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    Small Streamers Like Hallmark+ and BritBox See Subscribers Surge

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    Like Christmas shows? So does Hallmark+. Like horror? Dare to try Shudder. And British shows? There’s BritBox and more.Executives from the Hallmark Channel made a curious decision this fall: They started a new streaming service.It seemed like an awfully late date to do so. Most media companies entered the streaming fray years ago, and few have had success going head-to-head against titans like Netflix, Amazon and Disney.But Hallmark executives decided the timing was not an issue. Their app, Hallmark+, did not need to appeal to the whole country, they said, just their core audience — the people who regularly flock en masse to the network’s trademark holiday and feel-good programming.“We don’t have to make content that are all things to all people,” said John Matts, Hallmark Media’s chief operating officer.He might very well be onto something.For much of the past decade, conventional wisdom inside the entertainment world has been that only a small handful of megaservices would survive the streaming wars. After all, they had the stars, the budgets and the technological prowess.But numerous media executives now believe that there could be room for some more modest streaming services, too.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?

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      The Los Angeles headquarters of Metaphysic, a Hollywood visual-effects start-up that uses artificial intelligence to create digital renderings of the human face, were much cooler in my imagination, if I’m being honest. I came here to get my mind blown by A.I., and this dim three-room warren overlooking Sunset Boulevard felt more like the slouchy offices of a middling law firm. Ed Ulbrich, Metaphysic’s chief content officer, steered me into a room that looked set to host a deposition, then sat me down in a leather desk chair with a camera pointed at it. I stared at myself on a large flat-screen TV, waiting to be sworn in.But then Ulbrich clickety-clicked on his laptop for a moment, and my face on the screen was transmogrified. “Smile,” he said to me. “Do you recognize that face?” I did, right away, but I can’t disclose its owner, because the actor’s project won’t come out until 2025, and the role is still top secret. Suffice it to say that the face belonged to a major star with fantastic teeth. “Smile again,” Ulbrich said. I complied. “Those aren’t your teeth.” Indeed, the teeth belonged to Famous Actor. The synthesis was seamless and immediate, as if a digital mask had been pulled over my face that matched my expressions, with almost no lag time.Ulbrich is the former chief executive of Digital Domain, James Cameron’s visual-effects company, and over the course of his three-decade career he has led the VFX teams on several movies that are considered milestones in the field of computer-generated imagery, including “Titanic,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Top Gun: Maverick.” But in Ulbrich’s line of work, in the quest for photorealism, the face is the final frontier. “I’ve spent so much time in Uncanny Valley,” he likes to joke, “that I own real estate there.”In the spring of 2023, Ulbrich had a series of meetings with the founders of Metaphysic. One of them, Chris Ume, was the visual-effects artist behind a series of deepfake Tom Cruise videos that went viral on TikTok in early 2021, a moment many in Hollywood cite as the warning shot that A.I.’s hostile takeover had commenced. But in parts of the VFX industry, those deepfake videos were greeted with far less misgiving. They hinted tantalizingly at what A.I. could soon accomplish at IMAX resolutions, and at a fraction of the production cost. That’s what Metaphysic wanted to do, and its founders wanted Ulbrich’s help. So when they met him, they showed him an early version of the demonstration I was getting.Ulbrich’s own career began during the previous seismic shift in the visual-effects field, from practical effects to C.G.I., and it was plain to him that another disruption was underway. “I saw my career flash before my eyes,” Ulbrich recalled. “I could take my entire team from my former places of employment, I could put them on for eternity using the best C.G.I. tools money can buy, and you can’t deliver what we’re showing you here. And it’s happening in milliseconds.” He knew it was time to leave C.G.I. behind. As he put it: “How could I go back in good conscience and use horses and buggies and rocks and sticks to make images when this exists in the world?”Back on Sunset Boulevard, Ulbrich pecked some more at his laptop. Now I was Tom Hanks — specifically, a young Tom Hanks, he of the bulging green eyes and the look of gathering alarm on his face in “Splash” when he first discovers that Daryl Hannah’s character is a mermaid. I can divulge Hanks’s name because his A.I. debut arrived in theaters nationally on Nov. 1, in a movie called “Here.” Directed by Robert Zemeckis, written by Zemeckis and Eric Roth — a reunion of the creative team behind “Forrest Gump” — and co-starring Robin Wright, “Here” is based on a 2014 graphic novel that takes place at a single spot in the world, primarily a suburban New Jersey living room, over several centuries. The story skips back and forth through time but focuses on a baby-boomer couple played by Hanks and Wright at various stages of their lives, from age 18 into their 80s, from post-World War II to the present day.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ Review: More Real Than Reality

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      An unconventional documentary tells the story of a Norwegian gamer — and of how we live life on the internet.Almost from the start, the internet scrambled our sense of reality. You could never really know if whoever you were talking to was the person they said they were. Now it’s hard to know if they’re even a person.This is destabilizing and frightening, and also the premise for a good movie. But there has to be more to the story than just the scary parts. No, we don’t exist physically on the internet, but our virtual selves do things that have real-world consequences, and our emotions and minds, in some phenomenological way, extend into cyberspace, too. For better or worse, the internet is a place in which we live and love and rage and mourn. We bring our humanity with us, the bad parts but also the good ones.Movies haven’t always captured this aspect of 21st-century life well, in part because rendering the internet visually is weird and tricky. I loved Joe Hunting’s 2022 documentary “We Met in Virtual Reality,” filmed entirely inside a V.R. platform, for how it captured love and generosity in virtual space. And now we have Benjamin Ree’s “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” which is a rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way.“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” is about Mats Steen, a Norwegian man who died in 2014 at the age of 25. Mats lived out his final years nearly immobilized, the result of being born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare inherited disease which presently has no cure. Mats’s family knew him as smart and loving, but grieved while watching him grow more withdrawn as his symptoms progressed. He would spend most of his waking hours on his computer, playing games. “Our deepest regret was that he would never experience friends, love, or make a difference in other people’s lives,” his father, Robert, tells Ree.Mats’s family were loving, attentive and supportive of him to the very end. But they were wrong about the friends and making a difference part. Oh, were they wrong.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Blair Witch Project’ Brings Up a Riddle That Looms 25 Years Later

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      Twenty-five years ago, the indie horror blockbuster compelled audiences to ask, “Was that real?” The question now permeates our age of misinformation.“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.”Audiences packed elbow-to-elbow into theaters in the summer of 1999 saw that shaky white text on a black background during the first moments of “The Blair Witch Project.” What followed was 80 or so minutes of growing dread as three 20-somethings — Josh, Heather and Mike — tried to uncover the truth behind the legend of a supernatural entity called the Blair Witch. It does not end well for the trio.Initially shot for just $35,000, “The Blair Witch Project” grossed almost $250 million, then a record for an indie film. It became a pop culture phenomenon, one that foretold the found-footage horror boom and left one uneasy question hovering over moviegoers: “Is this real?” It’s an existential riddle that looms larger than ever 25 years later, compelling us to apply that exact question to nearly every image, sound or nugget of information we encounter.Back then, creating that air of uncertainty took some strategic work by the directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Marketed as a documentary, promotional materials included missing posters for its largely unknown lead actors — Joshua Leonard; Heather Donahue, now known as Rei Hance; and Michael C. Williams — who had to keep ultralow profiles in the lead-up to the film’s release.A separate faux documentary called “The Curse of the Blair Witch,” which aired on cable TV shortly before the film’s premiere, had an eerily convincing true-crime approach: It incorporated candid-seeming photos of the characters including childhood snapshots, as well as fake newspaper articles and interviews with actors posing as Heather’s film professor and Josh’s girlfriend, among others, to round out the alternate reality.Joshua Leonard and his “Blair Witch” co-stars filmed all the footage used in the movie.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      A Movie About Brian Eno Is Never the Same Twice Thanks to Software

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      Thanks to a software program, the length, structure and contents of the movie are reconfigured each time it’s shown. It’s the only way the musician would agree to the project.Gary Hustwit had a simple wish: to make a documentary about the visionary musician Brian Eno. When that wasn’t possible, he devised a far less simple approach. He made 52 quintillion documentaries about Eno.At a time when it seems like there’s a movie about every band that’s recorded even a 45, Hustwit’s “Eno,” opening Friday, is unlike any other portrait of a musician. It’s not even a portrait, because it isn’t fixed or static. Instead, Hustwit used a proprietary software program that reconfigures the length, structure and contents of the movie.“Every time it plays, it’s a different movie,” Hustwit told an audience in May at the film’s New York premiere. “I’m surprised every time I see it.”His collaborator, the digital artist and programmer Brendan Dawes, explained that because of the variables, including 30 hours of interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive, there are 52 quintillion possible versions of the movie. (A quintillion is a billion billion.) “That’s going to be a really big box set,” Dawes quipped at the premiere.Movie theaters are still guided by “a 130-year-old technical constraint,” Hustwit said over lunch the next day at a Chelsea restaurant. “We can use technology as a structural tool to do interesting things with the narrative. This idea that a film has to be set in stone and always linear is obsolete, I think. There’s another possible path here for filmmaking going forward.”At some showings of “Eno,” Hustwit brings the machine with the Brain One software for the film.Brandon Schulman for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      The Meme-ification of Anthony Bourdain

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      The beloved chef’s admirers have given him a distinctly modern kind of digital afterlife — at the center of fondly parodic jokes.After Anthony Boudain took his own life in June 2018, the internet was flooded with content memorializing him: obituaries, remembrances, bereft tweets by celebrities and regular citizens alike. But one post in particular foretold the chef’s afterlife on social media. Kyrell Grant, who tweeted as @imbobswaget, suggested that Bourdain had the charismatic aura of someone you might expect to be well endowed — except she said that using a pithy new catchphrase that would quickly enter the popular lexicon, garnering its own entry on Dictionary.com.That message on Twitter (now X) may have marked a transition in how people memorialized Bourdain. He was remembered, chiefly, as someone lovable and accessible: straight-talking, salt-of-the-earth, as thoughtful as he was devil-may-care. A real grief surrounded his loss, and he inspired the same types of posthumous adoration so many figures do, complete with words-of-wisdom quotes pasted over nature photos. But it soon became just as common to see posts playing on his drinking habits or salty comebacks; people began to use images of him in the same ways we use images of pop-culture characters like SpongeBob SquarePants or Homer Simpson. Anthony Bourdain became, in short, a meme.Anthony Bourdain in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2016.William MebaneLast month a new Bourdain meme made the rounds. The chef had offered several oft-quoted bits of advice urging people to explore and enjoy the world: “If you’re 22, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel,” or, “Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” But this new meme paired a pensive portrait of Bourdain with ever more parodic versions of that sentiment. “Go to a [expletive] restaurant. I don’t care what. Go to a [expletive] restaurant and order a [expletive] beer.” A less profane version prodded the reader to take a chance on a Hinge date: “Show her a picture of your cats. Show her two. Give her a tissue while she cries over her ex. Jump over a fence to impress her. Break your ankle. Never hear from her again.” Another tribute hits like whiskey left at a virtual grave: booty shorts emblazoned with the words I MISS ANTHONY BOURDAIN.If you too miss Anthony Bourdain, and you want to engage in serious communion with his oeuvre, there’s a vast trove of media to satiate your craving: 11 books, various essays and graphic novels, hours and hours of television. He participated in countless interviews, appeared on podcasts, played characters based on himself in TV guest appearances. You might dip into the subreddit r/Anthony Bourdain, which, with its 61,000 members, is in the top 2 percent of Reddit communities by size; that forum, far more earnest than X, is often engaged in forlorn discussion.But even in that hallowed space, memes cannot help infiltrating. Yet another variation on fake Bourdain advice recently emerged there, imploring the viewer to eat at Chili’s and get an appetizer combo. Some commenters expected moderators to delete the parody; after all, it didn’t “honor” the group’s subject. Others argued that they shouldn’t. Bourdain was a prodigious Twitter user and a funny one; his afterimage, in most minds, is as someone who could laugh at himself. Surely, people felt, he would have appreciated the lightness of a good Bourdain meme.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Catfish,’ the TV Show That Predicted America’s Disorienting Digital Future

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      MTVThis is Danny. He fell in love with a woman he’d met online. When he saw her photo, he called it love at first sight.He and Rosa talked on the phone daily for months and exchanged reams of texts in Spanglish. They bonded over being Puerto Rican.“You’re so funny, Daddy,” she once texted him. “You’re so sexy, my love,” Danny replied. Though they’d never met, he was making big plans: marriage and family.When the red flags started to pile up, Danny contacted “Catfish,” on MTV, for help. The truth was far from what he’d hoped. Rosa was secretly Jose.The TV Show That Predicted America’s Lonely, Disorienting Digital FutureSince its first episode aired in 2012, “Catfish: The TV Show” has held up a mirror to our online lives, reflecting how we present ourselves and make sense of love, lust, trust, companionship and loneliness in an increasingly digital world. Each episode unfolds like a detective show, with the host Nev Schulman summoned to untangle truth from lies, to take relationships that exist only on computers and phones and drag them into our three-dimensional reality.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryThe saga of Danny and Jose, which aired in 2017, is emblematic of the deception, dashed hopes and complicated situations regularly featured on the show.Danny contacted “Catfish” for help, believing Rosa had moved from Connecticut to Orlando, where he lived, but still would not meet him. Rosa had warned Danny that she had anger issues, in part because she had been molested as a child. When meeting with Schulman and his co-host Max Joseph, Danny said he wanted to help her by bringing more faith into her life. “I think I could make her a better person,” he said. “We plan to have a family.”In their research, Schulman and Joseph quickly discovered the so-called mask, meaning the unwitting person whose photos had been sent to Danny: a woman named Natalie. But Rosa’s real identity was harder to pin down. “This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Danny said when shown the evidence. “I never had anybody send me fake pictures.”Schulman called Rosa to inform her that Danny was now aware she’d lied about the photos. Though combative, she agreed to meet in Connecticut. It became clear that she had never moved.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Why Did Matt Farley Put a Song About Me on Spotify?

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      I don’t want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?I guess probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular Nice Man, didn’t hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity, though it may just be evidence of very poor search skills.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.When I did stumble on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” I naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radio’s “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did I realize it actually was about me. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.So, I called.It’s possible that I dialed with outsize expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting 11 long years as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was! I spent serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic, on the order of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” After one ring, a male voice answered.I said: “This is Brett Martin. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call.”The man had no idea who I was. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Dune: Part Two’ Gives Sci-Fi-Obsessed Silicon Valley a Reason to Party

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      In a top-floor atrium in downtown San Francisco on Thursday evening, tech workers from Google, Slack, X and Mozilla mingled next to a pair of cardboard cutouts of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook founder, chatted as others sipped from cannily named cocktails like the Fremen Mirage (gin, coconut Campari, sweet vermouth) and the Arrakis Palms (vanilla pear purée, gin, Fever-Tree tonic). Tim O’Reilly, a tech industry veteran, dropped by. Alex Stamos, the former head of security at Facebook, was also spotted.“Do you think they’ll let me take home one of the freaky sandworm popcorn buckets?” someone in the crowd tittered. The suggestively designed buckets had become a sensation across social media.The techies were all there to celebrate Silicon Valley’s newest obsession: “Dune: Part 2,” the latest movie adapted from the Frank Herbert-authored science-fiction saga, which helped inspire many of them to become interested in technology. The film, which follows the 2021 installment “Dune,” sold an estimated $81.5 million in tickets in the United States and Canada over the weekend, the biggest opening for a Hollywood film since “Barbie.”The invitation-only private screening at the IMAX theater in downtown San Francisco was hosted by two tech executives turned podcasters of “Escape Hatch,” a weekly show focused on sci-fi and fantasy films. And it was not the only game in town.Across Silicon Valley — from venture capital firms to tech executive circles — people had booked their own private screenings of the movie, directed by Denis Villeneuve. On Thursday, the venture firm 50 Years invited founders, friends and investors to “come fuel your imagination with stellar science fiction” in a theater takeover.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More