Rock, Paper, Robot - Tweed. Play the famous Rock-Paper-Scissors duel with a robot, and the robot will win every time. At least, this robot will: Researchers at the University of Tokyo’s Ishikawa Oku Laboratory have developed a small “Janken” robot which follows its human opponent with a small camera, and on the count of “3″ produces the winning hand signal. Technically, it’s cheating, but faster than the rest of us would be able to: the speed at which the robot recognizes the human’s signal and beats it is less than a millisecond. So, while this particular robot can’t yet predict the behavior of its human counterpart, maybe it’s time we start preparing to lose. Often. The applications could be numerous: as the the researchers say, “this technology can be applied to motion support of human beings and cooperation work between human beings and robots etc. without time delay.” Return to Top. Entertainment - Chris Feliciano Arnold - The Mexican Drug War Is Not Sexy.
Movies, TV shows, and songs have a warped way of portraying the violent conflict. Relativity Media At daybreak on June 3rd, border patrol agents in the Vekol Valley south of Phoenix followed a set of tire tracks that veered off Interstate 8 and into the rugged desert. A burnt sport-utility vehicle smoldered on the horizon. Inside they discovered five bodies charred so badly it was impossible to determine their age, gender, or ethnicity. "It looks like a cartel hit," Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu told reporters shortly after, calling a drug connection "very likely" in this region known for trafficking. "It happens all the time in Mexico: Our fear and concern is that this violence is spilling deep into the heart of Arizona. " Media nationwide picked up the story, including CNN, Fox, and CBS, adding another grisly tableau to a border narrative that's turned increasingly violent since Mexican President Felipe Calderón escalated the drug war in 2006.
Hold up there, Sheriff. Inbox - Outlook Web App, light version. The Big Sleep Trailer. Netflix. A Brief History of Film. A Brief History of Film- Animated Documentary. Digital History. What 'John Carter' Did Wrong - Entertainment. Kim Roberts, Kate Amend and Other Female Film Editors.
Welcome to Doonesbury. Entertainment - Scott Meslow - A Brief History of Time Travel (in Movies) From Men In Black III to Back to the Future to Planet of the Apes, films that voyage through the ages face internal consistency problems—and tap into the human desire to change fate. Universal Pictures If ever a movie earned its time-travel plotline, it's Men in Black 3, which attempts to revive a movie franchise largely forgotten by audiences after its disappointing second entry. Men in Black 3 sees Will Smith's Agent J going back to the 1960s to save partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones in the present, Josh Brolin in the past), and mines its late-'60s setting for jokes both obvious (hippies, Andy Warhol) and subtle (Rick Baker's new alien designs, which are derived from the style of '60s science fiction).
But if time travel, as the Men in Black would have it, is "illegal throughout the universe," cinema is full of lawbreakers. It's been 10 years since the last Men in Black movie, but nearly 100 years since the first time-travel film hit movie theaters. Though most would cite H.G. Mozilla Firefox Start Page. Why a Chinese Company Wants to Own Your Local Movie Theater - Jordan Weissmann - Business. By purchasing America's second largest cinema chain, Dalian Wanda Group is hoping to launch a global entertainment takeover A model stands in front of a video presentation before the start of an official signing ceremony between Wanda Group and AMC Entertainment in Beijing (Reuters) Assuming the deal gets a pass from government regulators, there's good chance that your local movie theater will soon be owned by a large, Chinese conglomerate. This weekend, Dalian Wanda Group announced that it would pay $2.6 billion to purchase AMC Entertainment, America's second largest cinema chain.
It would be the most expensive foreign takeover yet by a private Chinese company, a summer blockbuster for the M&A world. For those prone to anti-China hysteria, this all might sound vaguely menacing (First they came for our factories, then they came for our Kevin James vehicles...). But Dalian Wanda isn't buying itself higher profits, at least in the short run. Ken Burns on Why His Formula for a Great Story Is 1+1=3 - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - Video. From The Civil War to Jazz, Ken Burns's sweeping documentary series have brought American history to life for millions of viewers. His signature style is so well known that Apple's iMovie has a function -- a slow zoom on a still image -- called "the Ken Burns effect.
" For a documentary filmmaker, it's hard to imagine a more intimidating project than making a documentary film about Ken Burns. When Sarah Klein and Tom Mason set out explore the mysterious nature of story, however, they decided to do just that. In their beautiful short documentary, Ken Burns: On Story, premiering here today, the filmmaker shares insights into the craft of storytelling and reveals his highly personal quest to "wake the dead.
" Klein and Mason talk about the genesis of the project in an interview below. The Atlantic: What inspired you to explore storytelling as a topic for this film? Sarah Klein and Tom Mason: Everyone loves a great story. We were definitely nervous about it. What's next for you? At the Summer Box Office, a Battle Between Two Ways of Filming - Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty - Entertainment. Digital moviemaking is on the rise, but some high-profile directors still shoot popcorn flicks the old way. Marvel/WB This summer, Hollywood's blockbusters are engaging in a high-stakes format war between cutting-edge digital technology and old-fashioned, photochemical film. Digitally photographed thrillers like The Avengers, Prometheus, and The Amazing Spider-Man will be battling it out with equally epic movies shot on film such as The Dark Knight Rises, Men in Black 3, and Battleship.
Indeed, no summer in recent memory boasts so much variety in terms of how films are photographed and exhibited. Yet with studios looking to trim costs on increasingly expensive "tentpole" movies, traditional celluloid film—easily the more expensive of the two formats—may be on its way out as the cinema's medium of choice. Right now, advocates of film have numbers on their side. But digital technology has the momentum and the prestigious advocates who will likely help it win out eventually. Why Difficult Movies Are More, Um, Difficult. Whitewashing, a history - Movies. The extraordinary box office success of "The Hunger Games" has launched a heated discussion of Hollywood's peculiar habit of casting white actors in nonwhite roles. Why does this happen? We decided to turn to a very important studio chief for answers -- channeled here by comedian (and "Daily Show" correspondent) Aasif Mandvi.
All I have to say is that whitewashing has been going on since as long as Hollywood has existed — it’s a tradition — and rather than non-white people complaining about it, they should embrace it. It will make going to the movies so much easier and more fun. But there are just a few things you need to understand. First, stop watching movies as ethnic people and start watching them as white people. Take a minute to walk to your limousine in my Gucci shoes, and you’ll realize that I’m just trying to make people smile. My point is, I’m not the bad guy.
Now, look: I am trying to do the right thing. View the slide show. Ashton Kutcher's racist Popchips ad: Why Hollywood still mocks South Asians. Like Nina Rastogi, I grew up counting Indians in entertainment media—or at least taking notice when someone who looked vaguely like me showed up in a sitcom or in advertisements. When Kal Penn got to the big screen as Kumar, part of me thought, “Wow, we made it.” And this for a pothead with a penchant for White Castle. The recent en-masse arrival of South Asian actors onscreen has certainly improved things, as Rastogi argues, pointing to Aziz Ansari on Parks and Recreation, Mindy Kaling on The Office, and Iqbal Theba on Glee. (They’ve lately been joined by Raza Jaffrey on Smash.) In case you missed the now-pulled Popchips ad, it featured Kutcher in the role of Raj, a Bollywood producer with floppy hair, an unfortunate mustache, and fancy Indian clothes. It’s typical for new minority groups to show up on American TV and in Hollywood movies first as vague stereotypes, and to gradually evolve into fully realized characters.
Sandler brings film to Marblehead and Swampscott - North. The Astonishing 'Avengers' - Christopher Orr - Entertainment. Joss Whedon's superhero extravaganza is among the best big-budget entertainments in years. Nonesuch This American Life's Ira Glass once aptly described writer/director Joss Whedon as "one of those people who, either you have never heard of him at all...or you love him. " To those of you who, in your millions, are about to make the transition from the former cohort to the latter: Welcome. The probable catalyst for this conversion is, of course, Whedon's The Avengers. (I should note here that I am technically supposed to refer to the film as Whedon's Marvel's The Avengers, but I'm not going to, because that would be ridiculous. Were the honchos at Marvel concerned that their 60-something target audience would be confused by the absence of Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg? I think not.)
When news first broke that an Avengers movie was in the making, I thought there was no possible way it could work: too many supers, too many awkwardly intersecting storylines, too much everything. No Place for a Woman: The Transformation of Film Noir Women. The three types of film noir women appear throughout the noir cycle, but as the immediate post-War years give way to the 1950s, a shift begins to take place in the treatment and function of these female types. The good woman, who offered an idealized but unattainable vision of domesticity for the hero of 1940s noir, becomes even more elusive in later noir films, often proving to be too vulnerable to survive through the end of the film.
The more threatening marrying type becomes far more common and tends to replace the femme fatale as the source of the hero's anxiety and danger. And the femme fatale, whose unchecked sexuality was indeed "fatal" to herself and the hero in 1940s noir, is transformed into a "nurturing redeemer" who does not threaten the hero because she does not expect to marry or domesticate him. In The Big Heat, marriage and the family prove to be sources of both vulnerability and danger. Suzy also shows "abnormal" independence in her choice of a husband. 'Safe': Everything That's Wrong With Today's Action Movies, in One Film - Ian Buckwalter - Entertainment. What's the point of having your main character be an MMA fighter if he's going to rely so much on a gun?
Lionsgate The first thing we see of Jason Statham in Safe is his upper back, impressively sculpted muscles flexing menacingly. Yes, when you're Jason Statham, even your deltoids can look threatening. If his trapezius could speak, it would be in a low growl. The subject of all that lean tissue's ire? An unseen opponent in the cage-fighting match that's about to get started. And then... the camera cuts to a hospital room some time later where his opponent lies, comatose. That's not the last time that director Boaz Yakin pulls the rug out on a fight scene in the film. 'Haywire,' a far better film, was a throwback to days when action heroes were athletes first and actors second. The thoroughly mediocre Safe provides an excuse for Statham to do what Statham does better than anyone else: look stern while punishing bad guys. Safe, in contrast, is a case study in missed opportunities.
The Shirley Clarke Project by Milestone Films.