Fresh from the Thanksgiving holiday, Chelsea is again joined by Zach to recap Episode 4 of the sixth season of The Real Housewives of Miami. First, they give their thoughts on Alexia (01:44) before starting off the recap with the awkward opera rehearsal scene (03:51). Then, they give their reactions to Larsa’s Basketball Charity Event: from the bathroom discussion (15:45) to the wives playing sports (29:20).
Host: Chelsea Stark-Jones Guest: Zack Peter Producer: Ashleigh Smith Theme Song: Devon Renaldo
As the environmental, political, and above all, economic tension between the ultra-rich and the rest of the world continues to grow, it’s a topic that keeps driving dark, memorable movies — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest film festival, including this year’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which played as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, seems to fit the bill perfectly as well: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, sure to turn up in awards-season conversation again) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscillaco-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is part horror movie, part classic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or just to be Felix.
But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell told Polygon she doesn’t entirely see Saltburn as yet another eat-the-rich exercise.
“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she said.
Image: Prime
Saltburn is an intoxicating experience: a visually rich, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a while to fully unfold within the film, is obsessed with the luxury, comforts, and casual arrogance of Felix and his wealthy family. But as they spend more time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the family estate, they also drop hints that he’s probably just the plaything of the season, likely to be discarded out of boredom.
Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the challenging, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t entirely sympathetic toward Oliver, who’s clearly grasping and needy as well as ruthless. At the same time, it isn’t fully on board with Felix and his superficial, selfish family members, either.
“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”
As Fennell has explained in other interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the internet, and parasocial relationships, about the kind of connections people make from a distance and build into elaborate, often unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the kind of superstar who would earn a fandom: He’s handsome, charming, and skilled at everything he tries, but he’s also surprisingly kind.
“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell said. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”
Image: Prime
Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about toxic hunger, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting something that they’re willing to cut any moral corners to get there. In terms of other connections, though, Fennell says her own obsessions may be showing in the new film.
“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”
The reason Saltburn feels like so many classic British stories about class, Gothic manors, and dark secrets is because Fennell wanted the movie to be a recognizable world, a genre exercise where viewers think they know what the rules are, and what’s coming next.
“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell said. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”
As far as other comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that both Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love stories. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”
It may seem a little counterintuitive to compare internet fame with Gothic novels like BridesheadRevisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of these books and online obsessions as closely connected.
Image: Prime
“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she said. “If the Gothic tradition is about an outsider being introduced to a world which is both desirable and frightening — that’s absolutely what we’re doing with the internet, and our relationship with the world of fame and beauty.
“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”
Referencing one of the more visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, where Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell said, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”
By now most people know the secret behind Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: Scott Pilgrim — well, he takes off. He’s gone, for most of the narrative, leaving the players as we know them to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened to him. What happens to them in his absence is usually a total flip of what we’ve come to expect: Think Gideon introducing Lucas to the slowburn anime he’s been watching for a while (or maybe just a few days).
Bryan Lee O’Malley, who wrote the original comic and co-created the Netflix anime reboot with BenDavid Grabinski, knows that sort of remake is something audiences have come to expect. “I mean, it’s in the air, right? We’re all seeing remakes and reboots of everything,” O’Malley says.
When Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was in development he says he and the team looked at everything new in this vein they could, from The Matrix ResurrectionstoSpider-Man: No Way Home. But just as frequently he turned elsewhere for inspiration — Dragonball Z, Cowboy Bebop, Keep Your Hands off Eizouken!, or even Elden Ring. But none of these were quite the main catalyst, even something like Evangelion, which he calls “a good comparison, but not necessarily an influence.”
The real reason O’Malley wanted to make this story was simply: It was the only way he could see revisiting the world of Scott Pilgrim.
[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Polygon: Starting off: I’m curious to hear a little bit about how you did justice by Matthew Patel, the lowest ranking evil ex.
Image: Netflix
Bryan Lee O’Malley: Our first spark of idea was to kind of take Scott Pilgrim out of the picture after the first episode. And that naturally led to the process of: Then what happens to Matthew? What does Matthew get? And then what do the other exes think about it? So yeah, it really appealed to me right away, and to be like, Oh, then Matthew should win, and Matthew should become the boss. Because we’re going through all these different reversals of fortune; so someone goes from the top to the bottom, and someone has to go from the bottom to the top. And yeah, giving Matthew kind of his flowers was so much fun.
Were there any characters in particular — like Matthew, or just generally — that you felt most excited by like, OK, if we open up this world without Scott in it, what can you do?
I was excited to take on kind of all the exes; that was one of the biggest appeals to me of revisiting Scott Pilgrim, was just — I felt like I gave them short shrift in the books a little bit. I was making it up as I went along, and I was locked into Scott’s perspective. And I was younger and didn’t really know that much about other people like that! I certainly didn’t know about movie stars, or rock stars, I didn’t really know the details of how they lived; I just saw them in magazines, or whatever or in movies.
So now I’ve lived a little more, I’ve been in LA for a long time, and met lots of different types of people. And I think that just feeds back into kind of giving these characters a little more pathos, a little more depth and nuance — and pathos also in the sense of, like: pathetic; they’re also losers. And that was always really fun for me.
One of the things BenDavid told me was you were approached to adapt this, and you were wrestling with, Well, I’ve changed since I did this story, what does that mean? And I’m curious what sort of things you were really thinking about as you’re getting approached for this series that so many people love and so many people cherish and it hits different for you now.
Well, I mean that’s the initial fear. Netflix, and our producers, Jared [LeBoff] and Edgar Wright had approached me, we had talked about it a little bit — doing a series — and they were kind of keen on on doing it much more like the books initially. And for me that just made me kind of recoil. Like I don’t want to revisit myself at 25, necessarily. And it’s all there! It’s all on the page. So why would I want to relive that? Why would I want to perfect something that was so messy; it just seems like an impossible task.
Because the messiness is such a part of it. It’s part of the joy of it, is it’s messy, it’s complicated. It’s irreducible. So when faced with writing X number of TV episodes, I just thought, how the fuck am I gonna do that? I just had no idea, so it was really not until that dinner with BenDavid that that we just kind of started spitballing — not professionally; just kind of joking around [wondering], What can we do with these characters? And then a lot of those jokes we were like, Oh, actually, that would work. So you know, the joke of “Scott dies at the end,” or “Matthew becomes the boss” — those all just became something that we can really work with.
Image: Netflix
At what point did it become clear to you that if we’re revisiting this, and we’re taking Scott out of it, and we’re giving everybody space to be a little bit more themselves, a little bit more nuanced — at what point did it kind of become: Oh, Scott might be the bad guy?
Well, I mean, that’s definitely part of the initial discussion. That’s a perception. I don’t really see Scott as the bad guy. But these days — this is a terrible thing to say in an interview — the perception definitely on Twitter and stuff kind of turned over the last maybe five years where now it’s like, “He’s a bad character!” “It’s a toxic relationship!” and all this kind of chatter.
And I think all that stuff is true. But I don’t think that people in the 2000s didn’t think it was true. Like, I think the younger generation is, like, We discovered that Scott is bad. But, you know, it says on the very first page he’s dating a high schooler; no one’s supposed to think that’s a good thing. I think in the 2000s, I took it for granted that people would be like, Oh, he’s terrible, but it’s funny. So now you kind of have to be a bit more explicit — it’s just the way our culture works, the way online works. Like, if you don’t outright condemn something, then the absence of condemnation is seen as a tacit approval.
So yeah, it was never a tacit approval. It was a tacit condemnation. But definitely in the show in the modern era, yeah, we have a scene where [we show] Scott, it’s not a good thing to date a high schooler. So — throw them a bone?
I’m curious how you interpolated but also synthesized a lot of those conversations that are happening around this property into this, since it feels like this show is so in conversation with those.
I’ve absorbed all those things over the years; I didn’t disappear after Scott Pilgrim finished. So in a lot of ways, I kind of want it to feel like Scott Pilgrim is back from the dead. You thought it was gone, but it’s back. But not only is it back, like it never left, it’s also been paying attention to you. It’s grown up alongside you.
Image: Netflix
And we had to kind of cater to so many different audiences: someone like you, who read it a long time ago, and kind of has a memory of it, of what it felt like. But also someone who just read it last week for the first time, or someone who just discovered the movie, or somebody who hasn’t seen any of it. So it was just this really complex, but invigorating challenge of: how do we make this feel fresh, and also layered — and also hopefully staggering to some people who have thought about the book, but maybe not to this degree?
Did you find yourself being surprised by your reaction to revisiting this and reframing it in any way? Were there any characters who you felt ring a little differently or sit a little differently with you?
I don’t think I have a strong memory of how it hit back then. But it was really just a fun process, writing them and, and discovering these things and challenging ourselves to find new ways into everything.
I got to write the great scene where Knives and Kim sit down and play music together. And it’s not something I could’ve done in the comic, a) because it’s music. And then just the logistical challenge of making that happen, and making it feel organic and real, was very satisfying. And then that final scene, like just made plays magically for me. It was cool to discover those things by virtue of the collaboration with all these different artists and stuff. And that was that was the big new thing. It’s just letting other people in and letting their they all have their own different kinds of love for the series. And that shows, I think.
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is now streaming on Netflix.
Dungeons & Dragons will launch a revised 5th edition ruleset in 2024, promising full compatibility with existing adventures. That makes now a great time to pick up a few great campaigns for Black Friday. The biggest deals this year come in bulk, with buy 2, get 1 free sales at both Target and Amazon. But Amazon has already discounted some excellent books that make great standalone purchases — including highly-recommended adventures like Curse of Strahd and Tyranny of Dragons, which are both at seasonal low prices.
Finally, WizKid’s newest over-the-top terrain set is called The Watchtower, and it only just started shipping this week. It’s a modular headquarters ready to become your gaming group’s bastion — or the setting for your campaign’s most climactic encounters. Originally priced at $289.99, it’s now down to $217.49.
D&D’s latest anthology of adventures, this collection of 13 heist-centric adventures can be played as stand-alone sessions or as part of an episodic campaign.
Listen as Charles, Jomi, and Van diveinto the midseason break of Invincible Season 2! The guys discuss Mark’s first interaction with his father since Omni-Man killed thousands and fled Earth and the complicated feelings that come with it.
Hosts: Charles Holmes, Van Lathan, and Jomi Adeniran Producers: Jonathan Kermah and Isaiah Blakely Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal and Steve Ahlman
Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay are joined by Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, former mayor of Baltimore and current executive director of the NBPA, to discuss activism and philanthropy in the NBA (3:13) and serving as mayor during civil unrest following the death of Freddie Gray (21:38).
Hosts: Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay Guest: Stephanie Rawlings-Blake Producers: Donnie Beacham Jr. and Ashleigh Smith
Bakari Sellers is joined by director Gelila Bekele to discuss her journey from modeling to filmmaking (1:10) and her new documentary chronicling the life of Tyler Perry, Maxine’s Baby (6:49).
Invincible has always had a knack for delivering dramatic conclusions.
In the pilot of the animated series, Mark Grayson (voiced by Steven Yeun) begins to develop superpowers, and with the guidance of his alien father, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons), Earth’s greatest hero, Mark takes up the name Invincible and becomes a superhero in his own right. But what begins as a feel-good, familiar origin story for Invincible soon becomes a sinister introduction to who Omni-Man really is: Earth’s most fearsome villain. Just as the series premiere appears to be ending, Omni-Man ambushes the superhero team known as the Guardians of the Globe and brutally kills them all.
In Invincible’s explosive first-season finale, Omni-Man shares his true motives with Mark: He’s been tasked by his homeworld Viltrum with conquering Earth and preparing its population to join the expanding Viltrum Empire. After Omni-Man fails to convince Mark to help his cause, the Viltrumite devastates Chicago and nearly kills Mark to demonstrate the futility of resistance. However, Omni-Man stops just short of ending his son’s life, and then he flees the planet without explanation.
It isn’t until the final seconds of the third episode of Season 2 that Omni-Man and Mark are reunited, as Omni-Man manages to lure Mark to a distant planet under the pretense that it needs to be saved from a meteor shower. Omni-Man’s return paves the way for another shocking ending in Episode 4, “It’s Been a While,” a midseason finale that gives Mark his greatest test yet and reestablishes the looming threat of a Viltrumite invasion.
Due to a number of factors, including the challenges of the show’s animation process and delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, more than two years elapsed between the end of Invincible’s first season in 2021 and the start of its second in early November. But the extended layoff hasn’t hurt the show: Through the first four episodes of the latest season, Invincible remains one of the best superhero programs on TV as it builds on the momentum of Omni-Man’s betrayal.
Season 2 started with something of a misdirection, one that played with the audience’s expectation to receive some answers about what happened to Omni-Man and see the continuation of his conflict with Mark. The premiere opened with Mark fighting the Immortal (Ross Marquand), only to reveal that Omni-Man was back, as he teamed up with Invincible to kill the millenia-old superhero (again). But before long it became clear that this wasn’t the show’s main version of Earth at all. It was another universe entirely, a timeline in which Mark never stood up to his father but instead joined his efforts to prepare the world for the inevitable Viltrumite takeover.
With the introduction of a dimension-hopping new character named Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown), Invincible has become yet another superhero story to enter the multiverse. Between the two Spider-Verse films, The Flash, and Marvel Studios’ Multiverse Saga (along with non-superhero projects like Everything Everywhere All at Once), the concept of the multiverse has become a well-worn narrative device in recent years that’s grown more tiresome with every misfire. Much like The Boys and its spinoff series Gen V, Invincible emerged as a standout in the crowded superhero landscape because of the ways it subverted the familiar beats and tropes of a genre that has dominated Hollywood for more than a decade. Yet in its second season, the show’s embrace of the multiverse has threatened to propel the series into all-too-familiar territory.
Fortunately, Invincible manages to maintain its novelty. While the multiverse is often used to transport heroes to parallel dimensions or bring alternate versions of the same hero together in one universe, Invincible introduces the concept by way of a villain’s origin story. Angstrom first appears in the universe that saw Mark team up with his father to conquer Earth; as he later explains, the two “heroes” team up to take over the planet in most dimensions. Angstrom’s mission starts off well intentioned: By bringing together all the versions of himself from across the multiverse, Angstrom can pool the knowledge and resources from each Earth and share the collective findings among them to solve all of their individual problems.
But when Angstrom returns to the main Invincible universe and hires the Mauler Twins (Kevin Michael Richardson) to help him transfer the memories of every one of his multiversal counterparts into his mind, Mark intervenes as the volatile process is already underway. The Maulers’ machine is destroyed during the conflict, killing everyone at the scene save for Mark, one of the Maulers, and the superpowered Angstrom, whose brain mutates amid the massive download of newfound knowledge and memories. Rather than seeking to fix every world, Angstrom instead vows to get revenge on Invincible, and begins to travel between dimensions to gather intel on how to defeat him.
After the Season 2 opener, this multiversal threat fades into the background as Mark and the so-called Global Defense Agency (GDA) write off the encounter as just another run-in with the Maulers. Angstrom’s plotline will surely resurface when Invincible returns for the second half of its latest season in early 2024, but its absence for much of the remainder of Part 1 leaves room for the series to grow in more interesting ways, grounded within its main timeline. Where Season 2 really thrives is in its narrowed focus on the show’s central characters and their adjustments to a world without a heroic Omni-Man.
Omni-Man’s betrayal and departure have created a need for a new primary protector, and Mark slowly eases his way into the role. As he starts to work for Cecil (Walton Goggins) and the GDA, all of his choices are weighed against the guilt he harbors for his father’s actions. Even though Mark opposed Omni-Man and the world knows it, he still feels as if he needs to prove to everyone—and himself—that he isn’t going to turn into the world-conquering Viltrumite he was raised by (and raised to be). Meanwhile, Mark’s mother, Debbie (Sandra Oh), bears a different kind of guilt as she tries to reckon with why she never saw through her husband’s lies in nearly 20 years of marriage. She turns to alcohol as a coping mechanism and descends into a drunken depression as she grapples with the fact that she was never more than a “pet” to the man she knew as Nolan Grayson. Without any proper outlets to channel her grief or process how she could have been partners with someone capable of inflicting such cruel and senseless destruction, Debbie spirals and grasps for some semblance of control in her life.
The character-driven nature of Invincible has always been one of the series’ strongest qualities, and the emotional beats involving Mark and Debbie work particularly well this season. Their struggles reflect lasting consequences from the first-season finale as their lives carry on, with Mark graduating high school and starting college, and Debbie navigating the transition into an empty nester on her own during her darkest hour. By delaying Omni-Man’s return until the end of the third episode, Invincible allows these characters to grow while also building up the anticipation of a potential rematch between Mark and the show’s most captivating antagonist.
The midseason finale capitalizes on the groundwork laid throughout Part 1’s first three episodes to become the strongest installment of the season. Omni-Man reveals his new life as the emperor of Thraxa, a planet inhabited by insectoids who have a lifespan of only nine months, and he introduces Mark to his wife, Andressa (Rhea Seehorn), and their child. It’s a lot for Mark to process at once, and before he can even attempt to do so, Thraxa gets invaded by a trio of Viltrumites who have been hunting down Omni-Man for deserting his post back on Earth.
“It’s Been a While” boasts some of Invincible’s trademark action mixture of stunning and grotesque violence as Mark and Omni-Man team up to defend the planet and Omni-Man’s new family. The duo defeat the Viltrumites, but the victory comes with steep costs: Mark is nearly killed, Omni-Man’s spine is snapped, and much of the Thraxan civilization is destroyed. Just as Omni-Man returns to the forefront of the story, he’s taken away in a Viltrumite ship to be brought back to his homeworld for execution. Yet even in Omni-Man’s limited screen time, Invincible shows how much he, too, has grown as a character. He killed thousands of civilians in Chicago in the first season simply to convey to Mark how little their brief lives mattered in the grand scheme of things, and here he defies his fellow Viltrumites to defend a planet of beings whose entire life cycles last less than a calendar year.
Mark is spared by the Viltrumites so that he can return to Earth and supposedly assume his father’s role in preparing humanity for the Empire’s invasion, which sets up the second half of the eight-episode season. What with all of the other ongoing story lines in Invincible, including Angstrom’s multiversal revenge spree, the Coalition of Planets’ growing efforts to quell the Viltrum Empire in the far reaches of space, and Atom Eve’s (Gillian Jacobs) journey of self-discovery after giving up crime fighting, Season 2 can feel a little scattered as it divides its time among its moving parts. But the fourth episode reminds the audience what’s at stake by refocusing on the central conflict between Mark and Omni-Man, and the impending Viltrumite invasion, just as Invincible enters another hiatus.
Amazon Prime Video has yet to announce exactly when the series will return next year, but the streaming service already renewed the show for a third season back in 2021, and the surprise release of a stand-alone Atom Eve prequel special in late July could be the first of many of its kind. With a growing cast of dynamic characters (and an absurd wealth of talent voicing them), the Invincible universe is expanding. And as long as the series continues to develop those characters so deftly amid the chaos of the multiverse around them, there may be no limit to the narrative heights Invincible can reach.
A decade later, Frozen is still a pretty incredible looking movie. Despite accusations of Disney Face and a slew of movies that have aped its art style, Disney’s landmark 2013 film remains a pretty astounding display of digital animation prowess. Among the many fantastic looking elements, perhaps the most impressive is the snow. But Frozen’s snow has done more than simply look pretty — the technology that Disney used to make it helped solve the decades-old mystery of Dyatlov Pass.
For those who don’t know, the Dyatlov Pass incident is a hiking tragedy that happened in Russia’s Ural Mountains in 1959. A group of nine people were discovered dead a few weeks after pitching their tent in the snowy slopes. What was particularly haunting about the bodies, however, was the state in which they were found [Ed. note: This description is a little graphic]: Several seemed to have been dragged many feet from the campsite, while others were even further away. Some were discovered in various states of undress, injury, and disfigurement, missing eyeballs or tongue, and with cracked ribs and skulls. The bodies were also, bizarrely, lightly irradiated. In other words, it seemed like a graphic and grisly massacre, but no one could provide an explanation that exactly fit the facts.
That mystery made space for decades of fantastical theories to crop up, including Yetis, aliens, wild animals, infrasound, the Soviet military, or (most boring and plausible) an avalanche. But for years, the avalanche theory was considered an insufficient explanation. In the initial investigation, and several subsequent ones, researchers found none of the typical evidence that might suggest an avalanche had been triggered. But in 2019, a group of physicists determined that an extremely small avalanche could technically be possible in that area.
Image: Walt Disney Animation Studios
The next question for researchers was whether or not an avalanche of that size could really cause the kinds of injuries the nine victims were found with — and that’s exactly where Frozen comes into play.
When Johan Gaume, head of the Snow Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at EPFL, a Swiss federal technical institute, saw Frozen, he was immediately impressed with the way the snow in the movie moved. So impressed, in fact, that he met with Disney to talk about the animation technology they used to create it. Gaume then augmented the code slightly in order to create a more realistic model for how an avalanche of that size might look and behave, and more importantly how it might impact and injure a human body.
Between the Frozen code, his own simulations, and some old crash-test data from General Motors, Gaume and his team determined that a small avalanche actually could be enough to create the kind of blunt-force trauma injuries suffered by the victims of Dyatlov’s tragedy. According to their research, an avalanche of that size, in those specific conditions could do things like break ribs or cause serious head injuries, or even enough soft tissue damage to result in death — unlike most avalanche victims, who tend to die of asphyxiation.
Image: Walt Disney Animation Studios
But while Gaume’s model does give some compelling support to the avalanche theory, it can’t quite account for all of Dyatlov’s Pass’ mysteries. For instance, why were the bodies irradiated (possibly due to thorium present in some camping lanterns, but unconfirmed) or what happened to the eyes and tongues of certain members of the group (possibly scavenged by animals, though there aren’t many other signs that point to that on the bodies). Another of the ongoing mysteries is why exactly the bodies were so far from the camp or why they were undressed — though various kinds of panic and hypothermia could potentially account for that.
But at the end of the day, we’re still one step closer to figuring out the answers that have eluded researchers for years, and it’s all because of Frozen.
Honestly, Disney should lean into it. Frozen 3 and Frozen 4 are on the way — what’s keeping the House of Mouse from realistically modeling radiation spread, katabatic winds, and possibly the alpine speed of a Yeti?
Thanksgiving in the United States comes with a number of traditional televised events, but maybe none as seamless and low-key entertaining as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
This year marks the department store’s 97th parade down the streets of New York City, and the event once again promises floats, musical numbers, and big cartoon balloons, albeit with an extremely 2023 touch. Here’s what to know — and a few things you may never think about while watching.
How to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade stream
The official telecast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will air on NBC and be simulcast on Peacock. Today’s Savannah Guthrie, Hoda Kotb, and Al Roker will be back per usual to yap about the floats. A Spanish language simulcast will air on Telemundo, hosted by Carlos Adyan and Andrea Meza.
What time does the Thanksgiving Day Parade start
This year’s parade starts a little earlier than usual: the simulcast runs from 8:30 a.m. ET to 12 p.m. ET., but will also begin at 8:30 a.m. in all time zones, so no need to wake up at the crack of dawn. NBC will also air an encore of the parade at 2 p.m. ET.
The new parade balloons and how they got here
Photo: Macy’s, Inc/Getty Images
This year’s balloon lineup sees a number of returning Giant and Novelty favorites, including Spongebob, Grogu, Bluey, and Smokey the Bear. The commerce of it all means a number of unfamiliar faces will join the lineup, too, including Leo, Adam Sandler’s 74-year-old lizard from the upcoming Netflix animated film; Uncle Dan, the mallard main character of Illumination’s new movie Migration; and Blue Cat & Chugs, the mascots of the Web3 company Cool Cats Group and the winner of a Macy’s contest to decide which NFT brand should earn a coveted character in the parade. 2023, baby! Anime continues its mainstream takeover as well, with legacy balloons Goku and Pikachu joined for the first time by One Piece’s Monkey D. Luffy.
Time has not just modernized the balloon characters, but the process itself. Kathleen Wright, Macy’s director of production operations, tells Polygon that the journey of devising a balloon, rendering it in inflatable form, then parading it along Central Park has taken on the quality of a Seal Team 6 operation. Computers allow designers to test balloon concepts in various weather conditions to determine the appropriate center of gravity and lift, all while minding the dimension requirements that allow it to float through New York.
In the week leading up to the parade, Wright and her team walk through the route with various city departments to size up potential hindrances for the buoyant stars, including any protruding lamp posts, which are manually swung in the opposite direction by city workers on the eve of the parade. On the day-of, the balloons — once made of rubber, but now built as modular polyurethane pieces that are heat sealed together and painted — are inflated with a combination of helium and regular air, based on required lift. Ninety handlers are assigned to each balloon, with 40-50 people securing the handling lines at any given time (and you thought pop stars were needy). By the time you watch the parade at home, a balloon’s “flight envelope” has been completely broken down and considered. There is no room for error, and based on Wright’s description, they don’t leave any.
The rest of the parade lineup
Along with the balloons and fleet of floats (including a sadly inedible Wonka one), the Thanksgiving Day Parade will once again tout a ton of talent shivering in their knickers while performing on the street. The show kicks off with a performance by Jon Batiste, with expected performances by Bell Biv DeVoe; Brandy; Chicago; En Vogue; David Foster and Katharine McPhee; Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors; Jessie James Decker; Ashley Park and the monsters of Sesame Street; Pentatonix; Paul Russell; Amanda Shaw and Alex Smith; and Manuel Turizo. Oh, and ENHYPEN will be there — so if you hear an inordinate amount of screaming from the crowd, it’s because the parade has gone full K-Pop, bless.
Bill Simmons is joined by Chris Ryan and Amanda Dobbins to rewatch the 2005 action-comedy ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Chris Ryan and Amanda Dobbins to rewatch the 2005 action-comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith, starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
The Time Lord has come in the form of Jodie Whittaker, so Joanna and Mal are here to dive deep into the era of the 13th Doctor. They cover Seasons 11 through 13 of the beloved BBC series in Part 6 of their Doctor Who Viewing Guide (9:54). Then, they have some superlatives for all the Doctors they’ve covered as they look forward to David Tennant’s return (1:19:05).
Hosts: Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson Associate Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran
Sean, Amanda, and Chris explore the high highs of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon—in particular the battle scenes—while trying to sort through their feelings on why the movie doesn’t come together as a whole quite how they hoped it would (1:00). Then, they try to place Napoleon in the historical context of “great men” movies and share their top five in the genre (40:00).
Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Chris Ryan Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner
“The thing people forget about human babies,” mused Sam Altman, the entrepreneur whisperer turned artificial intelligence diviner, to The New Yorker’sTad Friend in 2016, “is that they take years to learn anything interesting.” Tough but fair, although any babies reading this oughtn’t feel too embarrassed: Altman pointed out elsewhere in the piece, which was titled “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny,” that we grown-ups aren’t too quick on the uptake ourselves.
“There are certain advantages to being a machine,” said Altman, the 38-year-old who—with the hectic exception of the past five-ish days; more on that in a moment!—has been the high-profile and highly influential CEO of OpenAI since 2019. His company recently flirted with an implied valuation of $80 billion; it is behind products like the smart image generator DALL-E and the beguiling large language model chatbot ChatGPT. “We humans are limited by our input-output rate—we learn only two bits a second, so a ton is lost,” Altman told Friend. “To a machine, we must seem like slowed-down whale songs.”
It’s easy to imagine a tech leader like Altman sympathizing with the plight of such a bot. When you’re a guy who likes to operate not just on a different wavelength from most other mortals, but in a whole nother realm of consciousness—one in which the goal of achieving AGI, or “artificial general intelligence,” is considered possibly world saving or world ending, depending on who is doing the extrapolations—those brisk whirs of industry tend to resonate better than humanity’s low, musical moans.
Why, just the other day—last Thursday, to be specific—Altman sat at a developer conference and described a recent experience that had left him positively vibrating with wonder. “On a personal note,” he told interviewer Laurene Powell Jobs and the rest of the APEC audience, “just in the last couple of weeks, I have gotten to be in the room when we sort of, like, push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward.” I’ve heard people use this kind of language to describe, like, the glory of childbirth, but in Altman’s case, he was describing the arrival of a different little bundle—lines of code on a computer that could go on to change the world.
And yet, even the sleekest, purringest, many-billion-dollar flywheel can get smoked by a dumb, sudden bird strike; even the deepest-dwelling whales can surface at random and upend a vessel. Why, just the other day—last Friday, to be specific—the OpenAI board of directors abruptly decided it would be prudent to fire its CEO into the sun. And so, without telling anyone, including its publicly traded partner and mega-investor Microsoft, it went ahead and did it, with a ruthlessness that might have pleased the machines if everything hadn’t turned out so aggressively, humanly awkward instead.
It’s always jarring when a real story feels fake, when everyone is skeptical of buying what you’re telling. Sometimes, the very people most familiar with a story are the ones most moved to try to explain things via shared fiction.
Even among the techno journos and cyber doomers and network statists and “See, corporate governance matters!”nerds who have been glued to the sudden goings-on and votings-out at OpenAI—even among those of us who are terminally online enough to have tuned in eagerly last Friday to a highly speculative and information-light Twitter Spaces event about Altman’s odd ousting cohosted by Martin Shkreli; ask me how I know—we couldn’t help but notice that the past five days have unfolded like something you’d find on TV.
Like an episode of Succession! Like a whole season of Succession,I should say, with enough rapid twists and U-turns in the power struggle timeline to make GoJo seem slo-mo by comparison. On Wednesday morning, when I woke up to the news that we’d reached a finale and Altman was coming back to OpenAI as CEO, my rotted brain could only think about Tom Wambsgans saying to Kendall Roy: “I’ve seen you get fucked a lot, and I’ve never seen Logan get fucked once.” And when I learned that Altman’s return involved a board of directors shake-up that installed both former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former jetsetting Harvard president and compulsive opiner Larry Summers (?!?) … I mostly thought about how ’ol “Lawrence of Absurdia” would have been quite the character on Silicon Valley. (“Larry sucks up, and he bullies down” has the makings of a Russ Hanneman motivational speech, you know?)
But mostly, all this time, I’ve thought about Survivor:specifically, one of thosehumdingers where the tribal council has started but there are still 24 minutes left in the episode. Just consider that, between the close of the stock market’s trading hours at 4 p.m. Eastern time Friday and the opening of the stock market’s trading hours at 9:30 a.m. Monday, all of the following happened:
OpenAI’s board of directors—a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, which sits on the original nonprofit side of the organization but has absolute control over the newer for-profit side too, due to a once-idealistic, now-unusual corporate governance structure—announced that Altman was out. It informed him of this decision via Google Meet; it informed most of the rest of the world via a press release that cryptically described Altman as having been “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.”
Into this absence of information flowed many theories. The abruptness of the decision suggested the worst. On the Twitter Spaces event I joined, Shkreli posited that perhaps it had something to do with a recent New York magazinestory titled “Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age,” in which Altman’s sister, Annie, spoke out about her estrangement from her brothers and followed up on past accounts of familial abuse. (The hosts of the Twitter Spaces event concluded that this explanation for Sam’s ouster seemed less likely once big names in Silicon Valley began speaking out with public statements of support for him.)
Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and a member of the board who was also blindsided by a vote of removal, bid adieu in protest.
Another theory behind the decision began to take hold around social media and hasn’t quieted since: that the board of directors had fired Altman out of some sense of moral duty because members felt or knew that he was being too cavalier, or maybe too commercial, with the technology’s rate of veil-lifting, frontier-pushing growth. Was this an attempt to keep OpenAI from breaking with its nonprofit origins and expanding its for-profit operations? Was it a way of slowing the company from iterating its way into the brave new world of actual AGI too soon? It’s not unusual for a board of directors to make decisions based on an organization’s mission or first principals or founding charter. But when that mission is related to the very future of mankind, the stakes are slightly raised.
If it’s true that they torched an $80 billion company cause they thought they were too close to building God, then that’s orders of magnitude the most punk rock thing I’ve ever heard of.
Terms like “doomers” (used to describe fretful people who regard the potential of AGI with dread), “safetyists” (self-explanatory), and “decels” (people who think we should just sloooow down, man, before someone gets hurt) were all over my timeline, deployed with varying amounts of derision or respect.
People make fun of academic jargon, but the phrase “decel safetyist” is currently being uttered by dozens of perfectly respectable people in the worlds of business and tech. Everybody is ridiculous.
An October tweet from board member Ilya Sutskever, who was said to have delivered the news to Altman, resurfaced and was widely analyzed for clues: “if you value intelligence above all other human qualities,” he had written, “you’re gonna have a bad time.”
Altman posted “I love you all” on Twitter; followers with big Swiftie energy pointed out that the first letters of each word spelled out ILYA.
Elon Musk, who cofounded and named OpenAI in 2015 and had served on the board for a time (along with Shivon Zilis, a former Yale hockey goalie who has worked at Tesla and Neuralink and who is also the mother of one of Musk’s sets of twins), stoked the existential crisis flames. He retweeted Sutskever’s quote; “I am very worried,” Musk added. “Ilya has a good moral compass and does not seek power. He would not take such drastic action unless he felt it was absolutely necessary.”
OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, wrote an internal memo viewed by several media outlets that explained all the reasons that weren’t behind Altman’s firing: The move “was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices,” Lightcap wrote. “This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board.” About what, he did not say.
The Verge and other outlets reported that Altman was in talks to return to the company. Soon after, he posted a photo of himself wearing an OpenAI guest badge. Another AI employee posted a photo of Altman taking said selfie, as proof of life.
OpenAI made an announcement confirming that Altman would not be returning as CEO—because the company had made a new indefinite-term hire. A warm welcome to onetime Microsoft intern Emmett Shear: the former CEO of Twitch, a noted Harry Potter fan, and one hell of a reply guy. Shear, a self-described safetyist/doomer who also seemed not to know exactly why his predecessor had gotten got, vowed to launch an investigation immediately.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella released a scorcher of a corporate communication around midnight Pacific time Sunday, expressing optimism about the company’s many-billion-dollar investment in OpenAI and adding that, oh, by the way, he had decided to hire Altman and Brockman into Microsoft directly so they could start a new in-house artificial intelligence and also that, oh, by the way, Big Clippy would be happy to hire any of the hundreds of OpenAI employees who sought to follow their former leaders to the BigCo. This was bonkers stuff. (Also, something about the glint of “We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear” made my blood run cold.)
OpenAI employees loyal to Altman—including Mira Murati, who had ever so briefly been interim CEO—flooded Twitter with heart emoji and the line, “OpenAI is nothing without its people,” which sounds precisely like the kind of thing a scheming AI would say to butter us tenderhearted humans up. (I did see someone on Twitter joke that maybe if he joined in and tweeted the line too, he could slip right into a seven-figure job at Microsoft undetected.)
ILYA TWEETED THAT HE DEEPLY REGRETTED HIS PARTICIPATION IN THE BOARD’S ACTIONS AND WROTE THAT HE NEVER INTENDED TO HARM OPENAI. (?????) (!!!!!!!!)
SAM RETWEETED ILYA’S TWEET AND ADDED SOME HEART EMOJI.
As reported by Kara Swisher, a petition went around imploring the remaining board holdouts—one of whom included the CEO of Quora, because of course—to step down or face the mass resignation of what would eventually be something like 95 percent of OpenAI employees. ILYA SIGNED THE PETITION. (It’s unclear whether he was clad in a hot dog suit at the time.)
And that accounting of the weekend absurdity doesn’t include the most Silicon Valley detail of them all, the one so on the nose it seemed scripted, but only because it happened after the opening bell:
The CEO of a “smart mattress” company called Eight Sleep tapped into the mainframe and emerged with some data: Few people in San Francisco got a good night of sleep on Sunday. Maybe it’s because they’re being surveilled by their mattresses?
Breaking news: The OpenAI drama is real.
We checked our data and last night, SF saw a spike in low-quality sleep. There was a 27% increase in people getting under 5 hours of sleep. We need to fix this.
The breakneck pace of updates continued once the workweek got under way: There were lots of reports about meetings, more OpenAI employees signing the petition; wives doing work; Salesforce’s Marc Benioff getting roasted; Shear trying and failing to learn why Altman got sacked in the first place; things of that nature. For a time, Altman existed in a sort of quantum state, employed (though not quite yet) by Microsoft and fired from (but still looming over) OpenAI. On Tuesday night, a New York Times story noted the deep rift between Altman and some of the members of the board—one of whom, Helen Toner, had criticized OpenAI in an academic paper she wrote and had also said that the company, and the mission, and humanity, could be better off without Altman.
I fell asleep thinking this might last for a while, feeling sorry for tech reporters whose Thanksgiving might be ruined. And when I woke up, Sam was back.
I know some readers might be thinking: What’s up with all the Sams? And you know what, they’re right to do so. Because there really are a number of similarities between Altman and another Sam of recent yore—Bankman-Fried—whose fraud trial I spentmyOctoberobserving.
Both have totally aptronymic last names, if you think hard about it, man. Bankman-Fried had a disagreement with a business partner named Tara Mac Aulay that led to a professional schism; Altman had a disagreement with a now-former board member named Tasha McCauley that led to Friday’s professional schism. (As a side note, McCauley married Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 2014, which I understandably have no parallel for, but it feels essential to mention.) Both had game-changing moments while on hikes just outside San Francisco: Bankman-Fried charmed Michael Lewis into writing a book, while Altman “relinquished the notion that human beings are singular” and began thinking more deeply about the power and might of simulating intelligence. (So, like, same, except exactly the opposite.) Bankman-Fried named his investment firm Alameda Research in an attempt to sound less crypto-y; Altman had an early entity he called Hydrazine, named after the compound used in rocket fuel.
And both Sams ultimately became well-known and willing avatars for their respective nascent industries, always ready to don those little nude nub microphones they hand out at tech conference panels and opine about P values and the future of crypto or AI. They may not have written the code underlying their ventures, but they sure spoke the media’s lingua franca. (Wait, were they the personality hires?!) In their own ways, they cultivated press relationships: Bankman-Fried’s attention to his own narrative was so deliberate that the prosecution used it against him in court, while Altman’s rapport with some reporters may have helped him this weekend, as one opined.
But the other quirky Samilarity is that both of their ascents had ties to effective altruism, the rationalist-adjacent worldview that seeks to define, quantify, and ultimately encourage the actions that can do the most good for all of humanity—both now and in the future. For Bankman-Fried, effective altruism was, at least nominally, an ethical framework that compelled him to seek greater and greater sums of money and encouraged him to take bigger and unwieldier financial swings. (He struck out.)
Altman’s engagement with EA is murkier. On Twitter, a coalition of shitposters, venture capitalists, and chaos slurpers—whoa, everything really IS (a) securitiesfraud and (b) college football—have started half-jokingly calling themselves “effective accelerationists,” or “e/acc,” of late, a salvo against what they consider to be the gloomier-and-doomier EA types. Altman offers glimpses of futures that both EA believers and e/acc trolls want, and some in the latter group have interpreted his reverse-Grandpa Simpson as a sign that perhaps he shares their merrier approach to AI R&D. Whether he actually does is something I assume we’ll find out when our strawberry overlords come to town.
While the Altman drama was in full flux, much of Silicon Valley hearkened back to its most notorious founder ousting of all time: that of Apple’s Steve Jobs, a farewell so famous that Uber’s Travis Kalanick later tried to turn the breakup into a verb. “If only twitter had been around during the john sculley / steve jobs conflict,” wrote Founders Fund principal Delian Asparouhov (recently described as “the man speed-running the new space race”). “History is so much more interesting when you watch it play out live on a timeline.”
It wasn’t just the firing of Jobs that is relevant to Altman’s situation, though. It was the way his eventual return only enhanced his power and influence.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs quotes him in 1983, two years before the split with Apple, when he recruited Sculley away from PepsiCo with this winning pitch: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?” But in the real world, Jobs and Sculley clashed over the disappointing sales of, among other products, the Macintosh. An attempt by the Apple cofounder to appeal to the board of directors following a demotion led instead to his departure from the company. “I am but 30 and want still to contribute and achieve,” Jobs wrote in a parting letter to the company’s vice chairman.
A little over a decade later, at the end of 1996, Apple was floundering, and Jobs was brought (and bought) back into the fold. At the time, I was a teenage employee of an online chat company with Apple roots that had Sculley as a board member and investor, as well as a huge Apple dweeb who handled the return of Jobs like a Marvel fan glimpsing a bygone fav in a mid-credits scene. When Apple debuted its “Think different” campaign in the fall of 1997, I downloaded a grainy QuickTime of the ad and watched it again and again.
By then, the company was back on the rise. Earlier that summer, I had attended the Macworld expo in Boston, where Jobs went on stage and made a pivotal announcement about a big, stabilizing $150 million investment from … Microsoft. Jobs was but 42, and still had a whole lot to contribute and achieve; to doom and bless the world with. Or, as he might’ve put it, he had a few more one more things up his sleeve.
Altman’s exile, depending on whether you calculate the end of it as his show of support from Microsoft or his return to OpenAI specifically, lasted roughly between one-twentieth and one-tenth of 1 percent as long as Jobs’s did. But it included a larger, undefined number of heart emoji tweets, that’s for sure. Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn sneaking into their own funeral service, both Altman and Brockman got to observe an enormous amount of employee support for their leadership. Now, back atop the company, they get to figure out what to do with it, and how to ensure that all this goodwill doesn’t break bad.
Since the will they or won’t they nature of this story has given way to (some?) clarity, this is the biggest focal point surrounding OpenAI’s future. In a pair of televised appearances Monday evening, Microsoft’s Nadella had amiably and CEO-ishly hedged about whether he thought Altman would wind up in-house at Microsoft or whether he’d be able to return to OpenAI. “I’m open to both options,” he said on CNBC. “One thing I will not do is stop innovating.” (He’s running!) Over the past few days, Microsoft served as an important backstop for OpenAI, a sort of employer-of-last-resort during what felt like the HR version of a bank run. In exchange for Nadella’s trouble, it stands to reason that OpenAI’s new board—which, at the moment, consists of just three people: Taylor, Summers, and the Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who already had a seat—will have a much friendlier and likely more commercial relationship with the company who provides all that computing power in addition to capital. And Microsoft will ostensibly at some point want to push for a board seat of its own.
There are two other parts of the 2016 New Yorker story that feel especially relevant today. The first is a quote from the venture capitalist Paul Graham, a longtime Altman colleague and advocate who once approvingly wrote that “software is eating the world” and had a track record of finding Altman to be formidable. “Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful,” Graham told Friend in the story. It echoed something that Graham wrote back in 2008, linking to a video of Altman presenting his Gossip Girl–approved app, Loopt, at an Apple developers conference while wearing two polo shirts with popped collars: “Sam Altman has it. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.”
The second resonant part of that New Yorker story is an anecdote about a leading AI researcher from Google visiting Altman and Brockman. The researcher asks them—I mean really asks them—how they would define OpenAI’s goal. Brockman’s answer is classic Silicon Valley, and classic Silicon Valley.“Our goal right now … is to do the best thing there is to do,” he declares. “It’s a little vague.”
What isn’t as vague is that, going forward, OpenAI is well and truly Altman’s baby—a baby that has a much scarier and expedient learning curve than our human ones do. These past few days have been filled with everyone talking over one another—investors, founders, and observers alike. But to the machines, it was all just background noise, some distant hum of human discord. Sometimes you eat the whale, and sometimes the whale eats you.
Saltburn has the slick intrigue of a Gothic thriller and the icy wit of a comedy of manners. The eponymous estate at which bookish University of Oxford loner Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) works to ingratiate himself is a museum of decadence, its splendor concealing a depravity that only the wealthy can disregard. But the movie’s target isn’t straightforward. Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the bewitching classmate who invites Oliver home with him for a rambling summer, starts out as a token of desire but becomes a heedless lodestar. Felix inherited his savior complex from his mother, Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), a wannabe do-gooder with a vampy cruel streak. She’s married to a daffy lord (played by Richard E. Grant) whose lack of self-awareness rivals her own. As for Oliver, he spends his days at Saltburn currying favor among the Cattons, only to enact extravagant subterfuge.
Emerald Fennell, the writer and director of Saltburn, calls it a “vampire movie.” Oliver is the ultimate bloodsucker in question, yet his drive remains a sympathetic one. He wants what everyone wants: to belong. When Felix embraces Oliver, who talks of drug-addicted parents and a life without spoils, Oliver quickly leeches on to the most popular guy at school. Can you blame him? Grandeur is an aphrodisiac.
“It’s the same as constructing any love story. I mean, it is a love story,” Fennell tells The Ringer. “Can you completely believe why these two people would come together?”
Part of the seduction scheme that eventually leads Oliver to acquire Saltburn involves sex—the sex he witnesses, the sex he wants, the sex he initiates. If he has something to gain beyond corporeal pleasure, nothing is off-limits. That includes semen-streaked bathwater, menstrual blood, and grave fucking. With the movie hitting theaters, Fennell and Keoghan walked The Ringer through Saltburn’s three outré sex scenes, the ones meant to shock and titillate in near-equal measure.
The Bathwater
For the movie’s first kink to land, Fennell had to plant a few crucial seeds. Casting the right Felix was the first. Keoghan is well-known for playing shifty oddballs like Oliver (see: The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Green Knight, The Banshees of Inisherin), but Feilx is all about surface-level élan. Fennell needed an actor with a magnetism that leaps off the screen, someone so striking his mere presence can melt hearts—not unlike Bo Burnham in Promising Young Woman, her 2020 directorial debut. Felix, whom Fennell compares to Brideshead Revisited aristocrat Sebastian Flyte, doesn’t have a whole lot to offer beyond beauty, charm, and money.
Fennell was pleased to discover that Elordi, the Euphoria and Priscilla heartthrob, shared her take on the character. “Felix does something shitty in every scene,” Fennell says. “He’s casually misogynistic, he’s fickle, he’s snobbish. I was always saying to Jacob, ‘He’s not a good kisser. He’s not good in bed. He’s never had to be.’ When Jacob came in to audition, he [played Felix as] kind of a dope. The thing that’s important is that so much of what makes him interesting is Oliver looking at him.”
Oliver certainly can’t stop looking, first through a dormitory window where he watches Felix holding court amid a tribe of admirers. Felix’s poise screams privilege, which immediately beguiles Oliver. When he watches through another window at night while Felix has sex with a young woman, it’s blissfully unclear whether Oliver would rather swap places with Felix or the girl. (For whatever it’s worth, Fennell says Oliver is “absolutely bisexual.”) By the time he enters Saltburn’s imperial gates, he’s completely enthralled, only seldom betraying his underlying desperation. After growing acquainted with the family and their ostentatious house, which Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land) sought to shoot “like a fetish object,” he spies Felix masturbating during a bath.
The camera, mirroring Oliver’s eyes, lingers on Felix’s long torso and aroused face. But it’s what follows this voyeurism that’s most erotic. When Felix leaves the bathroom, Oliver slinks into the tub and guzzles the last of the ejaculate water as it drains, as if he’s harvesting Felix’s fluids and social status at once.
“The moment where he rubs his face along the plughole and wants to be in it, it’s sort of like, ‘I want to feel it, I want it to be part of me, I want it to change me,’” Keoghan says. “It’s a total obsession. He’s confused and lost. I don’t think he knows what he’s actually chasing.”
Keoghan says he channeled some combination of fox and snake while descending into the tub, and the sound team blended his slurp with the effects of raw octopus sliding against oil. Oliver’s animalistic excess was one of the first images Fennell thought of while brainstorming Saltburn. “It’s the impulse,” she says. “The moment he does that, it imbues him with this kind of wicked power. It also just felt, to me, so profoundly true of vulnerability, desire, and class envy: All of us can only ever really hope to lick the bottom of a bathtub. So there’s something pathetic, funny, incredibly sexy, and incredibly real.”
The Garden
As the summer continues and his stature among the Cattons swells, Oliver starts to see everyone as a potential dupe. If he can embed himself in the fabric of Saltburn, maybe he’ll never have to leave. He gives Felix’s catty American cousin (Archie Madekwe) a hand job as a sort of vengeful come-on after the cousin embarrasses Oliver at a dinner party. He even flirts with Elspeth, attempting to appeal to her affinity for waifs. She sees him as a sapling to protect, so Oliver then directs his persuasions to Felix’s troubled sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), seizing on her fragility. As a self-conscious idler with an eating disorder, she’s anxious to find esteem within a family where Felix is the star.
Aware that she’s uncomfortable in her own body, Oliver uses lusting after Venetia as his ace card. Late one night, when he spots her stalking the garden, Oliver pounces. He treats her like a delicious talisman, fingering her on the fog-soaked lawn and smearing her menstrual blood across both of their faces. This act of demented flattery confirms Oliver’s mounting sense of power. Look at how far I’ll go for you.
“So much of the dom-sub thing is about taking care of the person,” Fennell says. “We see him giving people what they want, and that’s just being a good acolyte. What turns him on … is having control of the situation.”
Keoghan takes that sentiment a step further. “He’s abusing her, and he’s a master manipulator,” he says. “He wants to see how far he can take it: ‘I own you. You’re going to do what I say.’ He knows he wouldn’t get away with that with Felix.”
The Grave
Oliver’s quest to become an honorary Catton falls apart when Felix arranges to take him home to visit his parents on his birthday. Discovering that Oliver is nowhere near as Dickensian as he’s led on, Felix sours on his summer guest, sending Oliver into a spiral. If he can’t worm his way into Saltburn by feigning victimhood, he’ll go for the second-best option: killing the Cattons one by one and taking the whole thing for himself. Anything to avoid feeling once again like an outcast.
After poisoning Felix’s champagne during a blowout party, Oliver enacts a final act of longing: He leaves the funeral to return to the cemetery, pulls down his pants, and fucks the dude’s gravesite. For Fennell, the gesture is more about grief than sex—a visceral version of Heathcliff digging up Catherine’s body at the end of Wuthering Heights. It’s his last chance to touch Felix. Oliver can never have him back, and although he tells himself he wasn’t in love, the intensity of his sobs suggests otherwise.
Initially, Fennell imagined Keoghan rubbing his face in the grave and fondling the dirt, blending the bathtub scene and the garden scene into one showstopping desecration. But upon discussing it with the actor, they decided to be less coy. “I wanted to see what the next step was,” Keoghan says of Oliver’s farewell to Felix. “It wasn’t to get a wow factor. It was quite sad, because he’s lost at that moment.” Keoghan requested a closed set, meaning only essential people like Fennell and Sandgren were present. Shot from behind, he did the deed in one take, hoping to avoid the “sheer embarrassment” of needing to repeat it.
With the Catton clan eventually gone, Oliver is alone at Saltburn, having convinced Elspeth to will the property to him. He can dance naked through the house’s halls all he wants, but Oliver’s victory is hollow. After the movie fades to black, he’ll be left without companionship or a clear purpose. What was it all for? “I’ve always believed that what he wanted was very simple, which was just to be there with [the Cattons],” Fennell says. “The framing narrative makes it seem like he was always in pursuit of this specific end goal, but what he’s most interested in, even if he doesn’t know it himself, is the game of power. That’s why he’s interested in Felix from the beginning. It’s not just that he’s beautiful. It’s that he’s in the middle … That’s what Oliver’s preoccupation is: with being special. And aren’t we all preoccupied with being special?”
Matthew Jacobs is an Austin-based entertainment journalist who covers film and television. His work can be found at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost, and beyond. Follow him on X @majacobs.
The Steam autumn sale has gone live, and is set to run through Nov. 28 at 1 p.m. EST. The Steam sale is always a good chance to catch up on games; with the sheer amount of new titles that are released every year, it’s impossible to play all of them. Luckily, the Steam autumn sale has deep discounts on some spectacular titles that demand your attention. If you have a little cash to drop before the holidays, you can do worse than indulging in one of these picks.
Image: Supergiant Games
Hades, one of 2020’s best games, is available for $12.49, 50% off its original price. But an even better deal is the Supergiant Games bundle for $35.63, or 73% off the total price of four games and five soundtracks. You’ll get Hades, Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre— with each of their soundtracks — and a 10th anniversary soundtrack featuring music from all the games. The Bastion soundtrack, which won multiple awards, is worth the price of the entire bundle, in my opinion; the music in Supergiant’s first game absolutely slaps.
The developer expects to release Hades 2 in early access in 2024, and what’s a better way to prepare than revisiting Supergiant’s back catalog? —Nicole Carpenter
Image: Strange Scaffold
El Paso, Elsewhere was released in September by developer Strange Scaffold, but you can get it now for $15.99, 20% off its original price of $19.99. If you’re a fan of Max Payne and PlayStation 1 visuals — or just original third-person shooters — it’s worth checking El Paso, Elsewhere out. Playing as James Savage, you can slow down time to blast away a bunch of different monsters. Not only is it a solid shooter, but El Paso, Elsewhere has a great narrative, too. —NC
Image: Geometric Interactive/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
Cocoon is a game that surprised me a lot; it felt like it came out of nowhere and was all of a sudden in a top slot on my games of the year list. Released in late September by Geometric Interactive, Cocoon is a puzzle game about worlds within worlds within worlds, most of which exist inside orbs you can tote around. Beyond holding worlds, the orbs each have their own special powers, meaning they each have a different role in uncovering Cocoon’s secrets.
Despite its recent release, Cocoon is available for $19.99, or 20% off, its original $24.99 price. —NC
Image: Motive Studio/Electronic Arts
When Dead Space was originally released in 2008, it received tons of praise for being a genuinely scary sci-fi shooter. The 2023 remake of the game, originally released in January, lives up to that legacy. Isaac Clarke’s terrifying trip through the USG Ishimura looks better than ever, even under a thick layer of grime and gore, and the narrative’s detour into new territory works well at humanizing Isaac. The Dead Space remake is one of the best survival horror titles available in a golden age for the genre, and at a full 50% off (making it $29.99), it’s worth the chills for the thrills of eviscerating hordes of scary Necromorphs. —Cass Marshall
Image: Hazelight Studios/Electronic Arts via Polygon
Two player co-op games are surprisingly rare, considering most of us have at least one friend. A Way Out and It Takes Two are exceptions to the rule that are built entirely around two person cooperative play. The stories are quite different, but the core mechanics are similar, and based around playing with a pal.
In A Way Out, players take the role of two convicts teaming up to escape prison and acquire revenge, while It Takes Two is the story of a couple on the verge of divorce who find themselves trapped in the bodies of dolls. Both tales force the players to work together to platform, solve puzzles, and overcome the odds. A Way Out is 85% off, down to just under $5, and It Takes Two is 75% off, making it $11.99. —CM
Chelsea and Zack discuss Larsa’s loose lips and dive into the snooze fest of ‘The Real Housewives of Potomac’ Season 8, Episode 3
Chelsea and Zack kick off today’s Morally Corrupt with a discussion of the Bravo news of the week and a dissection of potential clues that may hint at the return of a fan favorite (1:47). Then, Chelsea and Zack turn to The Real Housewives of Miami Season 6, Episode 3 and Larsa’s loose lips (10:23) before diving into the snooze fest of The Real Housewives of Potomac Season 8, Episode 3 (28:54). Finally, Chelsea and Zack end the pod with a chat about Southern Charm Season 9, Episode 10 (38:47).
Host: Chelsea Stark-Jones Guest: Zack Peter Producer: Devon Manze Theme Song: Devon Renaldo
Whenever a new movie prequel is announced, even the core audience that loved the original work sometimes responds with a resounding ugh. Who can blame anyone for dismissing out of hand the marketing formulation that gave us 2007’s Hannibal Rising, 1979’s Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, or 2004’s Exorcist: The Beginning? Prequels tell stories where the end has been predetermined, often without beloved key actors, prompting unflattering comparisons to inimitable classics. (Like what happened with the Star Wars prequel movies.)
But once in a long while, prequels can also tell new stories that experiment with stylistic shifts and new characters. At their best, they can deepen an existing story, or offer additional dimension and insight into familiar characters. (Like what happened with… the Star Wars prequel movies.)
Prequels have become an overly familiar go-to move for anyone hoping to reverse-engineer a hit. But maybe the form has gotten a bad rap. A good prequel can be an escape hatch from dead-end sequels and tangled continuity. Sometimes they’re just baggage-shedding fun. With that in mind, let’s have a look at 10 prequel movies that actually are surprisingly worth your time.
A few ground rules: No Star Wars movies, because at this point, nearly half the Star Wars feature films in existence are prequels, and they’ve been discussed to death. Also out: alternate-timeline reboots (like the 2009 Star Trek), retellings with ambiguous relationships to previous films (like Rise of the Planet of the Apes or the 2006 James Bond movie Casino Royale), and movies set years before an iconic original film, but with no particular narrative or character connection to the earlier film (like the Predator prequel Prey). In other words, we’re keeping it challenging! You can sayWonder Woman is technically a prequel to Batman v. Supermanbecause it comes before it in the same continuity, but that isn’t really what Wonder Woman is doing on a narrative level. Here, on the other hand, are 10 pure prequel movies that prove jumping back in a story doesn’t have to be a doomed, last-ditch effort.
The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023)
Image: Lionsgate
Director: Francis Lawrence Where to watch: Currently in theatrical release
Has there been a 21st-century film series as successfully built around a single star as the Hunger Games movies are built around Jennifer Lawrence? The original Hunger Games movie quadrilogy features a stacked cast of Oscar nominees, but Lawrence’s steely resolve sells the humanity behind the world-building. So how the hell does a Hunger Games prequel manage without Katniss Everdeen?
Songbirds & Snakes makes the attempt by shifting character focus, turning the villain (President Snow, previously played by Donald Sutherland) into a good-looking, young pre-fascist, caught between a corrupt institution and more idealistic friends, and falling for an irresistibly feisty brunette. (Sound familiar? It’s the Attack of the Clones approach.) While Suzanne Collins’ books and Lawrence’s performance gave Katniss a directness and aversion to artifice that made her a compelling and unwilling Tribute, Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) and his Hunger Games mentee Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) have more complicated, less clear-eyed relationships with their respective worlds — and with each other. That adds an element of unpredictability to a story whose ultimate ending has already been dramatized.
Circling back to explain how certain aspects of series lore developed in-world can be a risky, hardcore-fans-only strategy, so it’s all the more impressive that The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is by turns brutal (for a PG-13 fantasy) and entertainingly daft. (At some points, it resembles a musical.) It’s also notable that the movie, perhaps owing to its literary source material, doesn’t tease a whole world of prequels, sequels, and spinoffs, even if some fans will hope for them anyway. The book and movie simply tell a compelling, sometimes haunting story that feels complete even in its ambiguities. In that way, it even outdoes its predecessors, none of which were expected to stand alone the same way.
Pearl (2022)
Photo: Christopher Moss/A24
Director: Ti West Where to watch: Showtime, Paramount Plus
Knowing the full backstory of Pearl, the elderly killer who picks off the cast and crew of a porn movie in Ti West’s superior slasher X, can diminish the way X evokes a lifetime of thwarted dreams. But at least West and his star Mia Goth came by Pearl’s story honestly: While quarantining prior to filming X in 2021, they wound up working out a character history and accompanying screenplay, shooting this companion prequel on the fly alongside the original film.
That explains why Pearl feels like a bit more of a low-key creative exercise compared to the fully developed X — but what an exercise! Pearl pulls from 1950s Technicolor melodramas, its Silent Era period setting, and its status as a contemporary pandemic production, all tied together with Goth’s fierce performance. It avoids killing X’s vibe because Pearl never feels especially opportunistic: It’s a prequel that stays true to its conception as an artistic experiment.
Orphan: First Kill (2022)
Photo: Steve Ackerman/Paramount Pictures
Director: William Brent Bell Where to watch: Prime Video, Paramount Plus
Orphan: First Kill is undoubtedly cheaper-looking than the slick 2009 original. It also has a counterintuitive reversal worthy of Benjamin Button: While the first movie has then-tween Isabelle Fuhrman playing a little girl who’s secretly a murderous grown woman with proportional dwarfism, the 2022 prequel uses camera tricks and good old-fashioned great acting to have now-adult Fuhrman play the same character when she’s supposed to look even younger.
Orphan: First Kill uses the audience’s presumed knowledge of the first movie’s wild twist as a distraction, unleashing a second, unrelated but brilliant twist upon a seemingly straightforward story that has Esther (Fuhrman) claiming to be the long-missing daughter of a well-to-do suburban couple. It’s a too-rare case of a horror prequel playing better — cleverer, weirder, more daring — for viewers who keep the original’s triumphs in mind.
300: Rise of an Empire (2014)
Image: Warner Bros/Everett Collection
Director: Noam Munro Where to watch: DirecTV; streaming rental
Following up Zack Snyder’s influential megahit 300 was always a fool’s errand, one especially unlikely to succeed without Snyder directing or Gerard Butler starring. (In retrospect, it seems amazing that this seven-years-later prequel made it past the $100 million mark at the box office essentially on branding alone.) That said, maybe fool’s errands would have a better reputation if more of them featured Eva Green.
In300: Rise of an Empire, Green plays Artemisia, naval officer and secret architect of an ongoing conflict between the Greeks and the Persians. For Green, that entails kissing a severed head on the lips, wearing a shiny dress while occupying a boat-throne, and having rough recruitment sex with the enemy. (She even gets a mini-prequel-within-the-prequel to explain her origin story.) Her movie-star energy may make the rest of the movie dim by comparison (the Snyder-knockoff battlescapes had greater exploitation-movie kick in the film’s 3-D theatrical release), but that makes sense — she dominates the original 300 in the same way.
Prometheus (2012)
Image: 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection
Director: Ridley Scott Where to watch: Streaming rental
George Lucas must have felt a lot less lonely in the decade following the end of his Star Wars prequel trilogy, as a host of directors beloved of surly Gen-X males, like Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) and the Wachowskis (The Matrix), made their own ill-regarded prequels and sequels. In 2012, it was Ridley Scott’s turn to make an underappreciated prequel to his sci-fi classic Alien. Like another film on this list, Prometheus feels meaner than its predecessor. (Though Alien: Covenant, also good but less of a prequel, is even nastier).
That alone feels like a refreshing rejection of the fan service prequels often represent. The movie itself has a menacing, terrible grandeur, using xenomorph-related imagery and mythology to explore the idea of creations and creators pitted against each other in an impossible struggle.
X-Men: First Class (2011)
Photo: Murray Close/20th Century Fox
Director: Matthew Vaughn Where to watch: Starz
You know what’s worse than a prequel? A movie hastily reconfigured as a trilogy-capper, against all evidence to the contrary. The X-Men comics contain vast numbers of characters and stories for potential adaptation, yet for some reason, Fox hedged its bets with X-Men: The Last Stand, positioning it as an abbreviated grand finale that killed off major characters abruptly, treated famous storylines carelessly, then cravenly left a few doors ajar for the future sequels the studio seemed to be spurning.
So it was a blessed relief (and, at the time, surprise) that the mainline X-Men series went into prequel mode instead, with this stylish, zippy period story about how Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) met as young men in the 1960s and formed an early iteration of the superhero team.
X-Men: First Class provided a badly needed reset for the franchise, not in terms of timeline (Days of Future Past attempted that a few years later), but in form, casting aside various Canadian locations in favor of a globetrotting James Bond-esque fantasy. It felt capricious to swerve the story into a prequel world, but the approach let the X-Men series open up a whole new avenue, resulting in one of the best superhero movies of the modern era.
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
Image: Screen Gems/Everett Collection
Director: Patrick Tatopoulos Where to watch: AMC Plus
On paper, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans represents everything wrong with prequels. It jettisons the charismatic star of the first two movies, Kate Beckinsale, to retell a story the earlier movies covered in mere minutes of exposition. In this case, it’s a historical rundown on the werewolf uprising that led to a generations-long conflict between werewolves and vampires.
Yet returning to the origin of the werewolf-vampire battles lends Rise of the Lycans a medieval-fantasy kick; it’s pulpier, lustier, and more all-around entertaining than any other Underworld entry, and one that best fulfills the lizard-brained promise of supernatural creatures in love and at war.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Image: Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection
Director: Steven Spielberg Where to watch: Disney Plus, Paramount Plus
A lot of folks first heard the term “prequel” in connection with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, one of the highest-profile pure prequels that had yet been released in 1984. At first, it feels strange that Spielberg and Lucas bothered situating this movie before Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s not as if the first film had such a neatly resolved happy ending that it precluded further adventures, and Indiana Jones’ nature suggests his whole life is a series of adventures. The reason it makes sense for Temple of Doom to take place before Raiders turns out to be what put off some audiences. (Not exclusively; there’s also the racism.)
As it turns out, this is a meaner movie, with a more callous Dr. Jones pursuing “fortune and glory,” bickering with a lady, and repeatedly endangering his child sidekick. Anyone who felt they were acclimated to Indiana Jones’ rhythms might still be thrown off: Temple of Doom is grosser, more violent, and eclectic enough to accommodate a James Bond homage, a musical number, and a literal rollercoaster ride. Apart from its racial insensitivity (which will understandably not be easy for many viewers to hurdle), it’s still the most interesting and best-crafted of the four post-Raiders Indy movies.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Image: 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection
Director: J. Lee Thompson Where to watch: Starz
The original Planet of the Apes series is so dependent on time-travel that you could claim it doesn’t contain any true prequels, just stories kicked into gear by a potential temporal paradox. That feels truer of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, though, than it does for Conquest, which dramatizes the story of ape oppression and uprising that eventually leads into the 1968 original.
Thefirst wave of Apes movies notoriously decreased in budget with each entry, but director J. Lee Thompson stretches his resources impressively far in this fourth installment, creating an evocative future city that gets absolutely and satisfyingly trashed by the apes resisting slavery to humanity. Sometimes actually witnessing the watershed event from a film series’ lore is as powerful and exciting as it’s supposed to be.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Image: Everett Collection
Director: Sergio Leone Where to watch: Streaming rental
The surprising part about this one isn’t the quality — the third in Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” trilogy is an acknowledged classic. But how often is the third movie in a trilogy the best one, and how often is a third movie in a trilogy set entirely before its predecessors?
It seems unlikely that the intent was to add backstory to Clint Eastwood’s nameless character (here nicknamed “Blondie”), even if the movie does show him acquiring his iconic poncho. Leone probably just wanted to set his three-hour epic during the Civil War, allowing for more epic sweep than the comparably smaller post-war stories of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. That decision gives The Good, the Bad and the Ugly some extra weight without sacrificing his stylizations.
If anything, those go even further than the film’s predecessors, with close-ups, exaggerated perspectives, and drawn-out confrontations galore. But having the film’s trio of gunslingers (Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef) repeatedly crossing through the ongoing wreckage of the Civil War on their competing quests for graveyard treasure gives the story a sense of real-life scale that also makes their violence seem small compared to the senseless slaughter around them.
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