Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 112
July 19, 2017
The Dark Tower Will Be the Rarest of All Gifts: A 90-Minute Summer Blockbuster
Even by the verbose standards of its author, Stephen King’s Dark Towerseries is a massive undertaking: Wikipedia has it totaling out to 4,250 pages and 1,334,631 words across eight separate books. And when the onscreen adaptation of the franchise was announced, it appeared that it would be a similarly ambitious affair, with TV installments in play in addition to a number of movies. But now the run time of the first film has been revealed, and it doesn’t just run counter to the seemingly infinite length of King’s novels — it’s also a sharp turn away from the prevailing trend in contemporary summer blockbuster-dom.
According to the British Board of Film Classification, The Dark Tower will run only 95 minutes. Such a seemingly modest film has supposedly raised the hackles of hard-core Stephen King fans hoping the movies would at least try to match the complexity and mythological expansiveness of the books. While it could still do that — after all, Akira Kurosawa only needed 88 minutes for Rashomon — The Dark Tower is pretty much guaranteed to be an anomaly in theaters. This summer, the 20 highest-grossing films so far have averaged out at a hefty 115-minute run time, highlighted by the 149-minute marathon of Michael Bay’s fifth Transformers; the 141-minute long runaway hit Wonder Woman; and War for the Planet of the Apes’ 140 minutes of simian-on-Homo-sapiens violence.
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In fact, if you remove a few titles from the equation — comedies The House, Snatched, and Rough Night, the kid-targeted Despicable Me 3, Cars 3, Captain Underpants, and Everything Everything, and the indie 47 Meters Down — you’re left with the 12 movies that seem to best represent the type of fare that characterizes the summer season: studio wide-releases that feature either superheroes, monsters, big stars, or real-life subjects. Those 12 movies clock in at an average run time of 129 minutes, or 34 minutes longer than The Dark Tower’s alleged length — the longest of the group being Transformers, the shortest being the 107-minute The Mummy.
Why are these movies so long? You could blame a few factors, including the prevalence of cinematic universes, in which films often have to carry the narrative weight of both their own story and a larger, more complicated one, as well as the rising budgets of studio productions and the increasing sense that every outing needs to be a potential worldwide megahit. But length has characterized the successes as well as the failures of this summer’s slate: Guardians 2, Wonder Woman, and Spider-Man: Homecoming keep you in the theater even longer than Pirates, King Arthur, and Alien: Covenant. While bloating has been mentioned as an aspect of sequel fatigue, it doesn’t seem to be a factor when audiences don’t mind what they’re getting more of.
In that sense, it’s hard to draw too stark a conclusion from The Dark Tower’s relatively abbreviated running time. On the one hand, you’d certainly expect a film based on such dense and abundant material, especially one hoping to launch a franchise, to be more in line with its overstuffed world-building peers. On the other, The Dark Tower’s reported $60 million budget is even lighter in comparison to these other films than its length is, and if that is in fact what it cost, then it needs to make far less money to be considered a success than the likes of Transformers or Pirates. Who knows: After sitting through those behemoths, The Dark Tower might seem like a breath of fresh air. Unless it’s bad, of course, in which case, 95 minutes will be 95 minutes too many.
Source:
http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/the-dark-tower-is-the-rare-90-minute-summer-blockbuster.html
Two new Harry Potter books set for release later this year
#Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” celebrated its 20th-anniversary release on June 20. As part of the celebration, U.K. publisher Bloomsbury announced that they will be publishing two new Harry Potter books. The new books will be released in October to accompany the Harry Potter Exhibition: A History of Magic at the #British Library.
The new books
Bloomsbury will be releasing two new background books: “Harry Potter: A History of Magic — The Book of the Exhibition” and “Harry Potter — A Journey Through a History of Magic.” The first book “The Book of the Exhibition” is reported to be about the subjects taught and studied and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
The second book, “A Journey Through a History of Magic,” is composed of stories about spells, magical creatures, and wizards and witches.
Unlike the other complimentary Harry Potter books, the 2 new books are not written by J.K. Rowling, according to Fortune. Bloomsbury has not yet revealed the cover art nor have they announced an exact release date yet.The exhibition at the British Library will be held from October 20, 2017 to February 28, 2018. There are no words yet from ScholasticaPublishing house, which publishes the Harry Potter books in the U.S., regarding the new books.
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Other supplementary books
In September 2016, J.K. Rowling wrote three stories about the Harry Potter world. The first book is “Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists” which is about the darker side of the wizarding world.
The story includes the history of Azkaban, the life story of Professor Umbridge, and the relationship between Tom Riddle and Professor Horace Slughorn.
The second book is “Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies” which is about the heroic characters like Remus Lupin and Minerva McGonagall. The last book is “Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide” which is about the history of Hogwarts.
In July 2016, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” was published. The “Cursed Child” is a West End stage play written by Jack Thorne based on a new story by Thorne, Rowling, and John Tiffany. The story is set nineteen years later after the events of the original series. The story follows Harry’s son, Albus Potter, who gets sorted into Slytherin with Draco Malfoy’s son Scorpius. The script of the stage play was been released as books on July 31 – Harry and Rowling’s birthday. An updated version of the book, since revisions in the script were made, is to be released on July 25, 2017.
In 2001, J.K. Rowling published the complimentary books “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” “Quidditch Through the Ages,” and “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” The books benefit the charity Comic Relief. A film series based on the “Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them” was released on 2016, and the sequel is set to be released in November 2018. #JK Rowling
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Amazon has launched a shoppable social network called Spark — here’s how it works
Amazon would really like you to buy more stuff, ideally through Amazon.
The company has launched Amazon Spark, an Instagram-style shoppable feed that appears inside the Amazon app to showcase products. We first saw Spark on TechCrunch.
The experience is similar to scrolling through your Instagram feed, except in this case everything is set up so you can click on an image and buy the items in it.
Business Insider tried Amazon Spark on the iOS version of the Amazon app. It feels a bit beta for now — you have to be in the US, and Spark shows up only for Prime members. And some items don’t seem to be available to buy as they appear in Spark; we tried to buy a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses that we saw on Spark, and Amazon showed us a slightly different version.
Here’s how Spark works:
View As: One Page Slides
To open Spark from the Amazon app, click the menu from the home screen, scroll down to “Programs and Features,” and you should find Spark listed.
Shona Ghosh/Amazon
If you’re in the UK and want to use Amazon Spark, you’ll need to change your country settings to the US.
Shona Ghosh/Amazon
Spark will show you images based on your interests, and it will ask you to pick five or more from categories like men’s fashion and home decor.
Shona Ghosh/Amazon
Once you’re in Spark, you can scroll through an Instagram-like feed, all inside the Amazon app.
Shona Ghosh/Amazon
Spark highlights which items in the image are available to buy on Amazon — in this case, it’s the rug, the mistletoe, and the sunglasses. We tried buying the sunglasses …
Shona Ghosh/Amazon
… and it’s not perfect. The Ray-Ban sunglasses shown on Spark look slightly different and cooler than what’s available on Amazon.
Shona Ghosh/Amazon
And Amazon shows you items in Spark that aren’t available to buy. Here is a glossy product shot of Amazon’s new meal kits, which launched this week …
Shona Ghosh/Amazon
… but if you want to buy them, they’re sold out.
Shona Ghosh/Amazon
Anyone who uses Spark right now is probably a big Amazon fan. The company has acknowledged that by featuring a nod to a recent meme about its CEO, Jeff Bezos.
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Bitcoin Jumps After First Solution to Major Ideological Divide
Bitcoin reversed steep losses as miners began using new software which aims to bridge an ideological gap that has threatened to divide the cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin’s community has been at bitter odds for more than two years about how to solve its scaling problem, which has hampered the cryptocurrency’s growth and allowed rivals like ethereum to steal some of the spotlight.
The new software, known as SegWit2x, is seen as a compromise for the two sides of the debate: miners who deploy costly computers to verify transactions and act as the backbone of the blockchain, and developers known as Core who uphold bitcoin’s bug-free software. While both sides have incentives to reach a consensus, bitcoin’s lack of central authority has made reaching agreement difficult.
The price of bitcoin rose to as high as $2,356 before trading at $2,348 as of 2:22 p.m. in New York. The digital currency slumped to as low as $1,758 over the weekend on Coinbase’s exchange. Bitcoin, which has more than doubled this year, climbed to just shy of $3,000 on June 12.
SegWit2x was formally released over the weekend and has already gained adoption by large miners Antpool, BTCC and Bixin. About 55 percent of blocks mined in the last 24 hours were done with SegWit2x, according to coin.dance, which monitors blockchain activity.
If support reaches 80 percent and maintains that threshold from more than two days, it will move bitcoin closer to avoiding a split.
“Traders are excited by the prospect of a resolution to the scaling debate, which is why the price has rallied,” said Thomas Glucksmann, head of marketing at Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange Gatecoin.
Read more about bitcoin’s civil war.
Despite the progress with SegWit2x, some warned that bitcoin isn’t out of the woods yet. Many Core members still vehemently oppose the software, which they say hasn’t been properly vetted for bugs. Also, not all miners support SegWit2x, which they say is a flawed compromise that doesn’t solve the root scaling problem.
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With Entry Into Interest Curation, Google Goes Head-To-Head With Facebook
There’s a good chance you’re hungry for information you didn’t even know you wanted, but Google knows — and the tech giant is going to spoon-feed it to you.
Google is following in Facebook’s footsteps, with plans to redesign its popular search page on mobile phones so that you’ll get something similar to the social media site’s News Feed. Only Google’s will just be called “feed.”
“Google search should be working for you in the background even when you’re not searching,” says Ben Gomes, vice president of engineering, who spoke at a news conference at Google’s San Francisco offices. “It should be looking for information on the Web to give you information that’s important and relevant to you to further the interest that you have.”
Starting Wednesday, if you use the Pixel smartphone or the Google app (for Android and iOS), you’ll see this personalized feed. It will continually draw from what Google has learned about you across its suite of products — such as Search, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, the Google home assistant and Chromecast.
Google and Facebook — which both make their money by selling advertising — are in a constant tug-of-war. Google has tried and failed to build a hit social network, but this new product could draw more eyeballs.
Engineering leader Shashi Thakur explained how it is fundamentally different from the competition: “It’s not really about what your friends are interested in, which is really what other feeds might be.”
Say you have a secret passion for woodworking: Relevant articles will show up in your feed. On the other hand, if you’ve been reading up on herpes that shouldn’t show up in the feed, because Google is using technology to filter out “potentially upsetting or sensitive content.”
When it comes to political interests — take health care overhaul efforts — what you get on Facebook or Twitter is heavily influenced by your social network, which could push you into groupthink. Thakur says the Google feed breaks you out of that, because it’s based on the same search algorithm that crawls and ranks the entire Internet, not just what your friends share.
“We are trying to provide a variety of perspectives on any given topic,” he said. Although in the near future, a spokesperson says Google does plan to add a like button to posts, so that users can actively indicate what they want to see.
Aside from Pixel phones and the Google app, the feed soon will appear in your smartphone browser when you go to Google’s search page. The company does not plan to include this feature on desktop browsers. Gomes and Thakur declined to say if Google would include advertisements in the feed.
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$5 billion in student loans may be dismissed because the lender lost the paperwork
Billions of dollars in student loans may be wiped out for tens of thousands of borrowers in the US because a lender didn’t keep track of the paperwork verifying ownership of the loans, according to The New York Times.
The National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts, which holds 800,000 private loans and is one of the country’s largest owners of private student loans, is at the center of the legal dispute, The Times reports.
Borrowers are failing to repay more than $5 billion of the $12 billion in private student loans held by National Collegiate, sending the loans into default. The organization has brought more than 800 lawsuits against borrowers this year alone in pursuit of repayment — and National Collegiate usually wins because borrowers either choose to settle or don’t show up in court, according to The Times.
When borrowers do show up to fight, the cases are not so straightforward. Disorganized or missing paperwork has made it difficult for National Collegiate to prove it does indeed own the defaulted loan it’s demanding repayment on, according to The Times. To be clear, The Times reports, the organization’s legal problems don’t include falsifying documents.
The student loans held by National Collegiate were made “more than a decade ago by dozens of different banks, then bundled together by a financing company and sold to investors through a process known as securitization,” and they weren’t guaranteed by the federal government, according to The Times.
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Donald Uderitz, the founder of Vantage Capital Group, a private-equity firm in Delray Beach, Florida, is one of the financiers behind National Collegiate’s trusts, and even he appears to be confused by the missing paperwork. In 2015, he hired a contractor to audit the servicing company that bills National Collegiate borrowers each month and found that not one of 400 randomly sampled loans had the documents showing a chain of ownership.
“It’s fraud to try to collect on loans that you don’t own,” Uderitz told The Times. “We want no part of that. If it’s a loan we’re owed fairly, we want to collect. We need answers on this.”
Private student loans lack the consumer protection and manageable interest rates that come with federal student loans, now a $1.3 trillion market. Because of steep interest rates on private loans, borrowers can often end up paying hundreds — and in some cases thousands — of dollars in monthly payments.
Notably, federal student-loan borrowers have the ability to apply for loan forgiveness or a loan discharge, such as in the case of an incomplete degree from a defunct for-profit college, while private borrowers do not.
Source:
http://www.businessinsider.com/national-collegiate-billions-student-loan-debt-2017-7
July 18, 2017
New Trailer for ‘Birth of the Dragon’ Reveals Bruce Lee’s Most Controversial Fight
One of the most dramatic and controversial fights of Bruce Lee‘s career did not take place on the silver screen or even in front of a cheering crowd but rather behind closed doors, a private mano a mano contest between martial arts masters. Believed to have stemmed from a conflict over Lee teaching Chinese martial arts to Caucasian men, the tension escalated to the point that Lee and instructor Wong Jack Man came to blows in a bout for honor. A new trailer for Birth of the Dragon sets up this story in dramatic fashion.
To be clear, this film isn’t a straight biopic of Lee’s life and career but rather takes inspiration from this legendary fight. It took place before Lee’s Hollywood star status really took off, though he had already been acting in Chinese films from an early age. A couple of years after this match, he would star as Kato on both The Green Hornet and in a few episodes of Batman before embracing his feature film status. Also of note, Birth of the Dragon originally premiered at TIFF 2016, but this is a new cut of the film.
George Nolfi directs from a script by Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson. Phillip Ng, Xia Yu, Billy Magnussen, Jin Xing, Jingjing Qu, and Simon Yin star, with Martial Arts Supervisor Corey Yuen overseeing the all-important fight sequences. Look for Birth of the Dragon in theaters on August 25th.
Check out the new trailer below:
