Author Archives: Carol Edwards

Anthony Mackie is putting his money where his hometown is.

The New Orleans-born actor who now wears the mantle of Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe closed a deal on Friday to purchase 20 acres of land in New Orleans East. It’s believed that the location will be the home of East Studios LLC, a Mackie-led film studio, as multiple sources told the local news outlet NOLA.com.

Any specifics beyond that are unknown at this point, though Mackie has leveraged his Marvel success in recent years to take a more high-profile role on the projects to which he’s connected. He was credited as the executive producer on the 2019 science fiction film Io, and he’s listed as a producer on two more recent streaming projects — The Banker on Apple TV+ and Outside the Wire on Netflix.

Mackie is also set to star in and executive produce Twisted Metal, a comedy reimagining of the classic car combat video game series for Peacock that has him partnering with Deadpool writer/directors Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. He may also still be producing a biopic about celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochran called Signal Hill, but there hasn’t been much news about that one since 2017.

The Mackie family already has a big presence in New Orleans, including a lengthy history of supporting the city. Anthony specifically has said the 2008 disaster the city faced after Hurricane Katrina prompted him to head home and invest himself in his hometown’s success.

“I loaded up my truck, I moved back to New Orleans, built a house,” he said in a 2011 interview with The Guardian. Upon arriving home, Mackie took note of how the government response and insurance company red tape failed the people on the ground who were still reeling and trying to find their way in the midst of widespread devastation

“Every time I go home now, I feel it with everybody who’s stayed and rebuilt, the magnitude of we did it,” Mackie said in the Guardian interview. “Even when the federal government fucked us, we did it on our own. We’re in a position where we can say we did it without your help, so kiss my ass.”

Mashable reached out to Mackie’s publicist for more details on what the plans for East Studios LLC look like and we’ll update this story if we hear back.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just click a button and just wipe, say, the last 15 minutes of your Google search history?

iPhone users have been living that dream since last summer, when Google rolled out that very option to its iOS app. Now Android users can now feel the joy of deleting your most recent search history with a single tap too.

Google is now rolling out the option to remove the last 15 minutes of a user’s search history to its official Android app, according to The Verge and confirmed by the search giant. Some Android users are already reporting that the feature is now available to them.

Tweet may have been deleted

In order to take advantage of this new convenient tool, simply open the Google app on your Android device and tap on your profile. In the pop-up menu, you should see a “Delete last 15 minutes” option located under “Search history.” Tap that and the Google app will delete the last 15 minutes of your search history from within the app.

Google already offered ways to simply clear your entire Google search history. There are also options to automatically delete history that’s 3 months, 18 months, or 36 months old. Users could go through their history manually and remove individual items too. While this is all good, none of these options are particularly convenient if you want to quickly remove items from just one particular search session. The 15 minute delete option seems to be the perfect tool for that.

This feature will now be available on both the iOS and Android versions of the Google app. Google has not yet mention if or when the feature will be available for users on the desktop version of Google search.

• Google tries to make finding a doctor less of a nightmare

• How to use Waze and Google Maps to find cheaper gas

• 4 things to know before googling health issues

Ever miss a really important email? We’ve all been there.

The team over at the messaging platform Telegram probably knows exactly how bad that feels too. Now it’s banned in Brazil, and missed emails are the culprit.

According to Reuters, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes issued an order Friday for Telegram to be blocked in the country. Much like in the U.S., the messaging platform has become a hub for conspiracy theories and disinformation surrounding Brazil’s elections as the far right supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro have flocked there. 

Authorities in Brazil have attempted to crack down on this disinformation and Telegram had complied with some requests, such as when it banned channels belonging to a pro-Bolsonaro blogger based in the U.S. earlier this year. However, according to Moraes, Telegram has overall been uncooperative and was not complying with Brazil’s local orders.

Telegram has a very simple explanation as to why it hasn’t worked with Brazil to avoid the suspension: The company missed Brazil’s emails. According to Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, the company “had an issue with emails going between our telegram.org corporate addresses and the Brazilian Supreme Court.” 

“As a result of this miscommunication, the Court ruled to ban Telegram for being unresponsive,” Durov continued. “On behalf of our team, I apologize to the Brazilian Supreme Court for our negligence. We definitely could have done a better job.”

Durov further explained that Telegram had referred the court to a dedicated email address it had for takedown requests. However, the Brazilian court continued to correspond via Telegram’s “old general-purpose email address.” Durov says the team missed these emails and are now working to comply with the court’s requests.

• The best messaging apps not owned by Facebook

• Normalize sending audio messages instead of text messages

• What is Signal? The basics of the most secure messaging app.

As a result of Moraes’s ruling, Brazil’s telecommunication agency, Anatel, has been ordered to officially suspend the platform, at least until Telegram cooperates with local authorities, complies with Brazilian law, and pays the related fines. The court order also requests that Apple and Google aid in blocking access to Telegram in Brazil as well.

A Google spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the company had received the Supreme Court order.

As Durov points out, Telegram has been inundated with official takedown requests over the past few weeks as a result of world events like Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, Telegram’s suspension in Brazil provides a valuable lesson: Always check your email.

They say “never meet your heroes” because reality never really lives up to what we picture in our heads, but “you might break one of said hero’s prized possessions” seems pretty scary, too.

Daniel Radcliffe lived that exact nightmare recently as he prepped to play the lead role in an upcoming “Weird Al” Yankovic biopic. After sharing the story of how he got cast during a Friday appearance on The Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon held up a picture of the Miracle Workers star posing proudly with one of Yankovic’s accordions.

Upon seeing the picture, Radcliffe launched into a story about how Yankovic lent him the pictured accordion to practice on as part of his prep for the role. He got to spend a month noodling with the instrument and getting a feel for it, but that blessed month almost went flying off the rails right at the start.

“On day two [of having the accordion] I broke one of the straps,” Radcliffe explained, eliciting immediate groans of worry and concern from the audience. “Yes,” the game Radcliffe deadpanned in response. “That’s how I felt.”

• K-pop group Stray Kids make their U.S. late night debut with ‘Maniac’

• Invincible: Eddie Vedder and…NASA just made a weirdly inspiring rocket music video

• Rose Matafeo goes ‘nerd-to-nerd’ with Stephen Colbert over LOTR

Fortunately, it wasn’t a big deal at all. Radcliffe “immediately” replaced the straps and all was well in the end, thanks in part to Yankovic being who he is. “Thankfully, he’s like the nicest guy,” Radcliffe said. “If he was furious about it, he kept it to himself.”

Weird: The Weird Al Yankovic story was announced earlier in 2022 as a Roku-exclusive release. There’s no release date yet, but the movie is already in production. Watch the rest of the Tonight clip to hear Radcliffe recount exactly how Yankovic ended up casting him in the lead role.

Fashion choice or subtle act of protest?

The International Space Station’s newly arrived trio of Russian cosmonauts came aboard on Friday dressed in yellow flight suits with blue accents, echoing the color scheme of the Ukrainian flag. It’s a notable look given that Commander Oleg Artemyev had been seen wearing a blue flight suit during the docking process.

No one specifically mentioned Ukraine, but the color choice is notable given that Artemyev, along with fellow cosmonauts Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov, are the first to arrive aboard the ISS since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Artemyev explained after the boarding was complete that each crew chooses its own flight suit colors.

“It became our turn to pick a color,” he said (h/t Associated Press). “But in fact, we had accumulated a lot of yellow material so we needed to use it. So that’s why we had to wear yellow.”

• What social media platforms are doing to stop misinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

• Ukraine’s everyday heroes are owning social media

• How to help refugees fleeing Ukraine

• Video game publishers and developers are cutting off Russia, too

• Humble Bundle launches ‘Stand with Ukraine’ charity offer

It’s hard not to clock the significance of seeing Ukrainian colors splashed across cosmonaut flight suits, however. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s widely condemned invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by an online disinformation campaign intended to falsely paint the seemingly illegal military action as a heroic endeavor.

Tech companies are working to neutralize those disinformation efforts and isolate Russia financially, but Ukrainian iconography — such as the flag’s colors and the country’s national flower, the sunflower — has also become a way for people to express support (and raise awareness) online. Any ISS arrival is a cool space moment that has the potential to go viral, so whether it was intended or not, the yellow-and-blue flight suits left a mark.

Tweet may have been deleted

Tweet may have been deleted

Tweet may have been deleted

The arrival of Artemyev, Matveev, and Korsakov marks the start of their six-month mission in space. They’re replacing cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov who, along with NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, are scheduled to head back to Earth on March 30.

NASA just hauled its massive heavy-lift rocket to a launchpad at Kennedy Space Center for some crucial testing ahead of its first moon mission.

It’s been a long time since the U.S. space agency had a rocket of this magnitude, capable of sending large payloads — astronauts and cargo — into deep space. Not only is the Space Launch System, or SLS, built to travel to the moon, it’s expected to one day put millions of miles on the odometer during the first crewed flight to Mars. Robotic scientific journeys to Saturn and Jupiter also could be in its future.

Here are some key facts about the megarocket as it prepares for its maiden voyage, the Artemis I mission to lunar orbit, which could come as soon as May 2022 (though, in typical NASA fashion, this might happen later this summer).

• NASA unveils its colossal moon rocket in grand display

• The star of NASA’s megarocket reveal isn’t the big rocket

• Invincible: Eddie Vedder and…NASA just made a weirdly inspiring rocket music video

• A rocket will crash into the moon. It’ll leave way more than a scar.

• SpaceX doctor finally gets his shot to be a NASA astronaut

1. It’s the only rocket that can send the Orion spacecraft to the moon

SLS is the only rocket capable of sending the Orion spacecraft, a capsule that sits atop the stack of boosters, to the moon and beyond. Think of the Orion capsule as the RV of the sky: It’s not only a ride but a habitat for up to four astronauts. In order to travel long journeys into deep space, people will need to be able to eat, sleep, work, and pass time aboard for months.

For Artemis I, an uncrewed Orion will fly thousands of miles past and around the moon. Three weeks after liftoff, the capsule will splash down in the Pacific Ocean. The purpose of the inaugural Artemis mission is to test its ability to safely reenter Earth’s atmosphere and drop into the correct spot for the Navy to recover.

2. It’s not the size, but the thrust, that counts

Standing 322-feet high, the megarocket is taller than the Statue of Liberty and London’s Big Ben. Compare that to the 184-foot Space Shuttle rocket, which blasted astronauts to the space station in low-Earth orbit.

Despite towering over its predecessor, SLS is actually a bit shorter than Saturn V, the last rocket NASA used to take people into deep space. The Apollo-era rocket was 41 feet taller.

But the new rocket is demonstrably more powerful. SLS will produce 8.8 million pounds of thrust — the oomph an engine provides for the rocket — during liftoff and ascent. That’s 15 percent more than Saturn V offered. Future configurations of the new rocket will pack even more punch.

The four main SLS engines, fueled with 700,000 gallons of cryogenic, or super cold, propellant, will produce a thrust powerful enough to keep eight Boeing 747s aloft.

3. The megarocket is state-of-the-art 1980s technology

SLS is literally and figuratively built upon the Space Shuttle legacy. NASA incorporated major components of the shuttle, which operated between 1981 and 2011, into the new rocket.

Engineers swapped the iconic space plane out for either a cargo or Orion crew spacecraft. The central orange core is an elongated shuttle external fuel tank, powered by four shuttle engines. Rather than reusing those engines, though, NASA will ditch them in the ocean. Twin shuttle solid rocket boosters will assist the core during the first phase of the flight, providing 75 percent of the initial skyward push.

It’s not all old tech, though. NASA upgraded some hardware and used new tooling and manufacturing techniques to get the job done. Some parts have been modernized to meet the needs of deep-space travel, but Congress didn’t allow the space agency to start completely from scratch to design the latest megarocket.

4. Sorry, environment. It’s not reusable.

Remember that the new moon rocket is built with shuttle parts. NASA designed the shuttle to haul astronauts and supplies back and forth to the space station, which orbits some 250 miles from Earth.

In order to modify the rocket so that it could travel much deeper into space, engineers needed to lighten the load. After all, the moon is roughly 239,000 miles from Earth, around 1,000 times the distance of the space station.

Engineers gutted the Shuttle’s reusable boosters, parachutes, reserve fuel, and landing sensors from the design — the system that allowed the agency to use it again. This gave NASA back about 2,000 pounds of extra weight capacity for lunar trips. Doing so will help Orion reach 24,500 mph, the speed needed to send it on a moon-bound trajectory.

But this means SLS will need new rockets for each mission.

At least the engine exhaust is relatively “clean,” superheated water vapor. The engines are fed liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel. And NASA upgraded the booster insulation from asbestos to rubber materials, also an environmental improvement.

5. The megarocket has an all-American price tag

Many folks at NASA and in Congress refer to SLS as “the nation’s rocket,” the “flagship rocket,” or “America’s rocket.” It’s considered a national asset, not unlike a bespoke aircraft carrier for the military, intended to serve a national interest: exploring the solar system.

That’s the major reason it’s thought to be the most expensive rocket ever built. While the burgeoning commercial spaceflight sector may soon prove it can build a more cost-efficient space transportation system, affordability was never the priority for SLS.

When Congress passed a NASA spending bill in 2010, it directed the space agency to build the rocket, even specifying what parts to use, which companies to contract, and what kind of business arrangements to leverage. At that time, amid the Great Recession, those lawmakers sought to support thousands of jobs in their districts. Artemis is not just a space program, but a jobs program.

About 3,800 suppliers in all 50 states have contributed to the rocket and Orion projects, said Tom Whitmeyer, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems.

“When you see this rocket, it’s not just a piece of metal that’s going to sit at the pad. It’s a whole bunch of people, rocket scientists throughout this country, throughout our agencies, that have worked on this.”

“It’s a symbol of our country and our communities, our aerospace economy, and what’s in partnership behind it,” he said on a call with reporters in March. “When you see this rocket, it’s not just a piece of metal that’s going to sit at the pad. It’s a whole bunch of people, rocket scientists throughout this country, throughout our agency, that have worked on this.”

At a March congressional committee, Inspector General Paul Martin, who serves as the space agency watchdog for the federal government, estimated each launch would cost $4.1 billion, with half of the tab attributed just to SLS. For perspective, that’s about one-fifth of the entire NASA budget. By 2025, Martin expects NASA will have spent $93 billion on the Artemis program.

6. The rocket is the ultimate Transformer

Engineers designed SLS to evolve into increasingly powerful configurations as its Artemis missions become more complex.

The first assembly, called “Block 1,” will use the central (orange) core booster with four main engines. It can send over 59,500 pounds to orbits beyond the moon. Additionally, a pair of solid rocket boosters and liquid fuel-fed engines will provide much of its thrust. After leaving Earth’s atmosphere, a final rocket booster — the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage — sends the Orion capsule onward to the moon. This is the configuration NASA plans to use for the first three Artemis missions, including a moon landing.

Later missions, which will carry astronauts, will have a different rocket configuration, including the powerful Exploration Upper Stage. Known as “Block 1B,” this rocket design can transport crew and large amounts of cargo — up to 83,700 pounds.

The next iteration of SLS, aka “Block 2,” can provide 9.5 million pounds of thrust and will be the workhorse vehicle for sending cargo to the moon, Mars, and other deep-space destinations, an eight percent increase over Artemis I. This rocket will lift a whopping 101,400 pounds.

In the harsh places NASA astronauts are going, they’ll need bounties of supplies.

NASA’s trusty helicopter will soon enter some precarious terrain.

The aerial craft Ingenuity is headed to a dried-up river delta in the Jezero Crater, a land filled “with jagged cliffs, angled surfaces, projecting boulders, and sand-filled pockets that could stop a rover in its tracks (or upend a helicopter upon landing),” says NASA.

But first, it must fly there.

Over a series of at least three flights, NASA will send Ingenuity across an expanse of desert dubbed “Séítah.” The space agency released an image from a trip across this terrain, captured in midair using Ingenuity’s high-resolution color camera.

The image shows windswept sand in the foreground, and hilly, even mountainous terrain beyond. You can also spot the helicopter’s shadow on the bottom of the frame, and a glimpse of the ball-like end of one of its legs on the upper left side of the image.

• NASA satellite captures a dazzling, important crater on Mars

• NASA unveils its colossal moon rocket in grand display

• The star of NASA’s megarocket reveal isn’t the big rocket

The Ingenuity helicopter, an experimental robot, has vastly exceeded engineers’ expectations. NASA hoped to prove it could fly something on Mars. Now, the helicopter has flown over 21 times, and its next journey is expected to span some 1,150 feet — while avoiding a hill.

“This upcoming flight will be my 22nd entry in our logbook,” Ingenuity chief pilot Håvard Grip said in a statement. “I remember thinking when this all started, we’d be lucky to have three entries and immensely fortunate to get five. Now, at the rate we’re going, I’m going to need a second book.”

The chopper will soon accompany the car-sized Perseverance rover on a journey through the dry river delta, a place planetary scientists suspect once teemed with water. The mission seeks evidence that primitive, microscopic organisms once dwelled in moist environments on Mars.

Still today, there’s no proof of life anywhere beyond Earth.

Some films are so painfully predictable that you know exactly what will happen before you reach the second act. Windfall is not one of those films.

Netflix’s new “Hitchcockian thriller,” directed by Charlie McDowell, tells the story of a robbery gone wrong. Severely, and at times even laughably, wrong. Jason Segel plays an unnamed man (cited in credits as “Nobody”) who breaks into a tech billionaire’s vacation home, expecting to lounge in luxury for a while, steal a Rolex watch and some cash, then split before anyone even realizes he’s there. That breezy plan is foiled when the wealthy homeowners, played by Jesse Plemons (“CEO”) and Lily Collins (“Wife”), unexpectedly arrive for an impromptu getaway.

After a prolonged opening-credits shot of the stunning vacation home, the camera pans to views of the estate. We get a glimpse of the grounds, the pool, the orange grove, and the garden, all of which serve as backdrops for later scenes. The camera lands on Segel’s character, who’s serenely sipping orange juice and soaking in the view. He’s imagining what it would be like to be these people; to have it all. He makes his way into the house, stops to tie his shoe, takes a piss in the shower, and rummages through drawers and closets until he finds money and a gun. He’s about to head out when the couple corners him. He panics and makes the impetuous decision to take them hostage, beginning one hell of a ride.

The filthy rich tech CEO promises to give his captor $500,000, but the three are forced to kill time together until the money arrives. As pressure mounts, the characters reveal their true selves. And their clashing conduct fundamentally molds and elevates the ever-changing situation.

The trio delivers outstanding performances that are only enhanced by a nerve-racking score, created by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, and Isiah Donté Lee’s gorgeous cinematography (the @OnePerfectShot Twitter account would be overwhelmed with options). The contemporary noir is a simple, stripped-down thriller that presents seemingly straightforward solutions at the start. But Windfall grows increasingly complex, keeping viewers engaged and inquisitive from beginning to end.

Segel successfully portrays a generally nonconfrontational dude who’s trying and failing to act tough. He ties the couple up with electronics cords but nearly has a breakdown trying to unclasp the wife’s purse. It’s obvious that he’s woefully unqualified to run the show. His threats are gentle and visibly empty, and he wears desperation, regret, and the burning desire for a solution on his sleeve. Even in the process of committing several crimes, he feels worthy of our compassion, especially since you’ll spend a decent chunk of the film wanting to punch Plemons’ character in the face.

The Power of the Dog actor utterly infuriates as an entitled slimeball, who lacks the smallest bit of self-control. In the middle of this hostage situation, he takes time to remind his wife that he hates her tattoo. He taunts his captor every chance he gets. And he delivers several sickening monologues — one of which eerily echoes Kim Kardashian’s recent insensitive work ethic comments. Plemons ably plays an arrogant asshole at one point exclaiming: “Try being a rich white guy these days! Everyone always thinks it must be real fuckin’ nice.”

Meanwhile, Collins brings incredible depth and range to her character. Windfall will remind everyone that the Emily In Paris star isn’t all fun in France. Collins, who’s married to McDowell, plays a quiet, discontent wife, who finds her voice throughout the film. Her character displays the ability to remain level-headed in times of turbulence. But Collins gives a stunning, multifaceted performance that shows her cycle through fear, disgust, empathy, introspection, anger, and just about everything in between.

McDowell wrote the story, along with Justin Lader, Andrew Kevin Walker, and Segel. And he’s close friends with both Segel and Plemons, which likely played a role in their amazing onscreen chemistry.

Windfall‘s casting is brilliant, and its unconventional camerawork crafts a picture-perfect presentation of three sorely imperfect lives. Masterful shots of everything from a sculpture in the living room and birds circling in the sky to eyes shifting, to a leg bouncing with anxiety and fingers tapping on the couch, help emphasize the agonizing passage of time.

Though the film is a thriller, it’s undoubtedly one of the most chill high-stress situations of all time. It’s dialogue-heavy. It’s ripe with awkward, tense, and lengthy stretches of silence. And winks of levity are sprinkled throughout, including a scene where they watch the 1986 comedy, Three Amigos!.

Windfall’s unhurried pacing and the couple’s laidback lack of escape attempts might not keep everyone’s attention. But if you manage to stick around as long as that burglar, you’ll be rewarded with a satisfyingly surprising ending.

Windfall is now streaming on Netflix.

Like all good pornos, A24’s hotly anticipated new horror-comedy, X, knows exactly what you came for.

Unloading bloody money shot after even bloodier money shot, this gore-fest with tits also finds thrilling new ways to subvert the classic ’70s slasher formula it pays homage to. But as part of a larger trend of artsy indie horror movies that make you think, X is more boobs and guts than it is brains. Despite enthralling and transgressive genre filmmaking, it fails to rise above the one old horror trope we really need to retire.

Fear of aging — most often depicted on screen as a sexist disgust toward elderly women’s bodies — is just too tired a cliché for what’s otherwise the best teen slasher since Cabin in the Woods. Just like that 2011 cult hit, X also suffers from being a bit too up its own ass at times, full of winking-to-the-camera meta-commentary on the horror movie conventions it toys with.

Opening on a grisly crime scene in rural America, the movie feels like it begins exactly where the 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s iconic ending left off. You can practically smell the putrid scent of teen flesh rotting in the baking Southern sun. So when we flash back to a van with a hot young cast and crew going to shoot a porn film on a farm, we already know where this is headed. The dread only mounts after a tense encounter between our group of groovy, free-lovin’ youths and the decrepit, God-fearing elderly couple whose barn they’re using as a set.

As the latest entry into Ti West’s horror filmography (joining cult favorites like The Innkeepers and House of the Devil), X is the best execution of the writer-director’s unique talents so far. Aside from a trademark blend of humor and horror, the movie highlights West’s unparalleled mastery of tension and pacing. With offputting scene transitions that cut back and forth like a stutter, a fun flourish with the ’70s split-screen cinematic technique, and its keen eye for finding visceral beauty in the grotesque, X is a total filmmaking flex.

However, it’s held back by the director’s weaknesses as much as it shines from his strengths. West was an early pioneer of the modern arthouse horror-comedy. But when it comes to using that sub-genre as a metaphor for bigger ideas about the human condition, West still lags behind more recent trailblazers like Jordan Peele.

X lays it on thick with thematic explorations of sex as death, taking the commonly touted fun fact that a French euphemism for “orgasm” translates into “a small death” pretty literally. Most obviously, the movie interrogates American culture’s uniquely hypocritical Puritan values, which condemn sex as a sin but celebrate violence as a God-given right. There’s some interesting commentary on the cinematic similarities between slasher films and porn, too, positioning them as opposite sides of the same hedonistic spectrum.

But for all its smugly self-aware jokes about using avant-garde editing techniques to hide the porno’s low budget, X appears oblivious to some of its other hacky, self-aggrandizing superficialities.

Much of the movie’s horror relies on an ageism that dehumanizes young and mature women alike.

Much of the movie’s horror relies on an ageism that dehumanizes young and mature women alike, and the meaning behind this central choice isn’t clear enough to justify how little it questions this trope’s misogyny. It’s a blind spot made more frustrating by how X has already garnered far greater critical attention and praise than a film like Relic ever did. The slept-on 2020 indie horror by writer-director Natalie Erika James brilliantly subverts the genre’s demonization of the kind of older women that X doesn’t hesitate in depicting as inherently horrific.

The ageism is made all the more egregious by how X appears to see itself as being in conversation with some seminal feminist film theories that were sparked by the classic ’70s slashers the movie pays homage to.

X deliberately plays with the formula we’ve come to expect from the “final girl” trope, a term famously coined by critic Carol J. Clover as a way to point out the slasher’s gendered sexual politics. Instead of sacrificing the archetypal female “whore” character so that the “virgin” can live till the end, X‘s modern twist has audiences rooting for the survival of basically a whole group of unabashed “whores.”

It also feasts on the Freudian-feminist film language of critics like Laura Mulvey, whose classic essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema coined the term “male gaze.” X loves to use phallic objects as metaphorical penises, evokes fucked-up family gender dynamics, and takes pleasure in climactic murder scenes full of suggestively spewing bodily fluids. The movie even breaks the fourth wall while its female characters fuck for the camera, seemingly as an interrogation of that ever-present male gaze in everything from porn to slashers.

But it only seems to wade into those conversations pioneered by and about women for the intellectual clout, like that toxic film major guy from college who just recently discovered the existence of a male gaze.

The movie often feels like it lampshades a great pair of tits as some kinda empowering critique on patriarchy. At the same time, it uses a bunch of poorly caked-on prosthetic makeup to perpetuate male-centric cinema’s revulsion toward the wrinkled naked female form. Despite wanting to be above such demeaning practices, X still exclusively treats aging women as synonymous with the monstrous rather than, you know, the nature of being human.

Speaking from my own personal experience, X wasn’t a fun movie to watch while having a female body. It also wasn’t a fun movie to watch for anyone who’s seen aging loved ones fall into the nightmares of dementia. I understand that it doesn’t necessarily need to consider either of those lived experiences to be great cinema. But its failure to do so does undercut the emotional potency of the story it tries to tell.

Whatever X lacks in intellectual rigor or human empathy, though, it makes up for in pure carnal delights — especially for slasher fans. Thanks to a phenomenal cast and stand-out performance from Brittany Snow as blonde porn star Bobby-Lynne, the laughs land as hard as the blows in its axe murders.

X is a mastery of the grotesque that even veteran horror film lovers will find hard to sit through at times. But if you can stomach both the best and worst of this snuff film orgy, then you’re sure to enjoy yet another Ti West hall of famer.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is officially a “loser.”

His failing, ongoing war in Ukraine, which has resulted in Russia being near-completely cut off from the international community, is solid proof enough.

But Loser.com has made the designation official, and you can see it for yourself. Type the domain in your web browser and visit the URL. You’ll be redirected to Putin’s Wikipedia page.

The Loser.com domain name has gained notoriety over the years for doing this very thing before. (It even has its own Wikipedia entry.) The URL often redirects visitors to whomever its owner, Brian Connelly, deems as the biggest “loser” of the moment. Connelly has previously shared that he registered Loser.com back in 1995. Unsure of what type of website to develop for the domain name, he has been using redirects in order to troll world-renowned losers ever since.

It’s unclear exactly when Loser.com first started pointing towards Putin’s Wikipedia entry. A generic “coming soon” landing page sat on the URL, according to a Feb. 22 archive saved by the Wayback Machine. Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine began just a couple of days later on Feb. 24.

The next Wayback Machine archive of Loser.com was the night of March 1, which shows the domain redirecting to Putin’s Wikipedia page then. The first tweet from a user noticing the change was posted to Twitter on the morning of March 2.

Loser.com’s most attention-grabbing redirect came in 2015 when the domain pointed to Kanye West’s Wikipedia entry. West had previously criticized musician and songwriter Beck after he beat out Beyonce for Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards that year. In comments he shared at the time, Loser.com owner Connelly admitted he was no fan of West. (Ironically, Beck is also likely known by most for his hit single, “Loser.”)

In 2016, Loser.com made headlines again when Connelly redirected his domain to then-U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump’s Wikipedia page during the Republican primaries. Connelly would, once again, point the URL towards Trump’s Wikipedia entry after the 2020 presidential elections, which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.

Kanye, Trump, and now Putin…who will Loser.com point to next?