Final Fantasy developer and gaming behemoth Square Enix has been heavily criticised for its plans to add NFTs to its upcoming games, but the company's New Year letter shows that instead of halting efforts, it's "aggressively" doubling down on it.
Concept Nyx made headlines last year as Dell's vision of a future where you can use a central edge gaming server in your home to play PC games on all the mediums you own. Now in 2023, Dell is advancing Nyx beyond just gaming. While still in the concept stage and not launching as an official product anytime soon, Dell has evolved Nyx to become more of an ecosystem that can power a future of virtual work, play, and gaming that's much more immersive and accessible.
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Amidst a legal battle with Apple, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has teased that Fortnite will return to iOS in 2023. The popular game was removed from the App Store after violating the platform's guidelines. This started one of the most high-profile legal battles in the industry. Scroll down to read more details on the subject.
Tim Sweeney shared the news on Twitter to celebrate the new year. He wrote, "Next year on iOS!" followed by a Fortnite character looking at 2023 fireworks. It was previously reported that Apple would soon allow third-party app stores or sideloading of apps on the iPhone with iOS 17 to comply with the new Digital Markets Act or DMA law in Europe. Henceforth, this could potentially allow Fortnite to return to iOS and iPadOS. However, it is not necessary that the game will be available through the App Store.
Epic Game's Fortnite is a massively popular battle royale game that is available on a wide range of platforms. Apple decided to remove the title from the App Store in August 2020 after Epic Games offered a direct payment method within the game. This bypassed Apple's in-app purchasing mechanism and violated the App Store guidelines. Now, there is a possibility that Fortnite will return to iOS sometime this year. Apple issued a statement back then that reads:
Today, Epic Games took the unfortunate step of violating the App Store guidelines that are applied equally to every developer and designed to keep the store safe for our users. As a result their Fortnite app has been removed from the store. Epic enabled a feature in its app which was not reviewed or approved by Apple, and they did so with the express intent of violating the App Store guidelines regarding in-app payments that apply to every developer who sells digital goods or services.
After being removed from the App Store, Epic Games filed a lawsuit against Apple, and the legal battle continues to this day. Sweeney stated, "We're fighting for open platforms and policy changes equally benefiting all developers. And it'll be a hell of a fight!". Almost three years later, Apple and Epic Games are appealing a court decision that would require Apple to offer in-app links to external websites, circumventing Apple's payment mechanism in the App Store.
This is all there is to it, folks. We will share more details on the subject as soon as further information is available. Do you think Fortnite will return to iOS this year? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
The post Fortnite Is Potentially Returning To iOS In 2023 Almost Three Years After It Was Removed by Ali Salman appeared first on Wccftech.
It may be unfair to refer to filmmaker Takashi Miike as a horror filmmaker, given how prolific he is. Since he first started directing movies in 1991, Miike has accrued 112 directing credits. To save you from doing the math, that averages out to about three and a half films a year. He has made horror movies, yes, including the notable "Audition" in 1999, perhaps his best-known film in the United States. He also directed an episode of "Masters of Horror," as well as "Over Your Dead Body," the original "One Missed Call," the David Lynch-adjacent "Gozu," "Lesson of the Evil," and "As the Gods Will." His polarizing "Visitor Q" might also be considered a horror film depending on your personal interpretation of the premise.
Among those films, however, Miike has also made a superhero film, a partly animated musical, a few historical epics, coming-of-age dramas, and many, many crime movies. One might even be hard-pressed to find a genre that Miike hasn't worked in.
The director's association with horror, however, is likely pronounced because of his propensity for extreme, graphic violence. Anyone who has witnessed the final scenes of "Audition" can speak to Miike's talent for presenting pain and mutilation in excruciating detail.
In a 2019 interview with Bloody-Disgusting, Takashi Miike admitted that, while he may have the stomach to film extreme acts of violence and unsettling scenes of surreal grotesquerie, he actually doesn't watch too many horror films. One might not assume so, but Miike describes himself as being skittish and anxious, easy to scare, and often startled. For every scene of spilled bodily fluids one might see in a Miike film, know that the filmmaker was probably even more scared to make it. He said:
"I'm actually quite a scaredy cat, myself. Since a child I've been this way [...] I'm even a little afraid of the dark. If I'm alone in the dark I'll sometimes feel that there's a presence behind me and I'll even be afraid to turn around. But then if I do get the courage to turn around, I'll just be scared that whatever was there has just jumped over to the other side of me."
These fearful impulses might be relatable for many kids who tend to let their imaginations get the better of them on dark and stormy nights. Miike, 59 at the time of the interview, has seemingly never outgrown such thoughts. Indeed, his fearful demeanor, paired with his boundless imagination, seems to have been a useful directing tool. Once his scary movies are finished, however, he's too afraid to revisit them. He continued:
"This sounds really silly, but as a child, I've always been a bit of a coward so I don't watch many horror films myself. I personally don't want to pay money to go to a theater to get horribly frightened! [...] Even after I finish making horror films, I usually don't go to a theater to watch them myself."
Read this next: Horror Movies That Even Horror Fans Could Hardly Finish
The post Audition Director Takashi Miike Loves Making Horror Films, But He Doesn't Watch Many of Them appeared first on /Film.
Oh. OK. I guess it’s time for me to publicly confess which games I voted for in this year’s advent calendar but that didn't get it, and without the usual protection of anonymity granted by group lists. Listen: please don’t judge me. I just want to say that up top before you find out where I live and start sending me pizzas or something. I am fallible. You cut me, I bleed red. I put my bread in the toaster one slice at a time.
Anyway, with that out the way, here’s a list of things I liked this year that no one else at RPS had a chance to play, or in one case just thought was total ass.
Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption 2, Far Cry, GTA, and countless other shooting games struggle to tell coherent stories. This isn’t to say these games are bad, or that they don’t have their own, various, narrative qualities – RDR 2 and GTA 4 especially are very competently written. But all of these shooters have the cohesion and potency of their drama almost terminally undermined by the same issue - one which classic Christmas film Die Hard neatly illustrates.
2022 was another standout year for RPGs, from brand new IPs from the progenitor of the Souls subgenre to indie darlings that surprised in more ways than one. Whether you prefer your RPGs more verbose or leaning more towards stylish action, there’s plenty to fill entire weeks of your free time.
Notably, it was an especially great year for JRPG fans. Almost every game on this list comes from Japan, although something like Elden Ring cannot truly be classified as a JRPG. Without further ado, here's our list of the best RPGs released in 2022.
Also in Wccftech's Best Games of 2022 lists: Shooters, Fighting, Platformer, Adventure, Indie, Action, Horror, Multiplayer, and Strategy/Simulation.
Former Arkane founder Raphaël Colantonio went all out with Weird West, the debut game of his independent WolfEye Studios. The game designer, previously known for his work on Arx Fatalis, Dishonored and Prey, successfully managed to translate immersive simulation elements (usually reserved for first-person games) into an isometric RPG. Weird West got a warm reception from gamers, having sold 400K units in less than two weeks since launch, and critics alike. Our own Francesco De Meo wrote:
With its gripping story, wacky characters, solid action role-playing game mechanics, and masterfully crafted immersive simulation features, Weird West is one of the very few role-playing games on the market where players truly shape the world with their choices and actions. Some balancing and technical issues damage the experience, but if you're looking for a truly immersive RPG to play, you won't find anything better than Weird West.
A 2022 list of best RPGs could not possibly avoid mentioning Elden Ring, arguably From Software’s most ambitious role playing game to date. Bringing the tinier crafted dungeons into an open-world setting might scare some from starting on a grand adventure in The Lands Between but soon after venturing out and getting smacked around by the Tree Sentinel, players will find themselves in an action RPG that continuously surprises players with more and more. Elden Ring got a perfect score in Wccftech's review:
Elden Ring is not only the best action RPG developed by From Software but one of the best open-world titles ever made. A masterclass of game design, Elden Ring isn't just a game but an epic dark fantasy journey that no one will be able to forget for a very long time.
One of the more surprising spinoffs to come out of Square-Enix, Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin gave us an origin story of an antihero in the unlikeliest of places. Before he was Garland and was knocking fools down, the protagonist Jack sought to struggle against the forces of Chaos as a man that’s lost his memories and is driven forward by that singular driving focus. Jack is perhaps the most single-minded Final Fantasy protagonist since Final Fantasy IV’s Kain’s personality was set to Constant Backstab. Here's an excerpt from the review:
It’s no isekai, but Stranger of Paradise is absolutely a stranger even in its own land. If you’re fresh off of running through the original as part of the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster series, you owe it to yourself to take this chaotic road trip across Corneria and relight the four crystals once again.
Following the underwhelming release of Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, developer tri-Ace pulled off a surprising comeback with a new franchise installment that is well worth being listed as one of the best RPGs of 2022.
Even with some issues here and there, Star Ocean: The Divine Force is undoubtedly a return to form for the series by tri-Ace. The game delivers a solid JRPG experience that both fans of the series and newcomers will enjoy thanks to the best battle system in the series to date, likable characters, and an engaging but a little slow and not particularly surprising story. Some technical issues and by-the-books game design do take something away from the experience, but for those looking for a traditional JRPG with plenty of heart, Star Ocean: The Divine Force is the game to get.
Monolith Soft once again delivered a masterpiece game with Xenoblade Chronicles 3, worthy not only of being named among the best RPGs of 2022 but also among the best JRPGs of all time. The game got a perfect score in Wccftech's review.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 has its flaws like any other game. However, its qualities more than make up for them, bringing a beautiful JRPG experience like none other before seen in the series. The Class system is varied and fun to experiment with, the story is one of the best in the series history, and the aesthetic and production values are incredibly high. This game offers tons of content that will keep you glued to your Nintendo Switch and last a long time.
For avid roleplaying game fans, here's another five titles that nearly made our best RPGs of 2022 list.
The post Wccftech’s Best RPGs of 2022 – The Year of the JRPG by Kai Powell appeared first on Wccftech.
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Chances are, you’ve probably heard—or possibly even repeated—the enduring myth that we swallow an average of eight (or four, or some other random number of) spiders each year. While that’s not true, it would not be unheard of for a spider to crawl into your bed at some point during the day or night.
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Four-year-old Philippines retailer Hardware Sugar has divulged its returns during its initial years as a seller of computer components. It is a small shop in no way comparable to Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, and others, but it gives insight into some of the more recognizable brands being returned and the percentage rate of failure from its shelves.
Not surprisingly, graphics cards are at the top of the failed components, with only two companies sold on their list — Gigabyte and MSI. The retailer sold 129 MSI graphics cards and 141 Gigabyte GPUs but saw a five percent failure rate for the latter manufacturer. MSI witnessed a failure rate of 1.5%, with only two returned over four years. Motherboards were also limited to MSI and Gigabyte, with 470 units sold and 388 for the latter and failure rates of 2.4% and 1.8%, respectively.
Other limited component sales were on RAM and NVME SSD, with TeamGroup in both spots and G.Skill in RAM sales, and Samsung in SSD sales. TeamGroup had the highest failure rate in both categories, with RAM failing at 1% and NVMe SSDs failing at 1.2% in the last four years. G.Skill RAM was close to TeamGroup's failure rate, reaching 0.66%. Samsung never had a return on SSDs over the previous four years with Hardware Sugar.
| Manufacturer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gigabyte | 141 | 7 | 5.0% |
| MSI | 129 | 2 | 1.5% |
| Manufacturer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSI | 470 | 10 | 2.4% |
| Gigabyte | 388 | 7 | 1.8% |
| Manufacturer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corsair | 451 | 1 | 0.22% |
| DeepCool | 46 | 0 | 0% |
| Cooler Master | 157 | 3 | 2.0% |
| Seasonic | 644 | 12 | 1.8% |
| Manufacturer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| NZXT | 154 | 6 | 4.0% |
| Corsair | 42 | 0 | 0% |
| DeepCool | 149 | 0 | 0% |
| Manufacturer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| G.Skill | 601 | 4 | 0.66% |
| TeamGroup | 179 | 1 | 1.0% |
Power supplies and cooling products received the vastest amount of companies sold through Hardware Sugar, with PSUs offered by the retailer four brands and three brands for cooling supplies. In power supply failure rates, Seasonic came out at the most failed at 1.8%. The only manufacturer not to have a single failed unit through the Philippines retailer was DeepCool. However, only 46 units were sold, while the other manufacturers — Corsair, Cooler Master, and Seasonic — sold over 100 units over the last four years.
Cooling supplies had the most interesting numbers, with NZXT being the only manufacturer in the list, which also involved Corsair and DeepCool, to have any failed cooling supplies with a percentage of 4%.
The only missing information was when talking about motherboards from MSI and Gigabyte. It is unknown whether it was a single CPU-based brand (i.e., AMD or Intel), which leads one to wonder what company saw the most significant failure over that time.
The post Retailer Discloses Failure Rates For Popular Hardware Over Four Years Worth of Tracking by Jason R. Wilson appeared first on Wccftech.
With "No Time To Die" in the rear-view mirror, can we all agree "Casino Royale" is the best Bond movie? If it weren't for the 2006 reboot, Sean Connery would remain the undisputed Bond king, and who knows, maybe the famed super-spy and his decades-old franchise would have fizzled out as society moved into the modern-day.
Thanks to Daniel Craig's broody and embattled take on Bond, and the general "gritty reboot" trend of the early 2000s, 007 was reinvigorated for a new generation. Yes, before Bond once again became a parody of himself, for a brief moment we were all treated to a glimpse at a truly 21st Century 007 that still remained true to Ian Fleming's original vision. Craig's scarred bruiser of a spy gave the impression that beneath the icy bravado and suave affectation, there existed a real person.
It seems Craig maintained some of that icy bravado off-camera too. Looking back at "Casino Royale" in 2021, he recalled being "So uptight, not uptight but just kind of jangling nerves about everything, because everything was just so important, so important" during filming. The actor clearly couldn't relax with the weight of a Bond reboot on his shoulders, which luckily translated to a searingly intense performance on-screen. That may've also made him a bit of a killjoy during production, like when he refused to join his co-stars' off-screen poker games because he "had other things to think about." Even after "Casino Royale" was a success, the actor repeatedly played down his experience as Bond, at one point infamously remarking he would rather "Slash [his] wrists" than play 007 again.
In general, Craig treated his tenure as Bond with self-deprecation and awkward forced humility during interviews -- especially when talking about one of the most memorable shots in "Casino Royale."
For all the emotional complexity beneath James Bond's surface in "Casino Royale," the film was packed with memorable action scenes and stunning visuals. Whether it was the Parkour sequence in the opening moments or the taut poker game itself, director Martin Campbell made sure to include as much style as he did substance — all the while subverting the classic Bond tropes audiences had come to expect.
A particularly memorable shot recalled a famous moment from the first Bond movie, "Dr. No," wherein Ursula Andress's Honey Ryder emerges from the ocean in an ivory cotton two-piece bathing suit. This shot alone helped launch the relatively unknown Andress to fame back in 1962, and caused quite a stir in pop culture due to its apparent embrace of the female body at a time when Western society was still outgrowing the more buttoned-down culture of previous decades. The suit itself reached almost $150,000 when it was auctioned off by Christie's back in 2001 and was expected to reach almost $500,000 when it went back up for auction in 2020 (no final figure was announced).
In "Casino Royale," Campbell seemingly both subverts and pays homage to Andress' indelible scene by having Bond himself emerge from the Bahamian waters in a similar fashion. In an inversion of the male gaze approach taken by director Terence Young in '62, Daniel Craig's 007 can be seen in all his sculpted glory, rising from the ocean and surveying the beach in a pair of, frankly, unbelievably tight pale blue trunks. It was an image used across the promotional material for "Casino Royale" and one that turned Craig into somewhat of a sex symbol, as well as reinforcing his more muscular spy.
Clever stuff — or at least it would be if the whole thing wasn't an accident.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2008, Daniel Craig explained that the original intent for the scene was to have him swimming in and out of frame:
"It was actually by accident. Where we filmed, off the Bahamas, it's just one of those places where there is a sand shelf and the sand shelf happens to be three feet deep. Because the idea was, I was supposed to swim in and sort of float off, but I swim in and stand up. And it was just one of those things."
The actor admitted he was vaguely aware the shot would be interpreted as an homage to Ursula Andress in "Dr. No," but quickly shifted into his characteristic self-deprecation by stating, "I had no idea I would be haunted by it for the rest of my life." I'm sure it was frustrating to have developed a complex take on James Bond for "Casino Royale," only to be repeatedly asked about the scene where he's got his shirt off. But it's not as though the film wasn't celebrated for other reasons too.
Yes, the blue trunks sold for almost £45,000 at auction and everyone made a fuss over the beach scene. But "Casino Royale" became the highest-grossing Bond movie ever upon its release, eventually making $594 million the global box office. Critics also heaped praise on Craig's performance as Bond, and the franchise as a whole was successfully revitalized for a new era. If you have to endure some questions about being shirtless, it doesn't really seem that big a price to pay. Evidently, Craig, who was still in his "I'm more than Bond" mode, felt otherwise. Luckily, he seems to have softened on the whole thing since then.
Read this next: The 14 Greatest Action Movies Of The 21st Century
The post Daniel Craig Was 'Haunted' By His Half-Naked Beach Scene In Casino Royale appeared first on /Film.
Last week’s winter storm left hundreds of thousands of people across the United States without power, as it hit the country less than a week into the season. And with the Farmers’ Almanac extended forecast predicting a long, cold, wet winter for much of America, there’s a good chance the deadly storm—which claimed the…
Modder ‘Elizabeth Jackson Hall’ has shared a new fully voiced huge quest mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. This mod is compatible with both the Legacy and Special Editions, and you can also find a gameplay video for it below. Brynjolf and the Riften Guild – Birthright extends the story of The Thieves Guild … Continue reading The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim gets a new fully voiced massive quest mod →
The post The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim gets a new fully voiced massive quest mod appeared first on DSOGaming.
Christian Bale has always had an unnervingly focused commitment to his craft and it's often helped him as much behind the scenes as it has on-screen. Back when he was still a struggling actor, he had to take his commitment to frankly unbelievable levels in order to get cast (and then recast) in "American Psycho."
The 2000 adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis' controversial 1991 novel had been through a shaky development process. Mary Harron was hired to direct after submitting her script, which itself had to beat out multiple other screenplays, including a version by Ellis. The Canadian filmmaker then lobbied hard to get Bale cast as Patrick Bateman, the psychotic, murderous yuppie lead. As Bale recalled in GQ's character breakdown video series, "She really put herself on the line [...] she just said, 'No, I want Christian' even though all the financiers were saying we're going to give you no money."
After a stage reading in New York with Bale, Harron, and Ellis himself, both the director and Bale were removed from the project. But Harron's lead, applying some of that singular commitment, simply refused to listen, and continued to prepare for the role despite other actors and directors being approached and in some cases hired. Leonardo DiCaprio was one such actor, who ended up turning down "American Psycho." Once producer Ed Pressman and Lions Gate had cycled through multiple directors and leads, according to Bale, they simply said "Let's call that crazy guy who keeps telling everyone he can play the lead." Of course, the financiers weren't too enthused with casting a relative no-name actor at the time and made their feelings clear in the salary they offered Bale.
Speaking to GQ, Bale explained how he was paid an embarrassingly low sum for the part. In fact, it was the absolute legal minimum Lions Gate could get away with paying him. As the actor recalled, "I remember one time sitting in the makeup trailer and the makeup artists were laughing at me because I was getting paid less than any of them."
After losing out on some of the biggest stars of the day — DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp were all connected to the project at various points — the financiers seemingly didn't think Bale was worth all that much. It's true that, at the time, he had little to no recognition among the public, with arguably his biggest role thus far being as a child actor in Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun." As such, according to Bale, "Nobody wanted me to do it except the director. So they said they would only make it if they could pay me that amount."
Luckily, "American Psycho" would prove to be Bale's breakout role, with the actor garnering widespread praise for his darkly humorous take on Bateman. He was seemingly the only one who shared Harron's view of the infamous psychopath as a kind of blank, vacuous vortex of humanity. Bateman wasn't a person, he was a collection of received ideas and quotes pilfered from 1980s yuppie and commercial culture, and was so outrageously over the top that the absurdity couldn't help but play as funny.
Bale's recognition of that inherent humor clearly wasn't enough to interest the film's financial backers in paying him a fair wage or even hiring him at all. But just like the novel and movie, that's just yet another searing indictment of the American psychos of the financial world.
Read this next: Horror Movies You Don't Want To Miss In 2023
The post Christian Bale Claims His Pay For American Psycho Was Less Than The Film's Make-Up Artists appeared first on /Film.
On Hulu's clever new show "Reboot," Paul Reiser plays Gordon Gelman, the wealthy, older writer who originally created the early 2000s hit sitcom "Step Right Up" that is being revived by Hulu. His estranged daughter Hannah, an indie film screenwriter who wants to inject new, contemporary life into the show, co-runs the series with him because he still owns the rights.
One of the best parts about "Reboot" is that it offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the tense and exciting environment of a writer's room. This space is made even more complicated by the fact that there are several generations of writers — inconsiderate boomers and Gen Xers and inclusive millenials and Zoomers — battling for creative control. The series explores how cultural standards have transformed the entertainment landscape and whether or not we can find cross-generational harmony. Show creator Steven Levitan elaborates on the intergenerational themes in an interview with /Film.
Paul Reiser sat down with GQ to discuss "Reboot," particularly how his own experience working in a writer's room at both Hannah and Gordon's ages helped him relate to the role:
"[W]hat's really fun for me about doing the show is it's a world that feels so familiar. That walk back from a rehearsal where jokes don't work and you have to go back to the writers' room and maybe you have to tear up the script: that's a real painful thing. In this show, I just get to pretend that I have those problems. It's actually [creator] Steve Levitan's problem. But those walks are where the comedy plays."
Reiser's work on "Mad About You" put him in a unique position to understand "Reboot" because the hit sitcom, which ran on NBC for seven seasons in the 1990s, was revived in 2019 for Spectrum.
As both a writer and star of "Mad About You," Paul Reiser explains to GQ that he understood the unique dynamic between actors and writers that "Reboot" depicts:
"On 'Mad About You,' I was in the writers' room and I was on stage, and also I created the show, so there was a little bit of a difference, but I know damn well when I walked out, there was a lot of rolling their eyes, like, 'Fricking actors.' The politics, the behind-the-scenes, the actors rolling their eyes at the writers, the writers rolling their eyes at the actors, the old people making fun of the young people: all that stuff is true."
There was also a generational divide behind the scenes of "Mad About You" when the series returned for a reboot. According to Reiser, he and his co-star Helen Hunt wanted a small writer's room with a younger staff: "Helen and I were very clear: 'Okay, we will be the old guard, we know what the show was and we know how to do it, but we need you guys to be the younger guard." These fresh-faced writers would bring contemporary ideas to the table.
You can mainly see their influence in the depiction of Paul and Jamie's daughter Mabel, a freshman at New York University. In one episode, Paul guest speaks at one of Mabel's film classes, and her peers chastise him for not including any women in his latest documentary. When Paul accidentally calls Mabel "honey," during his lecture (afraid of seeming privileged, she doesn't want her peers to know that he is her father), the class accuses him of being a misogynist. This storyline has the kind of modern twist that "Reboot" spoofs.
Read this next: The 10 Apple TV Shows That Justify A Subscription
The post Mad About You's Writers Room Was The Perfect Inspiration For Paul Reiser's Role in Reboot appeared first on /Film.
As 2022 comes to a close, I reflect back over the past year, and the previous years that have gone before. I know we find it fascinating to hear "experts" make predictions for the future, but I tend to believe that there's more value in reflecting on and learning from the past.
Years ago, I remember hearing about something in legal circles referred to as "the CSI effect". In short, the unrealistic portrayal of "forensics" on TV shows had influenced public opinion. People would watch an hour-long crime drama TV show and what they saw set the expectation in their minds of "forensics" should be, and this unrealistic expectation made it difficult for prosecutors to convince some juries of their evidence.
Over the holiday season, a "bomb cyclone" across the US combined with the numbers of folks wanting to travel to cause travel delays with the airlines, as one might expect. Planes needed to be deiced, but at some locations, travel was simply impossible. However, one airline in particular experienced heavier than usual delays and cancellations, to the point where the Transportation Secretary took notice. For several days, the evening national news covered this story, focusing in on the failures of the airline, and how stranded passengers were standing in long lines just to seek assistance from the airline's customer service. As each day went by and media reports highlighted how the cascading failures were snowballing and impacting travelers, all of this served to create an sense of negativity toward the airline management. Everyone I spoke with over the holidays had the same negative perspective of the airline's management.
On the morning of 28 Dec 2022, I saw the following post on LinkedIn:
Erin's message served as a stark reminder that there's often more to the story, that regardless of what we see being reported in the media, there are often stories that are not covered and reported, and that do not make it into the public eye. News outlets have a limited amount of time to cover a hand-picked menu of events of the day, so we have to be conscious of "collection bias", and if what we're seeing and hearing is playing into a narrative that we assume is correct.
The point here is to remain grounded, and as we roll over into the New Year, this is a good opportunity to make a resolution to remain grounded, and to seek out accountability partners and mentors to help us remain grounded. Don't be so focused on the negative aspects of an event that we loose sight of the positive things that happen, and that the folks who make those positive things happen need our support more than someone we believe is to blame needs our anger.
If you were watching television between 2001 and 2011, at some point you probably either watched or at least stumbled across "Smallville." The episodic adventures of a young Clark Kent, who was destined to become Superman, "Smallville" was a teen soap opera/monster-of-the-week TV ratings bonanza for The WB (which eventually became The CW), and for a whole decade, it was one of the network's signature shows.
Unlike previous Superman live-action shows, however, "Smallville" eventually went out of its way to incorporate other heroes and villains from the comics, creating its own sprawling universe. Over the course of the series familiar costumed crime fighters like Green Arrow, Martian Manhunter, Zatanna, Dr. Fate, and Hawkman — to name a few — teamed up with the fledgling superhero.
And yet over the course of the show, despite a series of amusing references and teases, "Smallville" never introduced Bruce Wayne, the Batman, in the series. And that's pretty danged funny since "Smallville" actually started out as a backdoor pilot pitch for a "Bruce Wayne" TV show.
Superhero movies were just starting to boom in the early 2000s, and even though Batman was one of the most famous characters in the world, "Batman & Robin" had effectively killed off the film franchise. The time would soon come for a reboot with Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins," which rewrote the character's origin story and focused on his first attempts to fight crime dressed up as a giant Chiroptera.
But years before "Batman Begins" hit theaters, screenwriter Tim McCanlies — who wrote the screenplay for Brad Bird's animated classic, "The Iron Giant" — was pitching a similar idea for a TV series called "Bruce Wayne."
"There's a lot of similarities [to 'Batman Begins']," Tim McCanlies told Mandatory. "We were sort of drawing on some of the same subject matter but the comics usually were panel three, Bruce as a kid is over his dead parents. Then there's a shot of him mixing test tubes in college, and then he's in the costume."
"So I wanted to explore that whole five or six-year thing and it became a big deal at Warner Brothers because they kept wanting to get movies mounted at the time. Darren Aronofsky was going to try to do 'Batman: Year One.'" Unfortunately for McCanlies, Warner Bros. was so committed to bringing Batman back to the big screen that a live-action TV series was a very tough sell, even though the screenwriter says networks were interested. "Suddenly it came down to Alan Horn," McCanlies recalled. "Lorenzo DiBonaventura was the vice president of Warners and I had done five things with him including 'Iron Giant.' He was sort of my guy over there and yet he really screwed up my TV thing saying, 'No, it's a features thing.' I still give him s*** over that."
According to Tim McCanlies, it was his own pitch for the "Bruce Wayne" television series that inspired the creation of "Smallville," even though "Bruce Wayne" itself never got made."'Smallville" sort of came as a result of my thing," McCanlies said. "'Smallville' was sort of a long story and I'm under a little bit of a nondisclosure agreement with Warner Brothers because of various things. 'Smallville' started out as a backdoor pilot in the 'Bruce Wayne' bible."
For anyone unfamiliar, a series bible is a compendium of characters, storylines, and pitches for future episodes of a series. The bible for "Smallville," for example, would likely have had biographies for Clark Kent, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, and all the other major supporting characters, as well as concepts for ongoing storylines, standalone episodes, supervillains, and superhero team-ups. According to McCanlies, his pitch bible included "an episode called 'Smallville' where a young Clark Kent comes to Gotham City. It's like a newspaper convention and Bruce tries to get rid of him and lose him and he can't. Everywhere he turns, Clark's right there."
"The idea was always to do a 'Smallville' pilot," McCanlies explained.
Unfortunately, the plans for Tim McCanlies' versions of both the Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent TV shows fell apart, because of old-fashioned creative differences. "Warner Brothers and I disagreed on what direction it should go and so they paid me off, handsomely, and went off and did their own," McCanlies said. We may never know what Tim McCanlies would have done with the TV series "Smallville," but at the very least he told us what he wouldn't have done.
"I guess I can say this much. I told them what 'Smallville' should not be is a 'Dawson's Creek' esque 23-year-old underwear models preening and pretending to be high school sophomores and who's sleeping with whom. And they said, 'That's exactly what we want to do.'" And that's exactly what they did. But there was one idea McCanlies had that did, in a roundabout way, wind up in "Smallville," a.k.a. the Superman series that didn't show Clark Kent becoming Superman until the very last episode. "They kept saying, 'No, you can't have Batman,'" McCanlies recalled. "I kept saying, 'Well, I'm not doing Batman. I'm doing Bruce Wayne. You don't see the costume until the last show of the seventh season.'"
Hey ... at least we eventually got "Gotham," right?
Read this next: Joker's Wild: Ranking The Cinematic Versions Of The Clown Prince Of Crime
The post The Idea For Smallville Came From A Rejected Batman Prequel Pitch From Tim McCanlies appeared first on /Film.
Exactly one year ago today, 2021 got in one last sucker punch with the death of Betty White. Now, 2022 has wrapped up with a heavy blow of its own: trailblazing news anchor and interviewer Barbara Walters has died at the age of 93.
Walters' career spanned more than half a century, during which time she hosted the "Today" show, "ABC Evening News," and "20/20" before creating and hosting her daytime talk show, "The View." Walters also made many appearance on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," where she was played by various members of the comedy show's cast over the years. Gilda Radner debuted the character of "Baba Wawa" in 1975, spoofing Walters' slight speech impediment that caused her to struggle with the letter "R." Walters later told the New York Daily News that she "wasn't so thrilled" with the parody at first. But one night, after she found her young daughter Jacqueline watching a Baba Wawa sketch and reprimanded her, Jacqueline retorted, "Oh, mommy, where's your sense of humor?"
Thanks in part to that admonishment, Walters' feelings about Baba Wawa softened. "Gilda was so wonderful — the sketch immortalized me," she told the NY Daily News in hindsight, also revealing that "years later, when Gilda died, I sent her husband [actor Gene Wilder] a sympathy note and signed it 'Barbara Wawa.'"
Other "SNL" comics who offered their own impressions of Walters include Cheri Oteri and Rachel Dratch (who reprised the role in "30 Rock," via a tongue-twisting interview about a fictional movie called "The Rural Juror"). And in 2014, Walters herself joined the "Saturday Night Live" Weekend Update desk to celebrate her retirement.
Sharing the Weekend Update desk with Cecily Strong, Walters gets in a few stern comments about her prior depictions on "Saturday Night Live," before indulging in some humor at her own expense. Walters was often criticized for throwing softball questions at her interview subjects, most notoriously asking Katherine Hepburn in a 1981 interview, "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"
Like many notorious quotes, this one has been heavily paraphrased and taken out of context. In the original interview, it was Hepburn who said she felt like a strong tree in her old age, to which Walters responded with the follow-up question, "What kind of tree are you?" (Hepburn's answer: an oak tree). Walters addressed the misquote in a 2004 "20/20" special, which today demonstrates an eerie bit of forethought. "At my funeral, or perhaps in my obituary, it may mention that I once asked Katherine Hepburn what kind of a tree she wanted to be. Well, that's not exactly what happened," Walters said, playing the original clip as proof. "I didn't ask her, she brought it up! What was I to do?"
Frankly, it's impossible to get through 50 years on camera without asking a silly question or two (I have personally asked many silly questions in a mere fraction of that time). But when it comes to the matter of Katherine Hepburn and the tree, consider the record corrected, Barbara Wawa.
Read this next: Actors Who Died In 2021
The post Barbara Walters Celebrated Her Retirement With a Heartwarming SNL Weekend Update Appearance appeared first on /Film.
The NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti is going to be launching on the 5th for an MSRP of $799 (which is going to be loosely interpreted by the AICs considering the company is not preparing a Founder's Edition for this and only custom models will hit the market). Videocardz has done it again and leaked the official performance figures of the RTX 4070 Ti - although we already had an exceptionally good idea from NVIDIA's official slides of the same card when it was launched as the RTX 4080 12 GB.
Long story short, the RTX 4070 Ti is roughly as fast as the older generation NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti. In gaming, the RTX 4070 Ti is just shy of the RTX 3090 Ti and in rendering applications such as Octanebench, it is actually slightly faster. The official MSRP of the card is $799, which is $1200 less than the $1999 MSRP of the RTX 3090 Ti.
While it might be similar in performance, it is worth noting that the RTX 3090 Ti did have 24 GB of VRAM while the RTX 4070 Ti only has 12 GB of VRAM. The full breakdown of the scores and their relative positions courtesy of Videocardz is given below:
| Data courtesy of Videocardz.com | TimeSpy Extreme (4K) |
FireStrike Ultra (4K) |
|---|---|---|
| GeForce RTX 4090 | 19484 | 24938 |
| Radeon RX 7900 XTX | 14883 | 19465 |
| GeForce RTX 4080 | 14022 | 17316 |
| Radeon RX 7900 XT | 12707 | 17288 |
| GeForce RTX 3090 Ti | 11312 | 13987 |
| GeForce RTX 4070 Ti | 11258 | 13698 |
| Radeon RX 6950 XT | 10694 | 15218 |
| GeForce RTX 3090 | 10288 | 12612 |
| GeForce RTX 3080 Ti | 10037 | 12451 |
| Radeon RX 6900 XT | 10012 | 14362 |
| Radeon RX 6800 XT | 9262 | 12978 |
| GeForce RTX 3080 | 8894 | 10843 |
| GeForce RTX 3070 Ti | 7402 | 9339 |
| GeForce RTX 3070 | 6789 | 8560 |
| Radeon RX 6750 XT | 6320 | 9001 |
The NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti will have 7680 CUDA cores clocked at 2.61 GHz and powered by 12 GB of GDDR6X memory. This means you are looking at a theoratical peak FP32 throughput of 40.01 TFLOPs. Interestingly however, these official benchmarks show that the RTX 4070 Ti will officially be slightly less powerful than the Radeon RX 7900 XT - which is going to have an MSRP of $899. So this is NVIDIA undercutting the Radeon competitor by pricing it to appeal to what is essentially the new mainstream market segment.
| GPU | FP32 TFLOPs | MSRP | TFLOPs/$ | Value (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GeForce RTX 4090 | 82.59 | 1599 | 0.05165 | 100.0% |
| GeForce RTX 4080 | 48.74 | 1199 | 0.04065 | 78.7% |
| GeForce RTX 4070 Ti | 40.09 | 799 | 0.05017 | 97% |
While the RTX 4090 sold like hot cakes considering the value proposition it was giving on a TFLOPs/$ basis, the RTX 4080 did not do well at all considering the bad price point. The RTX 4070 Ti is much much closer to the value proposition that the RTX 4090 made and should sell much better as well. This might not be the pricing that gamers were hoping for but it is certainly much better pricing than we have seen in the market for years and should make way for NVIDIA and AMD to start reconnecting with their core audience - gamers.
The post NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti Official Benchmarks Leak Out – As Fast As The RTX 3090 Ti But 40% Of The MSRP by Usman Pirzada appeared first on Wccftech.
Most people know Clint Eastwood became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood by making Spaghetti Westerns in Spain and Italy with filmmaker Sergio Leone. Most of these people probably figure Eastwood's Man with No Name was a man of few words at the behest of the director, due likely to a language barrier of some sort. This, however, was not the case.
Though Leone is no longer around to refute this, Eastwood holds that his laconic Man with No Name character featured in "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" would've been a good deal more loquacious had Leone stuck to the screenplay he wrote with Victor Andrés Catena and Jaime Comas. Given that Eastwood's career going forward would play off this stolid persona, you can't help but wonder if portraying a chattier gunfighter would've landed as palpably with American audiences. In any event, while Eastwood's instincts proved impeccable, Leone didn't give up on his scripted vision of the character without a fight.
Eastwood's assertion is especially fascinating when you consider that Leone's film was a fairly direct remake of Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo," which was itself an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's crime novel "Red Harvest" (though, despite clear plot similarities, the filmmaker claimed he was inspired by the author's "The Glass Key"). Kurosawa modeled Toshiro Mifune's rōnin after Hammett's Continental Op; ergo, he was a man seemingly devoid of a past. He just shows up in a town dominated by two corrupt, warring factions, and goads both sides into massacring each other. He betrays nothing personal about himself because doing so would run contrary to his task, and, on a basic narrative level, is of no consequence to the plot.
In a 1980 interview with Ric Gentry, Clint Eastwood revealed that Sergio Leone and his co-writers had devised a thorough backstory for his character:
"I wanted to play it with an economy of dialogue and to build a whole feeling through attitude and movements. So I said to Sergio, 'Let's keep the mystery of the character and just allude to what happened in the past.' Segio argued with me, though he did agree in a way, but it was just much harder for the Italian mentality to accept. They're just used to so much more exposition and I was throwing that out."
Leone ultimately came around, but when the film was finished, the producers were aghast. Per Eastwood, "They said, 'Christ, this guy isn't doing anything. He isn't saying anything. He doesn't even have a name! And that cigar is just sitting there burning.'"
That stoic persona, that terseness, and that cigar rescued the Western from its latter-day John Wayne doldrums, and made Eastwood a global movie star. It also established Leone as a supreme big-screen stylist, allowing him to make a string of masterpieces in "Once Upon a Time in the West," "Duck, You Sucker," and "Once Upon a Time in America." Sometimes less is more. Sometimes it's everything.
Read this next: The 20 Best Westerns Of All Time
The post Clint Eastwood Had To Fight To Make The Man With No Name A Mystery appeared first on /Film.
By the time Stanley Kubrick came to direct "Full Metal Jacket" in the mid-1980s, his legendary status had been well and truly established. At that point, most of his filmography was behind him. "Full Metal Jacket," released in 1987, would be his penultimate film, followed by "Eyes Wide Shut" in 1999 — the same year the director passed away. But Kubrick had long since ascended to a status in Hollywood that few other directors ever had or would reach. Naturally, actors were eager to be a part of his Vietnam War epic.
Kubrick, ever the informed and calculating artist, was well-aware of his reputation and took a characteristically unique approach to casting "Full Metal Jacket" by playing on that reputation. The director had always put the story first on whatever project he was working on, and as such was diligent about getting the right actors for his roles. As "Full Metal Jacket" star Matthew Modine once said of the director, "Stanley doesn't seem to be able to separate acting from life. You either are the character or you are not. It's not acting."
That was no different with his adaptation of Gus Hasford's "The Short-Timers." Kubrick was diligent about casting the right actors in leading roles, with Modine taking on the central role of Private JT "Joker" Davis supported by his friend Vincent D'Onofrio as Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle," and the former Marine, R. Lee Ermey, as the downright scary Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. But before those names were confirmed, the director sent out an international call for new faces to play the marines. As well as resulting in thousands of tapes to review, the stunt proved an effective marketing trick for his movie — just as Kubrick knew it would.
As related in John Baxter's "Stanley Kubrick: A Biography," from his country home in England's Hertfordshire, Kubrick let "wannabe actors do much of the work of casting for him [by telling] the world's press that he wanted audition tapes from anyone who felt able to play an 18-year-old Marine." The 1984 casting call came with typically specific Kubrickian instructions that demanded actors "stand against a plain background in jeans and a white T-shirt with a card showing their name and a contact number." The performers would the run through a three-minute scene before providing some information on their personal life and interests. Finally, they were instructed to hold up a sheet showing their name, contact details, age, and date of birth.
YouTube is littered with some of the audition tapes, including one legendary example by Mr. Brian Atene ("the finest actor in the lot!"). Word also got back to almost as fine an actor, Val Kilmer, who similarly made a tape and delivered it directly to Kubrick by traveling to the UK where production was set to get underway. Ultimately, neither Atene nor Kilmer would be cast. Instead, according to Vincent LoBrutto's Kubrick biography, Kubrick's team pored over "as many as 3,000 videotapes of prospective movie Marine grunts," before paring them down to around "800" for the director to review.
But the tapes themselves weren't the only thing Kubrick had in mind when sending out his casting call. As Baxter's book noted, "Kubrick played on his mystique" with the casting call and the resulting publicity for his war epic was "phenomenal. Everyone soon knew about 'Full Metal Jacket.'" It was only after the thousands of tapes came in that Kubrcik instructed his assistant, actor Leon Vitali, to "discreetly invite proposals from professionals."
Stanley Kubrick's casting call can seem purely like a publicity stunt, considering he ultimately cast mostly-established pros in the lead roles. But it was more than just that. As Leon Vitali told The Guardian, "Stanley was just very, very open to someone being a good actor, and we'd try them out in different roles." Even after Matthew Modine had been cast, Vitali said he and Kubrick were still reviewing videotapes, adding, "It was like a jigsaw puzzle. We were three-quarters of the way into the film before we finished casting." Even once they turned to professional actors, those actors would be required to visit agencies to record their own taped audition, all at Kubrick's expense.
That said, there's no doubt the casting call did increase hype for the movie. As John Baxter noted, dozens of video companies were offering to film the audition tapes, including one in Boston which, at the height of the search, was churning out "30 pitches a day." As a result, Julian Senior, the Vice President of Advertising & Publicity for Warner Bros. Europe, was "inundated with tapes" and Kubrick had successfully created significant buzz for "Full Metal Jacket."
That was a good thing, too, considering even he was aware that after "Platoon," "Apocalypse Now," and "The Deer Hunter," audiences could easily be suffering from Vietnam War movie fatigue by the time his film debuted. Demonstrating a keen awareness of the media landscape in which he was working, Kubrick seemed to be constantly calculating behind the scenes of "Full Metal Jacket" — which turned out to be a bit much for the almost 60-year-old director. None of that seems to have impacted the final film, though, which, even without the great Brian Atene, remains one of, if not the best, Vietnam War movie ever made.
Read this next: The 14 Greatest War Movies Of The 21st Century
The post Stanley Kubrick Used Full Metal Jacket's Casting Call As A Publicity Stunt appeared first on /Film.
