This initial report on The Greatest Night in Pop comes from our team following the premieres at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. We’ll update this piece when there’s more information about the movie’s release.
Logline
On Jan. 28, 1985, more than 40 of the United States’ most famous musicians, from Michael Jackson and Diana Ross to Paul Simon and Billy Joel, gathered in secret to record a charity song. “We Are the World” was intended as a fundraiser for famine relief in Africa. The Greatest Night in Pop, a documentary coming to Netflix soon, is about how that song got recorded in just one night.
Longerline
“We Are the World” is one of the bestselling, most popular singles of all time, featuring perhaps the most star-studded lineup to ever record together. Bao Nguyen’s film runs through the making of the song, from the initial idea to the writing to getting talent on board to the recording itself.
Nguyen presents all of this through archival footage from when the recording session was initially filmed, as well as talking-head interviews with some of the musicians involved, including Lionel Richie, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, and Kenny Loggins.
What’s The Greatest Night in Pop trying to do?
Besides just documenting one of the most important moments in 20th-century pop culture, The Greatest Night in Pop also tries to communicate the sheer star power that came together in A&M Studios on that night in 1985. It was a who’s who of the most famous musicians on the planet, which meant that there was both a clashing of egos and an easiness that came from shared levels of fame: These superstars were in the only room in the world where most of the people around them truly understood what life was like at that level of celebrity.
Does The Greatest Night in Pop live up to its premise?
The Greatest Night in Pop is after a more relaxed and celebratory version of the harried energy that director D.A. Pennebaker captured in Original Cast Album: Company, his filming of that album’s all-night recording session. Mostly, Nguyen gets it there. His doc is airy and fun, and while it narrativizes the night well, thanks in large part to Richie’s fantastic narration, it mostly has the good sense to get out of the way of the personalities that were actually in the room. This approach holds it back from being a truly great documentary: It rarely adds much context to the footage we’re seeing, beyond the backstory, and it pointedly avoids any controversy, or any criticism of even the most difficult celebrity participants. But the footage-forward approach does make the whole thing tremendously fun to watch.
Seeing Bob Dylan look uncomfortable in a sea of famous faces, Stevie Wonder joking around with Ray Charles, or Huey Lewis nervously working out a harmony is as close to unguarded as most of these stars have ever been on film. It’s a fascinating document. And the way every second of that footage is still captivating nearly 40 years later is a testament to the raw, all-encompassing, absolutely magnetic star power that everyone in that room has.
Image: Netflix
The quote that says it all
As the movie itself points out, the most important aspect of the whole night was when producer Quincy Jones posted a sign inside the recording studio that said “Check your ego at the door.” That’s what makes The Greatest Night in Pop feel special: It lets us inside the room where all-time great musicians simply felt like they were among friends and equals.
Most memeable moment
There are a number of incredible moments, like Waylon Jennings walking out of the recording studio while muttering “Ain’t no good ol’ boy ever sung in Swahili,” or Cyndi Lauper realizing that her massive necklaces were making so much noise that the microphones were picking them up alongside her voice. But if anything from this movie is going to be a meme, it’s Bob Dylan’s awkward grimace, right smack in the middle of the most famous faces in music, as he desperately tries to figure out how to sing in chorus with them. It’s incredible, and as Bob Dylan as anything could be.
Is The Greatest Night in Pop good?
Absolutely. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of documentary classics, falling short of the insight into the tortured circumstances and frustrated production of Original Cast Album: Company, or the pure musical excellence of Monterey Pop. But there’s something special about seeing these stars mingle that makes this movie a fascinating document on fame and the people behind it.
When can we see it?
The Greatest Night in Pop will be released on Netflix on Jan. 29.
While she grew up wanting to live among animals, she was actually approached to study the chimpanzees by Louis Leakey, an anthropologist whos research she was helping. Until Jane Goodall’s research, chimps were believed to be passive vegetarians and that only humans used tools.
In 2021, One Shot blasted into action fans’ hearts, making full use of Scott Adkins’ varied skill set. It’s a high-octane tactical action movie with a fun gimmick: The whole movie is designed to look like one continuous take.
The newly released sequel, One More Shot, now available everywhere you rent or purchase movies digitally,is a more confident, polished effort than the original, adding a compelling and familiar action-movie setting (an airport), more action legends (Tom Berenger and Michael Jai White), and a string of exciting fight sequences that make the most of the location, the conceit, and the talent.
One More Shot also reunites director James Nunn with Adkins and fight choreographer Tim Man, who’ve each worked with Nunn four times. But this movie is Nunn and Adkins’ most accomplished collaboration yet. Polygon spoke with Nunn about the difficulties of shooting an action movie in one take, following in the wake of Sam Mendes’ Oscar winner 1917, hiding the cuts, what he learned from the first movie, and his hopes for the future of the series.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
Polygon: As someone who’s filmed more conventional action movies, like Eliminators, what do you think is different for the audience when a movie is portrayed as one continuous take?
James Nunn: Well, it’s funny, because it started as an exercise in How can I push something? How can I be different? How can I be unique? How can I use Scott’s raw, amazing ability to the best? And how can I use my technical knowhow? So it actually started as more of an experiment in just proving to people, I’m really good technically, he’s really good physically and on camera — merge them skills, make a movie. That was where the initial pitch came from. But as time went on, and as we started filming it, honestly, I’ve kind of fallen in love with doing it this way. You realize that you’re pushing this immersion on your audience.
All movies have a ticking clock. That’s the premise of a lot of stories: You’re going from A to B, or A to Z, but it’s not about the letters, it’s about the journey between. There’s always a ticking-clock narrative, especially in action movies. Whether it’s a bomb going off or saving your loved one because she’s about to fall into acid, there’s always a timer. And I think what happens when you don’t manipulate time with cuts is, you’re actually forcing people to, almost on a subconscious level, just feel that timer a bit more, feel the urgency, and be a bit more present in it.
Now look, a lot of problems come with the style, because you can’t film Scott as the best martial artist in the world, necessarily, because you can’t do the angles that really show off what he can do. Equally, he can’t be like, spinning around doing amazing butterfly pirouette kicks, because it would just be of a different world. So the format comes with restrictions. And we know what we’re doing. We try to hold back on the flashiness and go for, like, this grounded CQC [close-quarters combat] military vibe, which fits really well. I think the elongated take of it, whether you like it or not, you’re just being sucked in.
Certain actors will really rise to the occasion and be the best you’ve ever seen, because they’re like, I don’t want to be the one in this 10-minute take who messes it up. So they switch on to this level of authenticity and focus, and you can feel that as well. But then equally, if you’ve got a slightly weaker performance, it’s harder to hide away from that.
I’ve fallen in love with it. I won’t do it forever. I will return to normal, conventional moviemaking soon, I’m sure. But I’m having a lot of fun. And I am so pleased with the reception that we’ve had.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
What did you learn from One Shot that you applied to One More Shot? The movie feels more confident — did it feel that way to you while shooting?
For sure, we did. And I say “we” because I’ve got a very solid core team who I love working with, and they’re all on the same train with me. I think the first movie, although I was confident… Look, I tried to keep it a bit of a secret in the first one, but we all know there’s hidden cuts in the movie. Don’t get me wrong, I will run a take as long as I can. There’s three reasons to break: safety, geography, or actor availability, if you have to shoot out of sequence. Those are really the reasons I cut. If not, I’ll go for as long as I can within that time frame. So you’re really looking at, like, eight- to 10-minute takes.
On the first movie, I knew we could do it, but we hadn’t done it, in that we hadn’t actually hidden cuts before. So I put a lot of the focus in the first movie on making sure that we could hide the cuts. The difference with the second movie was that weight had been lifted. We’d done it. I knew we could do it. I knew how to do it. I knew how to get myself out of a bind, even if something wasn’t working on the day and I needed to get out of it. Because we’d tried and tested it before.
So that weight had been lifted off my shoulders. So it’s like, OK, well, now I’ve actually got the time to think a bit more about being more elaborate with the camera. And also, we had a tiny bit more money on this one. So we could do stuff like hand the camera out of the car and throw the camera down a stairwell on a rig and know it would be OK. We were able to be a little bit more tricksy.
How did you manage filming at London Stansted Airport?
That was the most difficult part of this whole process, filming in the working environment of an international airport. We knew we wanted to go bigger. The fan response to the first one was overwhelmingly positive, and much more than we’d anticipated. Obviously when you set out on these ventures you believe in the movie — you have to, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. But I really wanted it to land. And it didn’t necessarily get the big push I hoped for, because of COVID at the time, but it did enough to really find an audience.
We listened to the feedback of the fans. Not necessarily the big paper reviews, but the fans. And we tried to respond to that in this movie and give them more fights, give them more hand-to-hand, give them more plot, but also make it not feel as low-budget of a location, which was something we bumped into a lot in the comments.
So once we found out we were given the lucky opportunity to go down the road for number two, we embarked on what we’re going to do, and we were like, We’re never gonna get an airport. We’re just imagining we’re gonna get, like, some private little runway. It’s gonna be rubber, it’s gonna feel low-budget anyway. So the producer, Ben Jacques, was tasked with Can you get an airport? And as if by some sort of miracle, the fourth-largest airport in England, Stansted Airport, showed an interest. They were like, Oh, we love the sound of this. Yeah, come on down. And so we did.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
So we went down and we looked, and we thought it’d be perfect. And then we wrote the script around it. But this is where it became tricky. The first movie, we had a derelict location, which we could film for 11 hours a day, no questions asked, easy-peasy. But going to Stansted came with a huge amount of restrictions, the same restrictions you face as a traveler flying internationally. You’re going through the metal detector, you’re going through the screening thing. Getting a hundred crew in with guns, with knives, with fake explosives takes an hour off your day easily.
Equally, you’ve got tourists running around waiting to catch their flights and stuff. In the U.K., you can’t fly between midnight and 4 a.m. They basically close it down so that people can sleep. And that was when we shot the movie. So we’d get in the airport at like 7 or 8 at night, do some rehearsals, have a bit of food. And then we really started kicking off between midnight and 4. It was a hard stop at 4, because the planes were coming in, or people getting on planes.
One particular night, we were in the baggage claim area, and we had a long take and an hour to go. And we’ve had months and months of meetings about this. But you know, there’s always one guy who’s never at the meetings who shows up and is like, Oh, you’ve got to wrap in 20 minutes. We managed to get two takes that were nine minutes each. The second one’s in the movie.
Everyone knows the layout of an airport, so it becomes a lot easier for the audience to ground themselves in where things are, what access-restricted locations look like, that kind of stuff. But it lets you interact more with the environment in terms of the action. What else did the airport location add to the film?
It’s kind of like how I feel about 1917. One thing we faced coming out after 1917, even though [One Shot] had originally been written before 1917, was that people struggled a little bit with the backstory. There wasn’t a huge amount of backstory being told. And the problem with doing things in real time as a one-shot thing is, you can’t stop in the middle of a fight and start calling your mom or your wife, because the audience knows what you’re doing. You’re crowbarring in a backstory, but it just starts to feel hokey and not real.
And the advantage that 1917 had over us is that the nation and the world’s collective understanding of a soldier in World War I — everybody’s studied it in school. You immediately have some idea or backstory knowledge of that soldier. So it’s not necessarily that 1917 even has more backstory than we do. But what makes a difference is that there’s this unwritten understanding of World War I that you just understand. It’s in your subconscious, generally speaking, as a Western audience.
And that’s the same, probably, with the airport. Not everybody’s seen a Guantanamo-style base [the setting of One Shot] outside of a movie. Whereas everybody knows an airport. And I think that’s where [One More Shot] heightens as well, is that we’ve gone to somewhere that you all kind of understand: Oh, there’s gonna be an escalator, there’s gonna be this, there’s gonna be that. So I think to harp on your point, I agree with you totally. And then you just start enjoying the fruits of what you can find, you’re walking around and you design the [fall] going over the rails, or fighting on the metro.
Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment
By the way, that’s my favorite fight in the movie.
Me too. We don’t cut during the fights. That’s part of the reason that Scott loves doing it as well, is that we really make him do it for two, three minutes. And what I love about the metro fight is because of all of the foreground, poles, beams, and glass, it’s actually impossible to have even put a cut in there. So that is just two physically amazing on-screen fighters [Adkins and Aaron Toney] really going for it. And I’m privileged that they did that for us on a moving train at about 30 miles per hour.
What strikes me as one of the hardest storytelling challenges of the format are the transition sequences. How did you approach getting from scene to scene within this structure?
[That’s where] the advantage of going to the location [came in]. Having a 10-page outline, finding the location, then writing the script around the location, and then doing set visits backward and forward. And also it being a [real] location, not being something we were building that people had to try and understand.
Because there’s a lot of One Shot that is actually a set. Like, we use the exterior terrain, but actually all the interiors are generally fudged together in a gym on the location. And that was much easier for [screenwriter] Jamie [Russell] to write those passages of time. And then I had a couple of actor friends come down about three months before we shot the movie, and on a GoPro, we walked every scene just for script timings.
You want to do another one of these? One Last Shot, perhaps?
Yeah, I do want to do another one. I’ve got no spoilers for you. There’s no green light yet. I’m gonna try my best and knock on every door to hopefully get us there. But there’s no news, other than the title. And it seems like the internet has found the title itself.
I mean, you set us up for it.
[Laughs] Me and the producers have talked about it in the past, but it’s sort of organically been like this little bit of a roller coaster online, which is fun and exciting. So I desperately would love to do that movie, but we’re not there yet. Let’s see.
One More Shot is available for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and Vudu.
City-building survival game Frostpunk 2 will put settlers in the same perilous conditions as the first game — in a time of ice age, where the environment becomes bleaker and bleaker. But, according to a new gameplay trailer, it looks like it will up the ante from the original game’s unforgiving, dystopian conditions. The sequel is slated to come out sometime in the first half of 2024 on PC, and will debut on Game Pass.
In Frostpunk, you manage a city of settlers in a town near London during the industrial revolution, weathering a cataclysmic environmental event. Ice storms have ravaged most of humanity; you must find a way to keep the generators for heat, while assigning workers and making constant tradeoffs in order to keep people fed, housed, and, most of all, alive. The game’s motto was “The city must survive” — your citizens believe they are some of the last living humans, and letting the generator die means freezing to death.
Frostpunk 2, which is set 30 years after the original, takes these ideas and runs with them — the city has lasted this long, the motto is now “The city must not fall.” It looks as if each of the core conceits of the original game got a glow-up. The top-down design of the city is just as vivid and picturesque. But the gameplay trailer reveals more sophisticated UI features in the building layout, including what appear to be design elements related to new heating technologies. When Frostpunk 2 was first announced in 2021, the announcement trailer noted generator technology evolved to run on oil — but that these upgrades would come at a price.
In Frostpunk 2, players must navigate political conflict and worker rebellion. It appears workers now have agency to fight back against the Steward’s — that’s you, the player — choices, in the form of voting things down. The gameplay trailer shows the inside of a civic building, in which workers vote on equal pay. The trailer also shows off a few narrative flashpoint moments, where citizens ask for specific things, or voice specific complaints: At one point, a miner named Ian Mactavish shouts “where are the homes you’ve promised.”
That might be the most frightening bit this sequel promises, honestly — being able to put faces and names to the working population. The original game gave you basically no good choices: You’re forcing people to work 18 hours, feeding them sawdust, and attempting to puzzle out whether militarism or religion is the best way to enforce adherence. It looks like in the sequel, you’ll have to face the brutal consequences of your choices.
It’s no secret that the Polygon staff loves to read. We’re genre agnostic, with tastes spanning categories such as mystery, science fiction and fantasy, literary fiction, romance, and even nonfiction, and we love manga and comics, too. But we’re also sympathetic to how hard it is to find time to do it. By the time the workday is over, you might be too exhausted to consume words on the page — or maybe you’re a parent, working hard to take care of yourself and your family. It also can be difficult to focus, with endless emails, texts, and social media notifications taking up brain space or needing immediate attention.
But there are so many different ways to add reading into your life. There’s this perception of reading as an activity that you need to dedicate discrete time and space to — that it’s uninterrupted and relaxing. Maybe that’s an accessible option for you, which is wonderful, but maybe it’s simply become difficult to focus for long stretches. Maybe you try to read before bed but keep falling asleep. Or maybe you’re busy as hell and wonder, How could I even find time to start a book, much less finish it?
We’re here to help. Some of the regular readers on the Polygon staff have shared our stories of how we’ve found time to read in the past year. We all had wildly different answers, which is to say, there are many different ways to add it to your life. We hope these ideas can serve you in your reading journey.
Start your day with a good book
Working from home is the best thing that’s happened to my reading habits. When I stopped going into the office in 2020, I suddenly had an extra hour in the morning where my commute used to be. Instead of taking this as an opportunity to sleep in, I kept the time of my morning alarm the same, giving myself a bonus hour each morning to fill however I wanted. I tried a variety of things, including yoga and long walks with my dog, but nothing set a better tone for my day than using that time to read.
To this day, once I finish getting ready for work, I make myself a cup of coffee, curl up with my cats and a cozy blanket, and read for anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. Starting my mornings this way helps me relax and feel more grounded before signing on to work, and the joy I still get from this routine nearly four years later is more than worth losing that bonus hour of sleep. —Sadie Gennis
Try a dedicated reading device
Photo: Ana Diaz/Polygon
I’ve probably written about this enough already, but I got back into reading by reading manga on my tablet using the Shonen Jump app.
I think it’s really easy to get all high and mighty about what is and isn’t worth reading, but comics are great. Reading manga before bed has become a treasured part of my evening routine, and genuinely feels like me time. My tablet doesn’t have any messaging or social media apps, so I’m not interrupted while reading and I get a nice break from the internet. It’s like a little oasis of my own every night.
Other folks have already shared variations of the golden rule for finding pleasure in reading: “Stop assigning yourself homework.” Now let’s go a step further. Try stuff that you explicitly weren’t allowed to read in school. Books are sick, and I don’t mean cool; I mean depraved.
In high school, I, like so many millennial teenagers, had my Chuck Palahniuk period. Giggle all you want, but reading novels like Survivor and Choke felt like gaining access behind the beaded curtain. You can go highbrow with Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, the tale of a pier-loitering teenage sociopath. Or you can opt for a legend of the airport bookstore, like Anne Rice. You’ve heard of Interview with the Vampire, but if you haven’t read it, trust me, you’re in for some grade-A filth. —Chris Plante
‘Having fun isn’t hard when you have a library card’
In 2023, I read more books than I had in the previous three years combined. My favorite animated aardvark knew what he was about. Moving to a place with a library less than a 10-minute walk away has been a game changer. I’d previously used apps like Libby and Overdrive, but there’s just something about waltzing into a library without knowing exactly what you’re looking for and letting the stacks whisper to you. Last year, I discovered a bunch of new favorites and also became a certified romance reader, all because I took a chance on a library book.
But while the library definitely solved my “access to books without committing to buying something that you may not like and it will take up space on your bookshelf and haunt you for years to come” problem, there’s also another hurdle to address. Even with library access, you still have to find the time to read — which can be hard, with a million shows and movies on streaming, a ton of games in my backlog to play, and other hobbies that I could be spending time on.
Last year, though, I made it a point to get off social media. It actually wasn’t that hard, considering that Twitter kinda set itself on fire and TikTok was making me so enraged that I just deleted the app. I started to use that time to read instead. It especially works for in-between moments — waiting for my pasta water to boil, or grabbing a snack and not wanting to commit to watching a television show. As much as I love to just spend hours poring over a book, that’s not the only way to read. I can get the same fix in bite-sized chunks, the same quick hit I used to get from Twitter or TikTok. It’s just as entertaining (dare I say… even more so?), without the negative side effects of doomscrolling! —Petrana Radulovic
Mix it up with an old classic or a new co-reader
A lot of things have helped me pull out of periodic reading slumps — taking recommendations from friends, tracking down old favorite authors to see what they’ve been up to, getting into ebooks and instant downloads from libraries via Libby and Hoopla, reading a lot of Book Riot for sales and recommendations. But two comparatively offbeat things spiced up my reading more than usual last year, and I’d recommend giving both of them a try.
Go back to some old favorites — I mean really old favorites.Susana Polo’s 2023 piece on Disney’s animated movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians reminded me of a writer I haven’t thought about in decades: Bill Peet, the movie’s writer and storyboarder, and the author of a huge pile of weird, wild picture booksI read in childhood. Armed with nostalgia, I hit the library and reread a bunch of those picture books — none of them were challenging or enlightening reading, obviously, but the memories they called up were a lot of fun, and they reconnected me with a different era of my connection to books. And then I got to recommend them to, and buy some of them for, my friends with young kids.
Similarly, a stray memory late last year took me back to Island of the Blue Dolphins, a favorite classic from my early reading years. It only took an hour or so to reread, and it brought back a lot of memories — and sent me off looking for more contemporary books about Native islanders, ones up to today’s standards instead of the standards of when it was written. Touching base with things I read and loved in childhood let me think more about what I like to read today, and why — and helped me think about some of the messages I internalized from books as a kid, which has been worth thinking and talking about with friends.
Read to someone else, or have someone read to you. Revisiting childhood picture books reminded me of the times I’ve read books to kids, and made me want to spend more time doing that. But we don’t put enough value on adults reading to each other. Inspired by a friend of mine who says he and his wife take turns reading A Christmas Carol to each other every holiday season, I started asking my husband to read out loud to me on long car trips. It’s a surprisingly pleasant social activity, with all the enjoyment of a good audiobook combined with the connection factor of focusing us both on the same story and making it an active process instead of a passive one.
This is a good one to try for evenings at home with a significant other or family member. Most of us who don’t have kids in the immediate family have probably gotten out of the habit of reading out loud, but it can be a really satisfying way to enjoy and engage with a story — and with someone else who’s interested in reading more, too! —Tasha Robinson
Listening is also reading
Photo illustration: James Bareham/Polygon | Source image: Netflix
Reading has always been one of my favorite pastimes, to the extent that it’s a hobby I identify with on the level of who I am as a person. But as I’ve balanced more and more responsibilities in my life, I’ve had to get more creative with how I keep reading. For the past few years, I’ve found it harder to find uninterrupted reading time — which has atrophied the muscle of being able to focus, even, with a book. I kept assuming that I’d ease back into it, but I never did. I’d sit with a book and find myself hopelessly distracted just a few pages in.
Instead, I’ve gotten really into audiobooks, which I can listen to while going on a daily walk, doing the laundry, or washing the dishes. It motivates me to actually get the chores done — I want to know what’s happening next — but it helps settle my fidgety nature, too. I’ve also started reading essay collections while my partner plays single-player video games. We both love gaming and reading, so if either of us hits an exhaustion point, we’ll simply trade: I’ll play the section he’s stuck in, and he’ll make his way through an essay in the collection. It’s a fun way of sharing media together that’s typically consumed individually. And it’s made the whole thing way more social. —Nicole Clark
Don’t forget — there are other kinds of reading out there
You want to read more books? Sorry, can’t help you there; I start way more of them than I finish, and haven’t read them regularly since college.
Would it be nice if I read more books? Sure, and maybe I’ll check out some of the suggestions from my co-workers above. But my wife and I are about to have our first child, so I don’t know that I’ll have the time or the inclination to make it through book-length works anytime soon.
What I do read a ton of, though, is journalism. I was a news junkie long before I started working in the media, but I’d say that it comprises something like 90% of what I read these days — and that’s everything from bullet-point news bites to magazine-length features. I’m not just talking about reporting here; I also mean analysis, explainers, movie/TV/game criticism, personal essays, interviews, and data journalism. I’ve always been a fundamentally curious person, and reading journalism is the main way that I learn and stay informed about the world and what’s happening in it.
Twitter used to be my primary curation tool here — I currently have nearly 180 tabs open across three Chrome windows, and the vast majority of them function as bookmarks: They’re tweets of stories that I intended to read at some point. It’s not the best strategy for actually reading more journalism, as you can see, but I do make attempts to chip away at that backlog every so often.
Something that facilitates this is that I maintain subscriptions to the New York Times (including The Athletic), the Washington Post, and The New Yorker. If you want to read more journalism, and in particular, great journalism, it helps if you can afford to pay for it! —Samit Sarkar
Where were you when Scandoval dropped? To find out why one cheating scandal dominated the zeitgeist in 2023, we have to go back in time. Ten years ago, Scheana Shay walked out of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and into the first-ever episode of Vanderpump Rules, creating an unholy lineage of mistresses that spans all the way to the now infamous March 3, 2023, TMZ headline: “TOM SANDOVAL & ARIANA MADIX CALL IT QUITS … Allegations He Cheated With Costar Raquel Leviss.” Meet the Cool Girl Ariana Madix and the endearing but toxic Tom Sandoval—Vanderpump’s most reliable couple. Until they weren’t.
Host: Jodi Walker Producers: Kaya McMullen, Andrew Gruttadaro, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Kaya McMullen Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville
Sean and Amanda react to the surprise box office hit of the weekend, Godzilla Minus One (1:00); share preliminary thoughts about Poor Things and why it’s seemingly losing steam in the awards races (18:00); and then open up the mailbag to answer your questions on all things Oscar season (32:00). Finally, they update their Best Picture power rankings (1:30:00).
Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner
Invincible has always had a knack for delivering dramatic conclusions.
In the pilot of the animated series, Mark Grayson (voiced by Steven Yeun) begins to develop superpowers, and with the guidance of his alien father, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons), Earth’s greatest hero, Mark takes up the name Invincible and becomes a superhero in his own right. But what begins as a feel-good, familiar origin story for Invincible soon becomes a sinister introduction to who Omni-Man really is: Earth’s most fearsome villain. Just as the series premiere appears to be ending, Omni-Man ambushes the superhero team known as the Guardians of the Globe and brutally kills them all.
In Invincible’s explosive first-season finale, Omni-Man shares his true motives with Mark: He’s been tasked by his homeworld Viltrum with conquering Earth and preparing its population to join the expanding Viltrum Empire. After Omni-Man fails to convince Mark to help his cause, the Viltrumite devastates Chicago and nearly kills Mark to demonstrate the futility of resistance. However, Omni-Man stops just short of ending his son’s life, and then he flees the planet without explanation.
It isn’t until the final seconds of the third episode of Season 2 that Omni-Man and Mark are reunited, as Omni-Man manages to lure Mark to a distant planet under the pretense that it needs to be saved from a meteor shower. Omni-Man’s return paves the way for another shocking ending in Episode 4, “It’s Been a While,” a midseason finale that gives Mark his greatest test yet and reestablishes the looming threat of a Viltrumite invasion.
Due to a number of factors, including the challenges of the show’s animation process and delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, more than two years elapsed between the end of Invincible’s first season in 2021 and the start of its second in early November. But the extended layoff hasn’t hurt the show: Through the first four episodes of the latest season, Invincible remains one of the best superhero programs on TV as it builds on the momentum of Omni-Man’s betrayal.
Season 2 started with something of a misdirection, one that played with the audience’s expectation to receive some answers about what happened to Omni-Man and see the continuation of his conflict with Mark. The premiere opened with Mark fighting the Immortal (Ross Marquand), only to reveal that Omni-Man was back, as he teamed up with Invincible to kill the millenia-old superhero (again). But before long it became clear that this wasn’t the show’s main version of Earth at all. It was another universe entirely, a timeline in which Mark never stood up to his father but instead joined his efforts to prepare the world for the inevitable Viltrumite takeover.
With the introduction of a dimension-hopping new character named Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown), Invincible has become yet another superhero story to enter the multiverse. Between the two Spider-Verse films, The Flash, and Marvel Studios’ Multiverse Saga (along with non-superhero projects like Everything Everywhere All at Once), the concept of the multiverse has become a well-worn narrative device in recent years that’s grown more tiresome with every misfire. Much like The Boys and its spinoff series Gen V, Invincible emerged as a standout in the crowded superhero landscape because of the ways it subverted the familiar beats and tropes of a genre that has dominated Hollywood for more than a decade. Yet in its second season, the show’s embrace of the multiverse has threatened to propel the series into all-too-familiar territory.
Fortunately, Invincible manages to maintain its novelty. While the multiverse is often used to transport heroes to parallel dimensions or bring alternate versions of the same hero together in one universe, Invincible introduces the concept by way of a villain’s origin story. Angstrom first appears in the universe that saw Mark team up with his father to conquer Earth; as he later explains, the two “heroes” team up to take over the planet in most dimensions. Angstrom’s mission starts off well intentioned: By bringing together all the versions of himself from across the multiverse, Angstrom can pool the knowledge and resources from each Earth and share the collective findings among them to solve all of their individual problems.
But when Angstrom returns to the main Invincible universe and hires the Mauler Twins (Kevin Michael Richardson) to help him transfer the memories of every one of his multiversal counterparts into his mind, Mark intervenes as the volatile process is already underway. The Maulers’ machine is destroyed during the conflict, killing everyone at the scene save for Mark, one of the Maulers, and the superpowered Angstrom, whose brain mutates amid the massive download of newfound knowledge and memories. Rather than seeking to fix every world, Angstrom instead vows to get revenge on Invincible, and begins to travel between dimensions to gather intel on how to defeat him.
After the Season 2 opener, this multiversal threat fades into the background as Mark and the so-called Global Defense Agency (GDA) write off the encounter as just another run-in with the Maulers. Angstrom’s plotline will surely resurface when Invincible returns for the second half of its latest season in early 2024, but its absence for much of the remainder of Part 1 leaves room for the series to grow in more interesting ways, grounded within its main timeline. Where Season 2 really thrives is in its narrowed focus on the show’s central characters and their adjustments to a world without a heroic Omni-Man.
Omni-Man’s betrayal and departure have created a need for a new primary protector, and Mark slowly eases his way into the role. As he starts to work for Cecil (Walton Goggins) and the GDA, all of his choices are weighed against the guilt he harbors for his father’s actions. Even though Mark opposed Omni-Man and the world knows it, he still feels as if he needs to prove to everyone—and himself—that he isn’t going to turn into the world-conquering Viltrumite he was raised by (and raised to be). Meanwhile, Mark’s mother, Debbie (Sandra Oh), bears a different kind of guilt as she tries to reckon with why she never saw through her husband’s lies in nearly 20 years of marriage. She turns to alcohol as a coping mechanism and descends into a drunken depression as she grapples with the fact that she was never more than a “pet” to the man she knew as Nolan Grayson. Without any proper outlets to channel her grief or process how she could have been partners with someone capable of inflicting such cruel and senseless destruction, Debbie spirals and grasps for some semblance of control in her life.
The character-driven nature of Invincible has always been one of the series’ strongest qualities, and the emotional beats involving Mark and Debbie work particularly well this season. Their struggles reflect lasting consequences from the first-season finale as their lives carry on, with Mark graduating high school and starting college, and Debbie navigating the transition into an empty nester on her own during her darkest hour. By delaying Omni-Man’s return until the end of the third episode, Invincible allows these characters to grow while also building up the anticipation of a potential rematch between Mark and the show’s most captivating antagonist.
The midseason finale capitalizes on the groundwork laid throughout Part 1’s first three episodes to become the strongest installment of the season. Omni-Man reveals his new life as the emperor of Thraxa, a planet inhabited by insectoids who have a lifespan of only nine months, and he introduces Mark to his wife, Andressa (Rhea Seehorn), and their child. It’s a lot for Mark to process at once, and before he can even attempt to do so, Thraxa gets invaded by a trio of Viltrumites who have been hunting down Omni-Man for deserting his post back on Earth.
“It’s Been a While” boasts some of Invincible’s trademark action mixture of stunning and grotesque violence as Mark and Omni-Man team up to defend the planet and Omni-Man’s new family. The duo defeat the Viltrumites, but the victory comes with steep costs: Mark is nearly killed, Omni-Man’s spine is snapped, and much of the Thraxan civilization is destroyed. Just as Omni-Man returns to the forefront of the story, he’s taken away in a Viltrumite ship to be brought back to his homeworld for execution. Yet even in Omni-Man’s limited screen time, Invincible shows how much he, too, has grown as a character. He killed thousands of civilians in Chicago in the first season simply to convey to Mark how little their brief lives mattered in the grand scheme of things, and here he defies his fellow Viltrumites to defend a planet of beings whose entire life cycles last less than a calendar year.
Mark is spared by the Viltrumites so that he can return to Earth and supposedly assume his father’s role in preparing humanity for the Empire’s invasion, which sets up the second half of the eight-episode season. What with all of the other ongoing story lines in Invincible, including Angstrom’s multiversal revenge spree, the Coalition of Planets’ growing efforts to quell the Viltrum Empire in the far reaches of space, and Atom Eve’s (Gillian Jacobs) journey of self-discovery after giving up crime fighting, Season 2 can feel a little scattered as it divides its time among its moving parts. But the fourth episode reminds the audience what’s at stake by refocusing on the central conflict between Mark and Omni-Man, and the impending Viltrumite invasion, just as Invincible enters another hiatus.
Amazon Prime Video has yet to announce exactly when the series will return next year, but the streaming service already renewed the show for a third season back in 2021, and the surprise release of a stand-alone Atom Eve prequel special in late July could be the first of many of its kind. With a growing cast of dynamic characters (and an absurd wealth of talent voicing them), the Invincible universe is expanding. And as long as the series continues to develop those characters so deftly amid the chaos of the multiverse around them, there may be no limit to the narrative heights Invincible can reach.
The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessey to rewatch the 1982 romantic drama An Officer and a Gentleman, starring Richard Gere, Debra Winger, and Louis Gossett Jr.
/EIN News/ — PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 07, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — 180 Life Sciences Corp. (NASDAQ: ATNF) (“180 Life Sciences” or the “Company”), today announced that an agreement has been reached with Prof. Avi Domb of the Hebrew University, School of Pharmacy, and with Prof. Elyad Davidson, of Hadassah Hospital, to perform a clinical pharmacology (“Pharmacokinetic” or “PK”) study of the uptake of cannabidiol (CBD) in a formulation which can be delivered as a pill orally. The PK study will seek to determine how much CBD is taken up into the blood of volunteers.
While CBD preparations have previously been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for rare forms of childhood epilepsy, a major problem in working with CBD is its low and unpredictable and variable uptake following the most convenient delivery form, by mouth, as CBD in oil. This has hampered progress and clinical trials seeking potential uses for CBD, such as for the treatment of pain, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), head trauma, and more, where reports have suggested the possibility of benefits. To help try to solve this problem, Prof. Domb and colleagues have developed “ProNanoLipospheres” (PNL), a mixture of components available over-the-counter, which form little droplets and have been shown to be absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract into blood. The dosage form has been shown in preliminary testing in rats to…
In April the city of San Francisco created an app asking for the publics help locating the “rare instances” of human feces found in public spaces (streets, parks, etc.) Tag it for “immediate” clean up. This map shows day 3 of the project, which was canceled 11 days later.
I just learned that the original voice for Crash Bandicoot passed away earlier this year back in March. Dude didn’t just voice crash either he pretty much voice most of the original cast from N. Brio, N. Gin, Cortex(just crash 1) and tiny. RIP
COLVILLE, WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES , April 14, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — Author Greg Simons’ latest novel, “Yakov’s Run,” is a thrilling and immersive historical tale that takes readers on a journey through the 14th century Holy Roman Empire.
In this engaging and atmospheric novel, Michael Simons, a widower seeking to rediscover his roots, is linked to the past through the story of Yakov Symons, a young farmer living in the Holy Roman Empire in the 14th century. Yakov’s life takes a dramatic turn when he is forced into bondage and enlisted in a conflict he knows nothing about. Along the way, he meets the infamous Petres the Chain and the enigmatic Der Flechtemann, a near-mythical figure on a mission to liberate the people from the chains of feudal hierarchies and institutionalized poverty.
Simons’ vivid portrayal of the Holy Roman Empire paints a picture of a dark and bleak world, where life is always on the brink of death, and the horsemen of the apocalypse stand witness to the age. But amidst this darkness, there is still hope, and the mysterious monk who knows so much of these events may hold the key to unlocking the past and the future.
“‘Yakov’s Run’ is a gripping and enthralling historical thriller that will take readers on a journey they won’t forget,” said Simons. “I wanted to explore the realities of life in the Holy Roman Empire and the struggles that people faced, while also weaving in elements of mystery, intrigue,…
Support the Agreement to End Hostilities, 2012, former prison artist Michael D. Russell
Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern sign the Good Friday Agreement on 10 April 1998
MinisterKingXPyeface putting his arm around fellow prison abolitionist Angela Davis.
Self portrait of prison artist C-Note
MinisterKingXPyeface contemplating on his dream to go from the KAGE to the STAGE.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the California Prisoner Racial Groups Agreement to End Hostilities of 2012 are examples of successful conflict resolution.
SILICON VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, April 8, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — On April 11-12, 2023, US President Joe Biden will travel to the UK and Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday accord. The Good Friday Agreement (GFA), was signed a quarter century ago, as a US brokered agreement to help end decades of deadly sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
Last year, in 2012, marked the 10 year anniversary of the Agreement to End Hostilities (AEH). The AEH was an agreement amongst California prisoners being housed in the most extreme form of long-term solitary confinement, Pelican Bay State Prison’s Short Corridor.
The AEH was an agreement between the various ethnic groups in the Short Corridor to end racial violence amongst California’s General population housed prisoners,…
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com.
AutoNation, Inc. engages in the provision of automotive products and services. It operates through the following segments: Domestic, Import, Premium Luxury, and Corporate & Other. The Domestic segment comprises retail automotive franchises that sell new vehicles manufactured by General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. The Import segment includes retail automotive franchises that sell new vehicles manufactured primarily by Toyota, Honda, Subaru, and Nissan. The Premium Luxury segment consists of retail automotive franchises that sell new vehicles manufactured primarily by Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Lexus, and Jaguar Land Rover. The franchises in each segment also sell used vehicles, parts and automotive repair and maintenance services, and automotive finance and insurance products. The Corporate & Other segment comprises other businesses, including collision centers, AutoNation USA used vehicle stores, auction operations, and parts distribution centers. The company was founded by Steven Richard Berrard and Harry Wayne Huizenga Sr. in 1991 and is headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
PANAMA CITY — An international wildlife conference moved to enact some of the most significant protection for shark species targeted in the fin trade and scores of turtles, lizards and frogs whose numbers are being decimated by the pet trade.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known by its initials as CITES, ended Friday in Panama. In a record for the conference, delegates enacted protections for over 500 species. The United Nations wildlife conference also rejected a proposal to reopen the ivory trade. An ivory ban was enacted in 1989.
“The Parties to CITES are fully aware of their responsibility to address the biodiversity loss crisis by taking action to ensure that the international trade in wildlife is sustainable, legal and traceable,” Secretary-General Ivonne Higuero said in a statement.
“Trade underpins human well-being, but we need to mend our relationship with nature,” she said. “The decisions coming from this meeting will serve the interests of conservation and wildlife trade, that doesn’t threaten the existence of species of plants and animals in the wild, for future generations.”
The international wildlife trade treaty, which was adopted 49 years ago in Washington, D.C., has been praised for helping stem the illegal and unsustainable trade in ivory and rhino horns as well as in whales and sea turtles.
But it has come under fire for its limitations, including its reliance on cash-strapped developing countries to combat illegal trade that’s become a lucrative $10 billion-a-year business.
One of the biggest achievement this year was increasing or providing protection for more than 90 shark species, including 54 species of requiem sharks, the bonnethead shark, three species of hammerhead shark and 37 species of guitarfish. Many had never before had trade protection and now, under Appendix II, the commercial trade will be regulated.
Global shark populations are declining, with annual deaths due to fisheries reaching about 100 million. The sharks are sought mostly for their fins, which are used in shark fin soup, a popular delicacy in China and elsewhere in Asia.
“These species are threatened by the unsustainable and unregulated fisheries that supply the international trade in their meat and fins, which has driven extensive population declines,” Rebecca Regnery, senior director for wildlife at Humane Society International, said in a statement. “With Appendix II listing, CITES Parties can allow trade only if it is not detrimental to the survival of the species in the wild, giving these species help they need to recover from over-exploitation.”
The conference also enacted protections for dozens of species of turtle, lizard and 160 amphibian species including glass frogs whose translucent skin made them a favorite in the pet trade. Several species of song birds also got trade protection as well as 150 tree species.
“Already under immense ecological pressure resulting from habitat loss, climate change and disease, the unmanaged and growing trade in glass frogs is exacerbating the already existing threats to the species,” Danielle Kessler, the U.S. country director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said in a statement. “This trade must be regulated and limited to sustainable levels to avoid compounding the multiple threats they already face.”
But some of the more controversial proposals weren’t approved.
Some African countries and conservation groups had hoped to ban the trade in hippos. But it was opposed by the European Union, some African countries and several conservation groups, who argue many countries have healthy hippo populations and that trade isn’t a factor in their decline.
“Globally cherished mammals such as rhinos, hippos, elephants and leopards didn’t receive increased protections at this meeting while a bunch of wonderful weirdos won conservation victories,” Tanya Sanerib, international legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “In the midst of a heart-wrenching extinction crisis, we need global agreement to fight for all species, even when it’s contentious.”
An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants are separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle, commonly known as a “death spiral” because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion.
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