeful. They provide hints at who these characters really are and where their storylines are headed. Given the fact that we know the season ends with not one, but a collection of corpses, could the opening sequence also offer a hint about who it may be? We'll have to dig deep to figure that out.
As the credits roll, Tapia de Veer's "Renaissance" begins with a harp, a gentle soprano, and a romantic engagement: a debonair man tipping his hat to a beautiful young woman. Seems nice, right? Except for the fact that right around the corner, hidden from their view, another woman is watching it go down. Much closer to the man's age, she wears a wedding ring and a look of disdain. It seems like infidelity is the name of this game, so it's no wonder that F. Murray Abraham's name appears onscreen, connecting this moment to Bert — the womanizing patriarch of the Di Grasso clan.
In its first two episodes, "The White Lotus" has revealed Bert as a walking, talking representation of old-timey misogyny. Despite decades spent cheating on his wife, Bert assumes all was well since she never divorced him. Now that she's dead, he spends every other breath openly harassing *cough* flirting with the women he encounters. But Bert's toxicity turns out to be a single piece of a very irritating portrait: because in reality, all three of the Di Grasso men are horrifically toxic.
Michael Imperioli's Dominic Di Grasso is sexist in a different way than his father. While he doesn't openly flirt with their waitress at dinner, there's a good reason he's earned the scorn of the family's women. Just like his father, Dominic has been unfaithful — but he made the mistake of getting caught. Fittingly, Imperioli's name appears as a man bows before a woman who walks away from him, tossing a necklace into the ocean.
It illustrates his devastation at being left by his wife, but the cracks in the fresco remind us that it's a much more complicated situation. While Dominic may see himself as the tragic figure still trying to save his marriage, the man can't even get through a weeklong vacation without propositioning the first sex worker he lays his eyes on. So much for salvaging his marriage to the great Laura Dern.
And then there's Albie (Adam DiMarco), the nepotism baby/Stanford grad who fancies himself a savior to women. When DiMarco's name appears onscreen, it's accompanied by a painting of a young musician, performing for the pleasure of a woman who lazes in the grass. What else might we expect from the "nice guy" who's been clinging to Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) since he first caught her crying on the phone? At first glance, there's nothing of concern in this image. But behind the musician, a dog paws at the woman's dress — a hint that Albie isn't as kind as he seems.
The dog will appear elsewhere in the opening sequence, seeming to represent primal male desire. It makes perfect sense as a hidden red flag for Albie's character. While he seemed nice enough at first, his persistent pursuit of Portia and his desire to be her savior is becoming pretty damn icky. It's not the blatant misogyny of his grandfather or even the regretful selfishness of his father. Albie sees himself as outside of the problem entirely. At first, the audience does too. But by the time he tells Portia that he has a thing for women who are "pretty wounded birds," we know better.
When Jennifer Coolidge's name appears onscreen, we see a woman in a tower, staring forlornly out a window as a chained monkey climbs to his escape. Which of these is Tanya? "The White Lotus" wasted absolutely no time telling us what has become of the McQuoid-Hunt marriage: Tanya is anxious and insecure about the state of their relationship and Greg (Jon Gries) has dejectedly checked out. He can't be bothered to answer her texts, show any affection or do anything besides complain about how many macaroons she ate.
Neither of them seems very happy, but neither is considering divorce. Tanya is bound by her own desire to make things work and Greg? Well, how can he abandon the women who has bankrolled his medical recovery? But this image floats the possibility of one of them breaking free. SO is Tanya doomed to watch Greg escape while she languishes in a castle (tragic, I know), or will she find a way out on her own terms?
Another glimpse of this couple is shown when Jon Gries gets his credit. Mirroring his Vespa ride with Tanya, the fresco shows a couple riding off into the sunset... on a donkey. The best part is, of course, the donkey, who looks back and breaks the fourth wall. He sees through the farce of this relationship, as do we. Maybe if Tanya wises up too, she'll be the one to off her awful husband.
Speaking of couples, there's also the vacationing quartet of the Sullivans and the Spillers. Meghann Fahy's vapid stay-at-home trophy wife is introduced with the image of cherubs. The cupids may project innocence on the outside, but there's a mischievous nature beneath that appearance. Harper (Audrey Plaza) has already assumed this about Daphne (Fahy), refusing to believe that her marriage is as easy as she lets on. It's not exactly hard to understand that suspicion: Cameron (Theo James) seeks to dominate every single interaction he has.
In the first two episodes, Cameron relishes in his alpha male dynamic with Ethan and when alone with Harper, flaunts his sexual power. Naturally, his visual is a nude statue being peed on by a dog. It works on so many levels — the refined version of Cameron being destroyed by his primal urges; the fact that the flashing dog mirrors his own efforts to flash Harper in the mirror; and the general idea of marking one's territory. Cameron is all aggression, bravado, and overconfidence. But Daphne isn't necessarily ignorant to any of that — she just seems great at playing her part.
As for Ethan, his fresco is decidedly less aggressive — a man making offerings to a goddess. It's a fitting image for the man who struggles to order what he wants at dinner, simply bending to the will of his wife's demands. Speak of the devil, Aubrey Plaza's name is plastered over the image of two birds, one of which is tearing the other apart.
So while Ethan continues deferring power to his wife, who is she on the verge of lashing out at? The possibilities are endless. The Harper we've come to know can be harsh and judgmental, particularly when she's in the company of wealthy elites whom she looks down on. Ethan is certainly an option — she seems concerned that his newfound wealth will change him, especially when in the company of Cameron. But then there's the Sullivans themselves.
Harper has been picking apart the Sullivan marriage from the start — partially because she thinks they're ignorant and terrible, but Ethan seems to wonder if she might also be threatened by their "perfect" relationship. With those two getting along easily, claiming to never fight, and having loud sec n the other side of the wall, it's no wonder the Spiller marriage is getting tense. The idea of Harper losing her s*** by the end of the season seems inevitable — but will she take it out on the Sullivans, her husband, or someone else entirely?
The White Lotus guests aren't the only ones with the potential to cause complete and utter chaos. Don't forget about all the pesky locals, who are perfectly capable of creating conflict all on their own. Sabrina Impacciatore plays Valentina, the irritable hotel manager with a tendency to snap at her employees. Her fresco involves a bunch of toga-clad women — one of which is an obvious authority figure, one her way to reprimand the lounging ladies. It harkens back to the way she responds to Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), who she immediately guesses are sex workers and tries to keep from the guests.
This might be wishful thinking, but maybe this is an 'if you can't beat them, join them' scenario — maybe Valentina will come around to the local girls and don a metaphorical toga of her own. Or maybe she'll finally find a way to keep them out of her resort.
That would be quite a feat though because the frescoes for these women are powerful symbols. Grannò's Mia boasts a griffin. The mythical beast of power is perched high in the sky, overlooking everything. Meanwhile, Tabasco's Lucia is a leopard on the prowl, already somewhat satiated by a bird caught in its teeth.
After its first season, "The White Lotus" concluded with the bleak note that none of the wealthy elites were ever in any real danger of death. It was a local worker who ended up in a body bag. Between that precedent and the troubling trope of sex workers ending up dead, I've been pretty worried about what the future holds for Lucia and Mia. But if these frescoes are any indication, then they're more than equipt to handle danger — a griffin and a jungle cat? It's everyone else who should be nervous about them.
Not all of the White Lotus guests have checked in. Two main cast members have yet to enter the fray, leaving two wild cards on the table for later: Tom Hollander's Quentin and Leo Woodall's Jack. Both of their murals show men lounging in the presence of other men. For Jack, they hide among the columns, and for Quentin, they live luxuriously.
Once the character introductions are taken care of, the beat drops, and "The White Lotus" opening truly devolves into chaos. First off, things get hornier: covert sex, copulating goats, and a grown man being breastfed, to name a few. But sex is just one half of the madness — the other is violence. A hunter strikes down a boar and a recently stabbed man is thrown down some stairs. Elsewhere, one man stands behind another, reaching into his pocket as if to grasp a concealed weapon. All of this hints towards the idea that this season's deaths won't be absurd accidents (RIP Armond), but outright murders. Betrayal is very much on the table and if anyone whips out a dagger, the alarm bells better ring.
Here's another pivotal image: atop a mountain, a villa burns while ships depart an island. This harkens back to the season one finale when the guests caused devastation before boarding their planes and leaving smoldering remains in their wake. Are the White Lotus locals doomed once more? Or will they be the ones to suffer this fiery fate?
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The post Unpacking The Secrets of The White Lotus Opening Credits appeared first on /Film.
When the casting news for AMC's "Interview with the Vampire" started rolling in last year, the series was upfront about who would be playing the main roles of Lestat and Louis. Sam Reid was first announced as Lestat, the role Tom Cruise made famous in the feature film adaptation of Anne Rice's novel. Soon after, "Game of Thrones" alum Jacob Anderson made headlines for his casting as Louis, the role that helped put Brad Pitt on the map back in 1994.
Months later, we heard that Bailey Bass and Eric Begosian had been cast as the new TV versions of Claudia and Daniel Molloy, the movie characters played by a young Kirsten Dunst and Christian Slater, respectively. One major outlier, however, for "Interview with the Vampire" casting was the vampire Armand, originally brought to life onscreen by Antonio Banderas.
As executive producer Rolin Jones notes on the post-credits "Episode Insider" segment for the streaming season 1 finale, Armand is a "major player" in the story that will continue to unfold in "Interview with the Vampire" season 2 (or "Part 2," since the finale retroactively labels this season "Part 1.") He's the subject of his own Rice novel and even inspired the character Gullermo's desire to be a vampire on FX's "What We Do in the Shadows."
Anyone who's read "Interview with the Vampire" or seen the movie will know this season has just focused on the New Orleans half of the story with Lestat, before Louis and Claudia head to the Old World in search of other vampires. With the finale, we now have a better idea of how the series will be approaching Armand in Paris.
Warning: from here on out, there are major spoilers for the season 1 finale of "Interview with the Vampire," now streaming on AMC+.
After a big bloodbath and the breakup of Louis, Lestat, and Claudia's dysfunctional vampire family, the "Interview with the Vampire" season 1 finale ends with the reveal that Armand has been hiding in plain sight all along. Earlier this year, we reported that Assad Zaman had been cast as a seemingly minor new character, Rashid, who would be "Louis' companion in present day" in "Interview with the Vampire." All throughout season 1, Rashid, the apparent human familiar, has lingered in the background as Louis related his story to Daniel in Dubai.
The penultimate episode, however, threw Rashid's true nature into question, as Daniel found himself nodding off on the couch and flashing back to his first meeting with Louis in San Francisco in the 1970s. In keeping with the idea that this series is a "do-over" of Daniel's first interview with Louis, that episode even used a bit of footage from the 1994 film, where the camera glides in over the Port of San Francisco sign.
In his flashback dream, Daniel suddenly recalls that Rashid was there at the bar with Louis, and he looked the same then as he does now (unlike Daniel himself, who has aged into Anthony Bourdain). He's suspicious of Rashid as the finale begins, and keeps an eye on him throughout the episode, observing how he's able to stand in the window and remain unaffected by sunlight.
We've seen Louis drinking from Rashid's neck, but it didn't leave Rashid staggering out of the room the way it did with Louis's other human blood donor. As Daniel confronts Louis about him failing to make an "honest reckoning" with himself again like in their first interview, Rashid comes to Louis's defense, saying, "You've only heard half of the story."
"Interview with the Vampire" has already made significant departures from the book and movie, and this continues as Rashid removes his contact lenses and reveals himself as a 514-year-old vampire who can levitate. "As we age, the sun loses its power over us," he explains. Though Rashid has been masquerading as Louis's familiar, he speaks as if he's the one in charge, saying, "Louis can sometimes act out. I protect him from himself. Always have."
Even when Louis takes Rashid by the hand and reintroduces him as Armand, the love of his life, Rashid/Armand is still seen hovering a whole head above Louis, as if to visually reinforce the idea that there's a power imbalance in their relationship. Here again, Louis would appear to be caught up in a relationship with a controlling older vampire who can fly. Lestat used "the cloud gift" against him, flying him up above earth, dropping him from a great height, and leaving him severely injured, bearing the telltale scars of an abusive relationship.
Seeing Louis with Armand, we're left questioning if he's really escaped the cycle of abuse and manipulation that he was in with Lestat, or simply traded one "love" of that nature for another. We also know from the book and movie that Armand has a hand in Claudia's fate, which drives a wedge between him and Louis. Here, they're still somehow together after Paris, and that adds another layer of uneasiness to the situation.
In the "Episode Insider," Jones said, "There is a story that has been told to Louis, that maybe Louis has told to himself, that maybe Armand has told to him, too." He said they wanted the season 1 finale to have the same slightly unsettling effect as the ending of "The Graduate."
In the "Interview with the Vampire" season 1 finale, we see a scrapbook devoted to the Theatre des Vampires. The series establishes that Lestat can exert mind control over people, and it's possible a vampire as old and powerful as Armand (who used to lead an entire malicious coven in that theater), could be doing the same thing to Louis. Daniel also notices that more pages have been neatly removed from Claudia's diary, as if by a ruler, in contrast to the other pages Louis messily ripped out, dealing with her implied sexual assault.
Chances are, this was Armand's doing. In season 2, Armand looks to be the next Lestat, another vampire who will be at cross-purposes with Claudia while seeking to keep Louis under his thumb.
While they never meet in the film, Lestat and Armand do cross paths in the "Interview with the Vampire" book and "Queen of the Damned" movie. They also both headline their own novels, beginning with "The Vampire Lestat" and "The Vampire Armand," which are part of Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles" series. AMC scooped up the rights to "The Vampire Chronicles" along with "The Lives of the Mayfair Witches" series and three crossover books in 2020, and it has already debuted the trailer for "Mayfair Witches," billing it as "the next series from Anne Rice's Immortal Universe."
"Mayfair Witches" is set to premiere on January 8, 2023. While "Interview with the Vampire: Part 2" doesn't have a premiere date yet, the Immortal Universe is already off to a better start than Universal's equally vampire-friendly but ill-fated Dark Universe. It's not a stretch to imagine we'll be seeing much more of Armand after this, not only in "Interview with the Vampire: Part 2" but in other subsequent miniseries based on Rice's novels.
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The post How Interview with the Vampire Sets Up Armand for Season 2 appeared first on /Film.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday announced the release of a Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC) guide that can help organizations prioritize vulnerability patching using a decision tree model.
"Stranger Things" hasn't just been the breakout for its young talent like Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, or Natalia Dyer, it has also revitalized the careers of its older stars. Winona Ryder is consistently back in the spotlight for the first time since her 1990s heyday, while David Harbor went from a "hey, it's that guy!" character actor to a household name.
Season 2 continued that trend with Paul Reiser as Dr. Sam Owens. "Stranger Things" is all about the '80s, so Owens is an inversion of Reiser's "Aliens" character Carter Burke -- a seemingly bad guy who turns out to be alright. On the "Lights Camera Barstool" podcast, Reiser admitted he only knew about the show thanks to his, "cultural canary in the coal mine," — his younger son Leon.
"[My son] told me about 'Stranger Things.' He watched it the hour it came out, like on a Friday ... So ironically that Monday, two days later, I get a call from my agent and he said, 'Are you familiar with this new show 'Stranger Things?' I went, 'Yeah, I don't live in a cave! Of course I am. I'm an expert.' Then he goes, 'Well good, because the Duffer Brothers want to meet you.'"
Leon Reiser came to regret keeping his old man in the loop. Reiser continued:
"I certainly would've watched Season 1 of 'Stranger Things' just because you have to, everybody's talking about it ... Left alone, I don't know that I would've watched Season 2. And [my son] said, with no trace of irony, 'You know Dad, that's true, I would've enjoyed Season 2 a lot more if you weren't in it.'"
Reiser compared this experience to Bruce Springsteen's revelation that his children don't keep up with his music: "you've gotta work hard to only know two [Springsteen] songs."
Reiser had the biggest role in "Stranger Things" season 2. However, he returned for a cameo in the season 3 finale and a supporting role in season 4 this year. His more entertaining TV turn in 2022, though, was on "The Boys" as "The Legend," the former VP of Hero Management at Vought (aka chief superhero babysitter). Reflecting the change in medium, the Legend was reimagined from a Stan Lee analogue (as he was in "The Boys" comic) to a stand-in for movie producer Bob Evans. Reiser is a bit against type as the foul-mouthed cigar-chomper, but that only adds to the fun of his presence.
When Reiser got the call about appearing in "The Boys," he hadn't heard of the series and had to reach out to his son for information. His son told him, 'Yeah it's great, you'll hate it.' This prediction turned out to be off; while Reiser did find the show "wild," he appreciated how it was violent and crass with purpose:
"You gotta appreciate, when someone does something well, even if it's not your taste, you go, 'oh these guys are good, and they're being graphic and over the top on purpose, it's not casual' ... it's a really smart show, the writing of it, they lace a lot of really current political, social strings without tripping over them, it's not easy to do."
It's always fun to see actors who've been out of the game for a bit jump back in. It's also a good thing these actors of yesteryear, like Paul Reiser, now have kids to keep them up to date on which projects to take.
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The post Paul Reiser's Son Had to Show Him Stranger Things and The Boys Before He Was Cast in Them appeared first on /Film.
Please be advised that some of the games might be inappropriate for underage users. If you are underage, you shouldn’t proceed with reading further.
That’s right. An absolute cult-classic and a machine of giving us morally questionable fun (to say the least) is celebrating its 25th birthday this year! And to share this fun with you we’ve launched special discounts on series’ POSTAL 2, Postal 2: Paradise Lost and POSTAL 4: No Regerts up to 90% off that last until November 15th, 11 PM UTC.
All these games are first-person action shooters where rampage and its ridiculousness knows no limits.
POSTAL 2 is the one that re-started it all. In this entry, infamous The Dude shows up for his first day working at RWS and hilarity ensues - you fight cops, rage against everyone, terrorize the city and most importantly - are on a quest to buy milk.
Postal 2: Paradise Lost is a full-fledged expansion pack for POSTAL 2 continuing the saga. You join The Dude as he ventures back into his former hometown embarking on a quest to find his lost dog. But not all is as it seems, as the once tranquil (relatively speaking) town and its citizens have been transformed in the wake of the nuclear destruction.
And POSTAL 4: No Regerts is The Dude great comeback. In this title several years have passed since the events of Paradise Lost, and all the Dude’s seemingly got left to his name is his canine cohort and his bathrobe, and neither of them smells all that great. However, on the horizon, he glimpses an unfamiliar and dazzling town that beckons to him. Which means more satirical and outrageous comedy.
But as we invite you to visit or re-visit The Dude’s world we’d also like to look at some of the most INSANE moments in his history so far. Let’s buckle up and reminisce about just how crazy our beloved protagonist is.
1. Everyone and everything is a urinal
We mean… even though that’s not a specific moment or event, we had to put it here. One of The Postal Dude’s favourite “weapon” is peeing on everyone and everything. It’s so bizzare, so over the top and so POSTAL-like that mentioning it was a no-brainer. This iconic mechanic can be used anywhere and everytime you like and guess what happens when you pee on people? Yes, they vomit - but to be fair it could be really practical because by doing so we disable the NPCs and can think how to eliminate them in some other, equally outrageous way.
2. Declaring an all-out war on Parents For Decency
In POSTAL 2 when The Postal Dude is going to receive his pay-check to buy the milk that his spouse is asking him to, he runs into the angry mob of parents that blame video games violence for real life violence and protest outside the company. So naturally what does The Postal Dude do? Dispose of them in whatever fashion the player wants. This triggers an open war with them and throughout the game we can run into said parents that attack us on sight.
3. Visit to church
It wouldn’t be anything extraordinary if that visit was done by anyone but our protagonist. While his initial intentions are to confess his sins, when he sees the queue to the priest he can’t help himself but to find a way to skip it. Either by a grenade, setting the church on fire or… you get the idea. And if that’s not enough that same church soon enough gets invaded by the terrorists and the place turns into a brutal battlefield. Another normal day in POSTAL 2.
4. Dealing with jailbreak
In POSTAL 4: No Regerts The Dude gets the job as a guard in a local prison from the job center. Perfect man for that position of course. And guess what happens? Yep, within a few minutes all the inmates break out and our “hero” has to manually lock them up again going from terminal to terminal and using a variety of “tools” to do so. Chaos and rampage truly worthy of a POSTAL series.
5. Turning into a cat
Another task in No Regerts is to make a delivery to some shady pet store. That visit ends in The Dude passing out from the chemical fumes present there and then turning into a cat. Or hallucinating about turning into a cat? We have no idea but that makes it even better. Then as a cat we have to bully a nearby dog, find a ladycat to “romance” with her and pick up (still as a cat) some milk just like we had to do it in POSTAL 2. Does it all make sense? Absolutely not. Is it overwhelmingly funny? Absolutely yes.
So there you have it - our choice of some of the insane moments in The Postal Dude life. Of course the whole series is filled with those and many of them can depend on the player's choices and how they choose to deal with specific situations. That’s why we’d like you to share some of your best memories with POSTAL.
If there's a holiday, there's probably a horror movie about it. Halloween is obviously the top dog, with plenty of solid options even beyond John Carpenter's seminal classic, but it doesn't stand alone. There are lots of Christmas-themed horror flicks, too, including enduring favorites like "Black Christmas" and "Krampus." The Fourth of July practically mandates a rewatch of "I Know What You Did Last Summer." Valentine's Day, of course, has its own early-'00s slasher.
Yet, likely by dint of its proximity to Christmas, filmmakers have gone cold turkey when it comes to serving up a heaping platter of Thanksgiving-related horror. It's inexplicable, too, given just how fruitful — and terrifying — the thought of family members both old and new gathering in one place really is. Dramas like "Pieces of April" and comedies like "The Oath" relish in Thanksgiving discomfort, but the horror genre is strangely resistant.
Sure, some horror classics, like "You're Next," are quasi-Thanksgiving fare, but certainly not in name. As a result, the holiday is in desperate need of new blood. Thankfully, there are a handful of unsung Thanksgiving horror films that are more than worth consuming alongside mountains of potatoes and seas of gravy. While some of them are turkeys in their own right, they all have an inimitable charm, largely on account of their moxie. Finally, Thanksgiving is as terrifying in the movies as it's always been in real life.
What happens when a Vietnam veteran becomes accidently addicted to marijuana after sexy young coeds seduce him, decides to taste-test chemically-enhanced turkeys to support his habit, and then dies and is resurrected as a murderous psychopath with the body of a man and head of a bird? To find out, look no further than Brad Grinter's "Blood Freak," a lowbrow, exploitative drive-in effort full of poultry heads run amok.
"Blood Freak" feels worrisomely improvised. While it appears to be a movie in shape and form, it never really behaves like one. Instead, it struts to a rhythm all its own, offering a kind of inimitable weirdness that's likely to appeal to the gore nuts out there, but probably not anyone else. Sure, its killer is a giant turkey man; for Thanksgiving, it's hard to get more festive than that. But why watch the carnage here when "Girls Nite Out" did more or less the same thing more successfully years later, albeit with a villain wearing a bear mascot costume, and not a mutant turkey?
Jordan Downey's "ThanksKilling" isn't a good movie, although there's an argument to be made that it's so bad it's good. It does waddle into some compelling indie film territory, raising questions about whether a knowingly-bad movie should be judged like a regular film, or whether the intentional low quality means that it actually fulfilled its mission. The creators behind this $3,500 schlockfest certainly had their hearts in the right place. As Downey, a Loyola Marymount University alum, told his alma mater's student paper, The Los Angeles Loyolan, "We were watching a cheesy horror film and started talking about what holidays hadn't been done in horror movies yet, and Thanksgiving was the most prominent one."
He's right. In horror, Thanksgiving hasn't been done often enough. Whether the film's "South Park"-lite humor will work for anyone but the most devoted fans of carnage is an open question, though this story about a demonic turkey who specifically slaughters white people does offer up some exploitative fun. It's not great, and it will only appeal to a very specific demographic, but in the canon of Thanksgiving horror, "ThanksKilling" and its sequel self-aware sequel "ThanksKilling 3" both deserve a mention.
Much like "ThanksKilling," Nettie Peña's "Home Sweet Home" isn't exactly great, though it endures as a laudable bit of horror history. It was directed by a woman and earned the horror badge of honor: being labeled a "video nasty" by Mary Whitehouse and the United Kingdom's Video Recordings Act 1984. Beyond that, there isn't a lot to say about "Home Sweet Home." Sure, it features scream queen Vinessa Shaw in her film debut, but it's a third-rate film. Unless you're a diehard slasher fan or a completionist, it's about as good as you'd expect for a movie about a drug-addled killer who slices up naked young women at Thanksgiving.
Yet, to her credit, Peña does accomplish some of what Amy Holden Jones did with "The Slumber Party Massacre." During the heyday of slashers, the horror genre was principally male-dominated. If nothing else, it's a remarkable curiosity to see the carnage and exploitation unfold from a distinctly feminine perspective. That's not enough to make "Home Sweet Home" anything more than a Thanksgiving oddity, but an oddity it is. Sometimes, that's enough.
A diehard fan might rattle off the names of some of these Thanksgiving horror films with ease, but for general audiences, "Séance" might inspire more confusion than acknowledgement. Released direct to DVD in 2008, Mark L. Smith's Thanksgiving-set paranormal thriller unfortunately missed the early '00s' preoccupation with supernatural horror. Had it arrived sooner, it might have had more of a chance at success. At the very least, the high-concept synopsis would have had it flying off of video rental store shelves: Five friends left alone in their dorms over the Thanksgiving break inadvertently summon inhuman spirits after screwing around with a Ouija board.
"Séance" looks, sounds, and acts like a direct-to-DVD horror movie. However, like the other entries on this list, it's set at Thanksgiving, and that alone makes it stand out. It's a more assured production than "Home Sweet Home" or "ThanksKilling," and will likely appeal to a broader audience on account of its emphasis on atmosphere over gore. Still, Gregory Jacobs' "Wind Chill," which came out a year earlier and stars none other than Emily Blunt, delivered claustrophobic holiday horrors much more successfully.
Casey Tebo's "Black Friday," a fun alien invasion flick that merges the likes of "The Thing" with some socially-aware, consumerist terror, is the most recent entry on this list. Devon Sawa stars as Ken, one of many miserable associates working at We Love Toys, a fictional (and unfortunately sparse, likely on account of the film's budget) retailer on Thanksgiving evening. The early comedic beats are broad, yet land successfully. Anyone who has had to leave Thanksgiving dinner early for a shift at the mall will empathize with Ken's ennui. Further, once the carnage starts, "Black Friday" narrows its focus well, delivering some worthwhile gore and genuine suspense.
As it nears its end, "Black Friday" gets a little too big for its britches, aspiring to more than its modest budget can achieve. Overall, though, it's a fun outing featuring a great assemblage of horror staples, including Sawa, Bruce Campbell, and Michael Jai White. While the holiday angle is somewhat lost as the movie progresses, it's niche horror within niche horror, and incredibly fun horror at that.
"Pilgrim," a feature-length entry in Hulu and Blumhouse's "Into the Dark" anthology series, is very much a Marcus Dunstan production. For those unfamiliar with Dunstan, he's the man behind the camera for films like "The Collector," and the scribe for several later "Saw" entries, as well as the ludicrously-titled "Piranha 3DD." In "Pilgrim," parents Anna (Courtney Henggeler) and Shane (Kerr Smith) hire a troupe of Pilgrim reenactors to spruce up their Thanksgiving celebration, much to the chagrin of teenage Cody (Reign Edwards), a young woman who (rightfully) remarks that the holiday is basically a celebration of genocide.
The tone of "Pilgrim" vacillates wildly, especially once the reenactors start succumbing to their more sinister inclinations. It's funny and disturbing in equal measure. While the film is never quite sure whether it wants to be a socially conscious interrogation of antiquated ideals or another home invasion shocker, Dunstan's efforts are worthwhile, even if his work here isn't likely to win him any new converts.
Stephen Kay's "Boogeyman" was trashed when it was first released. While it managed a respectable $67 million box office haul — enough to warrant two direct-to-video sequels— the film was a critical failure. It arrived several years earlier than "Séance," but it was saddled with the same main complaint: In trying to capitalize on the supernatural, J-horror-inspired craze of the time, "Boogeyman" failed to offer anything new to anyone with even a modicum of cinematic horror experience. However, while contemporary critics may not have been kind, "Boogeyman" was considerably ahead of its time, a trauma-informed supernatural spookshow with a pretty terrifying central villain.
Tim Jensen's (Barry Watson) father was taken by the titular boogeyman when he was young, and as he prepares to celebrate Thanksgiving with his new girlfriend's family, Tim is drawn to his childhood home to face down the supernatural threat once and for all. The opening scene is terrifying; while the film peaks there, Kay has a lot more fun in store. The Thanksgiving element is little more than window dressing, but it does lend the film a certain solemn gravitas, with Tim wandering through empty fields and chilly playgrounds, grappling with the demons he thought he left behind. "Boogeyman" isn't a masterpiece, but it deserves a reevaluation.
"Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County" is a remake of Dean Alioto's 1989 found footage shocker "The McPherson Tapes." While neither "The McPherson Tapes" nor "Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County" have the name recognition as some other found footage horror heavyweights, it's worth acknowledging that they were some of the first, and truly, some of the best. While Alioto returned to direct "Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County," he did so with professional actors, a higher budget, and a UPN distribution deal. Not a bad deal for an alien invasion shocker.
In both versions, pseudo-narration and footage contends the footage audiences are about to see is real, genuine proof of extraterrestrial life, proof captured at the expense of the titular McPherson family. As the family gathers for Thanksgiving dinner, they're plagued by weird phenomenon resulting from an alien invasion near their homestead. While the framework and structure had been done before—most successfully with BBC's "Ghostwatch"—it works remarkably well here. Unlike more contemporary found footage horror films, both versions feel real. They're obviously not, but it's a nice throwback to the days where found footage genuinely purported to have been found.
"Blood Rage" probably has the honor of being the most revisited Thanksgiving slasher around. While it's not quite the best, it's a gonzo, gory extravaganza that features more practical effects than audiences can shake a turkey leg at. John Grissmer's holiday classic follows Lousie Lasser's Maddy and her adult son, Terry (Mark Soper), as Maddy's other child, Todd, returns to their apartment complex and murders everyone who crosses his path. See, years prior, Terry framed his twin brother for the murder of a teenager, and Todd was committed to an asylum. Now, he's back for revenge.
With a charming low-budget feel and a cameo from horror stalwart Ted Raimi, "Blood Rage" is, well, all the rage. It's a grindhouse classic, and a movie that is knowingly in on the joke. Everything in it is operatic and soapy, although the blood spills in earnest, with hatchets and carving forks being just a few of Todd's tools of destruction. It's not Thanksgiving without a little serving of "Blood Rage."
Oliver Blackburn's "Kristy" isn't simply the best Thanksgiving horror movie. Festive tidings or not, it's also a solid, unrelenting slasher bolstered by a fierce and immensely physical Haley Bennett in the starring role. Here, Bennett plays Justine, a college student left alone in her dorm over the long Thanksgiving break. She can't afford the flight home, so she heads to a nearby convenience store to pick up some sad girl dinner, only to be accosted by a criminal gang led by "Twilight" star Ashley Greene. The perps keep calling Justine "Kristy" and follow her home, murdering anyone in their way as they pursue her through the abandoned campus.
It's primetime slasher material, and Blackburn makes great use of the college campus' scale to accelerate the tension. It all makes "Kristy" a more kinetic, larger-scale take on Bryan Bertino's "The Strangers." Sure, "Kristy" explains a little more, delving into snuff film territory that it never really commits to, but that's a small quibble when the rest of the film is so accomplished. "Kristy" isn't just the best Thanksgiving horror movie — it's one of this century's best slashers, period.
Read this next: 12 Underrated Slasher Movies You Need To Check Out
The post The 10 Best Thanksgiving Horror Movies appeared first on /Film.
The Doctor Who Centenary Special "The Power of the Doctor" was an emotional time for Whovians all over the globe, as fans said farewell to Jodie Whittaker's history-making turn as the Doctor. It had been previously announced that "Sex Education" star Ncuti Gatwa had been cast as the next regeneration, so imagine the intense shock to the system felt by all when Gatwa did not regenerate on screen, but instead Tenth Doctor David Tennant appeared to take Whittaker's place. The return of David Tennant's Doctor is a fascinating decision from a storytelling perspective, but fans were dismayed when the Doctor's regeneration also included a change of wardrobe.
This might sound like an oddly specific character trait to be upset about, but the Doctor's regeneration has consistently included the transformation into the clothing of the previous Doctor since the conclusion of the 1966 serial "The Tenth Planet." The fact Tennant arrived in clothing that looked familiar to the Tenth Doctor, and not the bright wardrobe of Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor seemed to break the rules of the show's own lore. Russell T. Davies, the man who revived and served as the showrunner for "Doctor Who" between 2005 and 2010, is also returning for this second incarnation of Tennant's Doctor and gave an explanation for the clothing regeneration change in "Doctor Who Magazine" issue #584.
As it turns out, Davies' reasoning for the clothing change has little to do with the time-traveling mythos of the Doctor, and everything to do with being mindful of real-life issues regarding clothing and gender presentation.
In the issue of "Doctor Who Magazine," Russell T. Davies chose his words very carefully when explaining his decision not to have David Tennant regenerate into Jodie Whittaker's clothing. "I was very certain that I didn't want David to appear in Jodie's costume," Davies said. "I think the notion of men dressing in 'women's clothes,' the notion of drag, is very delicate." Davies went on to describe himself as a huge fan of drag culture, but recognizing that dabbling into that realm "has to be done with immense thought and respect."
While Jodie Whittaker's costuming isn't as "feminine" as something like a fluffy dress could have been, Davies said that he was fearful a straight man wearing her outfit would "look like mockery," mentioning that Tennant is a good half of a foot taller than Whittaker. Most importantly, though, Davies had concerns about the way the media would have written about Tennant in the new outfit, worried that presenting the image of a man in "women's clothing" could be providing ammunition to newspapers that are critical of gender nonconforming people, and lead to sarcastic or harmful comments about gender presentation.
Davies has been a vocal advocate for the transgender community for years, something that cannot be said about other, prominent British voices in entertainment. The trans-exclusionary "radical" feminist (aka TERF) groups in the United Kingdom are directly connected to the increase in anti-trans discourse, legislation, and violence across the globe, and much of the British media have been willing participants in spreading their harmful ideology. Davies knows this, and it seems that his decision to regenerate a costume with the Doctor was to prevent allowing "Doctor Who" to be weaponized by TERFs.
In reading his comments in "Doctor Who Magazine," I can't help but think that Davies is holding back his true feelings so as to not upset the applecart, or more specifically, not upset BBC, who has been broadcasting the sci-fi series since the 1960s. "We could have the Doctor dressed as a knight, or dressed as God, or dressed as William Hartnell, and the only photo they'd print would be of David [Tennant] in what they considered to be women's clothes," Davies said. "Then it becomes weaponized — as a mockery of feminine traits, a mockery of drag, of that culture. So that was never going to happen." Knowing Davies' history with LGBTQIA+ advocacy, it seems obvious that his heart is in the right place. Unfortunately, his comments have stirred up some justifiably frustrated responses from fans and cosplayers.
Russell is right, the Doctor should not be wearing a jacket and suspenders. It’s just too ‘feminine’. pic.twitter.com/S1811yp954
— Jude (@_PigginTeaBreak) November 9, 2022
Davies' comments are doubly ironic considering the Thirteenth Doctor's costuming of colorful pants and suspenders is nothing new, and many of the male Doctors that preceded Jodie Whittaker. "I don't understand how DT wearing 13's outfit is a mockery of drag, given that it's deliberately and definitively gender-neutral," said one fan. "Anyone who watches and cares about the show understands that. I also don't understand the logic of pandering to bigots rather than catering to fans." The latter statement is completely understandable, but unless someone has been on the receiving end of targeted harassment from TERFs (which I and my trans wife unfortunately have), it's difficult to fully understand why someone may want to pursue preventative measures. When reading Davies' comments in bad faith, it can also appear that he's trying to shield David Tennant from the type of transmisogynistic abuse hurled at trans women every day. In my opinion, I think the situation is a little more complicated.
Jodie Whittaker's costuming as the Thirteenth Doctor has always appeared gender-neutral, and shortly after the issue of "Doctor Who Magazine" hit newsstands, a video of Whittaker went viral, where she told an audience, "You're not dressing as a girl and you're not dressing as a boy, you're dressing as the Doctor." Davies' comments may have been with good intentions, but the impact was harmful to any non-cisgender women who have ever cosplayed as Thirteen or found the costuming to be affirming regardless of gender identity.
Nothing about Whittaker's costuming resembles that of a "drag queen," which makes Davies' constant comparison all the more confusing. Well, until you remember that "Doctor Who" is broadcast on the BBC, a network that has been called out by human rights advocates as peddling harmful, transphobic rhetoric. The fact that Davies' comments never once contain the phrase "trans women" feels very intentional ... and likely legally mandated. The irony that the Master actor, Sacha Dhawan, had already worn Whittaker's costume in the same special cannot be ignored, but in my personal opinion, holds the key to the truth of the matter. I think there are three possible options:
The BBC told Davies he wasn't allowed to put David Tennant in Whittaker's clothing because of the possible transgender implications that would follow but didn't care if a "villain" could have a trans read because the BBC is notoriously transphobic.
Russell T. Davies needs a session with a sensitivity consultant on gender presentation before he talks to the press.
Davis is a well-intended cis man trying to do right by a marginalized community but fumbled the execution.
Read this next: Every Star Trek Show And Movie In Chronological Order
The post Why David Tennant's Costume Change For the Doctor Who Anniversary Special is Causing Controversy appeared first on /Film.
A new A Plague Tale: Requiem patch is now live on PC and consoles, introducing new graphics options on PC, better optimization on all platforms, and more.
Alongside better optimization for AI, rats, terrain, and navmesh to reduce framerate drops and freezing issues, the 1.03 patch rebalances the final arena fights in Nothing Left and Dying Sun and fixes multiple bugs.
Changes & Updates
Optimization
Bug Fixes
The new A Plague Tale: Requiem patch also introduces new PC-exclusive features, such as new graphics options. The patch also introduces full Steam Deck compatibility.
Changes & Updates
Optimization
Bug Fixes
A Plague Tale: Requiem is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Nintendo Switch worldwide. Learn more about the second entry in the series by Asobo Studio by checking out Chris' review.
The post A Plague Tale: Requiem Patch 1.03 Introduces New Graphics Settings, Optimization Improvements, Steam Deck Compatibility by Francesco De Meo appeared first on Wccftech.
Implementing backward compatibility has become easier than ever, but it's not a given that the successor to the Nintendo Switch console will be backward compatible, as Shigeru Miyamoto feels that Nintendo's strength is in creating brand new games not possible on existing hardware.
During the Q&A session held after the company's latest financial briefing, the Japanese company's representatives were asked about backward compatibility and how easy it now seems to transfer software across multiple hardware generations with the Nintendo Account system. The Nintendo General Manager and creator of the Super Mario Bros. series did agree that it is now much easier to have backward compatibility, as the software development environment has become more standardized in the past few years. He feels, however, that Nintendo's strength is in creating new games, and they would like to focus on creating unique titles not possible on existing hardware in the future.
We used to offer a system called "Virtual Console," which allowed people to play old software on new hardware. In comparison, video can be enjoyed for a long time as long as there is a playback environment. However, the rights for video are complicated, so Nintendo is proceeding with the project after ensuring that the rights are in place. Indeed, in the past, software development for game consoles was done in a dedicated development environment that differed for each hardware. Therefore, when the hardware changed, the development environment could not be taken over.
Therefore, software released on past hardware could not be played without modification.
Recently, however, the software development environment itself has gradually become more standardized, so it is generally easier to create a playback environment that allows software for past hardware to be played on new hardware than before. However, Nintendo's strength is in creating new games. With new hardware, we would like to propose unique games that cannot be realized on existing hardware.
The company's stance on backward compatibility has changed a lot over the years, and it was mostly the portable consoles that had some degree of backward compatibility, like the many original GameBoy revisions, the Nintendo DS, and Nintendo 3DS. The Nintendo Switch itself is, unsurprisingly, not backward compatible with previous Nintendo home consoles like the Wii and Wii U, and the fact that its successor may not be able to play games released on its predecessor may mean that Nintendo could be planning something more than a straightforward Nintendo Switch 2.
For now, the Japanese company is fully focused on supporting its Nintendo Switch console, which has been confirmed to have sold 114.44 million units worldwide. The console's price is not going to be increased in the near future, but Nintendo is monitoring the situation and will carefully consider if they indeed need to do so, which would be something unprecedented for a company that has never increased the price of already-released hardware.
The post Miyamoto: Backward Compatibility Is Easier Than Ever, but Nintendo’s Strength Is in Creating New Games Not Possible on Existing Hardware by Francesco De Meo appeared first on Wccftech.
John Sturges' 1960 western "The Magnificent Seven" was a Yul Brynner vehicle from the jump -- it was he and actor Anthony Quinn who had acquired the rights to remake Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" epic as a western. To fill out the rest of the hired guns tasked to protect a Mexican village, the "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" filmmaker would reunite "Never So Few" stars Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson as, respectively, a drifter and a broke mercenary. Robert Vaughn would play a traumatized war veteran, while Brad Dexter and "German James Dean" Horst Buchholz would round out the crew. James Coburn was last to come aboard.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly in 2001, Coburn revealed that he was one of the few cast members who had caught the original Kurosawa film beforehand. He would subsequently spend "a week straight" taking friends to see it:
"Cut to a year later, I'd come back to California and I ran into Robert Vaughn. I said 'What're you doing?' And he said 'I'm doing 'The Magnificent Seven.'' I said 'What?! Has it been cast?' He says 'No, I think there's still some characters.' ... So I went over to see [director] John Sturges, and John said, 'Yeah, there's one of the seven that hasn't been cast yet.' I say, 'Is that the guy who's the great swordsman in Kurosawa's film?' and he says, 'Yeah, yeah, that's right.' I said, 'That's the one I wanna play, John.' ... He says, 'I'll let you know by 3 o'clock.' So at 2:30 I get a call from him: 'Come on over and pick up your knives.'"
The great swordsman role is that of Kyūzō, played by frequent Kurosawa player Seiji Miyaguchi. Sturges' western re-imagining would see Kyūzō reborn as Britt, a knife-throwing virtuoso.
James Coburn was late to the "Magnificent Seven" party, with most of the titular seven having already been cast. He would beat out two competitors for the role of Britt: Sterling Hayden, the baritone star of "The Asphalt Jungle" and Stanley Kubrick's heist thriller "The Killing," and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" lead John Ireland. Coburn told The Guardian in 2000 that he snagged the role just under the wire:
"This was on a Friday afternoon and it had to be cast by Saturday night because an actors' strike was going to take place then. Any film that wasn't cast by Saturday midnight, you couldn't do it ... It was a real thrilling gig to get that, because it was a role that I always coveted."
Coburn would go on to lean into the coveted role using his acting experience and the techniques he acquired under the tutelage of Stella Adler, quickly learning how to throw knives for the part. Despite Coburn being one of the last actors cast, the character Britt is the fifth of seven professional gun-slingers recruited to protect a Mexican village from Calvera (Eli Wallach) and his cronies in "The Magnificent Seven." Of them all, Britt's onscreen introduction is the greatest (see below), ending in one arrogant gunman's hard lesson: Never disturb a man in the middle of a good nap.
Read this next: 14 Remakes That Are Better Than The Original
The post James Coburn Was No Stranger To Seven Samurai Before The Magnificent Seven appeared first on /Film.
