ReportWire

Tag: reviews

  • The Amazfit Balance Has a Wonky Heart In a Pretty Shell

    The Amazfit Balance Has a Wonky Heart In a Pretty Shell

    [ad_1]

    Of all the fitness trackers that I’ve tested, none has made a bigger leap in hardware development than Amazfit. The first iterations that I tried in 2018 were plasticky and horrible. Every year, the wearable has gotten steadily, well, more wearable. A coworker recently asked if my tester Balance was a Samsung Galaxy Watch6 (7/10, WIRED Recommends). That’s high praise!

    The Balance is Amazfit’s general purpose fitness tracker, aimed at promoting “wellness of body and mind.” It looks … well, it looks like a Galaxy Watch6, with a slightly different top button, and ideally it would work in the same way by tracking your sleep, heart rate, and activities, as well as taking your calls. It also comes with a bevy of optional AI-powered tools to help you sleep, meditate, and exercise. Right now, though, it’s just still too buggy, which is especially obvious with a seamlessly functioning tester Garmin on my opposite wrist.

    Red Flag

    As with most fitness trackers, I check the company’s privacy policy to see how it will use such intimate information. It’s usually easy to find, and it usually looks similar to Google’s—no data used for ads, et cetera. The Balance’s privacy policy is unusually hard to find. According to Amazfit’s website, the privacy policy explicitly does not apply to Amazfit trackers, nor does Zepp Health’s policy. There’s no privacy policy in the product manual, either. I asked Amazfit for a link to the privacy policy that applies to this tracker and got no response.

    Even if everything is aboveboard, the company has made it very difficult to find out what’s happening to your data. If that matters to you, you should probably stop reading here.

    With that said, the Balance is a very light, good-looking, and low-profile fitness tracker. Despite having such a big case—46 mm across, 10.6 mm deep—it didn’t feel large or obtrusive on my 150-mm wrist. The bezel is sleek gray aluminum, and it has two buttons on the left hand side to control it, as well as a tempered glass AMOLED touchscreen.

    Photograph: Adrienne So

    The screen is clear, bright, and responsive—maybe a little too responsive. It started and stopped workouts accidentally whenever I fidgeted with my jacket cuffs in Oregon’s cold, gray weather. The battery life theoretically lasts 14 days, but with a few tracked activities per day (walking my dog, running, indoor workouts), I did have to charge it once in the past two weeks. It charged relatively quickly, though—it went from 15 to 65 percent capacity in the 45 minutes that I was waiting for a plane at the airport.

    It has a water resistance rating of 5 ATM, which means that you can use it while swimming (if not while taking a shower, weirdly). (By way of contrast, my favorite Garmin Instinct 2 is rated to 10 ATM, and I have used it snorkeling and surfing without issue.)

    Like most higher-end fitness trackers these days, it comes with a bevy of sensors and tools. These include onboard GPS with dual-band positioning that helps the tracker filter out environmental noise; an acceleration sensor, gyroscope, ambient light sensor, temperature sensor, and a couple of biometric sensors for measuring your heart rate and blood oxygen and so forth. It also has a microphone and an incredibly loud speaker, and my favorite, most comfortable nylon strap.

    Add It Up

    Amazfit is owned by Zepp, formerly known as Huami, and the app that the Balance uses is Zepp Health. Zepp Health used to be almost unusably annoying, but the app’s homepage has been cleaned up quite a bit. Zepp Health now features a Readiness score, which is similar to that of Fitbit’s Daily Readiness or Garmin’s Body Battery, but you can still check the company’s previous general purpose metric, which was PAI. The company developed its PAI score using the research of Ulrik Wisløff, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It uses your age, sex, resting heart rate, and past seven days of heart rate data to calculate just how much activity you should be getting.

    Screenshot of Amazfit Balance App. Left Stats on readiness steps sleep and more. Right Chatbot conversation.

    Photograph: Adrienne So

    [ad_2]

    Adrienne So

    Source link

  • Elon Musk Might Be Right About Eight Sleep’s Temperature-Regulating Pod 3 Cover

    Elon Musk Might Be Right About Eight Sleep’s Temperature-Regulating Pod 3 Cover

    [ad_1]

    With celebrity endorsements from Elon Musk and Danny Green generating plenty of biohacking buzz, you may have heard of Eight Sleep’s Pod 3 Cover. It’s a mattress cover that can heat or cool your bed to help you sleep better. You can tweak the temperature in the Eight Sleep app or have the autopilot mode adjust it automatically, and the Pod 3 can provide in-depth, accurate sleep tracking.

    To unlock the smarts of this system, including autopilot and sleep tracking, you need an expensive subscription (from $15 per month), and that’s on top of the astronomical asking price (from $2,045). The UK Super King cover I tested costs £2,495 (around $3,175), which is far more than I could ever justify spending on a gadget like this. (The US equivalent is a Queen, roughly $2,145.)

    High prices and billionaire endorsements are a turn-off for me, so I approached the Eight Sleep Pod 3 with a healthy dose of skepticism. Turns out rich people have nice things. Closing in on a month with the Pod 3, I’m a grudging convert. It is far too expensive, and I don’t need another subscription in my life; not to mention there are some quirks I’m not keen on. But my wife and I have both been sleeping better, and that kind of trumps everything else.

    Make Your Bed

    The Eight Sleep Pod 3 is a thick mattress cover with a network of rubber tubing inside and a soft, plush black material on top. It is elasticized for a snug fit on your mattress, but I’d advise enlisting some help to fit it. There’s a sticker to ensure you put it on the right way around with the connectors at the top. The brushed fleece top is soft, and I found the cover very comfortable. It doesn’t feel as though it’s filled with tubes with sensors.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    A device that resembles a desktop PC with a big 8 on the front connects to the cover via a double tube. I slipped mine next to my bedside cabinet. This unit is the brains of the operation, with a quad-core CPU inside, and it pumps chilled or heated water through the mattress cover.

    Hooking up the app and Wi-Fi was a five-minute job; the app walks you through every step. The first time you set it up, you need to fill the Pod 3 with water. A cylinder slides out of the top with a clear fill line. You have to do this a couple of times, and it takes around 90 minutes after each fill to pump the water into the system and calibrate, so don’t start the installation right before bedtime.

    The cover has two distinct sides, so your partner can configure different settings, which is ideal if one of you runs cold and the other warm. It was easy to invite my wife from the app, so we could both control the Pod 3 from our phones. It took maybe four hours to prime the system, but most of that was waiting.

    Logging Some Z’s

    On my first night with the Pod 3 Cover, I slept like a log. My sleep score was 100. Like, actually 100. I fell asleep in less than five minutes and got seven hours and 55 minutes of blissful slumber. I woke refreshed and bounded out of bed, ready to tackle the day. This is rare for me. I usually take up to an hour to drop off and frequently wake through the night. But this auspicious start was not to last.

    Dark grey mattress on light wooden bedframe. Black towershaped device placed on the floor between the bed and nightstand.

    Photograph: Simon Hill

    [ad_2]

    Simon Hill

    Source link

  • 3 Body Problem is the kind of TV epic we need

    3 Body Problem is the kind of TV epic we need

    [ad_1]

    When Game of Thrones ended in May 2019, the hunt was well underway for a series that could match its blockbuster scale. HBO was already talking spinoffs with George R.R. Martin, while Netflix’s The Witcher, Disney’s The Mandalorian, Apple’s Foundation, Paramount Plus’ Halo, and Amazon’s mega-budgeted gambit on a Lord of the Rings prequel bubbled at various stages of development and production. Five years later, all the shows exist — but there’s no clear champion. Even reactions to HBO’s prequel, House of the Dragon, were more golf-clap acclaim than calls of the second coming of a franchise.

    What the wannabe successors proved (that everyone seemed to know at the time except IP-hungry executives?) is that Thrones’ secret wasn’t scale, but substantive drama. A great show needs characters with big questions and big goals, but down-to-earth emotions. The balance of a continent could hinge on valiant knights and ancient prophecy and dragon battles as long as when those involved got mad, it felt like actual people getting mad. For all the finale-related flack, Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were afforded the time and space to adapt the human side of Martin’s sprawling narrative as well as its set-pieces. So it’s no surprise that while the rest of Hollywood chased tentpoles, Benioff and Weiss set their boyhood dreams of making a Star Wars movie aside (phew, crisis averted) to cash their chips on a deal where they could demand time and space and quality work that didn’t involve swordplay.

    And they actually did it: Teaming up with veteran TV writer Alexander Woo (The Terror season 2), their new Netflix series 3 Body Problem, like Thrones, feels epic in scale while probing the messiness of human instinct. Movies like Interstellar and Solaris ventured into deep space to confront our innate spirituality, but 3 Body Problem season 1 sticks close to home to the benefit of its characters, who juggle romantic relationships and work-life stress and impending doom. Still, there is something extraterrestrial out there in the universe, a cosmic unknown. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo treat that promise like a chemical pipetted into a petri dish. Just a few drops of knowledge cause an instant reaction with consequences that will only be felt hundreds of years in the future.

    Image: Netflix

    The showrunner trio adapts Liu Cixin’s famed Remembrance of Earth’s Past science fiction trilogy with both reverence and an eye toward storytelling economics. The core drama of 3 Body Problem season 1, focused on a set of physicists out to understand what the hell is going on in the universe, weaves together people, places, and things from across all three books in order to be propulsively paced while easily digested. Die-hard readers may miss Liu’s dense “far out, man”-core style, but the pillar moments remain. Early episodes bounce from China’s Cultural Revolution to present-day London to virtual reality landscapes that hold the key to greater mysteries. The prickly politics of solving Earth’s perilous future simmer across timelines. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo don’t dumb any of it down as they tear through the plot, relying on genre conventions to keep it all watchable. (British mysteries like Broadchurch and Happy Valley feel as much part of the show’s DNA as any sci-fi series.)

    Perhaps a 10- or 12-episode season would have made room for deeper character work, but the writers are pros at making every line of dialogue illustrative of their characters’ deeper motivations, and every silent gesture — staring at the stars, gasping at equations, even watching a kid play Mortal Kombat — speaks volumes. Unlike recent Netflix adaptations that have crammed long narratives into uncompromising run times by removing all downtime “filler,” 3 Body Problem is full of humanity’s quirks. The show has religious zealots, anxious nerds, quiet romantics, and Benedict Wong as a no-bullshit cop. There is a lot of mumbo-jumbo about quantum physics and gravitational interaction, but also one of the best on-screen meet-my-family awkward dinner dates in recent memory.

    Doing the Lord’s work is actor Jess Hong, a relative newcomer and the nexus of all of 3 Body Problem’s narrative strands. In a cast full of Game of Thrones veterans and big-screen talent like Wong and Eiza González (Baby Driver, Godzilla vs. Kong), Hong takes on the burden of making all of the show’s otherworldly turns feel totally natural. Whether her character, Jin, is sipping a beer and making pub chat or navigating the immersive third level of the least fun virtual puzzle game ever invented, she reflects an authentic reality that’s increasingly tested by the show’s oddities. 3 Body Problem ultimately questions whether we deserve the planet we have so often fucked up. Hong’s Jin, in all her ups and downs, glimmers with the kind of humanity that we want to believe in.

    Jess Hong as Jin wearing Victorian era clothing and holding up an apple in a throne room

    Jess Hong as Jin
    Photo: Ed Miller/Netflix

    It really helps that Netflix didn’t skimp on 3 Body Problem, which, for all its character drama, goes big when it needs to go big. Benioff and Weiss’ clout has bought them the kind of top-tier production value that I thought only David Fincher commanded; flashbacks to the 1960s/’70s China feel rich in detail, while scenes set in the present-day drama have a refined look, rather than the cheap digital sheen that’s plagued so many post-Fincher Netflix projects. Anyone haunted by awful renderings of VR in movies and TV will be relieved by the show’s intentionally uncanny, often fantastical digital worlds that look like actual Unreal Engine survival-game backdrops. And when 3 Body Problem kicks into a high sci-fi gear, the show gets truly mind-bending — and often gnarly. The giddy provocateurs who orchestrated the Red Wedding are absolutely at the helm of this series.

    I’m a little in awe of 3 Body Problem. Liu’s books are like a character study of humanity itself; there is inherently too much to chew on. But Benioff, Weiss, and Woo came ready to cook. Their adaptation is gripping from the start and already prioritizing the pieces needed for a coherent endgame. From the trilogy’s pages of information they’ve carved out a visual story, dazzling and frightening. There are nits to pick from episode to episode, leaps in logic that may not stand up to scrutiny, but it’s a show that, unlike the Game of Thrones imitators, swept me up. Most of those shows settled on escapism. 3 Body Problem feels like a true escape, an excuse to wonder about the vastness of the cosmos from the comfort of the couch and wonder, What if?

    3 Body Problem premieres on Netflix on March 21.

    [ad_2]

    Matt Patches

    Source link

  • The Santa Cruz Skitch Ebike Won My Heart but Not My Wallet

    The Santa Cruz Skitch Ebike Won My Heart but Not My Wallet

    [ad_1]

    I stopped monitoring the range after about 30 miles, but the battery indicator on the top tube said that I still had about 30 percent of the battery left. (I weigh 115 pounds, so your mileage may vary.) You can also select drop handlebars if you plan on doing more bike commuting, or add suspension to a setup with flat bars if you want to ride more rocks and bumps. My tester also had a dropper seat post, which lets me raise or drop the seat as I come to stoplights or go up hills. I am pretty sure every bike (commuter, mountain, everything) should have one.

    Too Hot to Handle

    Photograph: Will Matsuda

    There is one major drawback to having a gorgeous, expensive bike that can go anywhere and do anything. When your bike is your primary mode of transportation, you do things like leaving it locked up in front of the Grocery Outlet (known locally as “the Gross Out”) to run errands. Even with all the best security measures, I really cannot make myself do that with a $7,000 bike. If you’re going to use it as a bike commuter, you are probably biking 12 miles to an office with a locked, indoor bike garage, then straight home to your own garage. You are not taking it as a car substitute to karaoke night at the dive bar.

    I have also read on Reddit that people have concerns about the Fazua system, as it’s much less common here in the United States and harder to fix. You could go with a Bosch or a Shimano, but it won’t be as light. I have decided not to care about this. In general, you’re probably going to have to go directly to the manufacturer or dealer to get an electric bike fixed, anyway.

    The app is just meh. It’s not pleasant to look at or navigate, and it’s always telling me to update, urgently, in a process that’s much less intuitive than Specialized’s Mission Control. Mission Control is also a little more useful, as it will automatically adjust the power output to help you make it home. However, the Skitch is light enough that it doesn’t really matter if you run out of battery. The app may also improve dramatically in the upcoming years, as Santa Cruz has direct and continuing input on the app’s development.

    [ad_2]

    Adrienne So

    Source link

  • Imaginary is a mess of a horror movie, and not in the fun way

    Imaginary is a mess of a horror movie, and not in the fun way

    [ad_1]

    It’s hard to know where to start in describing how bad Imaginary is. The new horror movie from Blumhouse and director Jeff Wadlow (Kick-Ass 2) starts with the simple but promising premise of a haunted stuffed animal and a malicious imaginary friend, but its bland characters, muddy storytelling, and lack of scares leave behind a movie more lifeless than a teddy bear with no stuffing.

    Imaginary’s mess of a story begins with a woman named Jessica (She’s Gotta Have It and Jurassic World Dominion’s DeWanda Wise) and her new husband, Max (Tom Payne), waking up after one of Jessica’s recurring nightmares. She’s being chased through a long hallway by a giant spider, who also happens to be the main villain in the children’s books she writes. The couple quickly decide that it’s time for them and Max’s two kids from a previous marriage, teenage Taylor (Taegen Burns) and much younger Alice (Pyper Braun), to move into Jessica’s childhood home, in hopes that the familiar setting will cure her of her nightmares. Max’s kids aren’t too happy about the move, though it isn’t quite clear how far they’re going or what their specific objection is.

    It isn’t really clear whether we’re supposed to believe Jessica wants to get along with her new stepdaughters, or if her rudeness to them is an accidental problem of the script and the performance. Either way, after a few days in the house, Jessica ignores Alice by sneaking out of the house during a game of hide-and-seek in order to take a work call, leaving Alice to explore the basement and find Chauncey the creepy teddy bear.

    Photo: Parrish Lewis/Lionsgate

    Chauncey quickly becomes Alice’s new imaginary friend, who she talks to constantly and takes with her everywhere. This part of the plot strongly evokes M3GAN, without ever getting near that movie’s knowing sense of fun. All this setup happens by about 10 minutes into the movie, and it’s also where the coherent details of the plot end.

    [Ed. note: The rest of this story contains significant spoilers for Imaginary. The good news is, reading about them is much more fun than sitting through all 104 minutes of the movie.]

    Chauncey’s arrival should also usher creepiness into Imaginary, but the movie gets so diverted by trying to piece together a story out of its myriad meaningless plot threads that it doesn’t have much time to dedicate to actual horror. In one scene, for instance, the children’s biological mother shows up at Jessica’s house without warning, attacks Jessica, reveals that she seems to psychically know there’s something evil in the house, gets arrested, then disappears for the entire rest of the movie. This scene is never brought up again.

    Shortly after that, Max just leaves his children with their new, clearly not up-to-the-task stepmom so he can go on a seemingly indefinite tour with his band. There’s also a creepy neighbor who just happens to have a fully illustrated academic textbook on imaginary friends that seems tailor-made for a lazy exposition scene. The movie even throws in two separate child-abuse plotlines that it eventually just shrugs off when they aren’t useful anymore.

    It’s tempting to try to read into this labyrinth of digressions to try to find some kind of meaning or intention, but Imaginary never makes that feel worthwhile. There isn’t a single character in the movie who feels worth rooting for, and the performances are entirely devoid of charisma. The script, written by Wadlow, Jason Oremland, and Greg Erb, is full of wooden dialogue that’s stiff and often feels almost completely nonsensical. Characters sometimes introduce new information like it’s a fact the audience has known forever.

    At other times, they treat seemingly obvious plot points like major, unguessable reveals — like when we find out that Chauncey once belonged to Jessica. None of these plot threads ever amount to much, and most of them are just left dangling by the end of the movie. If the filmmakers don’t care about them, why should we?

    A young girl played by Pyper Braun sits at the top of the stairs next to a teddy bear while an ominous shadowy figure lurk behind her in Imaginary

    Photo: Parrish Lewis/Lionsgate

    But as with any horror movie, most of this disaster could be overlooked if only the story was scary. Instead, that’s where its failures become most apparent. Imaginary doesn’t bring a single original idea to the horror genre. It’s entirely paint-by-numbers filmmaking that never even manages to create tension, let alone fear. Characters look under beds while the cloying score brings in a swell of strings to beg us to feel something. Chauncey moves on his own a time or two, and even transforms into a monstrous bear, but the scenes are lit so badly that the effect just looks cheap and underbaked rather than remotely terrifying. Watching sequences this rote is soul-crushing for a horror fan, and they make the moments where the movie slows down for its next attempt at a scare feel like they drag on for ages.

    The one briefly interesting sequence comes in the final third of the movie, when Alice has been tricked into visiting the world of the imaginary friends, and Jessica and Taylor have to rescue her. This world floats in darkness, and its only solid ground is a checkerboard floor in an endless hallway of doors. Sections of the world form staircases to nowhere, dead ends that drop into an abyss, and doors that seem to float upside down.

    None of these visuals are wholly original — they take aim at the middle ground between Twin Peaks’ Red Room and a Scooby-Doo chase scene, without any of the fun that combination implies. But even without originality, it’s far and away the best visual of the movie. Sadly, for most of their time in this world, the characters just charge blindly into doors and end up in the same boring rooms we’ve seen in the rest of the movie, each one shot essentially the same as it was in the real world, just a little bit darker.

    Imaginary didn’t have a high bar to clear. In a year that’s been lacking interesting horror movies so far, with the other Blumhouse entry Night Swim as the only real bright spot, all this movie ever really needed to be was some silly fun with a few good scares. Instead, it gets lost in a maze of awful storytelling and frustrating characters, all without offering anything more than the stock-standard horror tropes that have been done better in a million other movies.

    Imaginary is in theaters on March 8.

    [ad_2]

    Austen Goslin

    Source link

  • TCL’s Slim, Roku Ready Soundbar Is Uninspiring

    TCL’s Slim, Roku Ready Soundbar Is Uninspiring

    [ad_1]

    Swapping between the bar’s multiple inputs is slightly more intuitive, with a different LED color assigned to each input: HDMI ARC glows magenta, optical is yellow, the analog input is green, and the USB input is cyan. This color coding has become more common in A/V gear of late, usually seen in active/powered bookshelf speakers like the KEF LSX II where space is at a premium. In the Q6310’s case, the bar’s center-channel speaker likely takes up the real estate a traditional digital display might inhabit.

    Another likely reason TCL punts on the visual display is that, as a Roku TV Ready soundbar, the Q6310 is designed to allow you to control and adjust some settings directly from a Roku-powered smart TV. That functionality stems from a long partnership between the two brands, with Roku taking the reins as the smart interface in many TCL TVs (though TCL now seems to favor Google TV for its more premium models).

    Photograph: Ryan Waniata

    If you don’t have a Roku-powered TV, TCL’s app makes controlling the bar’s sound modes, volume, and other settings much easier via an iPhone or Android device. Other app settings include a Night Mode to keep the dynamics in check when the family’s asleep, a Dialogue Enhance feature, and virtual surround sound control.

    There’s also a calibration feature, AI Sonic, which uses your phone’s microphone to adjust the sound to your room, à la Sonos. That’s an impressive inclusion at this price, but the setup experience is quite loud and I couldn’t hear much of a difference once finished.

    Aluminum Punch

    TCL Q6310 Soundbar

    Photograph: Ryan Waniata

    My first thought when I started evaluating the Q6310 was that it doesn’t sound much better than a lot of high-end TVs I’ve auditioned this year. The sound is clear and forward, especially for dialogue, but there’s a brittle, metallic quality to the midrange and treble registers that can feel as thin as the soundbar looks. To be fair, a lot of pricier TVs these days are outfitted with multiple speakers like soundbars are, so comparing the two isn’t as big of a diss as it once was.

    [ad_2]

    Ryan Waniata

    Source link

  • The Diletta Bello Proves There Are No Shortcuts to Great Espresso

    The Diletta Bello Proves There Are No Shortcuts to Great Espresso

    [ad_1]

    When an espresso machine costs over $1,500, it can be trickier to test than cheaper models. It’s sort of like testing a high-end camera. At the very least, it should shoot good photos, maybe even great photos. The rest of the evaluation is less on its performance of basic functions than how well it performs those functions over time, how well it responds to you as a photographer, and how good it looks. I spent about 90 days with the Diletta Bello, and during that time I’d have to say it nailed three out of three.

    Any espresso machine in this price range should pull near-perfect shots right out of the box, and the Bello did not disappoint on that front. Within an hour of unboxing it, running water through it, and finding a good place on my counter for it, I was watching golden-brown espresso pour into a demitasse cup. The crema built up in a smooth, swirly layer and before I even brought it to my lips, I knew the Bello and I would get along during our time together.

    Crème de la Crema

    I’m a sucker for a bottomless portafilter, and machines like the Bello are the reason why. As soon as you flip the hefty, mechanical-feeling lever to begin pulling the shot, the machine begins to produce a rich, aerated, amber and earth-colored shot that builds up beneath a layer of crema. With a shot glass, you can really see it build up; it looks like someone pouring a Guinness. Tiny bubbles roiling beneath the surface, only to rise and become a part of the foamy cloud bank resting on top of a dense, bittersweet elixir.

    I actually got lucky with those first shots, because if your grind is off by even a bit the Bello will misfire. If your grind is too fine, it’ll whirr and struggle to push out a trickle of too-bitter coffee into your cup. If your grind is too coarse, water will shoot through the portafilter like it didn’t touch the coffee at all, filling your cup with an undrinkably weak coffee-adjacent water product that tastes like someone poured the drip tray into your cup.

    To be fair, this isn’t an entirely uncommon result when you’re using a high-end espresso machine. They can be finicky. The Bello even has an analog pressure gauge, which is super helpful for diagnosing issues with your shots: Low pressure and a fast pour means your coffee is too coarse; high pressure but a slow pour means your coffee is too fine or packed too tight.

    But the Bello’s favorite grind size was easy enough to find because it is so persnickety. If your grind is wrong, it will tell you. I like to err on the side of too fine, with a firm tamp, and then step up the coarseness over the course of a couple rounds of shots to get it dialed in just right. For me, I found that the machine does well with a grind that’s a little finer than the consistency of granulated white sugar, and a firm (but not heavy) tamp. We’re not trying to crush this thing under a hydraulic press, just press it down slow till it feels like there’s not any give left.

    Knobs and Levers

    Photograph: Diletta Espresso

    This is an espresso machine for tinkerers, and it looks the part. The front panel features a solid metal off-on switch that clicks with a satisfying chunk sound. There are also two articulated metal wands, one for steam and one for hot water. Their range of motion never felt restrictive, and they’re easy to move into place or out of the way, depending on what you’re doing. The steam wand’s maneuverability makes it easy to get it into just the right position to swirl your milk into a creamy microfoam.

    [ad_2]

    Jaina Grey

    Source link

  • ‘Red Right Hand’ Review: Orlando Bloom Tries and Fails

    ‘Red Right Hand’ Review: Orlando Bloom Tries and Fails

    [ad_1]

    Orlando Bloom hasn’t been around for a while; now I know why. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

    Red Right Hand, another routine crime-thriller with a title that makes no sense, is a violent and nauseating excuse to entertain the portion of what is left of that dwindling movie audience that lives for nothing more than a lot of posing, crunching and muscle-flexing, not always in the same order. I’ve managed to assign it one star for the risky surprises offered by Orlando Bloom and Andie MacDowell to observe the lengths they go to in hopelessly miscast roles tackled for only one reason: to prove they can act. They fail, but at least they try.

    RED RIGHT HAND ★ (1/4 stars)
    Directed by: Eshom Nelms, Ian Nelms
    Written by:Jonathan Easley
    Starring: Orlando Bloom, Andie MacDowell, Scott Haze, Chapel Oaks
    Running time: 111 mins.

    Mr. Bloom was never much of an actor anyone would applaud or praise. He plays a hard, scarred, working farmer in the backwoods of Appalachia named Cash. The farm was once a prosperous property owned by his late little sister, but now it’s facing bankruptcy because of neglect and poor management by his alcoholic brother-in-law Finney (Scott Haze). Cash has come on board to try and save what’s left of his sister’s land, improving the life of her bright teenage daughter Savannah (newcomer Chapel Oaks), supervising her education, and encouraging her Sunday morning regularity in church. Things progress slowly but positively until the fatal interference of a vicious, ruthless and consummately evil crime boss called Big Cat (Andie MacDowell), who controls everything and everyone in town. Big Cat runs the county and everyone in it and will stop at nothing to nail them to her will. Example: She gives a dinner party, and for after-dinner entertainment, her gang attacks the deputy sheriff, breaks his legs with sledgehammers, and for an encore, she slashes his throat and feeds his remains to a pack of man-eating dogs.  

    Best not to scrutinize Big Cat’s motivations too closely. They defy credulity. For reasons unexplained, it seems that Cash once worked as one of her thugs, and now she wants him back, but his newly martyred dedication to his niece’s welfare leaves her unhinged. One hour into the movie, things begin to gain momentum—or at least the profane violence, which remains horrible and pointless throughout, gets more interesting. Big Cat has one son she adores.  After his murder, all hell breaks loose and she turns to the preacher for resolution, demanding a clean swap—the life of Savannah’s beloved Uncle Cash for her own. This drives the innocent Savannah to the family arsenal to begin some gunfire of her own. Apparently, she’s learned more about life and death than reading Elsie Dinsmore.

    Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother with a waste of time like Red Right Hand, but this is the stuff they’re making now. If you wait for something worthwhile, you might end up writing about only two or three movies a year. This one teases with the rancid subplots featuring Orlando Bloom and Andie McDowell. He hasn’t been around for a while; now I know why. He has obviously been living in a gym. Gone are the smooth good looks, replaced by a body like a highway of corpuscles. When he speaks the numbing dialogue by Jonathan Easley, he mumbles incoherently, talking to his feet. Ms. McDowell is a bland performer with no range of any importance who has devoted her career to roles that resemble cosmetics commercials. It’s easy to see why playing against type as a cold-blooded villain would add dimensions to her resume. The risk fails on every level. In the end credits, the names of 32 executive producers are listed. Even in a cataclysmic time like this, it’s next door to impossible to believe it takes 32 producers to make a movie as bad as Red Right Hand. 

    ‘Red Right Hand’ Review: Orlando Bloom Tries and Fails

    [ad_2]

    Rex Reed

    Source link

  • ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: A Queer Road Trip Without Forward Motion

    ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: A Queer Road Trip Without Forward Motion

    [ad_1]

    Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan in Drive Away Dolls. Working Title/Focus Features

    Over the years, the Coen Brothers have developed a distinctive, compelling style of filmmaking, culminating in 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Since then the directors have gone their separate ways—artistically at least. Joel Coen helmed The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, an evocative, unsettling take on the iconic Shakespeare play. Drive-Away Dolls marks Ethan Coen’s debut solo feature (he also directed documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind in 2022), offering a glimpse into the filmmaker’s personal creative ambitions and inspirations. 

    DRIVE AWAY DOLLS ★★1/2 (2.5/4 stars)
    Directed by: Ethan Coen
    Written by: Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke
    Starring: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, Beanie Feldstein, Colman Domingo, Pedro Pascal, Bill Camp, Matt Damon
    Running time: 84 mins.

    The film, originally titled Drive-Away Dykes, a far better name for the resulting effort, is a collaboration between Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke, who co-wrote and edited the movie. It’s got an intriguing premise, paying homage to B-movies from the 1960s and ‘70s, but the storytelling itself falters, often mired in shock value for the sake of shock value. Visually interesting with committed performances, it doesn’t quite stick the landing. 

    Geraldine Viswanathan plays Marian, a young lesbian with a dull job and an uptight demeanor. Her unlikely best friend Jamie, played by Margaret Qualley doing quite the accent, is the exact opposite, a sexed up live-wire who cheats on her cop girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) in the opening minutes of the film. The pair head out on a road trip to Tallahassee by borrowing a car from the local drive-away, which rents people cars if they relocate them for the owner. The girls accidentally end up with the wrong car, which holds a mysterious briefcase and the frozen head in the trunk. A group of criminals are hot on their tail, although they are none the wiser. 

    In theory, it’s a fun story. In execution, it’s a series of scenes and set pieces that never quite gel. Marian and Jamie stop at various locales along the way to Florida, with Jamie encouraging Marian to let down her hair and get laid. This results in hijinks like an all-girl make-out party in someone’s basement and Jamie saying “honey darling” in a Southern accent a lot. By the time they get to Tallahassee, having discovered the contents of their trunk, Jamie and Marian’s relationship shifts, inciting a romance that doesn’t feel earned or true. Pedro Pascal and Matt Damon play small roles, but despite Pascal’s high billing he is barely in the movie. Kudos to Coen, though, for a scene that recalls the actor’s most famous Game of Thrones moment. 

    Pedro Pascal in Drive Away Dolls. Wilson Webb/Working Title /Focus Features

    On the plus side, Drive-Away Dolls is extremely gay. There’s a lot of sex, all of it between women, and Coen never exploits the girl-on-girl action or makes it feel voyeuristic, although some of it is purposefully wild (see: shock value). Cooke identifies as queer, which clearly helped the film’s authenticity, and the film smartly doesn’t attempt represent all lesbian experiences or tastes. The tone is light-hearted (although critics in my press screening didn’t find the movie particularly funny), and Cooke has said she wanted to make a queer film that isn’t over serious or dramatic. It’s a great addition to the queer movie canon with actresses committed to telling the story. 

    Drive-Away Dolls never sets itself up to be realistic or grounded—the colorful psychedelic interludes add to this effect—but even in its own version of reality there’s just something missing. It’s stylish with witty dialogue, but for a road-trip movie there’s not much forward motion. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is just a whimsical trip with quirky characters and little depth. Maybe we’re never supposed to really understand or care about anyone’s motivation or background. There are great moments and a great idea here. Without that connective substance, though, the car gets stuck in neutral.

    Observer Reviews are regular assessments of new and noteworthy cinema.

    ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ Review: A Queer Road Trip Without Forward Motion

    [ad_2]

    Emily Zemler

    Source link

  • WTF is going on at Amazon? (15 photos)

    WTF is going on at Amazon? (15 photos)

    [ad_1]

    The reviews are in: Amazon is insane.

    If you’ve ever stumbled on a batsh*t review in the wild, it’s thrilling. You thought you were just buying pants and now someone’s telling an elaborate story of how those pants saved their life. Wild stuff. I can’t tell if these reviews are sincere but I can tell you they made me laugh. Let’s go down the Amazon hole together, shall we?

    You can actually buy that attractive casket HERE. (LOL)

    [ad_2]

    Joe

    Source link

  • Review: Second Stage Theatre’s ‘The Apiary’: Stinging or Sweet As Honey?

    Review: Second Stage Theatre’s ‘The Apiary’: Stinging or Sweet As Honey?

    [ad_1]

    Carmen M. Herlihy and April Matthis in The Apiary. Joan Marcus

    The Apiary | 1hr 15mins. No intermission. | Second Stage Theatre’s Tony Kiser Theater | 305 West 43rd Street | 212-392-1818

    Science fiction may be a natural fit for movies and TV, where budgets allow CGI world-building and eye-popping F/X, but the genre flourishes in humbler forms of storytelling. Caryl Churchill probed the existential horror behind cloning in A Number and Jordan Harrison walked the uncanny valley with aide-mémoire androids in Marjorie Prime. Where does The Apiary rank among futuristic stage work? In Kate Douglas’s dark farce set a persnickety 22 years from now, bee populations are shrinking (even more) due to climate change. A pair of technicians who run a synthetic apiary think they’ve found a solution. But it’s going to take a lot of human corpses. The scientific stakes are fairly high—Earth is, um, dying—but after 75 minutes of tonal wobble, you may flit from Second Stage Theatre with little to buzz about.

    The Kate Whoriskey–directed production is part of Second Stage’s inaugural Next Stage Festival, which gives emerging playwrights an extra bump of prestige by opening in the institution’s midtown home. A piece such as The Apiary—compact, high in concept but green in execution—would make sense in the more intimate Uptown series on 78th Street, where the offerings are promising if rarely excellent. Douglas aims high by focusing her grim environmental fable through the lens of workplace farce and veering into pathos toward the end, but shiny design and an overqualified cast only highlight its limitations.

    Taylor Schilling and Nimene Wureh in The Apiary. Joan Marcus

    Zora (all-star April Matthis) is a new employee at the apiary where high-strung supervisor Gwen (Taylor Schilling) and earnest woman-child Pilar (Carmen M. Herlihy) feed and study endangered honey bees. (Healthy bee populations mean robust, pollinated crops for humans.) With her PhD in biochemistry and a longstanding admiration for the fuzzy insects, Zora wants to make a difference. First she surrounds the artificial colonies with fake flowers to stimulate activity. No good. When their co-worker Cece (Nimene Wureh) is found dead on the floor one morning (stage four thyroid cancer), everyone is shocked. Then Zora discovers bees hiving in Cece’s torso, and suddenly the queen’s egg-laying goes through the roof. Zora’s hypothesis: “The bees consumed and stored the flesh, like they would pollen. And the queen was breeding like mad in there.” So, behind Gwen’s back, Zora and Pilar begin to recruit women with terminal cases of cancer to donate their mortal coil to science. All of this is played, more or less, for ostensible laughs. When Gwen announces that the Netherlands is shipping five million bees to their lab, Zora and Pilar do the math and start freaking out.

    Occasionally, Douglas cuts to Cece at a support group for cancer patients talking about her mother’s superstitious belief that you must tell bees about all the good and bad happening in your life or they’ll sicken and stop producing honey. (Over the course of the play Wureh portrays three other “volunteers.”) During transitions between scenes, a dancer (Stephanie Crousillat) pops up inside the apiary’s “graveyard”—an enclosed glass area —to writhe and shimmy like a bee. Wearing skintight gray leggings and a gas mask, the lithe and sinewy Crousillat is a macabre but engaging sight. She is also, unfortunately, emblematic of Whoriskey’s tendency to throw ideas against the wall to buck up a sketchy text. 

    April Matthis and Carmen M. Herlihy in The Apiary. Joan Marcus

    The strained black comedy and one-note characters (Zora is controlling; Pilar is naïve; Gwen is selfish) would be forgivable if the world-building were credible or sustained. We get hints the climate is broken and all the research money is going into space exploration, but the latter point is used mostly as a punch line. It’s not remotely believable that Zora and Pilar would find dozens of willing suicides, much less smuggle them past security and keep them in the lab long enough for bees to colonize them. Much is made of the oppressive bosses “upstairs,” (cue actors actually tilting their heads up), but if we’re living in a bureaucratic dystopia, the CCTV is on the fritz.

    It’s a pity, because there is poetry at the center of Douglas’s vision: bees thrive when they feast on dead people. A metonym for the Anthropocene: enfeebled nature can only dance on humanity’s grave. Would-be weighty but disappointingly slight, The Apiary apologizes for its morbid topic with jarring zaniness and a twee last gesture at healing. There are valid ideas zipping through in the air—what constitutes a good death, can we be saved by communal matriarchy—but they lack a solid framework. Too much honey, not enough comb. 

    Buy Tickets Here 

    Review: Second Stage Theatre’s ‘The Apiary’: Stinging or Sweet As Honey?

    [ad_2]

    David Cote

    Source link

  • If we have to recycle old IP, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is the way to do it

    If we have to recycle old IP, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is the way to do it

    [ad_1]

    Have you watched Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the 2005 Brad-and-Angelina action comedy, recently? Like, actually watched it, not just let your nostalgic memories of it play in your head. Mr. & Mrs. Smith was at the center of pop culture in the mid-aughts for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do with the actual movie, and a few that did: It’s sexy fun with massive stars, and director Doug Liman knows how to put together a good action scene. The elevator pitch — two professional assassins are married to each other, but don’t know about the other’s job — is a good one.

    But right now, in 2024, it’s almost unwatchably strange. It’s one of those not-that-old movies that are so specific to their time they seem to have aged beyond their years. The bitter, marriage-is-hell humor lands wrong. The two leads look hot but sort of unreal, like they’re the premature product of de-aging technology. There are some iffy digital shots, and the cinematography and camera work — all handheld, all high-contrast, all orange and teal, all the time — are extremely 2005. It’s just not a film that plays anymore, and although it was a huge hit and the eye of a tabloid storm, it’s not much talked about today.

    Which makes it an odd choice to be adapted into a Prime Video streaming series. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe, in fact, the choice by star Donald Glover and co-creator Francesca Sloane is a genius one.

    In the current phase of the streaming wars (a phase we might be on the precipice of leaving behind, but that’s another story), the studios have not been shaken in their belief that any level of intellectual property name recognition is better than none, and creatives have been barraged with invitations to rework this or that old movie. Very rarely, as in the improbable success of Noah Hawley’s Fargo, an anthology series made in the spirit of the Coen brothers’ cinematic masterpiece, this has worked. More often it has not. Sometimes, the misbegotten results have at least been interesting, like Amazon’s curious reinterpretation of Dead Ringers. Sometimes, as in the case of the uninspired retread of Fatal Attraction, they have been both pointless and dull.

    Photo: David Lee/Prime Video

    Glover and Sloane’s inspired choice was to select a movie from the studios’ menu that is famous but unsophisticated and not especially beloved, with a dated iconography that could easily be junked and a strong concept that could be stripped to its core and rebuilt completely from scratch. This is exactly what they’ve done, creating a delightful series that is almost the inverse of its inspiration, while sharing its core values: It’s funny, sexy, glossy, and exciting, and built around the chemistry of its two leads.

    The setup is markedly different. Rather than rival assassins who got hitched by accident, Glover and Maya Erskine’s John and Jane Smith have been purposefully paired up by the same shadowy employer, shedding their previous lives to begin a new one together. Where Pitt and Jolie begin the film as flawless pros trapped in domestic tedium, Glover and Erskine are awkward, hesitant newbies exploring their dangerous new profession and budding relationship together.

    This sets up a show that is a lightly spiced, well-observed take on contemporary work and relationships with a side order of covert-ops hijinks. It might take viewers a couple of episodes to adjust to Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s unique world. It’s intimate and chatty, with a casual approach to the action stuff that isn’t concerned with realism or plausibility, and constantly lowers the dramatic temperature and the stakes, even as the Smiths get involved in increasingly outlandish mission-of-the-week scenarios. It’s a cool, easygoing relationship dramedy about people who just happen to be elite contract agents (but also gig workers, kind of). That’s not to say it doesn’t deliver thrills — there are some close scrapes, and one later episode set on Lake Como has an outstanding protracted chase scene — but it’s easy to tell where Glover and Sloane’s interest really lies: The action is as broad-brush and goofy as the Smiths’ dialogue is plausible, intricate, and nifty in its detail.

    Parker Posey smiles and makes a love heart shape with her hands in a dark study in Mr. & Mrs. Smith

    Photo: David Lee/Prime Video

    Ron Perlman looks sad in a yellow T-shirt at a candlelit dinner table at twilight in Mr. & Mrs. Smith

    Photo: David Lee/Prime Video

    Mr. & Mrs. Smith — unlike the cinematically ambitious Fargo show, for example, which Sloane worked on, as well as contributing to Glover’s Atlanta — is also under no illusions about what medium it belongs to. This is very much a TV show. It has slick, aspirational visuals, with lovely location shoots around New York and Europe, handsome architecture, and cool fashion (Glover’s looks are on point). But the scale is small, and the 40-minute episodes are tight, discrete, satisfying short stories. Each one moves the Smiths’ relationship on while pairing them with a string of one-off guest stars, often as the couple’s mission target. It’s a murderer’s row of iconic actors: John Turturro, Sharon Horgan, Parker Posey, Ron Perlman, Sarah Paulson, Paul Dano, Michaela Coel, and more. Perlman is magnificent as a mournful, childish oligarch with a killer Hitler joke, while Paulson provides a savagely accurate parody of a couples therapist.

    This is just a great TV format, and in theory Mr. & Mrs. Smith could run forever like this; it’s reminiscent of Poker Face in the way it seeks to rehabilitate old-school case-of-the-week TV. Glover, however, likes to play games with form, as with Altanta — albeit to a much less experimental extent in this case. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is only a few episodes old before it starts to break its own format. It’s cunningly done, but it perhaps doesn’t leave Glover and Sloane with a lot of room to maneuver in a potential second season.

    Perhaps, though, that’s because Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s primary motivator is John and Jane’s relationship, and it’s essential to the drama that this keeps moving forward. Glover and Erskine are simply irresistible: likable, simultaneously spiky and smooth, damaged but competent (up to a point), and very plausibly into each other. Their scenes together radiate with the comfortingly bitchy intimacy of two people who are inseparable partners in absolutely everything, and when things go wrong between them, the show’s insouciant surface cracks enough to expose real hurt.

    Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a fun bit of escapism wrapped around a complex, warm, and relatable love story. Glover and Sloane made something new and refreshing out of a movie that is past its sell-by date. If we’re only allowed to watch new things based on other, older things, we’ll be lucky if a fraction of them are made with as much wit and creativity as this.

    Mr. & Mrs. Smith is streaming now on Prime Video.

    [ad_2]

    Oli Welsh

    Source link

  • There’s bleak, and then there’s Netflix’s Nazi occupation thriller, Will

    There’s bleak, and then there’s Netflix’s Nazi occupation thriller, Will

    [ad_1]

    Will, Netflix’s imported Belgian movie about the moral impossibility of life under Nazi occupation during World War II, announces itself with shocking bluntness. Within its first 10 minutes, it’s made clear that co-writer and director Tim Mielants intends to confront the grisly horrors of the Holocaust head-on. But it’s also apparent that the film is constructed more like a thriller than a somber drama, and it tightens the screws on its lead character — young policeman Wilfried Wils (Stef Aerts) — in a series of breathless setups with escalating stakes.

    It’s an effective way to pull viewers into empathizing with the awful dilemmas faced by an occupied population, and into bearing fresh witness to familiar horrors. But the thriller genre sets up expectations — climax, catharsis, redemption — which risk trivializing the material, and set something of an ethical trap. Who’s going to fall into it: the filmmakers, or the audience? Mielants is too tough-minded to be caught, it turns out, but that’s bad news for the rest of us. Will nurses a glimmer of hope in the darkness, only to snuff it out completely. This is a bleak, bleak movie.

    It’s 1942, and Wil (referred to in the subtitles by the Dutch spelling of his name, despite the English title Will) and Lode (Matteo Simoni) are fresh recruits to the police force in the port city of Antwerp. Before their first patrol, their commanding officer, Jean (Jan Bijvoet), hands out regulation platitudes about the police being “mediators between our people and the Germans.” Then he sheds that pretense and offers some off-the-record advice: “You stand there and you just watch.” The ambiguity of these words echoes through the whole movie. Is it cowardice to stand by and watch the Nazis at work, or heroism to refuse to cooperate with them? Are the occupied Belgians washing their hands of the Nazis’ crimes, or bearing witness to them?

    Wil and Lode don’t have long to contemplate these questions. No sooner have they left the station on their first patrol than a ranting, drugged-up German soldier demands they accompany him on the arrest of some people who “refuse to work”: a Jewish family, in other words. The young men are initially paralyzed by the situation, but things spiral out of control, more through desperation than heroic resistance on the part of the two policemen. In the aftermath, Lode and Wil return to work in a state of paranoid terror.

    Image: Les Films Du Fleuve/Netflix

    Mielants, working with screenwriter Carl Joos from a novel by Jeroen Olyslaegers, wastes no time in using this premise to explore the paranoid quagmire of the occupied city. Can the two young men trust each other? Where do their sympathies lie? Wil’s civil-servant father leads him to seek help from local worthy Felix Verschaffel (the excellent Dirk Roofthooft), who boasts of being friends with the Germans’ commanding officer, Gregor Schnabel (Dimitrij Schaad). Suddenly, Wil is indebted to a greedy, antisemitic collaborator.

    Meanwhile, Lode’s mistrustful family — especially his fiery sister Yvette (Annelore Crollet) — want to know more. Does Wil speak any German at home? What radio station does he listen to? In occupied Antwerp — a region where German and French phrases naturally mix in with the local Dutch dialect — an innocent choice of word or of leisure listening comes freighted with dangerous political significance. “There isn’t much on the radio,” Wil responds. “Can you recommend something?”

    Time and again during the movie, Wil uses deflections like this to squirm out of taking a position on the occupation. But eventually, he starts working to save Jewish lives. Actions may speak louder than words, but even in the teeth of a febrile affair with Yvette, Wil continues to keep his words to himself. As Schnabel’s net closes in, Wil’s caution keeps him and his friends alive, but the cost is heavy.

    It’s a bold move to center a thriller about the Holocaust on a protagonist who, on some level, refuses to pick a side. We can only empathize with Wil because Mielants so effectively loads almost every scene and line of dialogue with implicit threat. Will is a tense, dark, frightening movie, filmed claustrophobically in a boxy ratio with lenses that blur the edge of the frame. The acting is intense (sometimes to a fault), and there are frequent bursts of unpleasant, graphic violence as the pressure builds.

    A man with a hat and a pointed white beard with no moustache raises his arms in triumph in front of a burning synagogue. He’s holding a gun

    Photo: Les Films Du Fleuve/Netflix

    But even though Schaad sometimes seems to be doing a weak impression of Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Will isn’t that movie, and Mielants isn’t interested in Tarantino’s style of catharsis. At the end of the movie, the vicious, inescapable trap he set for all the characters simply snaps shut. Will shows that under the remorseless illogic of Nazi occupation, survival is collaboration, and resistance is death.

    That’s a miserable payload for the movie to carry, and it’s debatable how constructive it is. Jonathan Glazer’s chilling The Zone of Interest, currently in theaters, shows that challenging new perspectives on the human mechanics of the Holocaust are as essential now as they have ever been. Thirty years ago, Schindler’s List achieved something similar, and just as necessary, through radically different means: It found a thread of hope and compassion that could lead a wide audience into the heart of the nightmare and throw it into relief.

    Will is too burdened by its point of view to manage anything similar. It’s clear-sighted on the cruel compromises of occupation and collaboration, but so fatalistic about them that it winds up wallowing in its own guilt and hopelessness. That’s a dark kind of truth, and not necessarily one that anyone needs to hear.

    Will is streaming on Netflix now.

    [ad_2]

    Oli Welsh

    Source link

  • Spice up your desktop with these unusual keyboards from Keychron, HHKB, Cloud Nine, and others | TechCrunch

    Spice up your desktop with these unusual keyboards from Keychron, HHKB, Cloud Nine, and others | TechCrunch

    [ad_1]

    Mechanical keyboards are everywhere these days, and there’s a larger variety now than than ever before. If you’re looking to pick one up but want to look beyond the most common layouts and types, read on. Here are 8 mechanical keyboards that stick out from the pack.

    Feker Alice 80

    Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

    My first Alice board! And to my great joy, the Feker Alice 80 is a solid — very solid — example of this layout, though its foibles should not be overlooked. The Alice 80 is of a similar build type to Keychron’s Q series, with a full-contact bottom (plus traditional flip-out feet) and all keys mounted on a gasket. In addition, Feker added “a sound dampening silicon switch pad, a silicone PCB foam and a bottom cotton foam” to further silence the Gateron Yellow switches.

    I can tell you it makes quite a difference, and anyone would agree in a few keystrokes. The quiet, medium actuation linear switches feel like they’re being pushed through a cloud, and are as close to silent as any mechanical keyboard I’ve used. That is to say, very quiet but for a sort of soft, rippling sound when you’re really going. It’s really very comfortable and my daily driver for now.

    This board has a slightly unusual layout, with a windows key to the right of the left space bar segment. I thought I’d hit it by accident a lot, but I didn’t once. It also has a light curve to the angled keys rather than a sudden turn, and a subtle but comfortable tenting angle. On the right edge, you’ve got arrows and page up and down, plus delete. Add a volume dial and that’s it! It’s not as minimal as some, but it’s pretty minimal. If I could have, I would have gotten the 75% version with the function row and aluminum build, but there are none left — for good reason, no doubt. This version is a little flexy and not perfectly balanced, though only at the corners.

    But what may put some people off it is the relative lack of customization. The board doesn’t come with any extra keys for swapping out (if you have a Mac layout, say) and although there is a software configurator, I was unable to get it to do more than swap one key with another or macro. So I couldn’t, for instance, set “Play/Pause” to function+down.

    I’ll tell you this – if I was sitting down to do a marathon writing session, this is one of the first boards I’d reach for. But if I needed regular access to function and other keys or any kind of more complicated layering (as many keyboard enthusiasts like), then I wouldn’t be able to use it. The feel isn’t quite right for gaming either, in my opinion, but I didn’t let that stop me. That it works wired, on Bluetooth, or using a wi-fi dongle is just icing on the cake.

    Feker Alice 98

    Image Credits: Feker

    Here’s a keyboard with a lot of potential but that ultimately didn’t charm me. The Alice layout plus a number pad on the right, a knob, and a tiny LCD screen. Seems like a great match for anyone who wants the ergo benefits of Alice but needs those numbers and doesn’t mind losing a little desktop space.

    But the Alice 98 is offered with only Kailh Winter switches, which despite the gasket underneath are just not my style — maybe they just need oiling, but they felt like they had a lot more friction, and not just an intentionally higher resistance. They’re not bad by any means, but the Yellows on the 80 just are a perfect match.

    The layout also has a less pronounced tent, almost none at all in fact, which with the tilted key layout actually makes it seem like you’re twisting your wrists inward a bit. I didn’t expect that, but now I understand why the tenting built into the 80 makes it seem flat when it isn’t.

    And lastly, the software support just isn’t there for a keyboard of this complexity. The firmware offered on the site didn’t even register as a real file on my computer, and set off some virus-esque alarm bells. And if I’m going to have an LCD on at all times, I’d like to be able to program it properly. So until the 98 gets the support it needs (and maybe some different switches), I can’t really recommend it.

    Keychron Q11

    Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

    Keychron has become one of the most popular mechanical keyboard vendors, putting out solid boards with lots of customization options in an increasingly wide range of layouts. This 75% split Q11 is among the latest, and could be a fantastic option for those who don’t need tilting or tenting.

    The Q11 is minimal and pleasingly industrial-looking, with a totally flat, very solid build. It sits directly on your desk with small rubberized feet, making it low profile and pretty much as compact as is physically possible with a 75% layout. The halves also fit together cleanly to form a more standard layout. It’s a wired-only board, and you’ll have to connect the two halves with a bridge cable, so if that kind of desk clutter offends you, move on. But for those who don’t mind a little visible cabling, though, it’s a handsome and understated look.

    The version I tested has Gateron Brown switches, which make for a nice light typing feel, albeit somewhat harder on the fingers due to the lack of a gasket or dampening layer. After typing on the Feker Alice this was definitely a more raw feel, but it’s still comfortable and quiet — just be wary of bottoming out (and consider selecting a higher resistance switch).

    The layout is compact and has plenty of layers plus five dedicated macro keys to the left, and interestingly two knobs, one in each upper corner. Normally the knob is relegated to volume duty and perhaps something else on another layer, but this lets you try out some interesting new use cases, like scrolling the page or moving the cursor. This is a nice, very portable split option if you’re willing to give up a little of that typefeel.

    Keychron Q13 Pro

    Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

    Well, there’s no getting around it: this keyboard is a bludgeoning weapon disguised as a computer peripheral. Weighing in at 2.4 kilograms (5.2 pounds) and with a solid aluminum body, this is definitely the keyboard I’d reach for if I was being charged by a zombie. You could hammer nails with this thing, no joke. But how does it perform?

    With a 75% Alice layout, the Q13 is unusually but practically laid out. The main cluster is traditional Alice (down to two “B” keys), with macro and function keys scattered around the edge in staggered rows. It’s not actually that large, but combined with the weight and increased height it feels more spread out, bulky even.

    They keycaps have an extra scoop to them in the Keychron style, which is a mixed bag. In the center and upper rows it feels like they are reaching out to greet your extended finger, minimizing movement. But in the lower rows it feels like there’s a ridge sticking up above where it shouldn’t be. The space bar’s shape, for instance, gives it a sharp angle where my thumb makes contact, which is not something I enjoyed, and somehow the act of reaching for the backspace key puts the middle of my right hand in contact with the up-thrusting left arrow key.

    Too much scoop.

    These aren’t dealbreakers (well, the space bar was for me) but they might require a bit of getting used to, or a bit of key swapping.

    It connects via Bluetooth or cable, and can sync with 3 different devices at once and switch quickly between them — always useful.

    Cloud Nine ErgoTKL

    Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

    A full-featured split ergo keyboard, the Cloud Nine ErgoTKL packs a lot of options into a relatively compact package. It has a compact tenkeyless layout but with a full (if unseparated) function row, which I appreciate, as well as arrows and navigation, plus a couple swappable macro keys on the left. And of course there’s that great big wheel in the middle.

    The ErgoTKL has the split angle to its key layout, plus a light built-in tenting angle that I found quite comfortable, though being able to adjust it would have been a plus. The two halves are easily separated but also come together nicely with a magnet to form a whole, with the wheel dead center.

    The switches, Kailh Browns on my unit, were light and snappy, with an audible but not bothersome click — you can pick linear Reds or clicky Whites as well. I could ask for a bigger space key — it seems like not all the ergo keyboard makers account for the different position your thumb takes when at this angle. Or maybe it’s just me, but I end up on the corner of the space key when it’s canted this way.

    It is of course full RGB, something I’ve never had any use for, and almost all the pre-loaded modes are gaudy, shifting rainbows. Fortunately there’s a very easy to use configurator that I put together a nice, chill custom color layout in within minutes.

    The central wheel is a nice tactile one, which you can set to a variety of functions (though sadly not cursor movement). It kind of looks like it would get in the way, but that never once happened for me. I only wish I could assign it to have one function normally, and another while activating the Fn layer.

    I had some slight issues with mine, one with a random repeating disconnection that seems to have fixed itself, and another in that the left half of the keyboard doesn’t sit flat on its little rubber pads. With the weight of my hand on it, it’s plenty stable, but it’s troubling in a serious keyboard to see it wobbling back and forth. The plastic palm rests are also not great, I’d spring for the padded ones.

    8bitdo Retro Mechanical Keyboard

    8BitDo's NES-themed mechanical keyboard.

    8BitDo’s NES-themed mechanical keyboard.

    Okay, this one isn’t really ergonomic, but it is unusual. This wired/wireless (dongle or Bluetooth) mechanical is fully custom from the switches up, and obviously it falls under 8BitDo’s retro aesthetic to the point where you might think it’s an official Nintendo accessory. (It’s not.)

    It’s a very clicky keyboard, but comfortable as flat layouts go, and compact enough that you can easily add your own wrist rests. There are two built in dials, one for wireless mode select and one for volume. But the real innovation is the giant macro buttons marked A and B like huge NES controllers.

    Look, I’m aware there are other standalone macro clusters out there. You can buy one for 10 or 20 bucks online. But these huge, cherry red mega-buttons are something else. I’ll say right now that they’re not quite as satisfying to press as they look, but they feel durable enough that you can really whack them if you’ve assigned them to stuff like close application or end call.

    HHKB Studio

    Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

    Here’s an odd one and no mistake. The HHKB Studio is one of a kind, with a unique layout, a pointer nub, mouse buttons built in, and four — count ’em — four touch-sensitive strips all around it. The idea behind it is to remove the necessity of a mouse at all, letting you never move your hands from the keyboard.

    And although it would take some getting used to, I think the hardware (handsome, understated, and well-built) truly supports this proposition. But there are a handful of major quirks you’ll have to get past.

    First, and most unhinged, is that there is NO BACKSPACE KEY. At least by default. You need to adjust a dipswitch to change delete to backspace, or you can do it in the customization software. Then, as you may know if you’re familiar with the Happy Hacking layout, caps lock is replaced by control, and delete/backspace and the forward slash have switched places. Though these changes are made with good intent, I simply can’t abide some of them, though fortunately it was easily configured. Lastly, the choice to use AA batteries instead of a rechargeable one is just plain strange to me!

    The space between the little upraised bits is touch-sensitive. Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

    The trackpoint is good, and adequate for desktop tasks, and the presence of mouse buttons just under the space bar is quite nice once you get used to it. It’s a bit odd hitting left click with my left hand while moving the cursor with my right, but it does save me a trip to the mouse.

    The capacitive strips are the most interesting piece, though, and I think they’re a qualified success. They run along the edges of the board, two on the front and one on each side. The left ones are set to basically repeat arrow keys (nice because they’re not present on this very compact layout), and the right ones are scroll up/down and switch apps by default.

    This could be a real time saver, but you need to get good at it, because there’s no tactile feedback and the strips themselves can be a little hard to find sometimes. And then, when they’re activated, they can be a little unpredictable. While I appreciate the effort that went into packing this much capability into this much space — and it really is a lot of power in a remarkably small form factor — I feel like the purpose would be better served with the strips facing upwards, or maybe even being along the corner (if that’s possible).

    If you’re a really keyboard-centric person and want to be even more so, or want a good couch keyboard option, the HHKB Studio could be a real eye-opener.

    Kinesis Advantage 360 (Quiet Limited)

    Image Credits: Kinesis

    If you’re ready for an ergo adventure, here’s one that’s challenging yet logical. The Advantage360 is Kinesis’s high end model with not just a columnar layout but a concave contour to minimize finger movements. And then your position and modifier keys are all in thumb clusters. The one I tested was a limited edition with Kailh Box Pink Linear Quiet switches and special colorway.

    Look, any one of these things I could probably adapt quickly to. Two would take time. All three at once is madness! That said, it’s really obvious that this could be an extremely comfortable and worthwhile layout for someone willing to put in the time, like the Moonlander I tried in the last roundup. Or if you’re already in this wild world of layouts — this is a nice one.

    The Advantage360 also has a sturdy tenting paddle setup that let me get a pretty sharp angle going. Overall the build quality was outstanding.

    On the days I was using it, I would alternate between being unable to locate C and suddenly and effortlessly typing a word with what felt like no movement at all. This is definitely a specialist keyboard, and the price ($449) reflects that, but if you’re already rocking a columnar or concave layout you may adapt to this one in a jiffy. Well, maybe not a jiffy.

    [ad_2]

    Devin Coldewey

    Source link

  • ‘The Animal Kingdom’ Review: This Family Therapy Weepie Is a Flat Zoo Story

    ‘The Animal Kingdom’ Review: This Family Therapy Weepie Is a Flat Zoo Story

    [ad_1]

    Clockwise from left: Tasha Lawrence, Uly Schlesinger, David Cromer, Calvin Leon Smith and Lily McInerny in The Animal Kingdom Emilio Madrid

    The Animal Kingdom | 1hr 20mins. No intermission. | Connelly Theater Upstairs | 220 East 4th Street 

    Theater critics and therapists have things in common. Both sit and listen to people talk about themselves, taking notes about telling turns of phrase or behavioral tics. After a session, both study their notes, assessing strengths and weaknesses. The main difference is that critics can’t prescribe; if we could, we’d be snorting Zoloft in the bathroom at intermission. On the plus side, the reviewer’s job is over after filing copy, whereas a shrink’s labor can drag on for years.

    Happily, the road to mental health is only 80 minutes in The Animal Kingdom, an oddly flat and obvious portrait of a family. Set entirely at group sessions, the play orbits around the attempted suicide of college student Sam (Uly Schlesinger), only 21 but with a decade of escalating self-harm under his belt. (Not that he’s allowed a belt in the treatment facility.) Sam and his timid younger sister, Sofia (Lili McInerny), are the products of a broken home. Rita (Tasha Lawrence) and Tim (David Cromer) are several years divorced but prone to glare and snipe.

    The family is (or was) nuclear and their psychodynamics follow the same symmetry. Withholding father uses silence as a weapon; mother fills the void with chatter to deflect and control; daughter follows after father in shut-down taciturnity; and son has inherited extreme depression from the maternal side. All very balanced, all very gendered. Sam is queer, which Rita insultingly implies was caused by the divorce, sending the boy into spasms of screaming rage. Honestly, I wish their problems were more interesting. Far be it from me to contradict the author of Anna Karenina but Leo, baby, are unhappy families really so unique?

    Calvin Leon Smith, David Cromer, and Uly Schlesinger in The Animal Kingdom. Emilio Madrid

    Kindly and soft-spoken therapist Daniel (Calvin Leon Smith) is a model of the mind-healing empath: sensitive eyes, encouraging murmurs, and a soothing ensemble of brown, orange and khaki. He painstakingly draws Sam out of his terrified shell, arms evolving from defensively crossed over chest to wearing shirts that don’t hide the scars. Likewise, each family member gets the chance to confess and process: Tim hugs, Rita sobs, and Sofia admits both anger at Sam and her own brushes with self-violence.

    Apart from giving actors a workout and fragile spectators a good cry, it’s not clear what playwright Ruby Thomas (also an actor) intends to say, except that the talking cure cures. The Animal Kingdom premiered at London’s Hampstead Theatre to admiring notices. Do they not talk about mental health in England? We can’t shut up about our trauma. The cast plays it American with no appreciable loss (or gain) of cultural authenticity, given how deracinated and circumscribed this world is. From the title on down, metaphors derived from nature pepper the script. Sam frequently alludes to examples among critters of self-harm, same-sex attraction, and infanticidal parents. When he notes that his major is in zoology, I dearly wanted Daniel to smack his forehead and say, “No wonder you keep making those annoying comparisons!” Perhaps the playwright wants us to view families as zoos, where beasts are unnaturally confined.

    Calvin Leon Smith and Uly Schlesinger in The Animal Kingdom. Emilio Madrid

    Visually, we never leave the zoo. A two-way mirror covers the upstage area of Wilson Chin’s austere, claustrophobic set, which includes a mint-green rug, gray plastic chairs, and little else. 

    Chalky white illuminates this sterile island from Stacey Derosier’s jumbo hanging light box. Completed by Ricky Reynoso’s just-stylish-enough costumes and sinister transition sounds by Christopher Darbassie, The Animal Kingdom is certainly attractively designed, its accomplished actors emotionally transparent and scrupulous in their vocal and physical “tells.” Director Jack Serio, who favors tasteful, intimate immersions (such as last summer’s site-specific Uncle Vanya) stages the affair cleanly, for better or worse. Given that Sam has long been a danger to himself, the story can resolve one of two ways. Was it bestial of me to thirst for blood?

    Buy Tickets Here 

    ‘The Animal Kingdom’ Review: This Family Therapy Weepie Is a Flat Zoo Story



    [ad_2]

    David Cote

    Source link

  • I’m a beauty writer with dry skin and these hydration-boosting moisturisers are my holy grail

    I’m a beauty writer with dry skin and these hydration-boosting moisturisers are my holy grail

    [ad_1]

    Good-quality moisturising lotions are also known to include other high-grade skincare ingredients, such as retinol, vitamin E, green tea extract, niacinamide, aloe vera and vitamin C – all contributing towards not only nourishing your face, but also to help with various skin conditions (such as acne, rosacea and eczema), tackle breakouts, calm itchy and flaky skin and even reduce appearance of fine lines.

    When should you moisturise?

    First, remember that regardless of your skin type, it’s important to moisturise all year round. And with winter fast approaching, moisturising is more important than ever, especially for the dry-skinned. After all, it’s the time of year in which skin goes into overdrive – skin barriers are easily depleted, and all moisture is zapped in the blink of an eye, both of which are most often caused by the combination of the bitterly cold British weather (yikes) and the constant need to have the central heating on at all hours of the day.

    What do dermatologists recommend for very dry skin?

    “As the weather turns colder, skin tends to become drier and more sensitive,” shares Dr Alexis Granite, CeraVe’s consultant dermatologist. Dr Granite also advises to really take the time to massage your chosen product in, ideally for at least 30 seconds to really maximise the effects. “And if you find yourself reaching for it several times a day, you might want to consider a richer product,” she adds.

    Which brand of moisturiser is best for dry skin?

    When it comes to choosing the one, it all comes down to your personal preferences and budget. Are you after a quickly absorbing lightweight formula that doesn’t cost a fortune? Check out the BYOMA Moisturizing Gel-Cream. You also can’t go wrong with the CeraVe Moisturising Cream, which is a firm fav in the GLAMOUR office. A good mid-range option is the Drunk Elephant Protini Polypeptide Cream, featuring a water-gel cream consistency and is packed with skin-loving proteins and nutrients that maintain your skin’s natural elasticity. But if you’re budget allows you to splurge, we recommend considering the SkinCeuticals Triple Lipid Restore, which contains a trifecta of skin lipids – pure ceramides, natural cholesterol and fatty acids.

    For more beauty content from Glamour UK Commerce Writer Denise Primbet, follow her on Twitter @deniseprimbet and Instagram @deniseprimbet.

    Feeling inspired to upgrade your skincare routine? Check out our guides to the best moisturiser for combination skin, face masks, anti-ageing creams, night creams, hyaluronic acid serum and vitamin C serums, face toners and eye creams.

    Read on to view the very best moisturisers for dry skin in 2024 for all budgets and preferences…



    [ad_2]

    Denise Primbet

    Source link

  • I’ve slept with this sleep mask every night for the past six months, and I’ve never felt better

    I’ve slept with this sleep mask every night for the past six months, and I’ve never felt better

    [ad_1]

    For that reason – as well as the pressure over my eyes and the fact that it loosely covered my ears to dull background noise – I fell asleep within minutes. In fairness, it has never taken me an age to drop off, but this speed was impressive.

    Overnight, I can safely assume the mask didn’t budge an inch, as when I finally woke up to the sound of my alarm in the morning (not the light streaming through my windows), it was still perfectly in place. I think the fact that I stayed asleep for ~so much longer~ in the morning was the biggest benefit of them all for me. This thing’s light-blocking abilities are impressive.

    Another huge benefit was that when I woke up, I wasn’t left with a single mark on my face – and after a week of use, I felt my skin looked glowier when I woke up in the mornings. An eye mask improving your skin? Really? I’ve not lost it – trust – there’s a legitimate reason as to why (and how) this is possible.

    The Drowsy sleep mask is made from 22 Momme mulberry silk, where the Momme count refers to the density of the silk – and indicates the quality of the material. A bit like thread count. Most quality silk products – like silk pillowcases – run between 19 Momme to 22 Momme, so Drowsy’s sleep masks are up there with the most luxurious. Outside of Momme count, Mulberry silk, also, is a great silk choice. The fibres are longer and more uniform than you might get with cheaper silk variations, which makes the fabric super smooth and durable.

    Not only is sleeping on a silk pillowcase – or with a silk eye mask instead of a cotton one – good for your hair (the reduced friction reduces frizz, tugs, static, breakage and split ends), but the reduced friction means that your skincare products won’t rub off, instead being given the chance to really soak into the skin and work their magic. My eye cream suddenly seemed endlessly more effective, and my skin, plump.

    That plays into another benefit of silk: it helps our skin to retain its natural moisture while we snooze, keeping it soft and supple – and in turn reducing fine lines, wrinkles and breakouts. Magic.

    I’ve scratched my head for a Drowsy silk mask “con” over the course of the past week – surely nothing is perfect – and honestly? It was a struggle. The only thing I could think of was the fact that my paler-coloured Drowsy eye masks (cream or light pink, for example) became a little discoloured when I wore fake tan on my face overnight. Perhaps slightly obvious, but to keep your eye mask in tip-top condition – and make the £69 price tag worthwhile – I’d go for something darker. The burgundy is new new fave.

    [ad_2]

    Sophie Cockett

    Source link

  • Review: Don’t Sleep on Splendiferous Sutton Foster in ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

    Review: Don’t Sleep on Splendiferous Sutton Foster in ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

    [ad_1]

    Sutton Foster in Once Upon a Mattress. Joan Marcus

    Once Upon a Mattress | 2hrs 15mins. One intermission. | New York City Center | 131 West 55th Street | 212-581-1212

    After suffering through Once Upon a One More Time last summer, I concluded that musicals about princesses had become a royal bore; no more singing and dancing tiaras for me, please. And yet Sutton Foster’s full-body comic onslaught as Winnifred the Woebegone in Once Upon a Mattress has restored my fealty to throne. Playing her first stage princess since the ogre-besotted Fiona in 2008’s Shrek, Foster musters every talented inch of her limber frame, rubber face, and iron lungs to generate waves of zany ecstasy in this delightful concert version for City Center Encores!

    An urbane riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea,” Mattress was an early pioneer of the musical fractured fairytale in 1959, decades before composer Mary Rodgers’ lifelong buddy Stephen Sondheim had a go at the Grimms with Into the Woods. Not so coincidentally, the production is helmed by Encores! artistic director Lear de Bessonet, who staged the luminous revival of Woods that transferred to a hot-ticket Broadway run. It’s unclear if the same trajectory awaits Mattress, a lightweight goof with an old-fashioned score that nevertheless has a role any comic diva would die for.

    Sutton Foster and Michael Urie (center) in Once Upon a Mattress. Joan Marcus

    Or dive for: Winnifred throws herself into a moat and swims to the castle in search of her prince, sight unseen. When Foster is pulled up onto the stage, she is a dripping vision in algae: an eel down her dress, an enraged beaver tangled in her bun. The sort of gal folks used to call a tomboy, Winnifred is exuberantly uncultured and has boundary issues: in her intro tune, “Shy,” she bellow the title word, bowling everyone over. It’s right there in her name; half of her is soft and feminine: Winnie. The other half is, well, Fred. She can lift weights, sing like a nightingale and chug gallons of ale. Even with today’s hypersensitivities, the material’s flipping of gender stereotypes comes across as cute, not cringe. Mary Rodgers’ music doesn’t reinvent the swooning, jazz-inflected style she inherited from her father, Richard, but combined with Marshall Barer’s slyly camp lyrics, the score carries a gently subversive charge.

    Part of the freshness is due to strategic book rewrites by Amy Sherman-Palladino (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), who sharpens the feminist jabs and underscores the vanity and thickness of the men. One of the thickest is Sir Harry (Cheyenne Jackson), a clueless knight whose union with the pregnant Lady Larken (Nikki Renée Daniels) is held up by ridiculous trials devised by the scheming Queen Aggravain (Harriet Harris) to delay marriage for her coddled son, Prince Dauntless (Michael Urie). When Winnifred enters the picture, the wicked monarch devises an impossible test: she plants a pea under 20 downy mattresses and will deny Winnifred’s royal status if she fails to detect the intruding legume.

    Harriet Harris and Francis Jue in Once Upon a Mattress. Joan Marcus

    As she did with Into the Woods, De Bessonet maintains a charming balance between earnestness and ironic sauciness in this no-frills but still attractive staging (economical and colorful sets by David Zinn and mock-medieval frocks by Andrea Hood). Her ensemble (a well-oiled machine after only ten days of rehearsal) is an embarrassment of riches: Daniels and Jackson’s voices blend lusciously on their romantic duets; as a petulant man-boy and embittered dragon lady, respectively, Urie and Harris mug with flamboyant glee; J. Harrison Ghee’s narrating Jester in glitter lipstick and fuscia garb lends a genderfluid vibe; and, as the kindly, mute King, David Patrick Kelly expresses much with his powerful, compact frame. 

    So Foster isn’t alone up there, but it is hard to notice anyone else when Winnifred is warbling tenderly about “The Swamps of Home” or struggling to find a comfy spot on her mountain of bedding through an increasingly agitated series of contortions. A star since she Charlestoned into Broadway lovers’ hearts some 22 years ago in Thoroughly Modern Millie, Foster is the perfect physical comedian and singer to revivify the role that made Carol Burnett famous. Foster doesn’t need the career boost; if Mattress does extend in a bigger venue, she already has her next gig: baking people into meat pies over at Sweeney Todd. 

    Buy Tickets Here 

    Review: Don’t Sleep on Splendiferous Sutton Foster in ‘Once Upon a Mattress’



    [ad_2]

    David Cote

    Source link

  • The Greatest Night in Pop has more star power per second than any other 2024 movie

    The Greatest Night in Pop has more star power per second than any other 2024 movie

    [ad_1]

    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.

    [ad_2]

    Austen Goslin

    Source link

  • I tried tape hair extensions and my bouncy blow-dry lasted all day

    I tried tape hair extensions and my bouncy blow-dry lasted all day

    [ad_1]

    The Kardashians, the royals and countless other stars around the world have been known to embrace the subtle art of tape hair extensions. Ever wondered how stars switch up their hair from hip-length mermaid waves to a bouncy old money bob and back again – all in a matter of days? This is the secret. We’ve seen Kim Kardashian and J.Lo’s long-time hairstylist Chris Appleton often applying tape hair extensions to add volume, length or a new fridge or style to his celebrity clients.

    Instagram content

    This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

    So, what’s the difference between tape extensions and clip-in extensions or wigs? Tape hair extensions have a much more natural appearance, they only take around 30 minutes to apply or remove and they can last up to six weeks if applied professionally and taken care of properly.

    Up until recent years, since around the age of 18, I have been a full-blown hair extension addict. I’ve had the lot; bonds, clip-ins, micro-rings, nano-rings and *shudder* synthetic hair pieces. Some I had professionally fitted at a salon, some I would fit myself. Mostly, my sister would apply them for me at home, this did save me hundreds of pounds whilst I was at university, but my natural hair certainly paid the price.

    It is so important to get hair extensions professionally applied, especially when there’s adhesive (bonds and tapes), metal (rings) or stitching (weaves) involved. This will prevent breakage and long-term damage to the hair. Often, hair extensions can improve the overall health of your hair, but this won’t be the case if you have a botched job done at home. Tape hair extensions come in small inch-long strips, with a small line of adhesive at the top. Two strips are then sandwiched together in a pair, on either side of a small section of your natural hair. It’s so simple and so subtle.

    During lockdown in 2020, I took my hair extensions out – because I couldn’t visit a salon to get them refitted. I slowly but surely got used to my natural hair and began to love it again. But these days, I’m starting to miss the volume of hair extensions. My hair is long and healthy enough, it’s just a bit thin and limp, which means whenever I attempt a bouncy ’90s blowout at home, no matter how much mousse or hairspray I use, it falls out after a couple of hours. I was craving the layered Matilda Djerf curls that took the internet by storm.

    [ad_2]

    Chelsea Hughes

    Source link