Researchers from the University of Cambridge have identified a new attack method that abuses Unicode to stealthily inject vulnerabilities into code.
Dubbed Trojan Source, the attack impacts many of the compilers, interpreters, code editors, and code repository frontend services used by software developers.
Graphics card costs in 2021 are nothing short of gruelling, and market trends paint a foreboding sign of things to come. While reports published back in September suggest that gaming GPUs could cost 70% more than their MSRP, further analysis by 3DCenter hints at even bigger hikes that could see AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series double in price.
According to 3DCentre's findings, AMD RDNA2 GPUs are now selling for 101% above MSRP, and some RTX 3000 series models and now fetching 88% more. The report also specifies that the red team's prices jumped 18% between October 10 and October 29, while Nvidia's tags also received a 16% bump. Naturally, this means that gaming PC component costs are inflating on a week by week basis, and could reach as high as pricing peaks recorded in May.
Since the price trend data only covers cards released until March, late contenders like the GeForce RTX 3070Ti and Radeon RX 6600 series aren't included. That's not to say that newer components are unaffected by the hike, as the German organisation also says the current market situation is far from being in a good place. In other words, even future releases like Nvidia's rumoured RTX 3070Ti and 3080 with increased VRAM could be afflicted by MSRP inflation.
RELATED LINKS: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X review, AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT review, Best CPU for gamingVirtually all compilers — programs that transform human-readable source code into computer-executable machine code — are vulnerable to an insidious attack in which an adversary can introduce targeted vulnerabilities into any software without being detected, new research released today warns. The vulnerability disclosure was coordinated with multiple organizations, some of whom are now releasing updates to address the security weakness.
Researchers with the University of Cambridge discovered a bug that affects most computer code compilers and many software development environments. At issue is a component of the digital text encoding standard Unicode, which allows computers to exchange information regardless of the language used. Unicode currently defines more than 143,000 characters across 154 different language scripts (in addition to many non-script character sets, such as emojis).
Specifically, the weakness involves Unicode’s bi-directional or “Bidi” algorithm, which handles displaying text that includes mixed scripts with different display orders, such as Arabic — which is read right to left — and English (left to right).
But computer systems need to have a deterministic way of resolving conflicting directionality in text. Enter the “Bidi override,” which can be used to make left-to-right text read right-to-left, and vice versa.
“In some scenarios, the default ordering set by the Bidi Algorithm may not be sufficient,” the Cambridge researchers wrote. “For these cases, Bidi override control characters enable switching the display ordering of groups of characters.”
Bidi overrides enable even single-script characters to be displayed in an order different from their logical encoding. As the researchers point out, this fact has previously been exploited to disguise the file extensions of malware disseminated via email.
Here’s the problem: Most programming languages let you put these Bidi overrides in comments and strings. This is bad because most programming languages allow comments within which all text — including control characters — is ignored by compilers and interpreters. Also, it’s bad because most programming languages allow string literals that may contain arbitrary characters, including control characters.
“So you can use them in source code that appears innocuous to a human reviewer [that] can actually do something nasty,” said Ross Anderson, a professor of computer security at Cambridge and co-author of the research. “That’s bad news for projects like Linux and Webkit that accept contributions from random people, subject them to manual review, then incorporate them into critical code. This vulnerability is, as far as I know, the first one to affect almost everything.”
The research paper, which dubbed the vulnerability “Trojan Source,” notes that while both comments and strings will have syntax-specific semantics indicating their start and end, these bounds are not respected by Bidi overrides. From the paper:
“Therefore, by placing Bidi override characters exclusively within comments and strings, we can smuggle them into source code in a manner that most compilers will accept. Our key insight is that we can reorder source code characters in such a way that the resulting display order also represents syntactically valid source code.”
“Bringing all this together, we arrive at a novel supply-chain attack on source code. By injecting Unicode Bidi override characters into comments and strings, an adversary can produce syntactically-valid source code in most modern languages for which the display order of characters presents logic that diverges from the real logic. In effect, we anagram program A into program B.”
Anderson said such an attack could be challenging for a human code reviewer to detect, as the rendered source code looks perfectly acceptable.
“If the change in logic is subtle enough to go undetected in subsequent testing, an adversary could introduce targeted vulnerabilities without being detected,” he said.
Equally concerning is that Bidi override characters persist through the copy-and-paste functions on most modern browsers, editors, and operating systems.
“Any developer who copies code from an untrusted source into a protected code base may inadvertently introduce an invisible vulnerability,” Anderson told KrebsOnSecurity. “Such code copying is a significant source of real-world security exploits.”
Image: XKCD.com/2347/
Matthew Green, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, said the Cambridge research clearly shows that most compilers can be tricked with Unicode into processing code in a different way than a reader would expect it to be processed.
“Before reading this paper, the idea that Unicode could be exploited in some way wouldn’t have surprised me,” Green told KrebsOnSecurity. “What does surprise me is how many compilers will happily parse Unicode without any defenses, and how effective their right-to-left encoding technique is at sneaking code into codebases. That’s a really clever trick I didn’t even know was possible. Yikes.”
Green said the good news is that the researchers conducted a widespread vulnerability scan, but were unable to find evidence that anyone was exploiting this. Yet.
“The bad news is that there were no defenses to it, and now that people know about it they might start exploiting it,” Green said. “Hopefully compiler and code editor developers will patch this quickly! But since some people don’t update their development tools regularly there will be some risk for a while at least.”
Nicholas Weaver, a lecturer at the computer science department at University of California, Berkeley, said the Cambridge research presents “a very simple, elegant set of attacks that could make supply chain attacks much, much worse.”
“It is already hard for humans to tell ‘this is OK’ from ‘this is evil’ in source code,” Weaver said. “With this attack, you can use the shift in directionality to change how things render with comments and strings so that, for example ‘This is okay” is how it renders, but ‘This is’ okay is how it exists in the code. This fortunately has a very easy signature to scan for, so compilers can [detect] it if they encounter it in the future.”
The latter half of the Cambridge paper is a fascinating case study on the complexities of orchestrating vulnerability disclosure with so many affected programming languages and software firms. The researchers said they offered a 99-day embargo period following their initial disclosure to allow affected products to be repaired with software updates.
“We met a variety of responses ranging from patching commitments and bug bounties to quick dismissal and references to legal policies,” the researchers wrote. “Of the nineteen software suppliers with whom we engaged, seven used an outsourced platform for receiving vulnerability disclosures, six had dedicated web portals for vulnerability disclosures, four accepted disclosures via PGP-encrypted email, and two accepted disclosures only via non-PGP email. They all confirmed receipt of our disclosure, and ultimately nine of them committed to releasing a patch.”
Eleven of the recipients had bug bounty programs offering payment for vulnerability disclosures. But of these, only five paid bounties, with an average payment of $2,246 and a range of $4,475, the researchers reported.
Anderson said so far about half of the organizations maintaining the affected computer programming languages contacted have promised patches. Others are dragging their feet.
“We’ll monitor their deployment over the next few days,” Anderson said. “We also expect action from Github, Gitlab and Atlassian, so their tools should detect attacks on code in languages that still lack bidi character filtering.”
As for what needs to be done about Trojan Source, the researchers urge governments and firms that rely on critical software to identify their suppliers’ posture, exert pressure on them to implement adequate defenses, and ensure that any gaps are covered by controls elsewhere in their toolchain.
“The fact that the Trojan Source vulnerability affects almost all computer languages makes it a rare opportunity for a system-wide and ecologically valid cross-platform and cross-vendor comparison of responses,” the paper concludes. “As powerful supply-chain attacks can be launched easily using these techniques, it is essential for organizations that participate in a software supply chain to implement defenses.”
Weaver called the research “really good work at stopping something before it becomes a problem.”
“The coordinated disclosure lessons are an excellent study in what it takes to fix these problems,” he said. “The vulnerability is real but also highlights the even larger vulnerability of the shifting stand of dependencies and packages that our modern code relies on.”
Rust has released a security advisory for this security weakness, which is being tracked as CVE-2021-42574 and CVE-2021-42694. Additional security advisories from other affected languages will be added as updates here.
The Trojan Source research paper is available here (PDF).
Aída Merlano Rebolledo became a Colombian senator in 2019, but she landed in prison several months later for voter fraud and corruption. Her sentence was for 15 years, but she only stayed in the slammer for two weeks thanks to her distracting daughter. — Read the rest
"Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"
That's one of those classically memorable lines from the original Star Wars film, A New Hope. Leia lounges in her extrajudicial torture cell, expecting some sort of princely rescue — and instead, meets a cute-lookin' schlub in ill-fitting stormtrooper armor who ends up being her biological twin (oops). — Read the rest
Even though I’ve been dead excited about Weird West since its announcement last summer, when the time finally came for me to play a preview build last week, I found myself unusually hesitant. Primarily, this was because I loved the game’s concept so much (“What if Dishonored and Desperadoes III had a rooting tooting baby, then let it watch way too many horror movies?”), that I didn’t really want to face the possibility that developers WolfEye Studios might have fallen short on it. But more than that, I was worried I’d have to… well, make an effort.
For whatever reason, my enthusiasm to start new games has been taking one of its periodic dips over the last month or so, leaving me in the comforting arms of old favourites I can play on autopilot. Time and time again, I’ll get right to the point of hitting play on something, before convincing myself - completely unreasonably - that it’ll probably be a load of hassle for moderate reward. And however promising a sprawling, top-down immersive sim set in a world of haunted stetsons sounded, I was certain it would involve a lot of fiddling about with inventories, reading long screeds of text, and going on sidequests.
I’m delighted to say, however, that I was completely wrong. Because while Weird West does involve all those things (and features even more emergent complexity than the hefty dose I’d anticipated, to boot) I have not had a smoother time getting into a game in a long while. The build I played only featured one of the game’s five character campaigns, admittedly. But unless the other four are all set in a Tesco car park or something, I can heartily recommend it to you.
Incompetent goodfellas hunting down amateur hour homeboys. A fishing hook cast through the earlobe of an unsuspecting layman. A floatie made entirely of blow-up dolls. Unbridled bridesmaids snatching husbands up off the streets. Small town suspicious types boasting butcher knives. One-eyed maniacs slashing their way through sanctioned buffoonery. Explosions. Eviscerations. Beheadings. Ball-busting. Horse-bucking. Juice cartons slowly stroked a little too enthusiastically. This is "Sweetie, You Won't Believe It," and nothing can prepare you for its chaotic energy.
Set on the day that his pregnant wife is scheduled to give birth, "Sweetie" follows Dastan (Daniar Alshinov), a financially struggling scrub who deals with his nagging spouse by ditching her to hang with the boys. With his ball and chain cursing his name as background noise, Das and his buddies, Arman (Azamat Marklenov) and Murat (Yerlan Primbetov), the same dudes he's been riding with since high school, head to the nearest body of water to fish for the very first time, beers and plastic fantastic lovers in tow. Their fishing debut is a disaster, with shorts ripped and cartilage torn, but these minor inconveniences are the least of their concerns. Like a domino effect of boisterous negligence, the gang's absentminded actions bring about catastrophic consequences.
After haphazardly witnessing a murder, the besties find a group of gangsters hot on their trail, with each everyday Joe now sporting a red hot target on his back. But that's not all. Said gangsters have grown a tail, and that tail belongs to a homicidal maniac dead set on revenge for the accidental death of his four legged best friend.
Somewhere along the line, something in the comedic genre got lost. Buddy comedies gave way to line-o-ramas. Meta, tongue-in-cheek commentaries overshadowed nuance. Sick burns telegraphing every subject of speech. What's so much fun about Yernar Nurgaliyev's "Sweetie, You Won't Believe It" is that it feels like a return to slapstick shenanigans. Much in the same vein as '80s and early '90s romps, this well-balanced laugh riot expertly meets nostalgia with fresh new prosthetics. Gore gags galore, Nurgaliyev and company choose to go the more practical route with their special effects, keeping the story grounded just enough so when the shlock hits the fan, the beats become uproariously hilarious.
Sometimes character development isn't really necessary. An expertly shot revamped version of the wrong-place-wrong-time scenario, "Sweetie" succeeds in its steadfast decision to keep things light, no matter how dark the plot threatens to become. Most modern day movies that try to be funny also aim to include a moral message for the audience to take away in the midst of the malarkey. Comedic reliefs learn and grow and change and ask the audience to strive to be better. Not "Sweetie." Not here. Director Nurgaliyev knows that's not why you came. You're here to giggle like gangbusters, not watch a man finally learn to step up to the plate and show his old lady who wears the pants. It's funnier to watch him cower from his wife's hurling accusations and shake in his boots.
You could call "Sweetie, You Won't Believe It" the "Hangover" of Kazakhstan, but it's a tool that fires a little more point-blank. It doesn't have that film's pockets of humanity or its star-studded extravagance. Director Nurgaliyev even undercuts his own fleeting moments of emotional connection: occasional skirmishes between friends over who's a bigger loser –- the guy who waits on his wife hand and foot, or the adult who's yet to engage in carnal pleasures -– are cut short by heavy artillery fire; I think one of the characters who dies is related to one of the gangsters but I can't quite be sure. When we learn the backstory of why the maniac was initially set on a path of destruction, we briefly see photos of his departed wife and child, but the tension building in the room is swiftly cut with a long, drawn-out series of fart jokes.
Another character imparts a phrase of wisdom upon his departure, something along the lines of "Do not step on a sleeping snake," and then is promptly bucked out of his saddle. One victim makes what I can only assume is a very deliberate nod to "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" as he gives an enthusiastic thumbs up with his hand while he slowly sinks down into the depths of a swamp. At one point Das tells himself he's okay with his wife naming their child after her ex-boyfriend and is immediately knocked out and dragged away by a sick girl with sicker fantasies.
"Sweetie, You Won't Believe It" is a lean, mean 84 minutes and it doesn't waste a second of them. It's hard to tell if there was more meat to the plot at one point or another -- does Das ever pay off his creditors? Will the codependent husband finally learn how to assert himself in his marriage? -- but in the end, it doesn't really matter. The current edit is consistently entertaining in its own quirky way. Sweetie lacks anything remotely nuanced or subtle, but what it does have is a gangster who can't stop fainting at the sight of blood, and it works. In a world where men doting unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts come equipped with a sixth sense for the subversive, anything feels possible.
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The post Sweetie, You Won't Believe It Review: An Uproarious and Chaotic Slapstick Caper [Telluride Horror Show 2021] appeared first on /Film.
"Doctor Who" has returned, and this time, it's trying something new. Though, that's part of the whole appeal of "Doctor Who," isn't it, that it's always changing and experimenting with new genres and tones? But "Doctor Who: Flux" is probably one of the show's flashiest experiments: one long multi-episode story that will serve as the final season for Jodie Whittaker's historic Thirteenth Doctor, before she regenerates in a series of specials ahead of the show's 60th anniversary. And as the first episode of that multi-part story, "The Halloween Apocalypse" has the toughest job: it has the set-up.
It's hard to rate the premiere of "Doctor Who: Flux," because it's so overstuffed with storylines and characters and monsters that are being introduced left and right. Not to mention the lingering questions over the mysterious Division that the Doctor is still investigating after the controversial "Timeless Children" revelation. But for all the messy structure and plot of "Doctor Who: Flux," it's still a hell of a lot of fun. The energy and comedy that has been sadly absent in the Chris Chibnall era are here in spades, with jokes aplenty and a mile-a-minute pace that makes up for the shoddy plotting. Not to mention a Very Good Dog (alien).
The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) are in dire straits — they're handcuffed and dangling upside down over an acid lake, and the Doctor "can't help but feel like some of this is my fault." "Some?! All of this is your fault!" Yaz angrily bites back, setting the stage for a fun new dynamic between the Doctor and Yaz after the departure of Ryan and Graham — and the most personality that Yaz has been granted since she first stepped into the TARDIS. While I was worried that Yaz would get pushed to the background again with the introduction of John Bishop's new companion Dan, "The Halloween Apocalypse" makes a concerted effort to show that Yaz is more than just the Doctor's "Yes Man" — her disappointment with the Doctor in the New Year's special "Revolution of the Daleks" has carried over, and she's now constantly questioning and probing the Doctor, who is clearly holding some secrets close to her chest. There's conflict in the TARDIS, and Yaz isn't just there to point out that weird rock over there anymore. Plus, because this is "Doctor Who," she now has some sweet hacking (and TARDIS-flying) skills.
Speaking of Dan, John Bishop makes an immediate impression as the Scouser who loves nothing more than living in Liverpool. A plumber by trade, Dan frequently sneaks away from his day job to give tours at the local museum — much to the chagrin of the actual tour guide Diane (Nadia Albina), who lets Dan off easy if he'll make it on time to their date that night. You can tell Dan's a swell dude; not only does he volunteer at the local food bank, but he's got a good-natured twinkle in his eye, whether he's enthusiastically gushing about Liverpool history or kindly giving candy to costumed kids. Bishop is a longtime comedian, but like many a past comedian to star in "Doctor Who" — Catherine Tate, Matt Lucas, Bradley Walsh — he shows the promise of an actual emotionality beyond the witty one-liner.
But despite his cheery attitude, things aren't going well for Dan. He's living with an empty fridge and pantry, and a strange dog-like creature just burst through his wall commanding him to obey. This is Karvanista, a monster who looks like a friendlier Chewbacca, the same creature who had strung up the Doctor and Yaz over an acid lake and threatened to travel to Earth "in its final hours." But curiously, that takes Karvanista to modern-day Liverpool, where — after Dan insults him by petting his face and honking his nose — he kidnaps Dan and takes him away on his spaceship, leaving only high-tech booby traps for the Doctor and Yaz to find.
There are so many plot threads that "The Halloween Apocalypse" introduces without much of a clue for where they'll lead. There's a short sequence in Liverpool, 1820, where a man named Williamson has a grand plan to excavate something "cataclysmic" and "impossible." There's Vinder (Jacob Anderson), a bored operator at the Outpost Rose space station who notices something strange happening to the stars. There's a couple in the Arctic Circle who anxiously ignore the alarm emanating from a small spaceship in their garage. There are a pair of Sontarans happily reporting of a coming cataclysm. There's the mysterious woman named Claire, who stumbles upon the Doctor and Yaz investigating Dan's house and seems to know the Doctor from her past — or was it her future? A later encounter with a Weeping Angel proves that there's something timey wimey going on with Claire, though it's hard to tell what. For now, cue the wild theories that Claire is actually Clara (she's probably not), especially with her "taking the long way home" remark.
But of course the biggest plot thread apart from the Karvanista kidnapping is Swarm (Sam Spruell), a creature (whose design looks a lot like a version of the season 11 villain Tzim-Sha except less toothy) being kept prisoner by the Division, and who has somehow been able to establish a psychic connection with the Doctor while she's flying the TARDIS. Within minutes of meeting Swarm by way of two stone-faced guards (RIP), Swarm breaks out of his prison and disintegrates the two guards with a touch, breaking the fourth wall by looking into the camera and leering, "Trick or treat, Doctor." Yuck.
This vision disturbs the Doctor, who keeps it secret from Yaz, but describes it as a "glitch" in her head, only earning more concern from her frustrated friend. But they have little time to linger on the secrets — there's " too much out of the ordinary tonight," the Doctor remarks worriedly. The TARDIS is leaking a black substance, the doors to the ship keep popping up in newer and stranger places, and something is happening to the planets.
Breaking into Karvanista's spaceship, the Doctor confronts the dog alien to make her usual speech about the Earth being protected, yada yada, call off your invasion. But Karvanista is confused; this is no invasion, this is a rescue operation. The 7 billion Lupari ships hovering at the edge of Earth's atmosphere aren't there to attack humanity, but save them from something called the Flux, "a cataclysm of unknown proportion" that has somehow slipped the Doctor's notice — and it's already begun.
We get our first glimpse of the Flux in action with Vinder at Outpost Rose, where he observes planets being eaten by a monstrous moving cloud — a genuinely cool special effect that shows the BBC's budget is being put to good use across this six-episode event. The episode unquestionably looks gorgeous (space has never looked more beautiful in "Doctor Who") and the spectacle can verge on awe-inspiring, but there are still some strange directorial choices — we'll never lose those extreme close-ups, it seems.
However, the way that the planets disintegrate immediately after contact with the Flux looks eerily similar to Swarm's power, which suggests that the two might be connected. It all gets even more intriguing when the Doctor is pulled into another psychic vision with the Swarm, who claims to have known the Doctor a long time, even if "they have done a good job" erasing him from her mind. "You and I dancing across time and space, locked in battle," Swarm practically purrs, dipping into that pool of story potential that the Timeless Child revelation has supposedly unlocked: the Doctor can now have infinite offscreen stories, they just can't remember it!
Still, Swarm is an interesting Big Bad — his disintegrating powers look gnarly, and his complete sociopathy gives him a sinister edge. When he arrives at the home of the mysterious Arctic Circle couple, he carelessly kills the man and turns to the woman (Rochenda Sandall, making an icy impression in her short scenes), who screams before she transforms into a creature that looks just like Swarm: his sister. By the end of the episode, they've intersected with one of the many other storylines of this episode: Diana, Dan's love interest, has been dragged by some unknown force into an old house, where Swarm and his sister emerge from a watery cave to gleefully declare, "We're going to have fun with you."
The episode climaxes in the Doctor finding the Flux after frantically searching for it, only to be immediately sent on the run from the universe-devouring phenomenon. After a failed attempt to stop it with the TARDIS' vortex energy, the Doctor sends an urgent plan to Karvanista (the easy MVP of this episode apart from Dan) to get the Lupari ships in a formation that can shield the Earth from the Flux. We end on that cliffhanger — as well as the other cliffhangers from our various other storylines that are mostly given little more than an intense close-up of peoples' faces.
The whole story feels extremely cosmic and comic book-y, which is in line with the tone of "The Halloween Apocalypse," an episode that is reminiscent of a Marvel crossover event in how it's lining up the pieces for a big climax. "The end of the universe is chasing us," the Doctor ominously states. While it's messy and chaotic now, it will (hopefully) all build up to something satisfying. But for now, the universe-shattering ambitions of this season narrative and its rediscovery of its humor and goofy energy, make this a promising — if overstuffed — start to "Doctor Who: Flux."
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The post Doctor Who: Flux Doubles Down on Spectacle and Set-Up With a Tricky Premiere, The Halloween Apocalypse appeared first on /Film.
Disney+ has at last unveiled the trailer and poster for "The Book of Boba Fett," the newest "Star Wars" TV series from Lucasfilm. Already from the first footage, we get an idea of the tone the show is going for, harkening to gangster epics like "The Godfather" or "Scarface," with the title Mandalorian clone/bounty hunter (Temeura Morrison) demanding a certain level of "respect" from the Tatooine underworld he now rules.
Starring Morrison and Ming-Na Wen, "The Book of Boba Fett" is executive produced by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Robert Rodriguez, Kathleen Kennedy and Colin Wilson, with Karen Gilchrist and Carrie Beck serving as co-executive producers, with John Bartnicki producing and John Hampian as co-producer. Although no new cast have been revealed, we do know that "Mandalorian" vets Favreau, Filoni, Rodriguez and Bryce Dallas Howard will direct some of the episodes. "Mandalorian" composer Ludwig Göransson will also return to the fold, providing the music to which Fett will smash various alien's skulls to.
Overall, this series looks like it will be a leaner, meaner show than the Baby Yoda-centric "Mandalorian." While it will surely take us to other planets besides Tatooine, it seems that Boba will have his hands full bending the various crime syndicates to his will. But will Boba become such a force to be reckoned with that the Republic or even Luke Skywalker's fledgling Jedi will have to deal with him?
Disney+ has also unveiled the new key art poster for the show, which you can see below. As you can see, they're going heavy on iconography we're already familiar with from "Mandalorian" season 2, namely Boba, Fennec Shand and the beloved Slave One ship first seen in "The Empire Strikes Back." Clearly the streamer is keeping its cards close to the chest when it comes to this show, and we're all for it since the weekly episode releases starting on December 29 will no doubt lead to lots of fun water cooler speculation through the beginning of 2022.
Check out the poster below!
Here is the official synopses:
"'The Book of Boba Fett,' a thrilling Star Wars adventure teased in a surprise end-credit sequence following the Season 2 finale of 'The Mandalorian,' finds legendary bounty hunter Boba Fett and mercenary Fennec Shand navigating the galaxy's underworld when they return to the sands of Tatooine to stake their claim on the territory once ruled by Jabba the Hutt and his crime syndicate."
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The post The Book of Boba Fett Trailer: The Original Mandalorian Returns to Conquer the Galaxy appeared first on /Film.
Warning: major spoilers ahead for "Last Night in Soho."
We live in a time that's positively drowning in nostalgia, this escapist obsession with an often idealized past that's frequently inaccurate and sometimes, indeed, dangerous. When the past becomes an obsession, it's as easy to get disconnected from our world as it is to misunderstand and romanticize days or eras gone by. Eloise, or Ellie, the "Last Night in Soho" protagonist ably played by Thomasin McKenzie, sees her life upended when she literally succumbs to both grave ills.
Eloise is haunted by the tragic death of her mother. In many ways, she's uncomfortable in her own time -- she makes her own clothes, sits uncomfortably with her contemporaries at modern parties, and is hesitant to go out into the modern, fast paced world. Ellie listens to the music of the 1960s and longs to see the world of that era. She soon finds herself eschewing the assigned university abode for an upstairs bedroom trapped equally in the '60s, complete with a home phone, record player, and rules about visitors that fit well in the past. It's an experience that soon becomes addicting, and then deadly.
Edgar Wright's new film is a visually stunning ode to giallo with a banginh soundtrack, stunning visuals, and whip-tight editing. It's swinging big, and that's always welcome, but its handling of thematic issues is mixed while the over-reliance on obvious CGI hampers what would be a technical marvel. It is a film whose virtues conflict with its faults, but one that is easily worth an audience's time.
One strange night, Eloise finds herself drifting off to sleep (in a stunning surreal sequence), finding herself transported into swinging 1960s London. Her vehicle (literally the body she's a passenger in for her tour of the past) is the hopeful Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) -- a gorgeous, put-together singer/dancer/all-around performer. At first, Eloise is elated. She's infatuated. She has to come back again and again to relive the past through the eyes of this glamorous ingenue.
The film is, on the one hand, very overt about the dangers of nostalgia, or at the very least being obsessed with it. The longer Eloise stays in the past, the more it infects her, changes her, makes her disassociate from her own time and endanger herself and others in her own. She has to finish the story, and yet the line between her and Sandie blurs. This psychological effect is amplified by the literal bleeding of the past into the present via a slew of faceless dead men that haunt her waking daily life. The ghosts, we discover, are Sandie's various Johns-turned-victims as she was forced by her nefarious manager/pimp Jack (Matt Smith) into prostitution. Sandie routinely killed these men, and shoved them under the floorboards of the flat that Eloise has been staying in (and oh my, that would smell).
What's interesting about Ellie's journey through this retro hell is that it proceeds at first with a variety of potential interpretations. Is Ellie mad, perhaps too far outside her comfort zone with the stresses of school and London? Is she actually being sent through time, somehow engaged in a form of time travel through which Sandie is the vehicle? Is there something grander afoot, as the past becomes the present and dapper faceless ghouls haunt her waking life? With the twist that she hasn't snapped, this is happening and Sandie is the source of the haunting, the nostalgia theme largely lands: Ellie's attachment to and idealization of the past lands her in trouble as her increasingly frazzled mind becomes an increasingly terrified one. The threat becomes all the more poignant as she discovers that Sandie is her landlady Ms. Collins, and the latter seeks to kill both Ellie and her love interest John (Michael Ajao). Nostalgia literally kills.
On the one hand, Ellie's idealization and obsession with the past blinds her both to the dangers of the present, putting her in danger. It makes the theme of the film, the rejection of nostalgia, work. At the same time, it makes a mess of other elements of the script that one can't help but wish were handled differently.
Another lens to explore the film lies in an engagement with Sandie's own path through 1960's London, which we see through Eloise's perspective. Like Eloise, Sandie has stars in her eyes and hopes to make it big in the city (albeit with vastly more self-assuredness than the former). She meets Jack (Smith is properly menacing and charismatic here), who smooth-talks his way into her heart and her career as a manger.
First comes background dancer roles at clubs -- everyone starts small, he says. Soon Sandie's path darkens, as Jack seems more intent on pivoting Sandie into prostitution than boosting her career onstage. One day, she pulls away from his control, and in a rage he comes at her blade in hand. Eloise fears Sandie's death (and from this point on, the visions of a horde of faceless male ghosts invade her life). While Sandie was a victim of many things -- predatory Jack, a host of skeezy men, and a patriarchal society that made young aspirant women so vulnerable among them -- it wasn't her blood in Eloise's vision... it was Jack's. She killed him, and proceeded the serial killing of various Johns that trapped a host of ghosts in her home for decades.
Here's where some of the film's thematic elements get messy.
While the plot device of Ellie being a passenger in Sandie's life provides an interesting perspective, it's a little odd in a film so evidently dedicated to criticizing rampant misogyny and the violation of women's autonomy. When Ellie's in the past, she's an impotent passenger in Sandie's life. She's a tourist in a host of sufferings in a way that bleeds into Ellie's own life when the past comes to haunt her (and in seeing Sandie at the end, that never seems to go away). Meanwhile, Sandie herself experiences a number of terrible experiences of autonomy violation. On top of that, she has a young woman from the future watching her every move and touring her body. It doesn't make or break the plot per se, but it's surely an odd choice for a film that so often highlights the importance of women's agency in other realms.
More fatally, its troubling to find out that Sandie effectively abandoned her dreams in favor of life as a serial killer and that the faceless ghosts aren't her time-locked tormenters as much as they're the ghastly remnants of Sandie's myriad victims. It's an odd emotional and conceptual pivot to show us the host of invasions of autonomy that this young hopeful woman has suffered and then make her, in effect, a villain. She's not getting retribution against the men who have wronged her (the version of "Promising Young Woman" I wanted but did not get), she ably dispatches her coercive former "manager" but then actively seeks out new men to lure, murder, and bury. She's the source of Ellie's undeserved psychological terrors, and then seeks to kill her. The long-suffering Sandie doesn't regain agency -- she somehow becomes the villain in a film full of obvious other predators. It's an intellectually interesting but conceptually muddled slide that doesn't serve the film's dedicated investment in Sandie's and Ellie's sufferings.
On a technical level, the film truly shines. Any new Edgar Wright movie will be in the running for the tightest, most artful and precise editing that year. This film is no exception, with tight pacing and editing (with longtime Wright collaborator Paul Machliss, who deserves an Oscar already) that makes for an enjoyable watch and a brilliant visceral experience. The cinematography by longtime Park Chan-wook collaborator Chung-hoon Chung is also brilliant, capturing the feel of both eras with ease. It's a visual stunner, complete with grimy giallo influences. The soundtrack, too, is unsurprisingly fantastic. Music is often central to how Wright conceives and tells his stories, and it certainly shows here. A lovely side effect of such organic musical incorporation is a wonderful sense of pace. The film just breezes by.
While the film boasts a number of technical accomplishments across the realms of editing, cinematography, and production design, there are issues with its over-reliance on very transparent CGI that doesn't meet the visual level of its cinematography and practical effects. The visage of the ghastly faceless men is conceptually shocking. In execution, it's a needlessly transparent CGI effect (when practical would have been exceptional here), and once they show up, they're deployed with the subtlety of an asteroid hit: too many, too frequently, and all the time. If they lost the early-2000s CGI look or were replaced with practical effects, those scenes would be terrifying. Instead, they prove to be a distraction. There are other instances of overt CGI that compound the problem -- a glaring scene where an important conflict is interrupted by a close-up of a knife, CGI-enhanced against its backdrop, is hampered by its cartoonishly-enhanced CGI quality. That sort of effect worked in a comic book movie like Wright's "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World," but feels out of place here.
Altogether, "Last Night In Soho" is that frustrating sort of a film that has a number of technical and storytelling virtues that are needlessly in conflict against a number of faults. It's not a perfect film, but it's a gorgeous big swing from Wright that tackles horror-thriller territory straight on instead of enmeshing it with comedy. It's visually stunning, the performances are marvelous, and the technical execution of the slide between worlds is absolutely masterful. It's a messy, groovy, gritty warning to keep yourself grounded in your present and don't get too caught in idealizing another time and place. While it doesn't entirely land, we're lucky that Wright has taken his considerable skills to a film so original in so many ways.
Read this next: All Of Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked Worst To Best
The post Last Night in Soho Spoiler Review: A Technically Astonishing and Often Muddy Horror Tale appeared first on /Film.
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The November Free Games with Prime feature Dragon Age Inquisition, Control Ultimate Edition, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Rogue Heroes, Liberated, Puzzle Agent 2, Demon Hunter 2: New Chapter and more.
The post Free games with Amazon Prime Gaming for November 2021 appeared first on Indie Game Bundles.
Rockstar Mag’s Chris, who has inside information about Rockstar’s games, has shared some details about Grand Theft Auto 6 and Red Dead Redemption Remastered. According to Chris, Grand Theft Auto 6 is currently in development hell. Rockstar has restarted its development right after Dan Houser left the company. Not only that, but Take-Two was originally … Continue reading GTA 6 is reportedly in development hell, Red Dead Redemption Remastered coming to PC →
The post GTA 6 is reportedly in development hell, Red Dead Redemption Remastered coming to PC appeared first on DSOGaming.
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A recent article in Canada's Cambridge Today talked about the efforts by some Canadian school boards to "identify and remove any texts deemed harmful to staff and students." While the brief reported piece focuses specifically on the Waterloo Region District School Board's ongoing efforts to look back at their library, the article does mention the completed actions of several other Canadian school districts:
— Read the restEarlier this year, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board removed William Golding's classic Lord of the Flies from its curriculum after its advisory committee on equity agreed with a student who said the book's themes were outdated and too focused on white, male power structures.
Yesterday. we shared a great graphical mod for Doom 3. And today, we are bringing you another cool mod that aims to add Physically Based Rendering, Global Illumination and TrenchBroom Mapping support to it. Created by modder ‘treborator’, RBDOOM-3-BFG is a tool that modders can use in order to overhaul the game’s graphics. As the … Continue reading RBDOOM-3-BFG adds Physically Based Rendering, Global Illumination and TrenchBroom Mapping Support to Doom 3 →
The post RBDOOM-3-BFG adds Physically Based Rendering, Global Illumination and TrenchBroom Mapping Support to Doom 3 appeared first on DSOGaming.
If you've lost count of how many "Halloween" movies there are, we're coming up on unlucky number 13 next year with "Halloween Ends." We're also coming up on the real Halloween holiday this weekend, which means there's no better time to talk about past "Halloween" franchise entries.
Let's be honest: "Halloween Ends" is a title that feels like false advertising, since we all know this franchise -- with its unkillable boogeyman, Michael Myers -- will never, ever end. Even now, he's out there, doing his murderous thing again in "Halloween Kills." The eighth installment in the series, released in 2002, came together under the title of "Halloween: Resurrection," but there's another version of it that could have been made called "Halloween 8: Lord of the Dead."
All but one of the "Halloween" movies feature Michael Myers and several of them feature the original series heroine, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), but what if those two characters became one and the same? That was the idea behind the potential twist ending for "Lord of the Dead," which screenwriter Daniel Farrands recently discussed with Bloody Disgusting.
Farrands wrote the sixth installment, "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers," which co-starred Donald Pleasance as Dr. Loomis and Paul Rudd as Tommy Doyle. The screenwriter came back in after the seventh installment with a pitch that involved Tommy consulting Loomis' diaries. He explained:
"The twist of my pitch was that, once the hell breaks loose and the murders began and we see all of this mayhem going on, with Tommy sort of taking on the role of Loomis, the big finale when they're going to finally unmask Michael Myers reveals that the killer is actually Laurie Strode."
Farrands continued with his vision for what would have happened in "Halloween 8: Lord of the Dead:"
"[Laurie]'s gone completely bats**t crazy and came back to relive the murders that she barely survived, and she's become like The Shape. It kind of made sense to me, because at the end of 'Halloween: H20,' what you hear, after she chops his head off with an ax, is that she's breathing heavily like Michael at the end of the original movie."
This sounds like a goofball idea to me, but truthfully, I'm not invested enough in the "Halloween" franchise to say whether it would have worked with the elaborate seven-film mythology that preceded it. If I had to swear on a Bible, I could only say for certain that I've seen three "Halloween" movies: the first one by John Carpenter, the 20th anniversary entry, "H20," and the 40th anniversary entry, David Gordon Green's "Halloween," which started this whole new trilogy that's playing out now. I feel like I've seen other random entries on TV or in the theater long ago, but my memory is vague at this point and the franchise has a continuity that's rather convoluted.
You can see "Halloween Kills" in theaters and on Peacock now.
Read this next: The 11 Scariest Scenes In The Halloween Franchise
The post Canceled Sequel Halloween 8: Lord of the Dead Had A Twist Ending Where Laurie Strode Became Michael Myers appeared first on /Film.
Freddy Goodall says his family bought a 500-year-old Sussex home 30 years ago, but he didn't know about its secret passageways until recently. He was clearing off bookshelves and noticed that the wall behind them was hollow. He also noticed that an 1870 photograph showed a handle behind the shelf. — Read the rest
