A BLT is a pretty perfect sandwich. I don’t thing I need to explain why the combination of crispy, salty bacon, crunchy lettuce, creamy mayo, and juicy tomatoes taste good together. Each component has a part to play, and they play it oh-so-well, but I think there’s a reason the “B” comes first. People love their…
Samsung have made a lot of great gaming monitors over the years, and they've also been making steady inroads into the realm of cloud gaming through their ongoing partnership with Microsoft. Until now, most of their cloud ambitions have been neatly contained in the console space, but today Samsung have unveiled their latest cloud-enabled PC monitors, presumably in the hope that the combination of Xbox Cloud Gaming, Nvidia's GeForce Now, Stadia, Utomik and Amazon Luna services inside their integrated Samsung Gaming Hubs will be enough to convince folks to part with their towers once and for all.
Techland has released a new patch for Dying Light 2: Stay Human that attempts to fix issues and features based on community feedback. Going into more details, Community Update #1 adds support for AMD’s FSR 2.0 upscaling tech. Moreover, this patch improves GPU memory management on PC in DX12 mode, especially when using Ray Tracing. … Continue reading Dying Light 2 Community Patch #1 adds AMD FSR 2.0 support, improves graphics, fixes DX12 memory leaks & more →
The post Dying Light 2 Community Patch #1 adds AMD FSR 2.0 support, improves graphics, fixes DX12 memory leaks & more appeared first on DSOGaming.
Hi everyone! We are Elliot Hudson (Game Director), Chris Williams (Studio Art Director), and Vidhi Shah (Senior UX Designer) at Blackbird Interactive. Our zero-g spaceship-salvaging sandbox game Hardspace: Shipbreaker releases on consoles September 20, and we’re here to share some insider details about how its futuristic world came to be!
Our vision for Hardspace: Shipbreaker was retrofuturistic – and more specifically inspired by the “cassette futurism” aesthetic which draws from 70s and 80s technology. To build the lore and general context in which the game takes place, we heavily researched emerging technologies and theories about the future of human space travel and the industrialization of space, as well as the history of industry and human labor. To help shape the specific blue-collar shipbreaking setting and the plot related to it, we looked at many different things for inspiration, from the Luddite rebellion, to America’s Gilded Age, the Ironworkers who built the first skyscrapers in the 1920’s, all the way to the modern-day Shipbreakers, particularly in places like Alang Beach in Gujarat.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is mostly played as a first-person zero-g workplace simulator as you explore the often dangerous inner workings of decommissioned spaceships waiting for salvage. This means establishing the design language of our spaceships was crucial to achieving a sense of immersion, and our extensive research on contemporary seafaring boats and ships was key to making the game’s world feel lived-in and real. We pored over the blueprints for real-world ships, explored and photographed a derelict ferry, and even rented boats to ride alongside massive cargo ships to examine their construction.
As a team of space lovers, we find a lot of challenge and joy in designing striking, iconic designs for the ships in our games. Yet our approach is not just based on the rule of cool (i.e. the idea that in a fictional work “the limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness”) as we stay immersed in the science of space travel so we can also engage with these designs in practical terms, working out how the game’s ships, tools, and systems might look and function in real life. You can come up with a lot of interesting ideas just by thinking through what a day in the life of one of these workers would be like, and how technology might help or hinder their work.
Striking a balance between futuristic elements and details from our current reality was tough, but we set some ground-rules to make the game’s world internally logical. There is no faster-than-light travel, nor is there teleportation or advanced AI. The industrial challenges of salvaging these ships are mostly solved through brute force.
Although Hardspace: Shipbreaker takes place in the future, our goal was always to show that the tools of labor often look similar, no matter the time period. We looked at existing welding and grinding equipment, and tried to bring that tactile, rough-and-ready look to everything we created for the game, staying away from science fiction technology that looked too sleek or unblemished.
While intentionally heightened and sometimes satirical, the dynamics between the working class and corporations in Hardspace: Shipbreaker are broadly the same as those throughout the history of labor and industry, and it’s easy to see those dynamics at play even today.
Mixing references and inspiration is a great way to explore and design your fictional world as you build it, and we often looked toward 80s and 90s Anime for our industrial design to visual effects.
We also had regular movie nights to explore the balance between satire and dystopia. Movies like “Alien”, “Moon”, “Outland”, and even documentaries and dramas like “Brazil”, “Blood on the Mountain”, “Deepwater Horizon”, and the seminal blue-collar, construction site thriller “Steel” from 1979 all helped point us toward different ideas for the game’s setting and tone.
We didn’t stop with movies and television, however. We read the works of John Steinbeck, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joseph Heller, Cory Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ray Bradbury throughout the game’s development. We’re far from the first people to explore these themes, and we knew the work that came before us would both help us see what had been done before and what we might be able to offer today’s audiences thinking about the future of work.
Simulating a zero-g environment and providing players with full movement within it is incredibly challenging, but equally fun, to tackle. Our biggest design challenges involved making sure the player understood where things were located in the salvaging environment, as well as keeping inputs minimal and intuitive. We worked on assisting players with spatial cues, such as giving each ship an easily identifiable floor and ceiling.
Technically and artistically, the requirement for all parts of a ship to be destructible and modeled with complex physics meant that each part needed to be a simple, convex shape. The art team did a tremendous job with texture work to overcome this problem of simplified geometry, and our technical team added some sneaky graphical features to “cheat” even more detail on objects.
These are details and design decisions that most players may not notice, but they all work together to give you the information you need to make the best decisions possible as you salvage each ship.
The first-person perspective is a powerful way to help the game’s world feel real and immediate to the player, and many of us on the team are long-time FPS fans. This was a great game in which to make the jump to a first-person perspective and stretch our skills as designers and artists.
To enhance this sense of immersion, we opted for a mostly diegetic UI style and HUD. We wanted to mimic the technology of the Hardspace world; slightly rundown, but also simple and utilitarian. Many of the UI interfaces in the game are modeled after very early monochromatic computers such as the Apple II, and the Player’s HUD in their helmet is modeled primarily after what you’d find in certain fighter jets.
We intentionally went just a bit overboard in conveying large amounts of information to the player in their HUD, and decisions about the limited color palette, visual effects and distortion you see when a player runs into hazards are all there to reinforce the dangers of the job, and the sense that the player is just a small part of a big world that may not have your best interests at heart.
We learned so much working on this project. The first-person perspective shift from our original roots and the physics simulations in Hardspace: Shipbreaker were a crucial part of the experience and sometimes proved trickier than we had anticipated. But it’s also those projects that tend to be the most satisfying: developing a game that not only fits with our core strengths in world building and ship design, but also allows us to stretch out and try new things and grow our expertise as developers. We’re so excited about using everything we learned moving forward as we explore even more varied games and experiences.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker releases September 20 on Xbox Series X|S and is coming Day One to Xbox Game Pass. The game is already available on PC and is included with PC Game Pass.
Heat (1995).
DB here:
Last year, Quentin Tarantino wrote a novel that extended and reconsidered the story of Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood (2019). Less elaborate is Michael Mann’s new bestseller Heat 2, written with Meg Gardiner. It’s not his first reworking of his film’s world: Heat (1995) was itself an expansion of a TV movie, LA Takedown (1989). Tarantino’s book was fairly experimental, as I tried to show, but Heat 2 is more conventional, being, as reviewers have mentioned, at once a sequel and a prequel to the original film. Yet it has its own interest, I think, and it provides me a chance to revisit a film I’ve long admired.
You’ve probably seen the film, but I’ll warn you of spoilers when I come to discuss the book.
Two genres for the price of one
In the film, Mann blends two schemas for crime plots: the heist film and the police procedural. What’s remarkable is the way both get expanded and interwoven to a degree rare in each of the genres.
The heist plot centers on Neil McCauley’s gang, consisting of Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), Michael Ceritto (Tom Sizemore), and Trejo (Danny Trejo). The team members are married, and two have children. McCauley (Robert DeNiro) is a loner, living by the code that by being free of personal ties he can escape when the police close in.
In the course of the film, the gang plans three scores. The first, in the opening, is a robbery of an armored truck. Being short-handed, McCauley has had to add another team member, the sociopath Waingro, to consummate the heist. This robbery will reverberate through the film. Waingro shoots one of the truck drivers, forcing the gang to kill all of them. By seizing the bearer bonds of the money launderer Roger Van Zant and trying to sell them back to him, the gang sets off a cascade of broken deals and violent confrontations. McCauley fails to kill Waingro as punishment for damaging the heist, and Waingro emerges to help Van Zant stalk McCauley.
The second score, an effort to access precious metals, is aborted when McCauley realizes that the police are monitoring their preparations. The third score is a brutal bank robbery in which the team is virtually wiped out, with only McCauley and Chris surviving.
The heist plot adheres to many of the phases I’ve sketched in an earlier entry on the genre. The jobs are set up by the fence Nate and the computer whiz Kelso. The gang meets to plan each attack, with a division of labor among them. As often in the genre, the private lives of the robbers intervene. Chris, a gambling junkie, is in a fraught marriage with Charlene (Ashley Judd). Before the last score, McCauley advises Ceritto to walk away, since his wife Elaine takes good care of him. For the bank job McCauley recruits a prison pal Don Breedan (Dennis Hastert), whose wife Lilian (Kim Staunton) tries to sustain his effort to hold a job. And after Waingro kills Trejo’s wife Anna, the fatally wounded Trejo feels nothing left to live for. Most risky of all is McCauley’s growing love for Eady (Amy Brenneman), who makes him inclined to relinquish his solitude and unite with her after the bank job.
Braided with the heist plot is an investigation plot centering on homicide lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). He’s brought in through the armored-car murders and begins systematically to trace leads to the gang. In the usual procedural fashion, Hanna and his colleagues visit snitches, search records, tail and tape suspects, and gradually identify the gang. It’s their botched surveillance that induces McCauley to drop the second score. There emerges a game of tit-for-tat, as the gang in turn surveils the police and use their informants in the police to identify Hanna.
Police procedurals often fill out the action with scenes of the cops’ personal lives, and here that function is fulfilled by a portrait of Hanna’s failing marriage to Justine (Diane Venora) and his effort to nurture Lauren (Natalie Portman), their teenage daughter from another marriage. As the robberies test the family relations of the crooks, Hanna’s commitment to the investigation drives home to Justine his emotional distance and his refusal to open up to her about how he reacts to the crimes he encounters. Further intertwining the two plotlines, Hanna must also investigate the latest in a string of serial murders of prostitutes. We will learn that the killer is Waingro.
We might think of Hanna as the protagonist, with McCauley as the antagonist. But the weight given McCauley and his plotline inclines me to say that the film has two protagonists. Each is an antagonist to the other, with subsidiary antagonists (Waingro, Van Zant) adding pressure to the conflicts. Each man stands out, of course, by virtue of the presence of major stars. The performances are carefully calibrated. As McCauley, Robert DeNiro underplays to the point of paralysis: he acts mostly with the space between his hairline and his eyebrows.
By contrast, Al Pacio’s Hanna is full of swagger and bravado, using what Mann calls “manically extroverted” gestures and speech to intimidate others. But that’s on the job. At home, he’s taciturn, justifying his impassivity there as a way to preserve his angst and keep his edge for the street.
Mann’s screenplay teases us with brief confrontations between the two men. One takes place via surveillance video during the second score.
The most famous encounter is the celebrated diner scene, handled in protracted over-the-shoulder views. Here Hanna is much more subdued, modulating his eye movements to match McCauley’s constant scanning of the room.
The two plotlines culminate at the airport. McCauley interrupts his escape to kill Waingro and, reverting to his “discipline” of abandoning personal ties, must leave Eady alone. But he’s pursued by Hanna for a final shootout.
Apart from its binary-protagonist structure, the sweep of the film also makes it something of a network narrative. There are a great many characters and locales, and nearly every scene is elaborated in such physical detail that we have a wide-ranging survey of vivid personalities and situations. I haven’t mentioned the memorable informers whom Hanna interrogates, or Charlene’s louche lover Marciano, or Dr. Bob, the veterinarian who patches up the wounded Chris. Even the smallest roles (often played by recognizable actors) gain a memorable intensity. The breadth and depth of the story world suggests that the film might be a prototype for the “mosaic” structure of TV series like The Wire (20002-2008).
Work/ life imbalance
Narratives cohere largely through patterns of causality. One incident triggers another. But narratives also depend on parallelism–likenesses and difference among aspects of the story world. Parallels can draw comparisons among characters, locales, and situations. Michael Mann deliberately built Heat on parallels, as he points out in the 2005 DVD commentary track.
Most obvious is the comparison of Hanna and McCauley as men devoted to their work, at the expense of intimate relationships. (Parallels between cop and crook are virtually a convention of the policier.) Each man’s willed solitude is virtually a compulsion, and they recognize their affinity in the diner conversation. That is prepared for by almost telepathic reverse angles during the video surveillance, with the lighting’s angles presenting them as virtually split.
One benefit of the expansive plotting of the film is the way it creates parallels to other men. Nate, Kelso, and Van Zant seem as isolated as McCauley, though perhaps not out of principle. At the extreme is Waingro, also a loner, but one who preys on women–a psychopathic alternative to McCauley’s asceticism.
The film multiplies parallels among the couples. Ceritto has a warm relationship with his wife, and Trejo chooses death over life without Anna. Chris, for all his faults, is deeply in love with Charlene. Breedan responds resolutely to Lilian’s urging to reconcile himself to the unfairness of his new job.
Likewise, Hanna’s police colleagues are happily married. In parallel scenes, we see the gang and the squad enjoying lively restaurant dinners. Even Hanna unbends enough for a dance with Justine. Only McCauley, alone with the other couples, is marked as without a woman–a status that impels him to call Eady and invite himself over.
There are plenty of other parallels, not least that of vulnerable daughters, with the suicidal Lauren and the teenage hooker Waingro kills. But the ones I’ve just examined point up a common feature of classical Hollywoood plotting. Often American studio films interweave two lines of action, one based on work and another based on romantic love. Problems arise when the two can’t be reconciled. The husband may be consumed by pressures of the job, while the wife is neglected and her wishes dismissed.
More specifically, cop films and novels often play out the conflicting demands of duty (danger, disruption of routine) and love (of wife and children). This is exactly the life that McCauley foreswears and that Hanna tries to negotiate. The crux of the film is that both McCauley and Hanna entertain the possibility of a normal life only to find that their nature precludes it. Their counterparts seem to have managed it, but each gang member is also drawn to the adrenalin high of crime. “For me,” Ceritto says, “the action is the juice.” They all go along with the bank heist, with ruinous results. To a lesser degree, they are on the same spectrum as McCauley and Hanna.
The work/life tension is sometimes made apparent on the level of style. After Hanna dances playfully with Justine, Mann interrupts with the next scene, in which Hanna blocks the distraught mother from approaching her daughter’s corpse.
There is deeper concern, to the point of passion, in Hanna’s frantic embrace of this grieving stranger than in his flirtatious dance with his wife.
In such ways the film spares sympathy for the women. The plot brings out the parallel situations showing women beseeching the men to face their problems. Mann also uses visual motifs to heighten the comparisons. The women express themselves in shots of their hands. A bold composition in which Hanna blocks Justine heightens her gesture of annoyed resignation, and later close-ups show Charlene’s secret signal to Chris and Eady’s tension while waiting at the airport.
Men’s hands have other things to do, although one close-up of Neil fetching water for Eady suggests the man he might become.
The climax of this motif comes at the end, as Neil lies dying and Hanna accepts his handclasp.
Scrambled backstory
Now the spoilers for the novel commence.
In planning Heat 2 Mann and Gardiner faced some problems. At the end of the film several characters are dead, including the fascinatingly reticent Neil McCauley. To revive him, you have to create his backstory. Chris Shiherlis and his wife Charlene survive, but she has chosen not to give him to the police, so he will have to find a new way to live. And how will you treat Vincent Hanna–his past, his future?
The authors found several solutions, some of which vary Mann’s usual narrative strategies. The novel is broken into time periods, but not in the manner of the prototype for such sagas, Godfather II (1974). After a prologue sketching the action of the film, one section is devoted to the immediate aftermath of the bank robbery. This alternates Chris’s escape from LA and Hanna’s inability to track him.
There follows a flashback to 1988, set mostly in Chicago, in which McCauley and his crew launch new heists. These scenes alternate with episodes of Hanna, stationed in Chicago, investigating some brutal home invasions. Eventually the gang executing the invasions learns of McCauley’s plans for a southwestern raid on drug smugglers and decides to rip off the team. The initiative is led by the monstrous Otis Wardell, a Waingro on steroids, who enjoys raping the women whose homes he invades. Ultimately Hanna’s frustration with his boss’s constraints on his investigation leads him to quit the force.
Most Mann films are resolutely linear in plotting. Apart from the time-jumping montage at the start of Ali (2001), he prefers chronological narrative. But now Heat 2 jumps ahead to 1995-1996. Chris has fled to Paraguay, where he takes up with a Taiwanese family involved in the arms trade and cybercrime. He falls in love with the chief’s daughter Ana, whom he helps gain power in the family.
The action returns to the southern border in 1988, with a showdown between Wardell and McCauley. In the course of a protracted firefight, Wardell kills Elisa Vasquez, the woman McCauley loves. Losing her is what plunges McCauley into the willed solitude that he projects in the film.
After another passage from 1996 bringing Chris and Ana up to date, the action jumps to 2000, after the events of the film. Everyone is now back in Los Angeles, and Hanna, remembering Wardell from his Chicago days, vows to capture him, while Chis vows to kill Hanna in revenge for McCauley’s death. Complicating things is the presence of Gabriela, Elisa’s daughter, who becomes a new target for Wardell. All these forces converge at a bloody climax.
Why did Mann break the prequel material into blocks and alternate the time periods? I suspect it was to maintain interest in the runup to the film’s action. If all the 1988 action preceded Chris’ 1990s career in Paraguay, we would have lost both McCauley and Hanna about a third of the way through the book. Chris would have had to carry a large central chunk of the story. Even as a soldier of fortune, he just isn’t as charismatic as Hanna and McCauley, so holding the resolution of the McCauley plotline in suspension keeps us turning the pages. Elisa’s death and McCauley’s devastation provides a strong lead-in to the film we have. Thereafter, the 2000 followup serves to wrap up nearly all the action. (The last line presents is a dangling cause that could lead to yet another sequel.)
The novel is less concerned with parallels than the film, although Ana’s frustration with the closed-in Chris matches that of Heat‘s wives. And Hanna’s fury at Wardell’s rape and beating of a teenage girl fuels his mission to find the gang, while thanks to a coincidence Wardell realizes that the waitress in a diner is the daughter of the woman he murdered in the desert. What knits the novel together most tightly is the premise that Hanna, McCauley, and Wardell were all in Chicago in the same years, but they were largely unaware of each other. We see links that the characters aren’t aware of.
This roaming-spotlight viewpoint is at work in the film as well, with the constant crosscutting of cops and crooks. But Mann and Gardiner take omniscience farther by penetrating the minds of the characters. Scene by scene we learn what the major characters are thinking, with some scenes containing several shifts of perspective. It would be as if the film gave us voice-overs from Hanna, McCauley, Chris, and others. The novel’s inner monologues remind me of Mann’s commentary track for Heat, which frequently draws larger conclusions and fills us in on what the characters are thinking. When Drucker pressures Charlene to give up Chris, Mann’s commentary reminds us that he’s trying to “build emotional solidarity” with her “despite having “a very short window.” Of Heat‘s two protagonists, he says:
These are the only two guys like each other in the universe. . . they are fully aware and conscious of who they are.
In the novel’s prologue the passage is:
Each navigated the future racing at him with eyes wide open. . . Polar opposites in some ways, they were the same in taking in how the world worked, devoid of illusions and self-deception.
The result is a narration that is, by the standards of Hammett or Elmore Leonard, over the top. On the same page, we get: “The detonation behind her eyes is seismic” and “For a second, she looks like she might explode.” Likewise, the perspective-shifting encourages scenes to be overelaborated; nothing is left to the imagination. But as with a lot of pulp writing, the novel has a raw power. We can treat it as a package, wrapping a Mann plot and dialogue in blunt, brash commentary.
Novel as script
A great deal of the appeal of a Michael Mann film is its richly textured surface. He is a “realistic” director insofar as he carefully researches a film’s milieu and takes pride in exact historical details. During a visit to Madison, he praised Dunkirk for Nolan’s attention to the Bakelite knobs on the aircraft. Yet Mann is also a pictorialist, always seeking striking, expressive shots that can de-realize the most familiar landscape, often through long lenses.
His early interest in video capture indicates both his realist impulse and his gift for abstract color design. Wanting to reveal LA at night in Collateral (2004), he wound up with night visions like nothing else on earth. Add in his talent for innovative film music. Heat‘s eclectic, melancholic score, so different from that of the routine action picture, is a big part of its power. So approximating a Michael Mann film on the printed page is far from easy.
Heat 2.0 tries. Written in the present tense, it has the staccato quality of a screenplay.
Gunfire. Deep. A rifle. Behind, them, rounds hit the connecting door from the far side. Somebody kicks it. Chris spins and fires a three-shot burst. They hear a body fall. More shots come through the wood, splintering it.
Reading it, you may find yourself hearing the dialogue in the voice of DeNiro or Pacino.
Ceritto glances around. The walls of boxes gleam in the spooky light. “Which one has the Holy Grail?”
Neil opens a gym bag. “Don’t matter. You find Jesus Christ, haul him out and hand him a sledgehammer.”
Hanna leans down into Alex’s face and grabs the crucifix in his right ear and rips it out through the lobe. Alex screams. Blood pours from the tear.
“Asshole!” Hanna shouts. “What the fuck do you think we’re gonna do? You are gonna flip, you dumb prick. You are gonna tell me everything I want to know, you cocksucker!”
He jerks Alex’s chin up, stares into his eyes, and shoves forward the cross. “The power of Christ commands you! I am your motherfucking exorcist. Tell me!”
Mann says he hopes to make a film of the novel. If he does, readers will hope that passages like these make their way into it.
Heat has proven to be an enduring modern classic. It’s encouraging that a followup to a movie nearly thirty years old can stir such widespread interest. Whatever happens to Heat 2, it shows that at age 79 Mann has not lost his lustre.
Nick James’s appreciative monograph on Heat offers many insights into the film. I discuss the heist genre and the police procedural in my forthcoming book Perplexing Plots.
Heat (1995).
(Welcome to The Daily Stream, an ongoing series in which the /Film team shares what they've been watching, why it's worth checking out, and where you can stream it.)
The Movie: So Vam
Where You Can Stream It: Shudder
The Pitch: In this micro-budget ode to LGBTQ+ identity, Kurt (Xai) is a young man in a small Australian town that feels trapped in its conservative politics, instead wanting to move to the city to follow his passion of becoming a drag queen. Unfortunately, he ends up getting kidnapped and bitten by Landon (Chris Asimos), a vampire who preys upon younger men. Before Kurt succumbs to the bite, he is saved by a pair of vampire vigilantes, Harley (Ethan McErlean) and April (Grace Hyland), who swiftly let him join their ranks. Although he feels like his true self after embracing his vampirism, Kurt, his friends, and his new boyfriend Andy (Tumelo Nthupi) must take revenge against Landon so he can finally be free.
Horror is inherently queer. It is something that has been discussed and analyzed at length by researchers and theorists, and the evidence that these studies provide is pretty damn convincing. After all, think about the prominent themes present throughout most horror movies: alienation, isolation, and transformation, among others. These are ideas that are intrinsically tied with the LGBTQ+ experience, so it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of people who identify as such gravitate so much towards the genre.
This gravitation is why we are also seeing more examples of queer-centric horror movies being released. These have admittedly been a mixed bag in terms of quality; for every "Titane," there is a "They/Them." While it can't be denied that the majority of movies shot from the perspective of the LGBTQ+ community often have the best intentions, they can sometimes feel too sanitized or pandering to straight, cisgender audiences.
"So Vam," on the other hand, is entirely meant for the community it features. Mackay isn't afraid to depict the difficult aspects of queer identity; the snide comments, the disgusted stares, and especially the acts of physical violence. At the same time, though, her framing of the joys of queerness, both big and small, balances these more disturbing scenes out. It is this nuanced depiction of being queer, where it feels both good and bad to be attracted to others in a way that defies the status quo, that has been rarely felt in mainstream LGBTQ+ film.
The vampiric subgenre takes the idea of horror as queerness to a whole new level. It goes far beyond the idea of blood-sucking as a romantic act. As April tells Kurt in a pivotal scene, vampires were used as avatars for any sort of so-called "evil" of a time period. While the xenophobia of classics such as "Dracula" can't be denied, it is also hard to deny that the lustful, pleasure-seeking vampires we've grown accustomed to aren't also symbols for queer people who have embraced their identities.
In the same vein, it is also difficult to ignore how vampirism, specifically the type shown in "So Vam," is intrinsically connected to transgender euphoria. After Kurt becomes a vampire, April reveals to him that she ran away as a human after coming out as trans. It's clear that becoming a vampire was the best thing to ever happen to her, as she is able to live the life she wants while also seeking revenge on people who abuse and traumatize others for being who they are.
Kurt experiences a similar arc throughout the film. While a shy outcast before his transformation, he becomes more confident and assertive after becoming a vampire. He even gets his very own slow-motion hallway strut, along with a killer end-of-movie drag routine that lives up to the hype. "So Vam" is ultimately about the joys of transforming into the best version of yourself, a powerful and important affirmation of the importance of allowing trans and gender-nonconforming people to exist freely.
If the queer horror subgenre is to remain as iconoclastic as it is, it shouldn't conform to the standards of mainstream cinema. Sure, queer-centric horror films should be given wide releases and appropriate funding by major studios, but they should never tone down their queerness to appease the most general audiences possible. Instead, queer horror needs to be unapologetically so. It should embrace the idea of being the Other rather than being afraid of it. It should find joy in the idea of transformation and of finding fulfillment in being yourself, even if your true self is a vampire with bites that melt your victims' skin.
That mantra is at the core of "So Vam," and it is a mantra that is needed now more than ever before. With the idea of gay and trans rights being stripped away becoming a very real possibility, finding unity in being loudly and unapologetically ourselves is imperative. With "So Vam," Mackay proves that horror should be a safe haven for everyone in the LGBTQ+ community, as it harbors a safe space for the weirdos, the outcasts, and those either learning to be or are comfortable in our skin.
"So Vam" is now streaming on Shudder.
Read this next: The 95 Best Horror Movies Ever
The post The Daily Stream: So Vam Paints a Bloody Picture of the Future of Queer and Trans Horror appeared first on /Film.
ASUS has further detailed its X670E Motherboard lineup which will carry some unique OC and IO features for AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs.
We have already talked about the ASUS X670E & X670 motherboards previously since we covered most of them in our detailed roundup over here. Now, ASUS has shared some more information for the lineup by revealing unique OC features that will be specific only to their motherboards. The company invited renowned overclocked, Der8auer, to their ROG Gamescom 2022 presentation & we got the first taste of two OC-specific features headed to the motherboards that are designed with AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs in mind.
ASUS Dynamic OC Switcher & Ryzen Core Flex Overclocking Features For AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs
The first overclocking feature is known as the "Dynamic OC Switcher" which takes into account the temperatures and current and lets you change dynamically between Manual OC for higher multi-threaded performance and PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) for higher single-threaded increases. This feature was previously exclusive to the ROG X570 HERO but now, it's coming to the entire X670 motherboard lineup.
The other feature that Roman talked about is "Ryzen Core Flex" which is aimed toward more hard-core overclockers with free algorithms that you can set input values, & different values/thresholds.
ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E GENE
ASUS has given us the first look at its mATX ROG Crosshair X670E GENE motherboard which comes with a solid 16+2 power stage solution rated at 110A. The motherboard features PCIe Gen 5.0 & an M.2 Gen 5 slot, has USB4 support, and even adds in the ROG Gen-Z.2 card for further M.2 storage expansion. There's also a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C port with Quick Charge 4+ (60W) capabilities.
The motherboard features two DDR5 DIMM slots, a total of four SATA III ports, and an additional PCIe Gen 4.0 x1 slot. There are two M.2 slots on the board itself whereas two additional ports are provided by the Gen-Z.2 card which fits within the slot next to the DDR5 DIMMs. There's a nice set of heatsinks on the motherboard and the I/O looks very solid too.
ASUS ROG STRIX X670E-I Gaming WiFi
ASUS isn't just stopping at the mATX form factor, the company also revealed the first Mini-ITX AM5 motherboard, the ROG STRIX X670E-I Gaming WiFI. The motherboard comes with a unique design that features the same dual-chipset layout as the standard X670 motherboards but one of the two Promontory 21 chipsets is located on a modular PCB instead of being fused to the main PCB itself to conserve space. The motherboard has active VRM cooling and features a solid Gen 5/DDR5 lay-out.
Based on the dissected shot of the motherboard, the ASUS ROG STRIX X670E-I Gaming WiFi seems to be equipped with a 10+2 phase PWM design. There are two DDR5 DIMM slots and a range of I/O ports. There's no M.2 slot on the motherboard itself rather, it comes within the modular bay that rests between the AM5 socket and the only PCIe Gen 5.0 x16 slot.
ASUS X670E Motherboard Lineup (Picture Gallery):
ASUS isn't specific about prices or availability yet but we will hear more information from them in the coming month.
| Motherboard Name | ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme | ROG Crosshair X670E HERO | ROG Crosshair X670E Gene | ROG STRIX X670E-I Gaming WIFI | ROG STRIX X670-E WIFI Gaming | PRIME X670E-PRO WiFi | TUF Gaming X670E-PLUS WiFi | ProArt X670E-Creator WiFi |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chipset | X670E | X670E | X670E | X670E | X670E | X670E | X670E | X670E |
| Form Factor | E-ATX | ATX | mATX | mITX | ATX | ATX | ATX | ATX |
| PCB Color | Black | Black | Black | Black | Black | Black | Black | Light Black |
| Motherboard Color | Black + Silver | Black + Silver | Black + Silver | Black + Silver | Black + Grey | White + Black | Black + Grey | Silver + Gray |
| VRM Design | 20+2 Phase | 18+2 Phase | 16+2 Phase | 10+2 Phase | 16 Phase (TBD) | 16 Phase (TBD) | 16 Phase (TBD) | 16 Phase (TBD) |
| VRM Heatsink | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes (Active Cooled) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PWM Controller | Infineon ASP2205 | Infineon ASP2205 | Infineon ASP2205 | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| Power Stages | 110A | 110A | 110A | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
| Power Delivery (CPU) | 8+8 Pin | 8+8 Pin | 8+8 Pin | 8 Pin | 8+8 Pin | 8+8 Pin | 8+8 Pin | 8+8 Pin |
| Memory DIMMs | 4 DDR5 DIMM | 4 DDR5 DIMM | 2 DDR5 DIMM | 2 DDR5 DIMM | 4 DDR5 DIMM | 4 DDR5 DIMM | 4 DDR5 DIMM | 4 DDR5 DIMM |
| Memory Support | DDR5-5600 (JEDEC) DDR5-**** (EXPO) |
DDR5-5600 (JEDEC) DDR5-**** (EXPO) |
DDR5-5600 (JEDEC) DDR5-**** (EXPO) |
DDR5-5600 (JEDEC) DDR5-**** (EXPO) |
DDR5-5600 (JEDEC) DDR5-**** (EXPO) |
DDR5-5600 (JEDEC) DDR5-**** (EXPO) |
DDR5-5600 (JEDEC) DDR5-**** (EXPO) |
DDR5-5600 (JEDEC) DDR5-**** (EXPO) |
| Memory Capacity | 128 GB (Max) | 128 GB (Max) | 64 GB (Max) | 64 GB (Max) | 128 GB (Max) | 128 GB (Max) | 128 GB (Max) | 128 GB (Max) |
| PCIe Gen 5.0 Slots | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| PCIe Gen 4.0 Slots | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| M.2 Gen 5.0 Slots | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| M.2 Gen 4.0/3.0 Slots | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2/1 | 2/1 | 2 |
| M.2 Heatsinks | Yes (All) | Yes (All) | Yes (All) | Yes (All) | Yes (All) | Yes (All) | Yes (All) | Yes (3 Heatsinks) |
| SATA III Ports | 6 | 6 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| WiFi Capabilities | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E |
| LAN Capabilities | 10 GbE LAN 2.5 GbE LAN |
2.5 GbE LAN | 2.5 GbE LAN | 2.5 GbE LAN | 2.5 GbE LAN | 2.5 GbE LAN | 2.5 GbE LAN | 10 GbE LAN 2.5 GbE LAN |
| USB 4.0 Ports | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| USB 3.2 Ports | 16 | 11 | 9 | 9 | 16 | 13 | 13 | 11 |
| USB 3.1/3.0/2.0 Ports | 4 | 6 | 6 | 7 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 7 |
| RGB Sync Software | ASUS Aura Sync ARGB Gen 2 | ASUS Aura Sync ARGB Gen 2 | ASUS Aura Sync ARGB Gen 2 | ASUS Aura Sync ARGB Gen 2 | ASUS Aura Sync ARGB Gen 2 | ASUS Aura Sync ARGB Gen 2 | ASUS Aura Sync ARGB Gen 2 | ASUS Aura Sync ARGB Gen 2 |
| Price | ~$700 US | ~$500 US | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD |
The post ASUS Further Details X670E Motherboard Features: First mITX & mATX Designs Revealed, Dynamic OC Switcher For AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.
This article includes spoilers for the season 2 finale of "Only Murders in the Building."
"Only Murders in the Building" just ended its second season on a wacky high note, solving one murder (in the most hilariously complex way possible) and leaving neighbors and amateur sleuths Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez) smack-dab in the middle of another. The season 3 set-up already looks promising. In the finale's final scene, we see that Mabel, Charles, and Oliver have reunited for the theatrical debut of Oliver's new play, headlined by none other than Paul Rudd's Ben Glenroy. Only, before the final curtain can fall, Ben has collapsed to the stage, dead.
/Film's Josh Spiegel recently spoke with "Only Murders in the Building" co-creator John Hoffman and gleaned some important information about season 3, which has already been greenlit. Namely, Hoffman says that the next season will revolve more around Oliver's world than the previous two. The writer and executive producer explained that so far, each season has dived deeper into the backstories of one of the three members of the podcasting trio, and the next one will be no exception.
"In season 1, we had a close connection with Mabel's emotional storyline with Tim Kono," Hoffman pointed out, "And in the second season, we had Charles and the history with his father and the history with the Arconia, all of the mystery around that." He says that the writers' room is eager to "angle towards Oliver Putnam and the world of theatrics, and his wishes and dreams to regain a reputation after his debacle with 'Splash!'"
In case you've forgotten, Oliver was a legendary and prolific theater director until 2005, when his reputation was damaged by a disastrous big-budget version of the Tom Hanks, Daryl Hannah mermaid rom-com from 1984. Audiences have only heard mentions of Putnam's time working on "Splash!" but from what he said about it way back in the third episode, it sounds like a "Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark"-level mess. Over budget and injury-laden, "Splash!" was a mess that ultimately cost Oliver's son his college fund, which makes the fact that Oliver's big comeback is now marred with murder genuinely sad. The poor guy can't catch a break!
Hopefully, season 3 will show us more of what "Splash!" was actually like, and give us a glimpse of what Oliver looks like when he has his director's hat on. Short is laugh-out-loud funny in this role, but the ensemble cast means he's not always in the spotlight. Next season, though, it sounds like that'll change. According to Hoffman, the season 3 writers' room is already open and five weeks into story planning, so they've "got a pretty good map for all 10 [episodes]." In fact, Hoffman says planning for the new season will be as much about cutting back as it is fleshing out, since, as he puts it, "we have so much that we want to fulfill."
Even though "Only Murders in the Building" just ended and there's no release date for season 3 in sight, we're already looking forward to more hijinks from the Arconia crew. With Oliver taking center stage and a Paul Rudd-centric murder, season 3 already sounds like it'll be a showstopper.
Read this next: The 20 Best '60s Horror Movies Ranked
The post Only Murders in the Building Season 3 Will Put Martin Short's Character Back in the Spotlight [Exclusive] appeared first on /Film.
Expiration dates are meaningless, but there is still a feeling of unease that can come with munching down on a snack whose packaging claims it expired weeks or months ago. That’s why it’s helpful to know which foods are especially fine to consume post-expiration date—and which ones you actually should not.
Virtualization technology software giant VMware on Tuesday released patches to fix an important-severity security flaw in the VMware Tools suite of utilities.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-31676, could be exploited by attackers to escalate privileges on a compromised system.
Techland has long promised Dying Light 2 Stay Human will be getting a major story-based DLC this year, and earlier this week we got our first peek at said DLC, entitled “Blood Ties.” That look was pretty brief, but thankfully, just minutes ago during the big Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase, we got a more substantial look at the expansion. As the teaser hinted, Bloody Ties will see players take part in bone-crunching gladiatorial battles set in a new opera house arena location. You can check out the first full trailer for Dying Light 2 - Bloody Ties DLC, below.
Looks like a brutal good time. Need to know more about Dying Light 2 – Bloody Ties? You can check out a brief official description, below.
“In Dying Light 2 - Bloody Ties, players will embark on a new story adventure, you will reach the epicentre of death, wealth and absolute splendor in a stunning location -- The Carnage Hall. This old opera building is full of challenges and quests, surprising new weapon types, character interactions, and discoveries to uncover. Players who pre-order will get access to the Aristocrat Pack, including an exclusive weapon and outfit!”
And here are a few more details provided by Dying Light 2 lead designer Tymon Smektała in an interview with Wccftech…
“What I can say right now is that the first one runs parallel to the main story, so it can be started right after Aiden arrives in The City. Since it’s the first one out the gate, we didn’t want to force players to finish the game before they’d be able to have fun with it. I went through some of the speculations our community has expressed online, but I haven’t seen any of those theories get it right. So I hope that we’ll positively surprise people with this DLC. […] Its story is centered around a specific place outside of the Villedor city limits. But of course, there will be some choices to make!”
Dying Light 2 Stay Human is available now on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and PS5. The Bloody Ties DLC enters the arena on October 13.
The post Dying Light 2 “Bloody Ties” Story DLC Gets Full Brutal Trailer and October Release Date by Nathan Birch appeared first on Wccftech.
Gearbox Software announced several months ago that a new Tales from the Borderlands game was coming this year, and its title is exactly that: New Tales from the Borderlands. CEO Randy Pitchford made an appearance at Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase to reveal more details about the game.
Pitchford said he was a big fan of the original game, a narrative-driven point-and-click title set in the Borderlands universe developed by Telltale Games. Pitchford said Gearbox brought in some of the writers who worked on the first game for New Tales from the Borderlands
The latest title has three new main characters (Anu, Octavio and Fran) and a fresh storyline. As you might expect from a Borderlands game, the trailer suggests it will have offbeat humor and lots of guns. It seems there'll be a minigame or two as well. While New Tales from the Borderlands retains the series' distinctive art style, it looks like the visuals have been given an upgrade after Gearbox switched to Unreal Engine.
Gearbox is making New Tales from the Borderlands in-house at its Quebec studio. It will release the game on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Steam and Epic Games Store on October 21st.
🚨 New Tales from the Borderlands Trailer
— 2K (@2K) August 23, 2022
Meet Anu, Octavio, & Fran as you stand against ruthless corporate overlords in this action-packed narrative adventure
💥 Make Mayhem Your Business on Oct. 21st!#Gamescom | #OpeningNightLivepic.twitter.com/GKfqlx2Epl
It’s an emotional time of year. Many young adults are headed off to college for the first time, eliciting the mix of tremendous excitement and apprehension that comes with crossing any of life’s major thresholds. Some parents are despondent at the thought of seeing their kids off, while just as many can’t wait to…
The big promise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was an interconnected franchise where each movie tied up to another, and characters could meet and fight together in big crossover events. This promise paid a big role in making the MCU the cultural powerhouse that it is today, with heroes meeting and the world growing larger with each installment.
At its best, this means seeing characters meet one or two at a time, in smaller stories compared to the huge "Avengers" team-ups, giving audiences an opportunity to see their favorite heroes hang out to create bonds and relationships outside of a quick quip in the middle of a busy fight. We've seen Hulk appear in "Iron Man 3," Hawkeye show up in the first "Thor," and Spider-Man teaming up with both Iron Man and then with Doctor Strange, or Thor and Hulk fight it out in "Thor: Ragnarok." These team ups make the movies feel like they are actually part of a larger universe with multiple heroes active at any time.
The latest superhero team up is happening on "She-Hulk: Attorney at Law" a show that already gave us a very cool Hulk out courtesy of Jennifer and Bruce. Then there's the worst kept secret in the show — the upcoming appearance of Charlie Cox's Daredevil. We don't know exactly how the two heroes will meet, but we now know how it all went down.
Creator and head writer Jessica Gao already talked about how it was impossible for the writers to include any Spider-Man-related characters in "She-Hulk" due to the complicated agreement between Sony and Marvel. Surprisingly enough, the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man was less friendly than the devil of Hell's Kitchen, because Gao told Collider that getting Daredevil to join the Disney+ show went much more smoothly.
"Most of the time, what we do is mine the movies and the comics, and we pick a character we wanna use, then we think of what the best and funniest way is for us to use them, and then we ask Marvel, if we can have them," Gao said. "But Daredevil was a dream that we dared not dream. We were like, 'Oh, there's no way. That's not even on the table.' It never even crossed our minds."
Getting a character from a show that, although technically made in collaboration with Marvel, aired on a different platform altogether does sound rather daunting. And yet, that's exactly what they managed to do. "We got wind, one day, that not only was he on the table, but Charlie Cox would be coming back as Daredevil, so we immediately started thinking of ways to incorporate him into our show," Gao continued. "If we only had a snowball's chance in hell of getting him on our show, it was still a chance, and we were gonna take it."
That being said, don't expect this to be the same brooding, Catholic guilt-filled Daredevil from the Netflix show, but one that adapts to the style of humor of "She-Hulk." According to Gao:
"[Cox] was totally up for more funny banter and having this fun dynamic with Jen and She-Hulk. It really feels like the character from the comics. It was so fun because he really does fit into the show so perfectly. They're both lawyers, and they're both superheroes. Who else can say that they have that in common? It was just very fun thinking about what their dynamics would be, based on the personalities of these two characters."
"She-Hulk" streams new episodes Thursdays on Disney+.
Read this next: MCU Jokes That Didn't Age Well
The post Here's How She-Hulk Managed to Secure Charlie Cox's Daredevil for the Show appeared first on /Film.
Fantasy fever is hitting the globe. While "House of the Dragon" recently jumped out to a rip-roaring start, its reign as the biggest and most dominant series of its genre in this volatile and hard-to-predict streaming age will prove to be relatively short-lived. In just a few short weeks, a major challenger will emerge for its share of attention and eyeballs. Who will win? Well, nerds, of course!
"The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" comes with years of hype and anticipation, not to mention all sorts of pressure from passionate fans (including the creators themselves!) to get it right. Adapting the writings of groundbreaking author J.R.R. Tolkien is never to be taken lightly, even if that source material mostly comes from an assortment of notes and collections found in the appendices of "The Return of the King," as opposed to the actual "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy itself. Still, showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have taken on this immense challenge anyway, filling in the gaps as best they can and telling the story of the Second Age of Middle-earth that's set thousands of years before the likes of Frodo and Sam and Aragorn ever set off on their grand adventures.
With the premiere of "The Rings of Power" fast approaching, Amazon has unleashed one more trailer to convince the fence-sitters out there to give this series a try. Check out all the new footage below!
You know, maybe Samwise Gamgee said it best when he nervously sputtered on about how he "...heard a good deal about a Ring, and a Dark Lord, and something about the end of the world" because, well, that just about sums up the extent of this new trailer. Much like how another, far older version of the character (played by the esteemed Cate Blanchett, of course) did in Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," Morfyyd Clark's Galadriel gravely intones about the coming threat of Sauron — a warning that falls on deaf ears to a world that has moved past such concerns after the defeat of Morgoth, the even darker Dark Lord (yeah, there's a few of them) of whom Sauron was only a servant. From more looks at fearsome orcs to stunning hero shots of new characters in action to all sorts of gorgeous imagery, there's something for every fan here, whether casual or Tolkien aficionado alike.
In addition to Clark as this younger and brasher take on the elf queen Galadriel, "The Rings of Power" stars Robert Aramayo as Elrond, Owain Arthur as Prince Durin, Sophia Nomvete as Princess Disa, Ismael Cruz Córdova as Arondir, Lenny Henry as Sadoc Burrows, Markella Kavenagh as Elanor "Nori" Brandyfoot, Sara Zwangobani as Marigold Brandyfoot, Megan Richards as Poppy Proudfellow, Daniel Weyman as "The Stranger," Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor, and much more.
Fans can expect "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" to premiere on Prime Video on September 2, 2022.
Read this next: Single-Season '80s Sci-Fi And Fantasy Shows That Deserve A Second Shot
The post The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Trailer: This Could be the Beginning of a New Era appeared first on /Film.
There are a lot of potentially problematic elements in "Game of Thrones" and its spin-off series, "House of the Dragon," but perhaps the ickiest of them all is the rampant incest. The Targaryen dynasty is rife with cosanguinity, which is a fancy word for inbreeding, and the practice is clearly still in fashion in "House of the Dragon," as King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) and Queen Aemma Arryn (Sian Brooke) are first cousins. They share a set of Targaryen grandparents, Jaehaerys I and his sister-wife Alysanne, so they both have some of that lovely double-dragon bloodline going on. Fans of the George R.R. Martin novel that "House of the Dragon" is based on know that the married cousins are not the last incestuous relationship in the story, because Targaryens are really all about keeping it in the family.
"House of the Dragon" is set in a fantasy world, but marriages between siblings, cousins, and other close family members have been a surprisingly common occurrence among royalty throughout history. There were practical and political reasons behind such marriages, and the potential genetic problems that could result from repeat inbreeding hadn't really been figured out yet. Let's dig into the Targaryen practice and the historical families that inspired their concerning custom.
Some of the most prolific practitioners of siblings parenting children together lived during the classical era, in the dynasties of the Egyptian pharaohs and of some Roman emperors. The "boy king" Tutankhamun was definitely the product of incest, as the Egyptian kings were thought of as living avatars of the gods, and the gods married their siblings. King Tut's father, the radical Akhenaten who tried to convert Egypt to monotheism under the son god Aten, was married to the legendary beauty Nefertiti, but later married his own sister as well when Nefertiti did not bear him any children. Tut is the child of this union, and scientists have found several genetic abnormalities from his mummified corpse that likely resulted from generations of dipping back into the same exact gene pool. The famous queen Cleopatra was also the child of a brother-sister union, and later married both of her own younger brothers.
The most famous stories of incest in Ancient Rome come from the family of Emperor Caligula, who has been remembered for both his fiery passion and his madness. While many historians now believe that rumors of Caligula having sex with his three sisters were largely fabricated by his enemies, his sister, Agrippina the Younger, did marry her uncle, the emperor Claudius. There are also plenty of rumors about her having an affair with her son Nero, who later became emperor as well. Caligula, Agrippina, and Nero are all clear inspirations for the Targaryens, who are half brilliant and half mad. After all, Nero was accused of enjoying the fact that Rome burned to the ground, and if that's not the most Targaryen thing on this planet, then what is?
In slightly more recent history, the medieval dynasties of Europe were pretty laden with their own incest issues, most notably the Habsburgs. This massive family's Spanish branch started twisting in on itself through political marriages between close relatives, and they continued this practice for nearly 200 years. Unfortunately, all of this inbreeding led to the family reinforcing some troublesome recessive genes, and the dynasty died out when Charles II, who suffered from an over-sized tongue, malformed jaw, and infertility, died at the age of 38. You would think that watching that kind of downward spiral in an uncomfortably close-knit family would prevent future generations from practicing incest, but Queen Victoria of England married her first cousin in 1840, with potentially disastrous consequences.
The Targaryens seem to marry their siblings for reasons closer to the Egyptians, as they believe they are touched by the dragons, but there are elements of other real-world royal families in their makeup as well. The Targaryens suffer from what they think is a curse that renders many of them mad, but it could really just be as simple as a recessive gene run wild (along with a healthy dose of royal entitlement).
Of course, the Targaryens aren't the only family in the "Game of Thrones" universe to dabble in sibling-diddling, because Cersei and Jaime Lannister are also quite smitten despite being twins. Cersei even tries to use the Targaryens to justify it, though they never get away with their forbidden fling as well as the dragon-riders did.
New episodes of "House of the Dragon" premiere Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
Read this next: The Best TV Shows And Movies Coming To HBO Max In August 2022
The post How the Ickiest Part of House of the Dragon is Steeped in Real History appeared first on /Film.
It's a cliché as old as the musical genre: If a filmmaker wishes to use a handy piece of cinematic shorthand in order to communicate that a character is a bad, scary, violence-prone person, then heavy metal will be played on the soundtrack.
Heavy metal as a descriptor first came into vogue in the mid-1970s to describe the sound of louder, "heavier" types of rock coming from bands like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. Throughout the '70s, bands like Motörhead, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Saxon would push the genre forward, earning it a generation of hardcore fans and no small amount of hand-wringing from concerned parents and uptight "moral majority" groups (a response that was intentionally sought). Like all popular genres, heavy metal eventually fractured into various movements and dominant aesthetics; The genre could now be said to include bands as far removed from one another as Stryper and Cradle of Filth.
Rob Zombie, initially a member of the metal band White Zombie prior to his solo music career and filmmaking career, added an interesting aural wrinkle to the genre by including electronic remixing and techno beats underneath the heavier metal guitars and bass. Add a distinct horror-movie-forward set of lyrics about sex, violence, and living dead girls, and you have a notable niche in pop music history.
Despite being known as a heavy metal musician, one might note that Zombie tends not to use heavy metal music in his own movies. Indeed, a remarkable sequence in his film "The Devil's Rejects" has several characters being gunned down to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird." In a 2005 interview with the website eatmybrains, Zombie explains why he eschews metal when it comes to filmmaking.
Zombie, despite loving metal, seemed to have been all too aware of how metal is used in movies. It's rare that a character will be listening to heavy metal in their car, exit, and introduce themselves friendly to a startled protagonist. At least there was Bill & Ted and Wayne & Garth to prove that metal fans are also, typically, pretty nice guys. Zombie wanted to convey different emotions in his films. Luckily, he had a deep well of pop music knowledge to draw from, and was able to find other artists from the classic rock era that would, to his ear, be creepier than any metal song. In the eatmybrains interview, Zombie refers specifically to his music selections in his film "The Devil's Rejects," saying:
"One thing I've always hated is when people use heavy metal music in horror movies. It's just so obvious, so over the top. So something like the Terry Reid songs we used in the film -- they're beautiful but they're also really creepy and sad. The whole movie to me has a sad overtone to it. You know that the Firefly family are sort of doomed; you know that the Sheriff is sort of doomed. So the whole thing is really sad and those songs were just so perfect for that mood."
The Firefly family — a clan of filthy, nihilistic serial killers — are the main characters of "The Devil's Rejects," and they will not emerge unscathed. Well, until their deaths were retconned for "3 From Hell," Zombie's 2019 sequel. Terry Reid is the English rocker known for "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" and many others.
The kind of stylized, rubber-mask, haunted house horror that marked Zombie's music is not typically a part of his movies ("House of 1000 Corpses" notwithstanding). His movies tend to be about misanthropic outlaws who take pleasure in death and fear no authority beyond their own casual bloodlust and their ties to one another. The villains in "The Devil's Rejects" are presented with a weirdly respectable integrity; They torture and kill, but they also have formed a close-knit, f***-everything family, free of the bonds of earthly morality.
To Zombie, metal doesn't describe characters like that. For Zombie, he heard The Allman Brothers Band. He said:
"The Allman Brothers' songs, they're like sad outlaw music. Not heroic at all. It's like that really great Manson documentary that came out in '70s that has this sort of flute folk music running through it. That is so creepy. Nice music with horrific images. A lot of people don't get it. They're like 'oh yeah that's funny, it's supposed to be a funny juxtaposition.' I wasn't thinking that it would be funny. I just thought it would have a lot of emotion."
The film Zombie refers to is Robert Hendrickson's and Laurence Merrick's 1973 film "Manson," a truly terrifying film currently available on Fubo.
Zombie's next film is a feature version of the 1960s sitcom "The Munsters" and will be rated PG. It's likely that "The Munsters" will feature more surf rock (like the show's theme song) than metal. If Zombie declines to use his "Munsters"-inspired hit single "Dragula" in his new movie, it will be a display of the utmost restraint.
Read this next: 20 Movies About Time Travel Ranked Worst To Best
The post Rob Zombie Has An Unexpected Take On Heavy Metal's Place In Horror Films appeared first on /Film.
If you're a law-abiding citizen with no experience of life behind bars, a good prison movie is a window into a harsh world far removed from regular day-to-day life. There is something so intense about the idea of incarceration that makes it great for drama, and also lends itself to symbolism and metaphor beyond the usual narrative beats of violent inmates, old lags, sadistic screws, and suspenseful escapes.
I recently had a discussion around this with a friend regarding "The Shawshank Redemption." He keeps his kids well away from any screen violence while I have watched the movie with my seven-year-old daughter. Why, he wanted to know, did I think a film containing brutal beatings, suicide, and sexual assault was suitable for her? Well, we skipped some of the darker stuff, and I felt the story's overall message of resilience, hope, and friendship was the important thing, reflected in how its positive themes have won a place in the hearts of people all over the world.
Another prison movie that is right up there on the entertainment scale while also packing plenty of deeper messages is "Cool Hand Luke," the '60s classic starring Paul Newman at the height of his powers. The film provided one of his signature roles and his performance garnered his fourth Oscar nomination for Best Actor (after "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Hud," and "The Hustler"). His role as the rebellious Luke Jackson is one of the great anti-authoritarian figures of American cinema, standing alongside Jack Nicholson's Randall Patrick McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
While the bittersweet ending may seem straightforward, there is plenty to unpack to get the most out of it.
One drunken night out, World War II veteran Luke Jackson (Paul Newman) indulges in a spot of vandalism, cutting the heads off a row of parking meters. The stunt lands him with a two-year stint on a chain gang. The prison is run with strict discipline by The Captain (Strother Martin), and even a minor infringement means a night "in the box." To make sure nobody gets any ideas about escaping, The Captain's right-hand man is Walking Boss Godfrey (Morgan Woodward), a menacing rifleman whose mirrored shades have earned the moniker "The man with no eyes."
Luke initially butts heads with the burly top dog inmate, Dragline (George Kennedy), resulting in a boxing match to settle their differences. Despite being no match for the big man's strength, Luke just won't give up. His resilience wins the respect of Dragline and the other prisoners, and he cements his legendary status by winning a game of poker with a "handful of nothing," prompting Dragline to give him the nickname "Cool Hand Luke."
Luke's antics and disrespect for the prison authorities lift the other inmates' spirits, but his mood sours when his mother passes away and he is put in solitary confinement to prevent him from breaking out to attend her funeral. This makes him more determined than ever, but he is recaptured after each escape attempt. The Captain tries breaking him with harsh punishment and, when it appears he has succeeded, the other prisoners lose faith in Luke. But has The Captain really subdued Luke's fighting spirit?
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Cool Hand Luke," novels by Ken Kesey and Donn Pearce respectively, both centered on charismatic wild cards throwing themselves defiantly against the system. Kesey's book, published in 1962, anticipated the social struggles that would intensify as the decade wore on by pitting McMurphy against "The Combine," the monstrous mechanism that controls society and represented by Nurse Ratched, the cruel head nurse and "The Man" of the story.
Pearce's novel arrived three years later but its movie adaptation beat "Cuckoo's Nest" to the screen by eight years, under rather unusual circumstances. Kirk Douglas bought the rights to Kesey's novel and starred in a failed Broadway version before deciding to produce a film version. To direct, he picked an up-and-coming star of the Czech New Wave, Milos Forman. Forman never received the promised screenplay, which he suspected was confiscated by the strict censors of Communist Czechoslovakia.
This incident was symptomatic of the times; during a period of great social and political upheaval, non-conformity was becoming an increasingly powerful weapon against the authorities, and not just in America. While the States witnessed the Civil Rights movement, race riots, and anti-Vietnam war protests, rebellions and uprisings flared up in many other countries. Hong Kong was rocked by riots in '67, while '68 saw civil unrest in France and the ill-fated Prague Spring in Forman's home country.
If it wasn't for the Czechoslovak censors, Luke and McMurphy might have stood side by side as two of cinema's great non-conformists at a time when they were needed most. As it played out, they bookended some of the most tumultuous years of the period, with "Cuckoo's Nest" serving as an elegy in the Post-Watergate, Post-Vietnam '70s.
How do you fight back against The Man when The Man holds all the power? Nonconformity requires courage, willpower, and tremendous personal belief, and not everyone has the stomach for that kind of battle. Luke, embodied so wonderfully by Paul Newman, has clearly had that anti-authoritarian streak his whole life, summed up by the futile act of vandalism that gets him imprisoned in the first place.
It's not just the authority of The Captain that Luke resists. He initially refuses to observe Dragline's status among his fellow inmates, resulting in the boxing match. Foreshadowing the greater fight against the warden and his guards who hold all the power (guns, dogs, chains, fences), Luke is severely outmatched by Dragline in terms of size and strength, but he keeps going anyway. The subsequent poker game, when Luke wins with crap cards, is also key. He becomes an underdog who might succeed against all the odds, despite holding a handful of nothing.
Like McMurphy, battling the system eventually proves fatal for Luke, but he becomes a hero and a galvanizing force in the eyes of his fellow inmates. The guys on McMurphy's ward grow enough balls to openly disrespect Nurse Ratched, whose hold over them has gone. Dragline attacks Godfrey, knocking off his mirrored shades and leaving him scrambling pathetically in the mud. It's a small but significant act of retaliation from Dragline, who reclaims his Top Dog status not just by his strength and authority, but because he was Luke's friend and keeps his spirit alive through recounting the tale to the boys back in the chain gang.
The Captain likes to talk about how he's a reasonable man but the conversation only goes one way, as demonstrated by his "failure to communicate" speech. He's not interested in communicating at all and will punish anyone who doesn't obey his rules to the letter. Similarly, Godfrey's eye contact only goes one way, with his peepers hidden behind his mirrored shades. If the eyes are windows to the soul, it is his intent to convince the inmates he hasn't got one, making him a much-feared enforcer of almost mythic proportions.
The parallels with current events at the time are clear. If the Captain, talking like a folksy politician, represents the government, then Godfrey stands for the police, whose brutality helped spark many race riots in the '60s. High-profile assassinations were rife at the time, with the murders of JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and RFK. In this context, Luke represents the dissenting voice that is silenced with a bullet. By the time we come to the final standoff in the church, it is clear that The Captain and his men are just looking for an excuse to take him down; there will be no communication, no negotiation at this late stage. Instead, Luke's final act of defiance, mocking The Captain, is met with a fatal shot from Godfrey's rifle, ending the one-sided conversation.
If there is any doubt that it is anything but an assassination, we overhear The Captain saying he will take Luke back to the prison hospital rather than a much closer regular hospital, obviously planning to let Luke bleed out rather than allowing him to disrupt the other inmates any further. But it is a futile act; Luke lives on in their memory and becomes a martyr.
"Cool Hand Luke" is loaded with Christian imagery and symbolism, and you don't need to be a particularly religious person to pick up some of the bigger ones. The most obvious is the repeated motif of the Cross. After Luke completes his bet of eating 50 hardboiled eggs in an hour, he is left lying exhausted on a table in the pose of Jesus on the crucifix, arms spread and feet crossed, with eggshells around his head resembling a crown of thorns. At the end of the film, the imagery is repeated as we see a photo of Luke with some good-time girls, once ripped to pieces but now taped back together, superimposed over a long shot of a crossroads. The mended rips also form a cross, just in case we missed it.
Luke is set up as a redeemer for the other inmates, and he is punished beyond proportion for all their sins. The scene where he is forced to dig a hole, fill it in, and dig all over again echoes Christ's ordeal carrying his own cross to his crucifixion. In the closing moments, Dragline becomes a Judas-like figure, delivering Luke to his captors and his fate. Ultimately, Luke dies fighting the power and becomes a martyr, his spirit and sense of rebellion living on in the reverent tales of the other prisoners.
"Cool Hand Luke" is an effortlessly enjoyable movie, but all these details make it all the more resonant if you're looking for a deeper reading. I've watched the film several times, but I never feel sad when Luke is carried away at the end. He dies with a smile on his face, satisfied that he has fulfilled his destiny: Sticking it to The Man.
Read this next: The 15 Best Paul Newman Movies Ranked
The post Cool Hand Luke Ending Explained: A Failure to Communicate appeared first on /Film.
Every year, it's almost inevitable that two movies with a similar premise will go head to head, whether it be a siege on the white house, an asteroid heading towards Earth, or a story about animated bugs fighting fascism. It's bound to keep on happening since it's been going on for so long — with 1964 as the year in which two competing movies told us how close we were to nuclear annihilation.
Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" was released in January, while Sidney Lumet's "Fail Safe" came out in October. Each featured their own idiosyncrasies, but the one thing they did share was the looming nuclear threat bound to manifest itself. Kubrick's film took on a satirist tone with a paranoid Air Force commander sending out B-52 bombers to attack the Soviets, all while a group of disconcerted buffoons argue, taking guidance from a deranged (former) Nazi scientist.
Lumet's film, on the other hand, sees a similar scenario play out where the nuclear destruction of the USSR is imminent because of the US's incompetence. The key difference is that the attack is set into motion not by one individual, but the flawed system in place that gives the order out by accident. "Fail Safe" takes the matter very seriously as opposed to what Kubrick was doing.
The two films were not only competing at the box office in the same year and at the same studio with similar premises, but they would soon land themselves in a courtroom courtesy of the "Barry Lyndon" filmmaker.
Even with all of their differences, when Kubrick had gotten a whiff of "Fail Safe" going through at Columbia Pictures, he wanted to take the film to court, alleging plagiarism. According to a report from Slate, the case was settled with "Fail Safe" being pushed to the later half of the year so it wouldn't interfere with "Dr. Strangelove." It's obvious why Kubrick would be miffed with a thematically similar project clashing with his, but the argument of whether he was right or not to launch a lawsuit is complicated.
Kubrick had based "Dr. Strangelove" off of Peter George's 1958 novel "Red Alert." When word went around that "Fail Safe" was starting production, Kubrick and George saw its existence as a blatant rip-off of "Red Alert," with both taking the film to court on those grounds. Lumet's film, however, was more based on the 1962 novel of the same name.
Harvey Wheeler, one of the authors of "Fail Safe," had even claimed in an article for Life Magazine that he had started co-writing his novel with Eugene Burdick before "Red Alert" was ever released, but had difficulty in getting it published.
There's an irony in that Kubrick did all he could to shoot down "Fail Safe," only for his movie to ultimately be better received. The damage was done: "Fail Safe" had been pushed back to October where it died at the box office. Even the film's lead, Henry Fonda, who played the President, believed that he couldn't have played the role with a straight face if he saw "Dr. Strangelove" first.
"Fail Safe" posits a harrowing lose-lose scenario with its own set of consequences. Either the United States shoots down its own pilots and face an enormous case of mistrust in the public, or wait for them to drop the bombs on Moscow, which would instigate World War III. After a series of failed attempts to shoot down the bomber in association with the Soviets, Moscow is taken off the map. In order to prevent all-out war, the President orders a nuclear bomb to be dropped onto New York.
The nuclear threat of "Dr. Strangelove" sees its explosive finale as a nihilistic gag where we all go up because stupid people were in charge of our stupid arsenal. In "Fail Safe," however, the heavy decision to turn one of the country's most recognizable and populated cities into a nuclear crater is not taken lightly. You don't see the bombs drop, but rather the point of no return where the freeze frame snapshots show an average day in the life of New York for the last time in human history.
"Fail Safe" was shown to me in high school and after the credits rolled, you could hear a pin drop. Nobody really wanted to speak about what they just saw. I can still feel the pit in my stomach as the credits rolled atop the sound of New York's final moments. I was aware that what I just saw wasn't real, but "Fail Safe" still leaves you with the gut churning thought of the day where your world is decimated forever in the blink of an eye.
Both "Dr. Strangelove" and "Fail Safe" are currently available to rent on most VOD streaming platforms.
Read this next: The 20 Greatest Human Villains In Movie History
The post A Stanley Kubrick Lawsuit Sunk Sidney Lumet's Dr. Strangelove Rival appeared first on /Film.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
![[GOG] (Game) Dink Smallwood HD](https://external-preview.redd.it/tPkl82iJodNdTnt0g2fC1nc0nQO5noSh5Dj3xaL9dfw.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=0c5d3649f3c266a90bb0e231f240a2faad39b767 "[GOG] (Game) Dink Smallwood HD") |
submitted by /u/Embarrassed-Touch-62 [link] [comments] |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
House of the Dragon Episode 1 introduced us to several characters, of which Daemon Targaryen grabbed everyone’s attention with his complex personality. Now, fans are eager to know who exactly he is.
200 years prior to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon showcases the Targaryen Civil War for the Iron Throne. The war is also known as the Dance of the Dragons. Initially, the throne was expected to go to Daemon, but the episode ended by showing Rhaenyra as the successor. Well, at times, Daemon appears as a hero, while at times, he can give you chills by showing his dark personality. So, let’s explore who Daemon Targaryen is.
MORE: Who is Rhaenyra Targaryen to Daenerys?
Daemon Targaryen is one of the messiest characters that House of the Dragon brings. The Crown‘s Matt Smith plays the character. Before we begin to explore the character on our own, you can see below the breakdown of Daemon by HBO:
“The younger brother to King Viserys, and peerless warrior and dragonrider, Daemon possesses the true blood of the dragon. But it is said that whenever a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air…”
Daemon is Baelon Targaryen’s younger son and King Viserys I Targaryen’s brother. He is the most skilled warrior who wields a dark grey sword named Dark Sister. In the book, Daemon is shown as a charming yet dangerous warrior who doesn’t spare the thieves and kills them in the most brutal way he can. He desires to become the King of Westeros after Viserys but is left shattered when Viserys chooses his 8-year-old daughter over him. Initially, he always stood by his brother, but he gets against him when his dream of becoming the King is ruined.
Everyone applaud Matt Smith for his portrayal as Daemon Targaryen. He plays the Rogue Prince absolutely perfect. #HouseoftheDragon pic.twitter.com/5SVdVIvQ5y
— Art of Ice and Fire (@ArtofASOIAF) August 22, 2022
Daemon has been married thrice. His first wife died after falling off of a horse, while the second died at the time of childbirth. After that, he fell in love with his niece, Rhaenyra, and married her. After trying hard to win the crown, when he lost all his hopes, he happily supported his wife, Princess Rhaenyra, as she claimed the throne after her father’s demise.
MORE: Is House of the Dragon based on a book? Everything you should know ahead of the TV Show’s premiere
The post Who is Daemon Targaryen in House of the Dragon? appeared first on ForeverGeek.
**Warning – Spoilers ahead for House of the Dragon**
House of the Dragon Episode 1 has introduced new faces amongst familiar names and fans want to know more about Mysaria and actor Sonoya Mizuno.
We explain who Mysaria is in the source material and where her path leads her while also outlining actor Mizuno’s filmography.
Created by George R. R. Martin and Ryan J. Condal for HBO, House of the Dragon will serve as a prequel to Game of Thrones starring Paddy Considine, Emma D’Arcy, Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, and more, following the beginning of the end for House Targaryen including the family’s war known as the Dance of Dragons.
The Heirs of the Dragon introduced Mysaria as a prostitute from Westeros during Daemon Targaryen’s celebrations, however, after his exile Daemon is seen leaving with Mysaria.
The HBO series describes Mysaria in the following way:
“She came to Westeros with nothing, sold more times than she can recall, and she could have wilted… but instead she rose to become the most trusted – and most unlikely – ally of Prince Daemon Targaryen, the heir to the throne.”
Furthermore, the House of the Dragon source material states Mysaria, or Lady Misery, is a dancer turned lover of Daemon Targaryen and the mistress of whispers to Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen during her reign.
mysaria#HouseoftheDragon #HOTD pic.twitter.com/aPEP9jfosb
— house of the dragon scenes (@sceneshotd) August 15, 2022
Japanese-born British actor, model, and dancer Sonoya Mizuno began her credited career in 2012 with the movie Venus in Eros.
Mizuno then received a breakout role as Kyoko in Ex Machina and went on to star in larger productions including La La Land, Annihilation, and Crazy Rich Asians.
In addition to the actor’s TV role in House of the Dragon, Mizuno has also performed recurring roles in Maniac and Devs.
Mizuno is credited to appear in all ten episodes of House of the Dragon.
House of the Dragon Episode 2, titled The Rogue Prince, is scheduled to premiere on Sunday, August 28, 2022, on HBO Max.
The US can tune in to watch the installment at 9 pm ET/6 pm PT, and viewers in the UK can watch at the same time during their local time of 2 am GMT.
Title ‘The Rogue Prince’ suggests this episode will follow Daemon Targaryen after being exiled by King Viserys.
Quiet in the realm.
— House of the Dragon (@HouseofDragon) August 22, 2022
House of the Dragon starts now. #HOTD pic.twitter.com/ywqHj8Fckv
By Jo Craig – jo.craig@grv.media
House of the Dragon is now streaming on HBO Max.
The post Who is Mysaria in House of the Dragon? Meet Actor Sonoya Mizuno appeared first on ForeverGeek.
