Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 110
July 21, 2017
‘Killing Ground’ Will Make You Rethink That Camping Trip
“Killing Ground” features a man and a woman who make head-slappingly dumb choices as they flee from a pair of killers who are just as inept. Yet in the end, the most regrettable decision may be that of audience members who fork over money to see the movie.
Set in and around a national park in Australia, the story starts off with that charisma-free couple, Ian (Ian Meadows) and Samantha (Harriet Dyer), who plan to pitch their tent and spend time alone in the woods. She’s prone to dispensing exposition (“I’ve got no reception,” she says as she looks at her cellphone when they arrive), while he’s more than happy to ask a weird stranger for advice.
Intercut with that story is the tale of a family who previously camped in the area. The two plots, featuring the same set of predators (Aaron Pedersen and Aaron Glenane), intertwine and, after a lengthy intro, move toward some revolting cruelness.
In his director’s statement, Damien Power, who also wrote the script, cites ’70s “survival thrillers” as his inspiration, and like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” this movie has the hallmarks of torture porn: gratuitous slaughter, remorseless murderers and gruesome acts.
Mr. Power says his aim was to explore violence, and he generates some suspense from crosscutting the stories. But these personality-free characters fade from your mind even as you’re watching the screen, making the brutality waged against them akin to animated mutilation of cartoon creatures. Certainly, the senselessness of bloodshed may be Mr. Power’s point. But with this setup, such a message is all but muted.
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Will Smith on Jumping to Netflix: ‘You Almost Can’t Make New Movie Stars Anymore’
Comic-Con’s biggest stage used to be dominated by movie blockbusters, though lately, it’s been reserved far more often for high-profile TV titles. It’s fitting, then, that today in Hall H we got a project that controversially straddles the line between the two.
That would be Bright, which is rumored to be the most expensive film Netflix has ever commissioned. It walks and squawks like the sort of summer-movie tentpole that would play in 3,000 theaters: Directed by David Ayer, who is coming off the biggest hit of his career with Suicide Squad, it stars Will Smith as a human cop paired with an orc (Joel Edgerton) to solve crimes in an effects-laden, magic-infused version of Los Angeles. But despite costing upwards of $100 million to make, it will debut on the streaming service this December, foregoing any kind of exclusive theatrical window.
Will Netflix begin to cannibalize the theatrical experience if it can offer comparably big-budget films? For that matter, does it dent Will Smith’s big-screen career if his action movies, which once reliably set box-office records every Fourth of July weekend, now debut on a streaming service that doesn’t even offer viewership figures? The Netflix film Okja recently got this conversation rolling, but Bright will offer a far more mainstream test of whether a movie is still treated the same when it’s streaming. After Bright’s Hall H panel, Smith and Ayer gathered nearby to debate the matter with press.
“I have a 16-year-old, a 19-year-old, and a 25-year-old at home, and their viewing habits are almost anthropological,” said Smith, who proposed that Netflix and theaters can and should co-exist. “It’s a great study to see how they still go to the movies on Friday and Saturday night, and they watch Netflix all week. It’s two completely different experiences.”
“For me, it’s pretty simple,” said Ayer. “This movie, I got to make in a way and at a level that otherwise, I may not have been able to make.”
I pressed Ayer on that point. For as successful as Suicide Squad was, it was critically drubbed and subject to plenty of studio interference: Warner Bros. reportedly hired the company that cut the trailer to re-edit and re-score the director’s cut Ayer submitted, and the final version of the film leaves all sorts of intended story lines hanging in the wind. Had Ayer made Bright at a big movie studio, how much would he have had to compromise his vision for it?
Smith quickly covered Ayer’s microphone. “Objection, your honor,” he joked. “I’m not gonna have my client answer that.” After a huddle with Ayer, Smith relented: “I’ll allow it.”
“It’s hard to speak for what could have been,” said Ayer, delicately. “I can say that this is the movie that should have been. I got to shoot in Los Angeles, we weren’t chasing a rebate. We got the equipment we wanted, we were able to shoot practical stunts. As a filmmaker, to spend more time working on the creative [instead of] working on the spreadsheet that supports the film is a true pleasure. I think that changes how you come at the movie and it changes how the cast comes at the movie because you feel that freedom.”
“The rating would have been different,” added Bright producer Eric Newman. “This is a rated-R movie, but at a studio,” with the big budget it had, “it wouldn’t have been.”
“There’s a lot of orc nudity,” joked Edgerton.
“Once you go orc, you never go back,” said Smith.
At the Hall H panel before the press conference, Smith admitted that a theatrical release still has a certain magic to it. “There’s something about the big screen that does something to people’s minds,” said the 48-year-old star, recalling the “ecstasy” of seeing Star Wars in a movie theater as a kid. (“I had sex a few years later. It was close, but no Star Wars,” he said.) Though Smith had plenty of success as a rapper and TV star before transitioning to movies, his first big-screen success changed the way people treated him. “I was on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and people would see me on the street, like, ‘Will, Will, Will!’” said Smith. “And that Monday after Independence Day came out was the first time anybody referred to me as ‘Mr. Smith.’ [It] penetrates people in a very different kind of way.”
But Smith, who once studied Tom Cruise’s country-hopping promotional playbook in order to launch himself as a bona-fide global superstar, is paying just as much attention to the cultural shift that’s happening now. “It is such a new world,” he said. “I released my first record in ’86, so I’m over 30 years in the business. I’m seeing that transition of, essentially, the fans being more and more involved in the creative process. In terms of movie stardom, it’s a huge difference: You almost can’t make new movie stars anymore, right?”
Source:
http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/will-smith-explains-why-he-made-bright-for-netflix.html
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Apple launches machine learning research site
Apple just launched a blog focused on machine learning research papers and sharing the company’s findings. The Apple Machine Learning Journal is a bit empty right now as the company only shared one post about turning synthetic images into realistic ones in order to train neural networks.
This move is interesting as Apple doesn’t usually talk about their research projects. The company has contributed and launched some important open source projects, such as WebKit, the browser engine behind Safari, and Swift, Apple’s latest programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS. But a blog with research papers on artificial intelligence project is something new for Apple.
It’s interesting for a few reasons. First, this research paper has already been published on arXiv. Today’s version talks about the same things but the language is a bit more simple. Similarly, Apple has added GIFs to illustrate the results.
According to this paper, Apple has had to train its neural network to detect faces and other objects on photos. But instead of putting together huge libraries with hundreds of millions of sample photos to train this neural network, Apple has created synthetic images of computer-generated characters and applied a filter to make those synthetic images look real. It was cheaper and faster to train the neural network.
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Second, Apple tells readers to email the company in its inaugural post. There’s also a big link in the footer to look at job openings at Apple. It’s clear that Apple plans to use this platform to find promising engineers in that field.
Third, many people have criticized Apple when it comes to machine learning, saying that companies like Google and Amazon are more competent. And it’s true that the company has been more quiet. Some consumer products like Google’s assistant and Amazon’s Alexa are also much better than Apple’s Siri.
But Apple has also been doing great work when it comes to analyzing your photo library on your device, the depth effect on the iPhone 7 Plus and the company’s work on augmented reality with ARkit. Apple wants to correct this narrative.
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Apple launches machine learning research site
Willow Grove author sues writers, Netflix for allegedly stealing his story for frat film
Is the Netflix original film Burning Sands, about the torturous travails of fraternity hazing, actually original?
Or was writer-director Gerard McMurray’s feature, which premiered on the streaming site in January, actually lifted from a novel of the same name by Al Quarles Jr., a Philadelphia School District administrator and author?
Both novel and film are set at predominantly black colleges and tell the story of straitlaced students who respond to the pressure to fit in by rushing a fraternity. Both stories focus on the sometimes inhuman treatment of pledges by older frat members.
Quarles’ attorney filed a lawsuit Monday in federal court in Pennsylvania charging that McMurray and co-screenwriter Christine T. Berg plagiarized Quarles’ two-volume novel Burning Sands, which he self-published through Amazon in 2014. (The suit can be accessed online here.) The suit names Netflix and Mandalay Entertainment in addition to the screenwriters.
“Al is a great guy who put his heart and soul into these books,” Philadelphia attorney Brian Lentz said Tuesday. “We think that the evidence will show they took his creative work without his permission.”
A Netflix representative Tuesday said the subscription service would not comment on the suit. Calls for comment from McMurray’s and Berg’s lawyers were not immediately returned.
Quarles, 50, of Willow Grove, said he was shocked to find the film had “as many as 100 points of similarities” to his books. “There are some differences, but the heart of the movie was taken directly from my books,” he said.
Quarles said he was immediately struck by the film’s title, identical to his book.
“But that in itself isn’t a smoking gun,” he said. “Burning sands is an expression you would hear around fraternities. It’s a term to describe coming into a fraternity, crossing the sands, and making it in.”
At the heart of the dispute are two personal stories. McMurray has said that he based his film on his own experiences as an undergraduate at Howard University. Quarles, an administrator for the School District’s homeless and emergency services, also drew from his own life. The Abington High School alum attended Millersville University in Lancaster County, where in the late 1980s he pledged Kappa Alpha Psi, although his experience did not mirror those in his novel.
“I loved my fraternity,” he said Tuesday while en route to a vacation in Orlando with his wife and three children. “At Millersville I didn’t go through any sort of torture,” he said, referring to the horrors faced by the young men he depicts in his novel. “But I know some excesses were committed in the 1980s.”
Quarles said he began the novel nearly 18 years ago. “I started it on an old Mac word processor. It didn’t even have spell-check,” he said. “I wrote through to the end, then I took a year off and went back to it. I would do that, work on it for a while, then wait a year. So it was a real process.”
He published the first volume, Burning Sands: My Brother’s Keeper Volume 1, in 2014. “We’re pretty sure that the [Netflix film] wasn’t written until 2016,” he said.
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Facebook Pages can now build their own communities
Today, Facebook is rolling out a new feature called “Groups for Pages,” which will let artists, brands, businesses and newspapers create their own fan clubs. The company says the idea stems from two reporters at The Washington Post who started a Facebook group called PostThis, where they interact with some of “the most avid fans” of the paper on a daily basis. Facebook says right now there are more than 70 million Pages on its platform, so this going to be great for many users who want to let their loyal supporters feel more connected to them.
The launch could further Facebook’s new mission statement to “bring the world closer together” and push it toward its goal to grow the membership of “meaningful groups” from 100 million now to 1 billion in the future.
Users can look at a Page’s Groups shortcut for any communities they’ve created. Pages can link an existing Group to their Page in addition to launching new ones.
For years, Facebook pushed people to create lists of specific friends to share different posts with, or to just fully embrace “openness” and share publicly. But it seems to have realized that people’s values and interests don’t always align with their geographic communities, or even their closest friends. Since the News Feed prioritizes showing content that gets lots of clicks and Likes, niche content could often fall flat and reach few people. Plus there’s the issue that Trump’s polarization of the United States has made sharing political content to Facebook a minefield of angry relatives and extremist high school classmates.
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Facebook ‘Groups for Pages’ unlocks fan clubs
Shazam will be the next DC Universe movie after Justice League and Aquaman
Shazam will begin production in early 2018 and may be released in theaters by 2019, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The report pegs David F. Sandberg as the film’s director. The production will begin ahead of Batgirl, Flash, and the sequels to both Suicide Squad and Wonder Woman.
Shazam has been on DC’s film slate for a while, beginning with the 2014 announcement that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson will play Shazam’s archrival, Black Adam. The Hollywood Reporter wasn’t able to confirm if Johnson will appear in Shazam or just the Black Adam spinoff film.
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Shazam, also known as Captain Marvel, is one of DC’s most popular superheroes, but this will be the first time he’s appeared in a feature-length, big-screen, live-action movie. Shazam is the superhero alter ego of Billy Batson, a boy who, by saying the magical word “shazam,” turns into, well, Shazam. He can fly. He can go fast. And best of all, he has these powers, thanks to a 3,000-year-old wizard. Comic book movies are embracing their inner weirdness!
With Shazam and the batch of other films a couple years away, we’re entering a slower period for the DC cinematic universe. Justice League will be released on November 17th, 2017. It will be followed by Aquaman on December 21th, 2018.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/20/15972094/shazam-black-adam-sdcc-2017-dwayne-johnson
