Ronald.phillips

Enforcing strict guidelines in app stores can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, users bump into fewer low-quality software. On the other, developers have to tick endless checkboxes and sometimes deal with unnecessary hassles to satisfy our tech overlords. Apple is notorious for its relatively harsh app review process. The company sometimes rejects submissions for minor reasons that make little sense. Despite that, some malicious applications still pass through from time to time and find their way to the App Store. However — generally speaking — when you buy an iPhone, you’re getting access to an App Store that is better managed than most of its rivals. The latest (arguably unfair) guideline to go into effect is infuriating some developers — particularly indie ones. Several reports indicate that Apple is actively removing outdated apps from its App Store, even if they’re fully functional on the latest devices and iOS version.

I feel sick. Apple just sent me an email saying they’re removing my free game Motivoto because its more than 2 years old.

It’s part of their App improvement system.

This is not cool. Console games from 2000 are still available for sale.

This is an unfair barrier to indie devs. pic.twitter.com/7XNcLfiEcR

— Protopop Games (@protopop) April 23, 2022

According to several developers, Apple is warning them about removing their outdated apps from the App Store if they don’t submit a new version within 30 days. While on the surface this strict rule makes sense to filter out ancient releases, diving deeper into it reflects how it can be unfair to many devs, especially ones behind games — rather than apps. For starters, the guideline doesn’t specify how long the “significant amount of time” is. Additionally, it punishes those who have apps/games that remain completely functional today — despite them receiving no updates in a long time.

.@apple is removing a few of my old games b/c they have “not been updated in a significant amount of time”

Games can exist as completed objects! These free projects aren’t suitable for updates or a live service model, they’re finished artworks from years ago. pic.twitter.com/iflH70j7q4

— emilia (@lazerwalker) April 23, 2022

So those who have perfectly working apps will have to submit an updated version within 30 days just for the sake of staying on the App Store. Otherwise, Apple will be removing these apps once the time is up. Considering the outrage this policy is causing online, we can only hope that the Cupertino tech giant reevaluates it and makes exceptions for evergreen apps and games that are fully compatible with the latest hardware and software.

As a user — are you with or against this App Store policy, and why? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Via: The Verge

The post Apple is actively removing outdated apps from the App Store, even if they’re fully functional appeared first on XDA.

Ah, the kitchen—a room so vital to modern life it’s become a fraught battleground. Easily the most expensive renovation you’ll ever oversee, an average “midrange” kitchen remodel costs about $76,000, according to Remodeling Magazine. That cost and stress imbues every design decision with heavy emotion and dread, which…

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The Internet of Things, or IoT, has expanded beyond the mere concept that it was when first introduced. IoT is now part of most individuals’ daily activities, from smart speakers and thermostats to smartwatches and vehicles. IoT devices and systems bring massive convenience and functionality. IoT is transforming the way businesses function, and more rapidly than ever, industrial IoT, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure are depending on IoT for their operations. However, due to the complicated nature of IoT, when implementing and managing IoT, security must be top of mind. During a thorough survey, organizations were asked about their top security concerns when implementing IoT. Figure 1 identifies such concerns as per the IoT Signals report published in October 2021:

• Ensuring data privacy (46%).
• Ensuring network-level security (40%).
• Security endpoints for each IoT device (39%).
• Tracking and managing each IoT device (36%).
• Making sure all existing software is updated (35%).
• Updating firmware and other software on devices (34%).
• Performing hardware/software tests and device evaluation (34%).
• Updating encryption protocols (34%).
• Conducting comprehensive training programs for employees involved in IoT environment (33%).
• Securely provisioning devices (33%).
• Shifting from device-level to identity-level control (29%).
• Changing default passwords and credentials (29%).

Figure 1: Types of IoT security.

The importance of security for IoT

Rewinding back to 2016, a major Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack took place on a major internet service provider, impacting multiple websites and their customers. Why? Thousands of users failed to change the default passwords on their connected devices, providing an opportunity for attackers to form a botnet attack. Consequences? Detrimental. Fast-forwarding to the more recent years, security in IoT is finally starting to gain attention due to the realization of the impact any attack has on organizations and users. As outlined in Microsoft’s Zero Trust paper, below are some of the many consequences of IoT breaches:

• Operation and revenue impact due to potential changes in production, quality, and core business.
• Customer impact due to changes in product and service experience and reputation.
• Regulation impact due to non-compliance with government and industry-wide regulations.

Design lifecycle and risk diligence

Microsoft provides numerous tools, services, and capabilities that address IoT Security concerns, while also providing effective solutions to mitigate top IoT Security issues.

When designing an IoT solution, it is important to understand the potential threats within the design. This will provide an opportunity to integrate security and risk diligence in each step of the design lifecycle, as well as harden and maintain your solution’s security protocols. First step is understanding how to secure your IoT environment. Second step is identifying and mitigating potential security issues within your design. Third step is maintaining a security maturity model that allows you to track and manage the maturity of your design’s information security management. Finally, fourth step is following Microsoft’s Zero Trust principles to mitigate top security concerns.

Top properties of a highly secured IoT environment (device security)

Building a secure IoT solution is not an easy task. However, following the most studied and recommended principles and practices will provide you with the necessary tools needed to achieve optimal security within the design. Refer to Figure 2 for the top seven properties utilized within all highly secured and connected devices: hardware-based root of trust, small trusted computing base, defense in depth, compartmentalization, certificate-based authentication, renewable security, and failure reporting.

Figure 2: Top properties of highly secure devices.

For a deep dive on each of the seven properties, please read the Seven Properties of Highly Secure Devices.

Threat modeling

When designing an IoT solution, one must understand the potential threats that accompany that solution and identify the best protocols to defend the solution from such threats. Starting the design of a solution with security as a top aspect will help with this process. This is why Microsoft offers the Threat Modeling Tool, which is a key aspect of Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle. The tool encompasses five major steps in the security lifecycle: define, diagram, identify, mitigate, and validate. Additionally, the tool enables users to share information about their systems’ security designs, analyze designs for security issues, and provide mitigation suggestions for the identified issues.

For more details on the Threat Modeling Tool, please visit Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle Threat Modeling.

For information on Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle, please visit Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle.

Security Maturity Model (SMM)

What is SMM and how does it help? Security maturity is the measure of the understanding of the current security level, its necessity, benefits, and cost of its support. It provides a degree of confidence in the effectiveness of security implementation in meeting organizational needs, with an understanding of necessity, benefits, and costs:

• Builds on existing maturity models, frameworks, and concepts.
• Provides a holistic solution addressing process, technology, and operations.
• Provides actionable guidance for specific IoT scenarios.
• Connects maturity with control frameworks, best practices, and other guidance.
• Enables IoT providers to invest appropriately in security mechanisms to meet their requirements.

To help prioritize IoT Zero Trust investments, you can use the Industry IoT Consortium’s (IIC) IoT Security Maturity Model to help assess the security risks for your business.

Zero Trust principles and best practices for end-to-end security

When designing an IoT solution, it is extremely important to identify and understand potential threats to that solution. To help with this process, Microsoft established five Zero Trust principles that encourage defense in depth procedures and provide clear guidelines on achieving optimal security within IoT solutions.

Our customers and partners have IoT security-related concerns, such as ensuring data privacy and maintaining a solid process for changing default passwords. To address these concerns, we apply the Zero Trust principles within our products and services. The following sections are linked to our Well-Architectured Framework for IoT security, which expands on many of the Microsoft products and services that provide highly secured protocols for IoT solutions.

Strong identity

The first pillar of Zero Trust principles is having a strong identity for IoT devices. Maintaining a strong identity within your IoT ecosystem can be achieved using a variety of processes and protocols. To name a few, having a hardware root of trust, strong authentication and authorization protocols, and renewable credentials are great steps towards mitigating the top identity concerns.

Least-privileged access

In addition to the strong identity provided by integrated devices and services, Zero Trust requires least-privileged access control to limit any potential blast radius from authenticated identities that may have been compromised or running unapproved workloads. From access control policies and protocols to strong authentication mechanisms, Microsoft has its customers covered with a strong list of services such as Microsoft Azure Sphere, which securely connects microcontroller unit (MCU)-powered devices from the silicon to the cloud, while implementing least-privilege access by default.

Additionally, Microsoft provides a wide variety of training programs and resources to anyone interested in or working in an IoT environment. From Cybersecurity 101 training to Cybersecurity Awareness Month, employees can benefit from Microsoft’s implementations for IoT and operational technology (OT) security. For a full list of Microsoft Security trainings and programs, please read #BeCyberSmart—When we learn together, we’re more secure together.

Device health

Maintaining a device’s health means regularly running scans that provide effective information such as potential threats, vulnerabilities, weakened passwords, and anomalous behaviors. A trusted device must be continuously verified for its health, and such scans will enable such verification and ensure that only trusted and verified devices can access the larger IoT ecosystem. Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Defender for IoT and Microsoft Sentinel will help your organization track and manage its IoT devices and perform the necessary tests and evaluations to understand where your devices’ health stands.

Continual updates

To maintain IoT device health, continuous software and firmware updates are critical. A healthy target state should be identified and met at all times through centralized configuration and compliance management. Azure Device Update for IoT Hub is a great service for deploying over-the-air (OTA) updates to your IoT devices.

Security monitoring and response

Coupled with continuous monitoring for trusted device health, security monitoring and response further hardens the security of IoT devices by quickly identifying threats and providing the best mitigation protocols. Microsoft follows a defense in depth approach and offers IoT services that follow the key Zero Trust capabilities. This includes monitoring and controlling access to public endpoints, running security agents for security monitoring and detection, and incorporating response systems in all IoT devices. Tools and services like the Microsoft Defender for IoT will bring your IoT solutions one step closer to strong security.

Learn More

To learn more about strengthening your IoT security, visit Azure IoT Security.

Explore the Microsoft Zero Trust approach to comprehensive security.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Microsoft best practices for managing IoT security concerns appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

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The Mail on Sunday, a right-wing UK tabloid, published a hit piece on Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the opposition, insinuating that she uses her legs—and by comparison with Basic Instinct her vagina— to "distract" the Prime Minister. But the ludicrous, smirking sexism is proving to be a bigger distraction, with even conservative politicians angry at the naked misogyny on display. — Read the rest

A lot of people have opinions on method acting without really knowing what it means. The concept of an actor staying in character all the time and being a jerk to everyone around them for the sake of art is not it. Method acting was an evolution of the system developed by Russian theater director and actor Konstantin Stanislavsky. The system was brought over to the United States in the Group Theatre and was interpreted differently among a few of its members: Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner. Adler's approach favored the combination of research and imagination in crafting a performance. Meisner took to focusing on behavior, most famously stripping away the meaning of words through extensive repetition.

Then there's Lee Strasberg, the man who gave us what we think of as the Method. Strasberg's whole deal was affective memory. When you play a scene, you draw on your own experiences and senses of a similar situation to bring to the scene. There is a lot of debate as to whether or not this an effective form of acting ,or just simply psychologically damaging. Adler and Meisner both heavily resisted the technique, but this became the Method after Strasberg became artistic director of the Actors Studio. Crucially, though, it does not involve staying in character all the time, as it's physically impossible to remember dialogue and be fully impromptu concurrently.

So next time someone is a nightmare on set because they are a "method actor," know it isn't because of that. They are just a jerk. After all, thousands of actors have made their way through the doors of the Actors Studio to learn the teachings of Stanislavsky, Strasberg, and others where you do not hear horror stories about their on-set behavior. For instance, Bradley Cooper graduated from the MFA program at the Actors Studio, and you haven't read about him sending dead rats or whatever to his castmates. While Cooper did graduate from the Studio, he did not attend his graduation ceremony because he was working on a movie no one would associate with method acting.

From The Method To Michael Ian Black

I did not attend my college graduation ceremony. The pageantry simply did not appeal to me. I did not skip it in order to appear in a generational defining comedy. But that is exactly what Bradley Cooper did. When he returned to his old Actors Studio stomping grounds to sit across from James Lipton on "Inside the Actors Studio" back in 2011, Lipton, who was dean at the time, revealed he was unable to give Cooper his diploma because he was off shooting a movie. As to the reason why, Cooper responded with:

"I was having sex with Michael Ian Black in a sports shed in 'Wet Hot American Summer.'"

"Wet Hot American Summer" was Cooper's first film. He played camp counselor Ben, the producer of the camp's theater department. One of the more memorable moments in the film is the juxtaposition of seeing Zak Orth and A.D. Miles' characters taking part in the camp movie trope of ogling the bikini-clad female counselors. Meanwhile, their buddy Michael Ian Black hides away in a shed with his boyfriend for a passionate sex scene. It is completely earnest, making it one of the funniest in the film. In an interview on "Late Night with Seth Meyers," Cooper said:

"The joke of that scene was to make it, like, the one serious scene in the whole movie. Like, the whole movie is jokes, and that one scene is dead [serious], shot seriously, lit well ... It was like Hal Ashby did it."

He may have missed out on his graduation to film "Wet Hot American Summer," but because he did that, he got to start his career, which remains thriving. He even got to be on "Inside the Actors Studio," something not a huge amount of people have done after graduating from the program — Even rarer for those who had previously appeared on the program as a student in the audience, which Cooper did. You can see him in episodes asking questions to Robert De Niro and Sean Penn and listening intently to Steven Spielberg.

Now, He's Too Busy For Wet Hot

Bradley Cooper skipped his graduation for "Wet Hot American Summer," but now he is so in demand that carving out time for "Wet Hot American Summer" was difficult. Netflix gave David Wain and Michael Showalter the ability to make two limited series based on the film: the prequel, "First Day of Camp" (which I prefer to the film), and the sequel, "Ten Years Later" (which I very much do not). By the time the series came about, Cooper was a multiple-time Oscar nominee. Wrangling him into the show proved difficult.

He showed up for "First Day of Camp," though he clearly did not have much time to be there. His character Ben, at a certain point, dons a ski mask and calls himself DJ Ski Mask. That way, anybody could put on the mask and pretend to be Ben without Cooper having to be there. It was a funny meta gag, but we still got to see Cooper on screen with Michael Ian Black and theater department cohort Amy Poehler. The same cannot be said about "Ten Years Later." Ben basically spends the entirety of the series inside one room, obviously constructed as a gag to block shoot Cooper quickly for the time they had him. However, Cooper was completely unavailable, and they made the decision to replace him with Adam Scott, claiming he had extensive plastic surgery. That could have been a funny joke to wave away Cooper's absence, but they kept the storyline where he doesn't really leave the room. Putting the hat on top of the hat makes the whole thing feel awkward and hollow. Much of "Ten Years Later" did not feel all that thought-through, and this choice made that apparent.

If they ever got a chance to make a third limited series and have Cooper come back, maybe they could salvage it. Having Ben get plastic surgery again to go back to his original face would be very funny. After all, he did return to the Actors Studio. Why can't he return to "Wet Hot American Summer"?

Read this next: The 10 Best Comedies Of The Last 10 Years

The post Bradley Cooper Skipped A Major Life Moment To Film Wet Hot American Summer appeared first on /Film.

Despite being released nearly 20 years ago "Hero" (Ying xiong) remains as visually stunning and soul-stirring as it did when it was first released. It's hard to believe there was a time when the film was out of reach for U.S. audiences, owed to Miramax's decision to keep it on the shelf two long years after its initial Chinese premiere.

Oddly enough, lovers of the film's vibrantly colored scenes and breathtaking action sequences have Quentin Tarantino to thank for not having to buy or view "Hero" through a bootlegged DVD. Turns out it was Tarantino who pushed Miramax to give director Zhang Yimou's wuxia film a much desired American release. At the time, the "Pulp Fiction" director had just wrapped filming on his own martial arts story about revenge with "Kill Bill" and was understandably smitten by the Zhang's story. Especially in the much hyped rematch between Jet Li and Donnie Yen as the unnamed Narrator and the assassin Sky. But that's far from where the entanglement ends for these two films.

Tarantino Thinks Of Hero And Kill Bill As Sister Productions

"Kill Bill," which was released in 2003 during Miramax's shelving of "Hero," filmed scenes in China. Obviously so was Zhang's film as evidenced by its gorgeous shots of the country's landscape such as the lake fight scene, shot in Jiuzhaigou national park, and the awe-inspiring desert vistas filmed near the Kazakhastan border. In behind-the-scenes footage for "Kill Bill," Tarantino revealed that because of the timing there was overlap in the filming of both "Hero" and "Kill Bill." This led to quite the behind-the-scenes crossover between the cinematic and martial arts realms of Zhang's and Tarantino's films.

"I'd heard about it for a long, long time. And when we moved to China to do Kill Bill, they were actually just finishing it up. And, about a good quarter of the crew of Kill Bill worked on Hero. We almost felt like we were part of the Hero 'thing'. And Zhang Yimou came down to the set of Kill Bill, and it was almost like a sister production."

It was probably a boost to morale on set and for Tarantino as a lover of martial arts cinema to get such a stamp of approval as a visit from Zhang. Whatever logistical reasons there were for the two films to share crew members the coincidental link between the two points to their similarities. For one, both films feature nameless protagonists (though eventually Thurman's The Bride is given back her name) intent on using their martial arts talents to exact revenge on each film's respective supposed antagonists. One wonders if Uma Thurman got any martial arts pointers from anyone involved with "Hero."

With Tarantino considering giving his only sequel a trilogy in "Kill Bill 3" and a return to his martial arts infatuation I solemnly hope he returns to shooting on location in China and maybe even taps a few of the incredible actors in "Hero" for roles. Now would be the ideal time, especially given that Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, who played assassin Broken Sword, just got his MCU debut as Xu Wenwu in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" and Yen, a legend in his own right for the "IP Man" series, not long ago appeared in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story."

Read this next: The 14 Greatest Action Movies Of The 21st Century

The post Hero Has More In Common With Kill Bill Than Just Martial Arts appeared first on /Film.

What sets "The Sopranos" apart from a litany of other mob movies and TV? Unlike "The Godfather" or "Goodfellas," the boss sees a shrink. The series' pilot opens with Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) having his first appointment with Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). Seeking treatment for panic attacks, Tony remains Melfi's on-and-off patient until the end of the series.

Their sessions are a useful tool for the writers to let the audience inside of Tony's head; any monologue about his feelings is justified given the context. However, creator David Chase didn't include the therapy storyline just for convenient character development. He did it because one of the inspirations for "The Sopranos" was his own experiences in therapy.

A Boy's Best Friend

Tony's mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) is based on Chase's own mother, Norma. Livia has no love for her son, or anyone, and is only able to see the negative in the world; her catchphrase is "Oh, poor you," the implication being that no one has it worse than her.

Interviewed for 60 Minutes, Chase said:

"I used to tell people stories about my mother and the things my mother said and did and everybody, my wife first of all, said someday you've got to write about her she's hysterical ... she was hysterical, but she was also hysterically funny. And I always thought how would you ever do that, and then I got the idea of putting it with a gangster because to see a tough guy like that have to contend with a tough woman like that might be interesting."

In that same interview, Chase confirmed that, while his mother never orchestrated a hit on him like Livia does Tony, she did threaten to stick a fork in his eye (recreated with Livia and Tony during a flashback in the episode "Down Neck").

On the "Talking Sopranos" podcast, Chase said that Nancy Marchand won the part because of how she channeled his mother's spirit:

"I looked at her like 'my God, that's my mother she's channeling my mother,' it was unbelievable ... the cadence, the attitude ... and all my family went nuts when they saw it. Right away. 'That's Aunt Norma!' That was just all her."

Thanks to Marchand's passing in 2000, Livia is only present in the first two seasons; she dies offscreen in "The Sopranos" season 3 episode "Proshai, Livushka," with much of the episode centering on her wake. However, her memory continues to haunt Tony, as the ghost of his own mother no doubt did Chase. After all, their relationship is what drove him to therapy.

Chase On The Couch

Chase had worked in TV since the 1970s, most prominently as a writer on "The Rockford Files." Not content with TV, he aspired to direct films; indeed, he first conceived "The Sopranos" as a movie. According to "The Sopranos Sessions" (by Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall), even during the production of the pilot, Chase was secretly hoping HBO would pass so that he could turn the project into a movie then take it on the festival circuit.

Herein lies the irony of Chase's career. He revolutionized the medium he'd grown disillusioned with, and indeed, "The Sopranos" is a lynchpin moment in TV's usurping of film as "prestige" entertainment. However, he never quite became the film director he'd aspired to be.

Between these thwarted ambitions and his troubled upbringing, it's no surprise that Chase needed therapy. Speaking to The Guardian, Chase recalled how his mother's pessimism and depression had rubbed off on him, and it was his wife Denise who pushed him to seek help. His own stretch in therapy and lingering feelings about his family were the genesis for "The Sopranos." As Chase told Salon:

"People keep calling ["The Sopranos"] a story about a mobster with a midlife crisis, and maybe it's evolved into that. Actually, it's based on my own family dynamic -- a guy who is in therapy because his mother is driving him crazy. But who cares about a TV writer and his mother? I began to apply my family dynamic to mobsters."

Chase did what great writers do; he took his own experiences and applied them to a different context to tell a compelling story.

Can Therapy Help?

In a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, Chase confirmed that Melfi was modeled on his own therapist, Dr. Lorraine Kaufman. So, what did the talking cure do for him? In that same interview, he said:

"I think [therapy is] probably really good in the short term, and there are times when people just need someone to talk to. But the classic talk therapy that goes on and on and reinvestigates every aspect of your infancy just plays into a victim mentality ... Therapists never want you to leave. I don't know any who say, 'Go ahead, little bird, fly out of the nest.'"

How ironic that Melfi's story ends with her pushing her patient away. As "Sopranos" writer Terence Winter explained, Chase became aware of psychiatric study "The Criminal Personality," which argues that therapy teaches criminals not to fix their behavior, but how to rationalize it. Chase decided the study would spell the ending for Tony and Melfi. In penultimate episode "The Blue Comet," Melfi's own doctor Elliot Kupferberg (Peter Bogdanovich) points her to the study. Reading the study, Melfi discovers a lot of overlap with its findings and her sessions with Tony. Thus, his sway over her is finally broken and she realizes he's beyond help; their next session is their last.

The cap on Melfi's story reflects the clear-eyed view on therapy in "The Sopranos." In the years since the show went off-air, therapy has become even more socially acceptable. This is undoubtedly good, but it's been coupled by a tendency to treat the process like a silver bullet; walk in and you get what's plaguing your mind erased "Eternal Sunshine" style. Chase understands that identifying your problems and their roots is only half of it. The onus ultimately falls on the patient to make adjustments. The flaw in his characters is that none of them are willing to change.

Read this next: The 15 Best Netflix Original Series Of 2021 Ranked

The post David Chase Wrote The Sopranos For a Very Personal Reason appeared first on /Film.

You probably clicked this article because you're already familiar with the combination of creepiness, cleavage, and camp that makes up legendary horror icon Elvira, so let's just hop right into the fun facts. As the headline states, the opening scene of the 1988 comedy horror film "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark" features the titular vixen herself driving away from a fiery gas station explosion. The explosion is caused partially by Elvira's own ineptitude at safely replacing the gas pump after use, and partially by the gas station attendant's carelessness when it comes to discarding the cigarette he was foolishly smoking at the worst possible place to spark up. For those unfamiliar with the scene, you can check it out here.

Now that you've watched the scene, you may be wondering what makes it more explosive than expected. Luckily, we have the answer.

Elvira Was Hotter Than Ever, Seriously

In 2013, Cassandra Peterson, the actress who has played the ultimate spooky babe since the 1980s, revealed on her Twitter profile that the explosion in the gas station scene was much hotter than she anticipated. She tweeted:

"Fun fact about the gas station scene — they didn't tell me how BIG the explosion was going to be. SO hot it melted the back of my wig!"

It's typically not considered a bad thing when something turns out to be bigger than expected, but in the case of potentially life-threatening explosions, maybe less is more. At any rate, Elvira's brief tweet actually reveals two interesting pieces of information that offer insight into both the movie and the secrets contained with the Mistress of the Dark's hairstyle.

The first is that the blazing inferno seen on screen was not created with any sort of CGI or visual trickery. Instead, it was created using good old-fashioned movie magic in the form of making things go boom in a (relatively) controlled environment. Luckily, it seems only Elvira's wig suffered any serious damage, and our favorite goth gal was unharmed. So what does this tell us?

The Science Of Wigs

Well, that Peterson states the back of her wig melted rather than burned, reveals a bit of information that movie wig aficionados (which is a real thing and not something I made up to justify my own obsession with the wigs worn in various TV and film productions) will find amusing: Elvira's signature black bouffant was made with synthetic fibers, and not human hair! Synthetic wigs are typically made of plastic materials like acrylic or nylon, which melt rather than burn when exposed to high temperatures. Human hair, on the other hand, burns to a crisp when things get too hot to handle. The difference between melting and burning is that melting is just the process of liquifying a solid, whereas burning is the process of ruining cinnamon rolls by leaving them in the oven for well over the recommended bake time. Now you got two cool pop culture facts for the price of one article:

1. The explosion in the beginning of "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark" was not only real, but really big.

2. Elvira wears synthetic wigs (or at least she did for her 1988 movie), and one of those wigs melted thanks to the aforementioned explosion.

It seems the lesson here is bigger isn't always better after all.

Read this next: The 15 Best '80s Comedies Ranked

The post The Opening of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark Was More a Little More Explosive Than Expected appeared first on /Film.

Potential spoilers for "Ozark" follow.

Marty Byrde has come a long way from his humble money-laundering beginnings. Gone are the days of a quiet financial advisor puttering around a tiny office building, shuffling papers, rearranging numbers, and pondering the trajectory of his failed marriage. Enter the man he's become after four seasons of nonstop pressure, rushing to put out one fire after the next and just barely managing to scrape by while facing threats from all sides. All things considered, he isn't that different — callous, emotionally distant, and vaguely nonplussed in the face of horror. But his hands are dirtier and what little morality he has left is hanging by a precarious thread. Marty (Jason Bateman), along with his inimitable wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and their teenage kids who've been reluctantly dragged along for the ride, are now so entangled in the dealings of Navarro's drug cartel that they've evolved well beyond bearing witness to unspeakable horrors. They are now active participants in this twisting crime saga, just in time for it to bring them over the edge.

The Inevitable Crash

The opening moments of the fourth season are almost set up to deceive us — they would have the audience believe that the Byrde family is no different from any other. When the beginning of the end arrived in January, it took its sweet time to prepare us for the endgame by kicking off in the Byrde family minivan: all four family members were present and the car was cruising down the highway, with Sam Cooke crooning on the radio. Sometimes they masquerade themselves so well that you can almost forget the Byrdes are soaked in blood. But those masks rarely stay on for very long and in a matter of seconds, the show reminds us exactly who they are. Wendy barrels forward with preparations for their latest scheme, Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) resents her in the corner, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) makes jokes that hit morbidly close to home and Marty weathers it all with an indifferent expression. And in case that's not enough to bring the dynamics front and center, the show hits us with an effective bang — Marty glances away from the road for just a second too long, and their van goes careening off the side of the street, violently flipping over.

It's a hell of a way to start off a final season, especially one that already has us pondering resolutions. The supersized 14-episode final season has plenty of loose ends to tie up and stories to resolve, yet one question has trumped all others — what's the ending that the Byrdes deserve? In the era of prestige TV, this dilemma is nothing new. We've been here before, grappling with the fate of our morally gray protagonist trapped between what feels realistic and what seems fair. Painfully self-aware, "Ozark" doesn't skirt past the question but almost makes a joke of it with this car accident looming in the future. In the wake of all the tragedy they've caused and their refusal to backpedal, the Byrdes are careening towards consequences that, whether metaphorical or literal, are the equivalent of a crash.

When the first half of the final came to a close and hadn't yet caught up with the car accident, it only raised more questions. Given their internal tensions, how would the Byrdes get back to a place where they would ride together as a family? What would be the fallout of the crash? Who would survive? And how much of the aftermath would we see? With 7 episodes to go, the time for dodging questions is behind us, so "Ozark" faces them head-on. This is our last opportunity to see the Byrdes for precisely who they are and maybe even enact some judgment before the bill comes due. And sure enough, the entire clan makes who they've become crystal clear.

Suffer The Consequences

Thanks to the show's obsession with watching the domino effect play out, "Ozark" has always concerned itself with consequences. But sometimes the answer of who has to pay them ... well, that s**t ain't equal. Exactly how many people have paid the consequences for the Byrde's decision to launder money in the Ozarks? Ben paid with his life for getting involved in Wendy's mess of a life. And just last season, Wyatt lost his because of Darlene Snell's checkered past. We don't have to look much further to see the extent of their damage: Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) has paid the price of a lifetime. She's lost nearly every member of her family to the Byrde operation, not to mention becoming a target for drug lords and mobsters. But Wyatt's death is what pushes her over the edge and when the final seven episodes begin, openly mourning the loss of her cousin takes a backseat to her warpath for revenge. Killing his murderer is the least she can do to numb the pain and would perhaps be easily achieved if not for the identity of the killer in question.

Javi Elizonndro (Alfonso Herrera) isn't just the powerful new leader of the Navarro cartel, he's also a danger in his own right — an absolute wildcard whose fate is now inextricably tied to the Byrde's escape plan. Their arrangement with the FBI — the one allowing them to return to Chicago, finally leave crime behind and instead continue to rule the midwest as the legitimate founders of a charity foundation — is contingent on Javi being an informant. Which would be quite difficult if he were to die. But why should Ruth care? The Byrdes have taken everything from her, so it seems well within her right to get some payback. All she has to do is go through them first.

If time has revealed anything about Wendy Byrde, it's that she doesn't lose easily. But Marty has more pause when it comes to acting against the young woman he's obviously become fond of. Ruth has been a friend to the family — the person he asked to look after his children should some tragedy take him away. She herself has been like a daughter to him at times, having started out as a protege and evolve into a partner. And as frustrating as her grief-stricken decision-making is, he isn't so deluded that he can't find fault in himself for getting her here. And it's weighing on him. He tries very hard to play the bad situation off: after all, Ruth has never met Javi, doesn't know what he looks like, and how would she even get past his security? The odds are stacked against her, he argues — but Wendy knows better. They've seen what a person can do with only sheer will in their favor. Against all odds, they themselves are living, breathing examples.

The Table Is Set For Chaos

How can we not root for Javi's death? Especially if it would bring Ruth some peace. This is not to say that we don't care about the Byrdes, but they're a lot more difficult to love than Ruth, the crafty foul-mouthed criminal who has become the heart and soul of the show. She's the Jesse to the Byrdes' Walter White. The promise of something brighter has always been in her future and it's all too easy to rest our hope on her — not just because we've seen the Byrdes careen off a highway, but because after all her suffering, she must be allowed some peace. Meanwhile, the Byrdes have proven how despicable they can be and only doubled down on it since. Surely, they have to pay for all they've done.

It certainly feels like it as the pieces fall into place for the final act. Ruth is not the least of their worries, yet she's only one of many storms they must weather. Besides the threat of Javi's death, they also have to deal with the man himself — the dangerous cartel leader who's full of ambition and resentment for the Byrdes. And of course, Navarro is less than thrilled about recent developments and still carries significant weight from behind bars. Plus, their partnership with Shaw Medical Solutions CEO Claire Shaw becomes tenuous as she becomes increasingly more fearful of the situation she's gotten entangled in. As the search for Ben continues to yield interesting results, the Mel Sattem's (Adam Rothenberg) and Maya Miller's (Jessica Frances Dukes) of the world remain determined to expose the Byrdes, and believe it or not, that's not all! 

The external threats are more than enough to keep the Byrdes busy for seven episodes, yet they also have plenty of family drama to work through. Jonah remains on the outside, painfully aware of his mother's flaws, while even Charlotte is having difficulty pretending her parents aren't constantly endangering her life. And Wendy and Marty? Their marriage remains perilous as they operate on completely different levels, blatantly disregarding one another. But hey, where would the Byrdes be, if not juggling multiple crises at once? The final few episodes don't fully rise above the issue that's been plaguing this show for four seasons — but its uneven pacing is less noticeable this close to the end, when our minutes in the Ozarks are finally dwindling. At the very least, the premiere wastes no time getting right to the meat of this season's issues, with the action kicking off immediately.

A Marriage Of Inconvenience

As the endgame is upon them, the crows are coming home to roost. Think for a moment of all the Byrdes have done: the lives they've decimated and the paths they've altered. The Ozarks are full of ghosts and this season, the show is feeling especially sentimental. We glimpse familiar faces and long-forgotten stories as the show pulls its many threads closed. Through it all, Marty and Wendy are hardly concerned with any moral reckoning they may or may not have coming. Above all, Wendy wants to thrive. Whoever must be trampled to make everything worth it, she's mo0re than willing to pin them down. In a way, "Ozark" seems to reshape around her orbit, framing Wendy as the biggest bad of them all and the architect of the Byrde downfall. But though Wendy is the boldest influence in the family, she isn't singular. Marty bears just as much responsibility for the neverending cycle of crises they live in. His desire to merely survive is just as dangerous because as the season will prove, he's willing to cross many lines to get there.

In its eleventh hour, "Ozark" pushes past the question of what the Byrdes deserve to ponder something deeper and dangerously real: what does any of it matter, in the face of immense willpower? In a world of crime, death, and desperate acts of survival, humanity is a difficult virtue to maintain. Worst yet, the will to live is crucial to survival in a way that compassion isn't. Especially in its final moments, "Ozark" thrives as it puts these concepts to the test, contriving scenarios that push each and every character over the edge. All the while, it stays true to its domino-effect-obsessed roots, but makes ample room for the unpredictability of life and the struggle between selfishness and humanity. When it finally fades to black, it's with an ending we couldn't have possibly envisioned when Marty Byrde first presented his Lake of the Ozarks money laundering scheme, and yet, where else could this winding road have led?

/Film Rating: 8 out of 10

Read this next: 20 Movies About Time Travel Ranked Worst To Best

The post Ozark Season 4 Part 2 Review: The Crime Saga Crashes Into Its Inevitable Conclusion appeared first on /Film.

Even Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi felt "a proper jolt of absolute fear" when facing the towering villain known as Darth Vader. In an interview with Total Film, Ewan McGregor, spoke about his experience of filming opposite Darth Vader in the upcoming Disney+ series "Obi-Wan Kenobi." The actor recalled:

"I've never met Darth Vader. I had rehearsed the scene with Vader, but not with the helmet on or anything like that. When we came to do the scene, when they shouted 'action', he had to come from behind me. I turned around, and f**king Darth Vader was coming at me. It was like I was six again. I'd never acted into Vader's helmet. I'd never looked him in the eye."

Given how McGregor's Obi-Wan had only dealt with Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) so far, and that the actor himself has never experienced Darth Vader face-to-face until now, his fear is totally understandable. Vader has always been a cultural icon, more than a villain in the "Star Wars" franchise, and the range and depth of his influence on the unraveling narrative are impossible to ignore. After all, having someone like Vader sneak up behind you is never good news.

Even Stormtroopers Can Be Scary, Dude

"Obi-Wan Kenobi" will be delving into the time the Jedi spent on Tatooine during self-imposed exile, while he makes sure a young Luke Skywalker (Grant Feely) is safe from various threats, all while avoiding Jedi Inquisitors on the hunt for those who survived Order 66. Kenobi could also possibly be checking in on a young Leia Organa, although she would be on Alderaan at the moment, waiting to grow up and become part of the Rebel Alliance. As for Darth Vader, he's on his way to unprecedented power during the events of "Obi-Wan Kenobi," and we know there will be a pivotal confrontation between him and his old master.

While the circumstances under which Obi-Wan meets Vader for the first time are unclear at the moment, the experience would undoubtedly be an emotionally overwhelming one for both parties. On the one hand, Obi-Wan would be witnessing Vader's transformation first hand, all signs of the padawan apprentice and brother he loved now annihilated. Meanwhile, Vader would be encountering his previous Master, who he deems responsible for his fall and perhaps even the death of Padmé.

McGregor further explains the visceral fear he felt while shooting these scenes, and that fear extended beyond Vader too:

"It scared the s**t out of me. I'm not joking. It gave me a proper jolt of absolute fear. I was like, 'Oh my God, that's not acting. That's real. I'm really, truly frightened right now.' And the same thing would happen with the Stormtroopers. I'd worked with Clone troopers before, but so many of them were CGI. I never worked with Stormtroopers, and, again, I was like seven years old again. Because when you're actually faced with a Stormtrooper, with a blaster, it's like: 'F**king hell.'"

Perfect aim or not, witnessing Stormtroopers with their blasters can be an intimidating experience. As for the fear evoked by Vader's presence, director Deborah Chow alos described it as "very intense," and "an amazing thing" when they first started filming those scenes. Hopefully that translates to the series when we get a chance to see it next month.

"Obi-Wan Kenobi" premieres May 27, 2022, on Disney+.

Read this next: Star Wars Movie Villains Ranked Least To Most Powerful

The post Ewan McGregor Was 'Truly Frightened' While Acting Opposite Darth Vader For the First Time appeared first on /Film.

As Netflix shares plunge to their lowest point in five years, the company risks losing its most valuable resource: its star employees. From a report: Working at Netflix has been one of the most desirable jobs in Hollywood, if not all of corporate America. The company ranks as one of the most beloved brands, pays well and offers a chance to work with the people that changed the way we watch TV. But a record decline in Netflix's share price, precipitated by its poor financial results, has shaken employees' confidence in the company's long-term trajectory. It has also erased the value of many employees' options. People who were sitting on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are left with nothing. More people are looking to leave Netflix right now than at any point in recent memory, current and former employees said this past week. Netflix employees also asked leadership to issue new stock grants to make them whole for the losses this past week, per The Information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Fairfax, Virginia house sold immediately for $805k in cash despite an unusual sale clause to spice up the deal: the stranger in the basement.

The listing generated headlines in noting that buying the home required "acknowledgement that home will convey with a person(s) living in lower level with no lease in place."

— Read the rest

The post You Won’t Be Alone – Movie Review (4/5) appeared first on Heaven of Horror.

(The Morning Watch is a recurring feature that highlights a handful of noteworthy videos from around the web. They could be video essays, fan-made productions, featurettes, short films, hilarious sketches, or just anything that has to do with our favorite movies and TV shows.)

In this edition, find out how Matt Reeves' "The Batman" should have ended. Plus, director Robert Eggers and actor Alexander Skarsgård dissect one of the coolest scenes in "The Northman." And finally, "The Punisher" and "King Richard" star Jon Bernthal is challenged to choose 10 things that he absolutely couldn't live without, and there's a cute dog involved. 

How The Batman Should Have Ended

Retold using their traditional means of animation, the folks at How It Should Have Ended are covering the latest rendition of the Caped Crusader with Matt Reeves' "The Batman." After Batman beats the crap out of a member of the Train Gang, he unloads the catchphrase, "I'm vengeance." The rest of the Train Gang stand there recording on their phones, confused as to whether or not this dude's name is "Batman" or "Vengeance." Oh, and then Superman appears, because that's what happens in these videos. It's a lot of fun for DC fans, and someone finally finished Riddler's line, "I've been trying to reach you," with a punchline that all of our brains have been autofilling with since we first heard it. If you know, you know. If you don't know... well, you'll see.

It's The Return Of Amleth

The fine folks over at Vanity Fair are back at it again with another episode of their "Notes on a Scene" series. In this edition, Alexander Skarsgård and "The Northman" director Robert Eggers break down the return of Skarsgård's character Amleth, now a Viking after fleeing as a young boy, having witnessed his village massacred and his mother stolen by his uncle. Look, "The Northman" is low-key a retelling of "Hamlet" (or "The Lion King" if you really want to go there), so don't be surprised when Eggers describes one part by saying, "This is the 'Hakuna Matata' moment." The duo break down the historical accuracy brought to the scene, and there are some very sweet moments of Skarsgård highlighting the hard work of the stunt performers in the film, complete with drawing little hearts around their faces. Who knew such a brutal movie could be so sweet?

Jon Bernthal Is A Big Fan Of Bad Gum

Celebrities, they're just like us! In this latest interview with GQ, actor Jon Bernthal ("The Accountant") is tasked with figuring out what ten things he just can't live without. I'm not trying to bury the lede here, so it's important you know that Bernthal brought his dog to set, and I would actually die for Bam Bam. This series often finds celebs clinging to expensive, designer objects, but Bernthal is very sentimental in his decision making. There are a few tokens that will give you the fandom feels, but choices like a photo of his wife and Dubble Bubble gum are so wholesome. Bernthal is known for playing some of the toughest and most badass characters in the game, but seeing him in this element has me ready to petition for Bernthal as a leading man in a romcom. What an absolute gem of a human being.

Read this next: The 15 Most Anticipated Comic Book Movies And Shows Of 2022, Ranked

The post The Morning Watch: How The Batman Should Have Ended, The Northman Scene Breakdown & More appeared first on /Film.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is sounding the alarm on the BlackCat ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), which it said victimized at least 60 entities worldwide between as of March 2022 since its emergence last November. Also called ALPHV and Noberus, the malware is notable for being the first-ever ransomware written in the Rust programming language, which is known to be memory safe

Just Unzip and load the pk3 with any Doom or FreeDoom IWAD and any map wad that uses vanilla assets. Works on GZDoom and LZDoom. Can be played in Software rendering to remove 3D Decorations, but water splashes will look funny.

It's been three years in the real world since Bill Hader graced our screens as mentally unstable hitman/actor Barry Berkman (known to his actor friends as Barry Block) in the brilliant HBO show "Barry." Actually, it's been just over three years — even though HBO renewed the show for a third season in 2019, the pandemic being what it is, the show's production was delayed for quite a while. But while viewers have spent a long time away from Barry and his bloody exploits, the show's third season — with recaps done by me, hi there! — doesn't spend a great deal of time holding its viewers' hands to help get you back up to speed.

Here's what you should recall as we dive into the third-season premiere, "forgiving jeff." (And yes, the lowercase is intentional for the grammatically anal among you.) The second season ended with Barry's avuncular acting teacher Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) recalling — just after being cleared of the death of his girlfriend, LAPD Detective Moss — that Barry's amoral ex-partner Fuches (Stephen Root) not only showed Gene his girlfriend's dead body, but also whispered that "Barry Berkman did this" in Gene's ear. Barry, meanwhile, ended the season by laying waste to a group of foreign mobsters in an L.A. monastery in the failed hopes of killing Fuches himself, without yet realizing that his acting mentor may know more about his true identity.

Can You Earn Forgiveness?

Now, if the title of this premiere didn't make it clear, the grim opening scene of "forgiving jeff" serves as a hint as to this season's major theme: forgiveness and how you get it. Before we see anything, we hear a man wailing in the background, "Please forgive me!" But it's not Barry begging — he's standing in a deserted field, snacking on something while the off-screen wailer pleads for forgiveness, specifically from a very angry and cheated-upon man who first wants Barry to cut off the wailer's eyelids. (And yet Barry keeps on snacking. He's got a strong stomach.) After Barry gets a garden tool to do the job, he finds out that the wronged husband is ... well, read the episode title. "He's sorry he f**ked my wife!" the husband says, forgiving Jeff. And that would be all well and good, but Barry dispatches both men cleanly with bullets to the head, before walking to his car and shouting, "There's no forgiving Jeff!" The setup here is almost dreamlike, but the message is as much that Barry sees no chance for forgiveness of his own wrongs, let alone for others. Or, at the very least, if you call a hitman to do away with someone, don't change your mind at the last second.

As dreamlike as the opening feels, the next scene makes clear that we really did see Barry kill those two guys. He's living with fellow acting partner and girlfriend Sally (Sarah Goldberg), who realizes as she's getting ready to go to work that Barry never came to bed the night before, which he explains away as angling for some work that "fell through," leading him to drive around for a while. Sally doesn't get suspicious, primarily because she's locked into heading to the set of a show she's co-created and co-stars in, "Joplin," derived from the success of her audition at the end of the previous season and inspired by a past abusive relationship. More on that later.

A big part of the "Barry" puzzle, of course, is the exuberant Chechen mobster NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), who's called upon by the LAPD — led by Detective Mae Dunn (Sarah Burns) — for an interrogation about the monastery attack. NoHo Hank is nervous, but it's admittedly closer to stage fright, as he knew the cops would come calling. NoHo Hank learns a valuable detail in his interrogation: that Barry used Hank's Chechen pin (which Hank gave to Barry as a sign of having no further debt with his band of criminals) to frame the Chechens for Moss' death. Hank is understandably displeased, though he hides it as he learns that the detectives think Moss' death and the monastery attack are linked. Hank takes the chance to shift blame from himself — though the cops have photos of him outside the monastery — to someone else: Fuches, who Hank dubs "the Raven," the mysterious figure who killed Moss and the other gangsters. "But who knows where he is?" Hank says slyly.

Waiting For Things To Blow Over

That is, as we quickly learn, because Hank knows exactly where Fuches is: in a shack in the mountains of Chechnya. "Hank said you could come back to L.A. when everything cools over," a grumpy gangster tells Fuches as they share bowls of cereal with goat milk (the latter pulled direct from the source by Fuches). As mad as Fuches is about not getting a chance to watch some college football ("I guess streaming's a no-go?" he asks), he seems pleased at the arrival of a comely Chechnyan woman with new boxes of cereal.

The final piece of the puzzle is Gene, who we then see at the LAPD being shown photos of various gangsters at the monastery. Unsurprisingly, he quickly and firmly identifies Fuches as being "connected to Barry," only to learn two things: one, that the cops have readily swallowed Hank's naming of Fuches as the Raven, and two, that Barry has been cleared no matter what he may have done to ruin Gene's life. While Gene may not know the extent of Barry's bad deeds, we do, as we see Barry trolling for gigs on the helpfully named website "Hitman Marketplace" and asking someone looking for her husband to be offed about what flowers to buy Sally. (The consultation does not go well.)

Sally, meanwhile, is showcasing a finished episode of "Joplin" to a TV executive, portrayed by the always-wonderful Elizabeth Perkins. The clip we see is notable mostly for the presence of Sally's scene partner in the show-within-the-show, an actress played by Elsie Fisher of the excellent "Eighth Grade." Perkins' exec, however, gets hung up on the baffling trifle detail of whether the mother and daughter in the clip ... live together. "Well, they're mother and daughter ... so, yes," Sally says, near the end of a meeting that goes about as well as that quote implies. Before she heads to set, Sally instructs her ex-acting partner and now-assistant Natalie (D'Arcy Carden) not to talk in meetings, a faux pas she made to agree with Perkins' exec.

Sally, at least on the outside, has fully blossomed into her more powerful role — after the meeting, we get to watch a masterfully laid-out single-take shot in which she walks through the various sets within the soundstage where "Joplin" shoots, making wardrobe and lighting decisions while getting ready to film a scene with Fisher's character. She's soon joined on set by Barry, flowers in tow as planned. Things go well at first: as she prepared him earlier, Sally asks if Barry can stay for lunch, only for him to — as planned — say that he can't because of an audition. But as Sally compliments Barry, we hear the sound of a gunshot followed by the sight of Sally bleeding from her forehead. This one is a hallucination: Sally keeps talking like normal, and it's just in Barry's head that he sees his girlfriend with a gunshot wound in her head. But ... y'know, not a great thing to visualize.

In A Bad Spot

NoHo Hank, meanwhile, crows about how he fooled the cops to his fellow Chechens, saying that all crimes related to the Chechens or Bolivians from last season can be pinned on Fuches. There's just one wrinkle, as we see NoHo Hank driving up to his house so he can surprise in the shower ... Cristobal (Michael Irby), leader of the Bolivian mob, with whom he now lives in a loving relationship. Of course, the fact that NoHo Hank and Cristobal seem pretty happy with each other probably means they're not fated to last long (if countless other TV romances are any clue). The only sticking point they have is our title character, who they can't help but discuss even tangentially. "He killed all my buddies," Cristobal says of Barry, as Hank tries to get his boyfriend to think less of Barry, and instead plot an expansion in the Western side of the US.

Cristobal doesn't want to talk further about Barry, which makes sense. NoHo Hank, however, is faced with Barry in the flesh, as the latter appears in his backyard out of nowhere. "You and Cristobal are an item now?" Barry says before all but begging NoHo Hank for proper work. "I'm in a bad spot ... I think I'm losing my mind, man," he said before saying he needs a purpose in life. But NoHo Hank spells it out for Barry: "Forgiveness is something that has to be earned." The purpose spells itself out soon enough, as Barry is shocked to see an incoming text message from Gene, who requests Barry's presence at the old acting studio. Barry hopes it's for good reason, but we know immediately that it's not: when Gene sees Barry text back, we get a good look at a revolver he's preparing to use. Now, as ominous as this reveal is, it leads to the absolute funniest moment of "forgiving jeff." The gun, apparently, was a gift from legendary actor Rip Torn, whose note to Gene reads "Couscous, try not to blow your dick off with this. — Rip (dictated but not read)." As with other episodes of "Barry," when this goes for the laugh, it goes big.

Joking aside, Gene seems pretty clear-eyed the next morning as he goes to the acting studio, giving his grandson a big hug and saying "It's all going to be OK" in a manner that implies he's on a suicide mission and he knows it. When Barry arrives at the acting studio, it's in a state of abandoned disrepair, with a hand-written sign bidding farewell to Gene's various students. Gene's not interested in talking about that, though. "Remember that day in the woods? I've been thinking about that day a lot," he says calmly. He then reminds Barry about "Kenneth Goulet", AKA Fuches, and wastes no time in stating what he knows: "I know you killed Janice," Gene says as he reaches for his gun. He gives Barry two choices: turn himself in or "f**king die."

Where Do We Go From Here?

Now, the show's called "Barry," so it won't surprise you to learn that our title character escapes death once again. The gun Rip Torn gifted Gene may once have worked, but it literally falls apart after Gene tries to cock the safety. "...Oh," he utters quietly. Barry, for his part, looks truly heartbroken and torn as he whispers, "I'm sorry," and all but jumps out of his chair. We quickly cut to the deserted field from the opening scene. This time, Barry's pointing his gun at another pleading man: Gene. And just as before, Barry hallucinates the sight of someone close to him with a gunshot wound in their head — although Barry is holding a gun at Gene, he hasn't fired it. Gene is still pleading for his life, saying he forgives Barry, only for Barry to repeat what NoHo Hank said about forgiveness being earned. "Then f**king earn it!" Gene shouts. That, apparently, works on Barry, as he has some private epiphany, realizing what he can do "to make it up to you" and psyching himself up that this secret plan will work ... before ordering Gene at gunpoint to get back in the trunk.

I know that "Better Call Saul" is all the rage for many people, but it's hard for me to watch "Barry" and not think of how much this show is following in the footsteps of "Breaking Bad." Though this show still has outrageous moments of comedy — I may have startled my cat when laughing at the Rip Torn-pistol visual gag — Hader and co-writer/co-creator Alec Berg are leaning more and more into the Greek tragedy of Barry Berkman's life in this premiere. Though Barry is not on a path of criminal power a la Walter White, the more he tries to not be his old self, the more he becomes worse than his old self, and the more it seems likely that this show will — like "Breaking Bad," and here I warn you I'm about to spoil an immensely popular show's eight-year-old finale — end with its lead character being killed.

Wrapping Up

But not yet! And unlike, say, the jaw-dropping "Ozymandias" from "Breaking Bad," when one of the more purely good characters here finds out about Barry and speaks the truth, he only gets held at gunpoint without being killed. It's as surprising to me that Gene doesn't wait to push Barry as it is that Gene survives the episode. Barry may understand, deep down, that killing Gene would rip whatever shred of a soul he has left fully apart, but he's prepared to do it. Both Hader and the ever-reliable Henry Winkler are excellent in the last few minutes, and Hader especially does wonders with the physicality of a man hanging on to whatever sanity he can still find.

As with past seasons, "Barry" will air eight weekly episodes this year (with the first six made available to critics in advance). For now, it's harder to see how the industry-focused satire will connect with Barry's internal struggle. At least in this opener, Barry's connection to Hollywood is on the periphery, with Sally's work on her show serving as a palate cleanser between the moments of intensity on her boyfriend's hidden side. That said, "forgiving jeff" serves as a solid season opener with a truly surprising cliffhanger – what justification does Barry have to save Gene's life?

OTHER THOUGHTS:

• I love that the front space for the Chechens in Los Angeles is a store literally called "Plants!"
• It's probably for the better that the deserted field of the opening and closing is a real place, and not some hallucination on Barry's part, but that opening scene is so off-kilter. The guy who shifts from wanting to destroy a cheater to forgiving him switches his tone so quickly that it feels unreal.
• I have to assume that Hader — a well-known cinephile — cast Elsie Fisher for reasons beyond just loving her work in Bo Burnham's "Eighth Grade." We'll see soon enough.
• Speaking of that, Hader is in the director's chair (he directed five of the episodes from the first two seasons) and makes a great return. As funny as some of the jokes are, his visual choices feel heavily inspired by the Coens. (Especially since you could look at the last scene as an homage to "Miller's Crossing.")

Read this next: The 14 Best Sci-Fi Shows On Amazon Prime

The post Barry Returns For Its Third Season With A Chilling Premiere appeared first on /Film.

Halo and Doom fans, here is something truly special for you. Back in February, modder Lewisk3 released an amazing retro Halo Mod for GZDoom. And, alongside Halo Doom: Evolved, you can use some additional mods that can turn Doom into Halo. Halo Doom: Evolved adds 14 weapons and 4 vehicles from Halo. Naturally, you can … Continue reading Halo Doom: Evolved is an amazing retro Halo mod for Doom, available for download →

The post Halo Doom: Evolved is an amazing retro Halo mod for Doom, available for download appeared first on DSOGaming.

Modder ‘KirkBarnes’ has shared some of the new features that will be available in the upcoming version of q2xp. In case you did not know, q2xp is an HD graphical overhaul mod for the original version of Quake 2. While it does not feature any Ray Tracing effects (like Quake 2 RTX), it introduces other … Continue reading New features showcased for the Quake 2 HD graphical overhaul mod, q2xp →

The post New features showcased for the Quake 2 HD graphical overhaul mod, q2xp appeared first on DSOGaming.

Content warning: This piece digs into the history of Europe during World War II, including the events of the Holocaust. Reader discretion is advised. 

Season 1 of the Netflix series "Russian Doll" had fun with a time-loop à la "Groundhog Day," but season 2 ups the ante with some good old fashioned time travel, made possible through the magic of the New York subway's 6 train. 

Throughout the season, Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) and Alan (Charlie Barnett) travel through time to try and find peace in their present-day realities. They end up in several different periods throughout history, and while their journey to get there may be fantastical, many of their experiences are based in fact. So, how much of "Russian Doll" season 2 is historically accurate, and how much is fictionalized to tell a more interesting story? It turns out the truth, in some cases, can be just as wild as the fiction it inspires. 

Major spoilers for "Russian Doll" season 2 ahead.

Who Were The Guardian Angels?

When Nadia ends up in her pregnant mother's body in 1982, it comes as a pretty massive shock (especially since she's pregnant with herself). One of the first signs that she's traveled through time is the presence of Guardian Angels, wearing the distinctive uniform of a red beret and a shirt with a weird Illuminati-looking pyramid eye logo on the front. While the Angels are working in New York City once more, there was a time where their presence had faded and they were thought of as a late 1970s/early 1980s relic. 

The Guardian Angels were founded by Curtis Sliwa in 1979, with thirteen original members that helped patrol the city's dangerous subways. The Guardian Angels were a volunteer force and were required to abide by strict rules and regulations regarding their conduct on the trains and subway platforms, including a no weapons policy. The primary goal of the Guardian Angels was to patrol the subways and help prevent assaults, sexual harassment, and robberies, which is why the first time Nadia sees them, they're chasing after a purse-snatcher on the subway platform. One Guardian Angel, Derek (Ephraim Sykes) stops to help her, seeing that she's pregnant, and tries to offer her an escort home because, well, the streets of New York were not exactly the safest place in 1982. 

Later, Nadia seeks out the Guardian Angels in the hope that they can help her find Chez (Sharlto Copley), her mother's former lover, who stole the family's fortune. She assumes that the Angels can help her track him down, but that's really not what they do, and Derek even tells her as much. The Angels are protectors, using citizen's arrests to bring offenders to the police and offering self-defense training, but they aren't private detectives by any stretch of the imagination. The Guardian Angels have come under scrutiny over the years, mostly from the police force, though some citizens also raised concerns for the safety of the Angels themselves after one was killed in the line of duty in 1982, right around the time that Nadia is walking around New York in her mother's body. 

These days, in addition to stopping violent crimes and thefts on the subways, the Angels have an all-female division called the Perv Busters, who call out and sometimes detain sexual predators on the trains, taking them to police. Many of the Guardian Angels of today have taken over for family members of past generations -- like one young member of the Perv Busters who wears her grandmother's red beret. Throughout "Russian Doll" season 2, Nadia is reminded that even in terrible times, there are people willing to help. In the 1980s in New York, the best representation of humanity's guardian angels was the Guardian Angels.

Was There Really A Hungarian Gold Train?

After losing her family's fortune once more on the 6 train on her way back from the 1980s, Nadia decides to trace the loss back to the very beginning. She and her friend Maxine (Greta Lee) travel to Budapest to try and unravel the mystery behind the "Hungarian gold train," where Nadia believes that her family's belongings were taken by the Nazis and then redistributed among gentiles. She eventually ends up going back through time into her grandmother Vera's body in 1944, at the height of the Nazi occupation of Hungary. As she exits the train she's stopped by a friend of Vera's, dressed as a Christian widow in mourning gear, who tells her not to reveal her heritage or she'll end up on the next train (to a concentration camp). When Nadia/Vera tries to protest, the woman reminds her that if she's not careful, she'll "end up like her mother," and we discover that Vera's mother was taken away to the camps and she was never heard from again. 

Soon Nadia runs into Vera's best friend, Delia, who is also dressed as a widow in an effort to avoid detection by the Nazis. There are many stories of Jewish people "hiding in plain sight" during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and this is just one way they might have tried to avoid being singled out. People were taken by the Nazis for being Jewish, Romani, mentally ill, or homosexual, and being taken often meant a horrific death. Approximately 600,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust, so the threat was extremely real. Nadia, however, knows that her grandmother will survive long after World War II, so her only concern is finding the gold train and her family's stolen belongings. 

So was there a Hungarian Gold Train? Yes. Not only did it exist, but the United States military intercepted it in 1945 and had full receipts for the items inside. However, instead of attempting to return the stolen items to the Hungarian people, the United States just sort of took all that insane wealth for itself. There were promises to restore it to refugees who were displaced by or survived the Holocaust, but instead, U.S. military personnel serving in Austria, like Major General Harry J. Collins, "inherited" the riches for their own homes. Post-WWII, the warehouse where the items were stored was opened to the public for sale -- similar to the sale of stolen goods and the giant warehouse that Nadia discovers in Budapest. This is one part of "Russian Doll" that is sadly very true, and calls for reparations and returning items to the descendants of the original owners have still only been met with half-measures. 

What Happened To Hungary After World War II?

Hungary was actually aligned with Germany for much of World War II, as Nazi occupation made cooperation seem like an easier route for government officials. The Hungarian government generally worked with the Nazis and even sent their armies to fight against the Soviet Union, though they suffered heavy losses. 

In December 1944, Soviet forces were able to free Hungary from Nazi occupation and the country officially declared war on Germany. Eventually they signed the Armistice with the Allied Forces, and ended up as a satellite state of the Soviet Union. As Hungary tried to reconcile the horrors exacted upon its own people and began trials for war crimes, communist beliefs began to take hold among the population. Soviet control grew stronger until 1956, when the Hungarian people attempted a revolution, which was frustrated by Stalin's control. But although the Soviets crushed the uprising, they never regained the same control over the Hungarian government or its people. 

In 1968, when Vera goes back to Budapest to find her buried treasure, things were still a bit chaotic in Eastern Europe. Hungary had gained some autonomy from the USSR, but the Soviets invaded neighboring Czechoslovakia (which is now two nations: Czechia and Slovakia) in 1968. The goal was a full takeover of the nation, also a satellite state of the USSR, in response to the protests and liberalizing reforms referred to as the Prague Spring. The Hungarian government and its people had to be very careful to not incur the same kind of wrath, so it's really no surprise that Vera hightails it back to New York as soon as she gets her buried belongings. 

What Are Krugerrands, Exactly?

After Nadia (in Vera's body) manages to get her family's stolen stuff back from their underground hiding place decades after the war, she returns to New York with her best friend Delia (Athina Papadimitriu), who encourages her to exchange the valuables for Krugerrands, which she believes are the most stable form of currency. Gold, after all, usually maintains value, and South African Krugerrands, first minted in 1967, were considered the ideal standard for preserving a fortune in 1968, when Vera traded for them. 

At the time, Krugerrands were the only readily available one ounce gold coin, making them preferable for the collector that wasn't wealthy enough to buy gold bullion in bars or other, larger forms. The United States banned the import of Krugerrands in 1985 as worldwide awareness of South African apartheid policies grew, though the coins remained legal to own as long as you weren't bringing them into the country. (The import ban has since been lifted.)

The price of a single troy ounce of gold, which is what a Krugerrand contains, hovered around $40 in 1968. Vera's 150 Krugerrands would have been worth approximately $6000. Adjusting for inflation, that's almost $50,000. The cost of a 1968 Krugerrand today hovers around $3,000 -- higher than some other Krugerrands because fewer coins were minted that year. If Nadia still had all 150 Krugerrands and sold them in 2022, she would be looking at a fortune of close to $450,000. That's quite a chunk of change, so it's little wonder that Nadia wanted to get those coins back! 

Tunneling Under The Berlin Wall

While Nadia bounces all over time, Alan only really travels back to one specific place and time: East Berlin, 1962. He ends up in the body of his grandmother, Agnes (Carolyn Michelle Smith), a graduate student from Ghana. She (and Alan by proxy) are having a little romance with a German student named Lenny (Sandor Funtek). Alan is very much in love and learning some things about himself when he discovers that Lenny and a group of other students are going to tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall in order to get to their relatives in democratic West Berlin. 

East Berlin, still under Soviet rule, is a harsh place, but Alan finds a lot to love there as long as Lenny is around. Unfortunately, Lenny doesn't want to listen to Alan's request to wait until the wall falls in 1989; even if he did believe that Agnes somehow has knowledge of the future, he's not willing to wait 27 years to see his family again. Alan eventually loses track of Lenny when the students dig their tunnel and escape, and he's left heartbroken. 

Tunnels beneath the Berlin wall were very real indeed, and the story depicted in "Russian Doll" is fairly close to the true story of Tunnel 57. In 1963, a group of West German university students, along with one Eastern German who had escaped years before, decided to dig a tunnel beneath the Berlin wall to help people escape from East Berlin. They were caught by the Soviet police on their first attempt and some served jail time, but they tried again and were successful in October of 1964. The majority of the tunnels were dug from the west to the east, with helpers on both sides to help usher people to freedom. Tunnel 57 earned its name because 57 East Berliners were able to escape through it in just two days, comprising nearly one-fifth of all successful tunnel escapes during the existence of the wall. 

Some of these impressive tunnels still exist today, and one from 1970 is now a tourist attraction open to the public. 

How Autobiographical Is Russian Doll?

"Russian Doll" isn't just based in history; it's also partly based on season 2 showrunner and star Natasha Lyonne's personal history. There are numerous connections to her life and family, including having a grandmother who was a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, but she used those details to create a more complex fictional Nadia instead of just recreating them wholesale. In an interview with LA Times, Lyonne explained that while there is inspiration from her own life, the series is in no way autobiographical: 

"What I am drawing on is a more holistic, philosophical or even spiritual worldview — that's the personal part of the show. Yes, my grandmother was also a Holocaust survivor, that is true. But no, my grandmother has nothing to do with Vera, and no, my grandmother doesn't dress like that or act like that. She didn't have those conversations with my mom, and no, she never put my mom in a mental hospital in the '80s. And no, my mom was not pregnant with me when this happened."

Lyonne wanted to explore generational trauma through empathy, and the best way to do that was by literally putting Nadia in her mother and grandmother's shoes. Nadia is nearing her 40th birthday and is trying to reconcile who she is before Ruth, the last person who has known her since her childhood, dies. She feels completely adrift without her ancestors to anchor her -- both her blood relatives and her chosen family. Lyonne found the concept universally relatable, because we never really know what our parents or grandparents went through without our own context. As we age, we gain the ability to understand them more, even if we don't have the incredible tool of a time-traveling 6 train to help us get there. 

There is one character in "Russian Doll" that Lyonne pulled from her reality, and it's adoptive mother figure Ruth. While there are differences between the two Ruths, Lyonne's description of the one in her life has a lot in common with her no-nonsense TV counterpart:

"There is a real Ruth in my life and she definitely said, 'The only thing easy in this life is pissing in the shower.' She also said, 'Jersey — it's free to get in, but you got to pay to get out.' My Ruth is a chemist, this Ruth is a shrink. So they're quite different. But the essence of the idea of like, in Manhattan, you can scramble through a whole hectic day of being a troublemaker and then just show up at some safe haven and there's chicken in the fridge; that's definitely a direct pull from my life."

The second season of this incredible series is only made better by the historical and personal aspects added to it, making it feel more relevant and resonant than ever. There's really no telling where things might go in season 3, but hopefully the series maintains this level of emotional depth and willingness to dig deep into the tough stuff.

"Russian Doll" season 2 is now streaming on Netflix. 

Read this next: 20 Underrated Rom Coms You Need To Watch

The post How Much of Russian Doll Season 2 is a True Story? appeared first on /Film.

A former NSA computer scientist is disgusted with the current state of security practices, writes ITWire. Slashdot reader samuel_the_fool shares their report: Patching of vulnerabilities is the security industry's equivalent of thoughts and prayers, a prominent American security expert has said during a debate on the topic "Patching is useless" at a recent online conference named Hack At The Harbor. Dave Aitel, 46, a former NSA computer scientist who ran his own security shop, Immunity, for many years, said the remedies proposed by security vendors and big technology companies had served to lull people into a false sense of security all these years and ensure that all the old problems still remained.... Aitel pointed out that if there were vulnerable devices on a network, then they should be removed and substituted with others, rather than being continuously patched.... Aitel was no less severe on Linux, noting that the biggest contributor to the kernel was the Chinese telecommunications vendor Huawei Technologies, which he claimed had been indicted by the US, and asking how one could rest content if so many patches were coming from a company of this kind. On the positive side, he had praise for ChromeOS, an operating system that is produced by Google, and recommended the use of Chromebooks rather Windows machines. Aitel called for vulnerability management, advocating the government as the best entity to handle this. His argument was that no other entity had sufficient power to push back against the lobby of the big software vendors and the security industry.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To this day, a lot of people consider Morrowind, the third entry in Bethesda's open world The Elder Scrolls series, to be the best among those games. And seeing how it's now been 20 years since Morrowind's original launch, we can check out this retrospective from The Escapist Magazine that highlights the game's unique brand of weirdness.

A couple of sample paragraphs:

It’s difficult to forget stepping out of Seyda Neen, only to have an elf fall from the sky to his death immediately in front of you. His journal reveals that he crafted a spell that granted the power of flight. In reality, it’s a huge buff to jump, which allows the caster to leap across most of the game map but can only be used safely when countered with another spell for slow fall.

It might have looked absurd for characters to levitate by effectively walking through the air or to run so fast they triggered loading screens every couple of seconds – presumably one reason spellcrafting was simplified for Oblivion and left out of Skyrim. But spellcrafting in Morrowind trusted the player with a degree of freedom and experimentation rarely seen in open-world games since. In effect, Morrowind freely handed players the means to try to break it – a design approach usually associated more with immersive sims than with RPGs.

The Associated Press files this report from Chernobyl, where invading tanks in February "churned up highly contaminated soil from the site of the 1986 accident that was the world's worst nuclear disaster..." "Here in the dirt of one of the world's most radioactive places, Russian soldiers dug trenches. Ukrainian officials worry they were, in effect, digging their own graves." For more than a month, some Russian soldiers bunked in the earth within sight of the massive structure built to contain radiation from the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor. A close inspection of their trenches was impossible because even walking on the dirt is discouraged.... Maksym Shevchuck, the deputy head of the state agency managing the exclusion zone, believes hundreds or thousands of soldiers damaged their health, likely with little idea of the consequences, despite plant workers' warnings to their commanders. "Most of the soldiers were around 20 years old," he said.... The full extent of Russia's activities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is still unknown, especially because the troops scattered mines that the Ukrainian military is still searching for. Some have detonated, further disturbing the radioactive ground. The Russians also set several forest fires, which have been put out. Ukrainian authorities can't monitor radiation levels across the zone because Russian soldiers stole the main server for the system, severing the connection on March 2. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Saturday it still wasn't receiving remote data from its monitoring systems. The Russians even took Chernobyl staffers' personal radiation monitors.... When the Russians hurriedly departed March 31 as part of a withdrawal from the region that left behind scorched tanks and traumatized communities, they took more than 150 Ukrainian national guard members into Belarus. Shevchuck fears they're now in Russia. In their rush, the Russians gave nuclear plant managers a choice: Sign a document saying the soldiers had protected the site and there were no complaints, or be taken into Belarus. The managers signed. The article includes more stories from Chernobyl's staff: Even now, weeks after the Russians left, "I need to calm down," the plant's main security engineer, Valerii Semenov, told The Associated Press. He worked 35 days straight, sleeping only three hours a night, rationing cigarettes and staying on even after the Russians allowed a shift change. "I was afraid they would install something and damage the system," he said in an interview.... Another Ukrainian nuclear plant, at Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine, remains under Russian control. It is the largest in Europe. Long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes also notes reports that researchers at Chernobyl "had been looking for bacteria to eat radioactive waste — but they now fear that their work was irreparably lost during the Russian invasion of the facility." New Scientist reports (in a pay-walled article) that scientist Olena Pareniuk "was attempting to identify bacteria that could consume radioactive waste within Chernobyl's destroyed reactor before the Russian invasion. If her samples are lost it will likely be impossible to replace them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WinDirStat is a great program to get a better idea of just what is taking up how much space in your computer. But it isn’t a perfect problem, and that means that it’s worthwhile to look for alternative solutions.

Though it’s not difficult to find distilled water in stores, if you find yourself in a situation where you need (or want) to make it at home, you can do so pretty easily. The good news is that you don’t need any fancy equipment to get the job done. The bad news is that it takes some time. Here’s what to know.

Read more...

Software developers use Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and text editors every day. Having a good text editor or IDE and knowing how to use it efficiently is vital for productivity.

One of the most exciting anime directors working right now is Makoto Shinkai. Shinkai began his animation career in video games but soon migrated to filmmaking with the 1999 original video animation "She And Her Cat." Since then, Shinkai has directed six features. His greatest success was without a doubt the 2016 fantasy romance film "Your Name."

"Your Name" follows two teenage strangers, Tokyo native Taki and country girl Mitsuha, who begin swapping bodies with each other. One day they'll wake up in their own bodies; the next they'll be in the other's. Once they realize what's happening, the two start to communicate by leaving behind notes for each other. As a most unusual relationship blossoms, Taki discovers he must save Mitsuha from a horrible fate. Shinkai pulled from many inspirations to make the film, from art to real-life tragedy.

The Earthquake

The twist in "Your Name" comes when Taki and Mitsuha stop swapping bodies. The film then starts following solely Taki's perspective, as he discovers that his and Mitsuha's timelines weren't parallel. While he lived in 2016, she was in 2013, the same year her town, Itomori, was wiped out by a comet. Taki manages to engineer one last body switch and rewrite history so Itomori's citizens evacuate before the town's destruction. The pair briefly meet each other in person, but they forget each other afterward. Not to worry — they meet each other in Tokyo in 2021 and vaguely recognize each other.

In an interview with Vice, Shinkai explained his inspirations. They ranged from Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" to a waka poem by ancient Japanese writer Ono no Komachi: "I met someone in my dream, and had I known it was a dream, I would have stayed there." As for the destruction of Itomori, that came from a much more tragic place: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that ravaged Japan.

At magnitude 9.0, Tōhoku is the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history. The damage was threefold; the earthquake caused a tsunami and a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The disaster left 18,000 dead, and the effects are still felt in Japan today. On how the earthquake specifically influenced "Your Name," Shinkai said:

"It was the largest in a thousand years, and there was something similar 1,000 years ago, which we all forgot about. But if you look closer there were warnings, like stone inscriptions in the cave in the film: Don't live in this valley. But we forget those warnings, or dismiss them as something 'from the ancient times'. We think they're just dangers from the past. When we have a disaster in Japan, I wonder, how can we prevent our lives and traditions and history from the disaster?"

Weathering With You

Makoto Shinkai's next film was "Weathering With You." On the surface, the films are quite similar. They're both stories about puppy love. They're both set in contemporary Japan with a fantasy backdrop. They both involve a natural disaster. Taki and Mitsuha even cameo in "Weathering With You," confirming the films share a common setting. However, the two stories are spiritually inverted.

After running away to Tokyo, young Hodaka meets Hina, a "sunshine girl" with the ability to control the weather. However, sunshine girls must give up their mortal lives; otherwise Tokyo will be doomed to unending rain storms. Hodaka literally pulls Hina back to Earth, deciding any sacrifice is worth being with her.

On the surface, this is quite similar to Taki's actions in the climax of "Your Name," defying the will of the universe to save his love. However, the effects are the opposite. While Taki saves a town's worth of people, Hodaka damns Tokyo to save Hina. Hodaka's decision is definitely the more selfish one, but the film's ending, where he and Hina reunite as Tokyo has become mostly submerged, illustrates the film's message: Hold onto the things you love even as the world gets worse. This is, unfortunately, a truer-to-life message than trying to undo what's already happened, like in "Your Name."

Read this next: 10 Anime Movies That Deserved To Win The Oscar For Best Animated Feature

The post Makoto Shinkai's Your Name Was Partly Inspired By This Real-Life Disaster appeared first on /Film.

Back in 1989, superheroes were not a sure thing. The special effects required to accurately represent the fantasy action seen on the average comic book page were not yet possible, unless a studio was willing to spend a great deal of money to get it done. Additionally, while characters like Batman and Superman and Spider-Man had a good deal of cultural clout, most of the better-known superheroes of today were deemed too weird and obscure to warrant their own feature films. This is a difficult notion to fathom in a world wherein limp characters like Ant-Man appear in feature films on the regular. (Come at me, Ant-Man fans. I think I can take both of you.)

But in 1989, there was trepidation from Warner Bros. Throughout the 1970s, there were several attempts to get Batman on film, but nothing looked promising. The character, however, had begun losing traction in the popular consciousness, and a CBS-backed "Batman in Outer Space" was doomed to fail. Over the course of many years, Tim Burton's film version slowly came together. During production, some landmark Batman books were published: Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" (1986), and Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke" (1988). Batman was skewing further and further away from the colorful comedy of the 1960s into a bleak, shadowy, violent chapter. Burton latched onto this, electing to make his Batman more like "The Killing Joke," something he admitted in the Faber & Faber book "Burton on Burton," edited by Mark Salisbury.

In the finished film, it appears Burton and screenwriter Sam Hamm took a novel creative approach to Batman that would affect superhero cinema for the following decade. Rather than change Batman — an outlandish character — to fit in the real world, they changed the world to fit Batman. As such, Gotham City was a tall, implausible mashup of German expressionism, film noir, and other classic genres of the past. "Batman," as such, feels a bit timeless. Hamm revealed, in a 1989 interview magazine called the Comics Interview Super Special, his primary creative influences.

Retro-futurism

Tim Burton has said, in the same Faber & Faber book, that he wanted "Batman" to look like the future and the past simultaneously. He objected to the inclusion of Prince music on the soundtrack, as it pinned "Batman" too closely to a specific era. Complex sets and awesome matte paintings were used to create Batman's universe, and the result was something screenwriter Sam Hamm described as retrofuturist. From the Comics Interview Super Special: 

"Well, I think unavoidably will there will be a bit of 'Dark Knight [Returns]' in the tone. We were trying to figure out, you know, how to handle the world of Gotham City. And we both kind of simultaneously seized on 'Brazil' as a kind of visual model, as having a kind of really interesting — I don't know what term you would use — retro-futurist look!"

Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," released in 1985, was a famously fought-over sci-fi dystopia film heavily influenced by George Orwell's "1984" and the works of Franz Kafka. It took place in a future that was overrun with bureaucracy, and where cities had become so dense there didn't seem to be a sky anymore. Apartments were small and narrow, and plumbing and tubes reached everywhere. Everything looked to be coated in soot. Looking back and forth between "Brazil" and "Batman," one can see the visual parallels. 

A Projection Of The '80s

Sam Hamm and Tim Burton felt this Batman should take in the present, but to do so by combining the past and the future. There are high-tech devices in "Batman," but they look old and mechanical, not sleek and computerized. It was also a world that needed to accommodate a Halloween-style creature like a scary bat man and a horror movie monster like a mass-murdering clown man. It was set in 1989, but could just as easily have been the 1940s.

"[T]he idea that we liked was the movie would be set in the present day, but it would be set in a Gotham City which was in its look fairly far removed from anything which is out there at the moment. It will be a kind of nightmarish Gotham City, like if you had gone back to the '40s and taken a projection of what the 1980s or the 1990s would look like. So it's at once kind of gothic and futuristic."

In the 30-plus years since the release of "Batman," the tendency has been to push Batman further toward the high-tech, and deeper into the dark. Joel Schumacher attempted to retrofit Burton's aesthetic so it fit with the ethos of the 1960s comedy series. In 2005, Christopher Nolan rebooted the character in a more realistic world and walked Batman through practical concerns like where he would get his helmets from. By the time audiences arrived to "The Batman" in 2022, we had come back around to film noir again, only now it was a stylistic throwback to the serial killer movies of the 1990s. Everything cycles back and forth.

Read this next: The 15 Best Batman Comics You Need To Read

The post Tim Burton's Batman Based Gotham On Another Dystopian Sci-Fi City appeared first on /Film.