#entertainmentsoftwareassociation

Just because a company files a patent for a new device, feature, or random idea, doesn’t necessarily mean it plans to make it a reality. Sometimes, it’s just to prevent other companies from doing it. So it’s impossible to say what will come of this recent AR-centric patent filing by Nintendo, but the included images… Read more…

The Best Video Game Gifts for the n00b in Your Life

Some of our posts include links to retailers. If you buy something from clicking on one, G/O Media may earn a commission. Because editorial staff is independent of commerce, affiliate linking does not influence our editorial content. The holidays only mean one thing for a certain type of person: a bounty of new video games to play. Read more…

The PS4 and PS5’s Chief Hardware Architect Is Leaving Sony Next Month

He might not have as recognizable a name as corporate executives from companies like Apple and Microsoft, but next month, Sony will be saying goodbye to Masayasu Ito, who led the hardware development on the PS4, the PS5, and some of the company’s other notable gaming devices. Read more…

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/technology/entertainment/review-chernobyl-the-disaster-movie/

Review: ‘Chernobyl,’ the Disaster Movie

How do you dramatize a great big mess? The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a subject full of gripping detail and historical and scientific import. But as a story, it’s hard to get your arms around — sprawling and repetitious, dependent on arcane particulars of physics and engineering, marked by failures to act and by large-scale action that accomplishes nothing.

“Chernobyl,” a five-part mini-series starting Monday on HBO (in coproduction with the British network Sky), takes what you could call a Soviet approach to telling the tale. This is incongruous, since one of the messages of the program is that Soviet approaches don’t work. But there it is: the imposition of a simple narrative on history, the twisting of events to create one-dimensional heroes and villains, the broad-brush symbolism.

Of course the techniques of Soviet propaganda bore a lot of similarity to the techniques of Hollywood. And in “Chernobyl,” the writer Craig Mazin (“The Hangover” Parts II and III) and the director Johan Renck take an event unlike any other in human history and turn it into a creaky and conventional, if longer than usual, disaster movie.

Mazin, who created the series, begins (after a short prologue) in the moments after the explosion that destroyed the newest of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power station, in what is now Ukraine. It’s a disorienting, compelling sequence — like the operators of the plant, we don’t know what has just happened, and we helplessly follow along as they blunder through the flaming wreckage on fruitless tasks, absorbing tremendous doses of radiation that will kill them within weeks.

From there, the show moves along in extended vignettes, hitting the familiar high points of the Chernobyl story. A government commission is formed, the company town of Pripyat is evacuated, and firefighters and engineers die horrible deaths in the radiation wards of Moscow’s Hospital No. 6. Soldiers and workers conscripted from all over the Soviet Union undertake a series of deadly projects that have attained mythical status: the relief-valve mission, the digging of the heat-exchange chamber, the clearing of the roof of Unit 3.

Mazin ends with a potentially clever device: using testimony at the show trial of the plant’s supervisors as a way to circle back and finally recount the story’s beginning, the botched safety test that led to the explosion. But the scene doesn’t have the force it should, because like much of what has come before, it takes fictional license over the line into contrivance and melodrama.

Looking for a tragic hero to center the story on, Mazin has chosen the nuclear physicist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), in part, perhaps, because his experience with Chernobyl drove him to suicide. Centrally involved in the response to the disaster, Legasov was mostly a good apparatchik, hewing to the party line that operator error and not flaws in Soviet reactor design led to the explosion.

Legasov recanted before his death, in interviews made possible by the rapid progress of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In “Chernobyl,” however, Mazin puts Legasov on the witness stand at the trial and, in a stroke of pure fantasy, has him boldly denounce Soviet corner-cutting and secrecy, after which he’s hauled into a back room by the K.G.B.

The transformation of Legasov into a daring whistle-blower and martyr, complete with a courtroom apotheosis out of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is just one instance of the show’s propensity toward Hollywood inflation — to show us things that didn’t happen. The workers who volunteer to enter the reactor building to open water valves do so in “Spartacus” style, solemnly standing and reciting their names. The coal miners brought in to excavate beneath the superheated nuclear core flout the radiation levels by working in the nude. A tall column of black smoke pours from the reactor for days after the explosion, rather than the small clouds of white vapor that escaped in real life.

The biggest and most artificial contrivance is the creation of a fictional character, a Belarusian scientist played by Emily Watson who takes a suspicious radiation reading in Minsk and magically, preposterously takes over the story. She’s everywhere at the same time, forcing herself onto the investigatory commission, sitting in on meetings with Gorbachev, raiding government archives, interviewing engineers in their hospital beds, single-handedly uncovering the secret history of the faulty reactor. (If Mazin wanted a prominent female character to leaven a story dominated by men, why did he leave out Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat and supervised its evacuation?)

In the course of five hours, Mazin name-checks most of the pertinent facts of the story. But his cheap theatrics — including hilarious setups in which Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), the deputy prime minister in charge of energy, asks questions like “How does a nuclear reactor work?” so that Legasov can explain it for us — detract from the real tragedy of the story. So does the constant sense of foreboding reinforced by the buzzing Geiger-like noises on the soundtrack, and the prevalence of stoic-peasant and menacing-strongman Soviet stereotypes.

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/technology/entertainment/woodstock-50s-backer-says-the-festival-is-off-its-promoter-is-holding-out-hope/

Woodstock 50’s Backer Says the Festival Is Off. Its Promoter Is Holding Out Hope.

It was supposed to be the golden anniversary of the most famous rock concert in history, the event that crystallized in mud the free-love 1960s and the drawing power of a new generation of music stars.

But on Monday, Woodstock 50 appeared to be all but dead. According to a statement from the festival’s primary investor, the event — planned for Aug. 16 to 18 in Watkins Glen, N.Y., with acts including Jay-Z, the Killers and Dead and Company — was off.

“It’s a dream for agencies to work with iconic brands and to be associated with meaningful movements,” the investor, an arm of the Japanese advertising giant Dentsu, said. “But despite our tremendous investment of time, effort and commitment, we don’t believe the production of the festival can be executed as an event worthy of the Woodstock brand name while also ensuring the health and safety of the artists, partners and attendees.

“As a result and after careful consideration,” the statement continued, “Dentsu Aegis Network’s Amplifi Live, a partner of Woodstock 50, has decided to cancel the festival. As difficult as it is, we believe this is the most prudent decision for all parties involved.”

The agency believed that production milestones had not been met and was concerned about delays in acquiring permits, as well as a reduction in the originally planned capacity, from 100,000 visitors a day to 75,000.

But while Dentsu’s statement ricocheted around the news media, Michael Lang, the promoter of Woodstock 50 and one of the primary forces behind the original festival in 1969, denied that the event was kaput.

“They do not have the right to unilaterally cancel the festival,” Lang said in an interview shortly after Dentsu released its statement, which Lang said caught him by surprise.

On Monday evening, Mr. Lang’s team released a statement insisting that the show would go on, but giving no further details.

“We are committed to ensuring that the 50th anniversary of Woodstock is marked with a festival deserving of its iconic name and place in American history and culture,” the statement said. “Although our financial partner is withdrawing, we will of course be continuing with the planning of the festival and intend to bring on new partners.”

“The bottom line is,” the statement added, “there is going to be a Woodstock 50th Anniversary Festival, as there must be, and it’s going to be a blast.”

Lang said that all acts had already been paid in full, leaving open the possibility that he could rescue the festival with another backer. He is no stranger to last-minute saves. The 1969 Woodstock festival lost its original venue, in Wallkill, N.Y., and relocated to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, N.Y., just weeks before it took place.

It was unclear what prompted the timing of Dentsu’s announcement. The company declined to make any further comment. Several major music agents and acts booked for the event said they had not received any notification of cancellation.

The list of performers also includes Miley Cyrus, the Raconteurs, the Lumineers, Chance the Rapper, Imagine Dragons, Halsey, Robert Plant and some who had played the original event, like Santana, Country Joe McDonald and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Woodstock 50 was announced in January as an ambitious and principled celebration of the original event. Organizers envisioned a three-day camping festival, for approximately 100,000 people a day, with what Lang said would be music as well as representation by activist organizations.

“We want this to be more than just coming to a concert,” Lang said at the time. “And hopefully a lot of the bands will become part of this effort to get people to stand up and make themselves heard, to get and out vote. And if they don’t have a candidate that represents their feelings, to find one — or to run themselves.”

But from the start, Woodstock 50 drew skeptics throughout the industry, who doubted that such an event could be successful in an era now dominated by big festivals and tours promoted by giant companies like Live Nation and AEG.

Through permit applications, the organizers had also quietly reduced its intended capacity to 75,000.

The lineup was announced last month, but the on-sale date for tickets — April 22, Earth Day — came and went with no more information. According to news reports, the organizers had applied for but not yet received a mass gathering permit from the New York State Department of Health. Without that permit, no tickets could be sold.

Woodstock 50 was to have been the most prominent event among a series of anniversary celebrations throughout the Northeast, including a series of events at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, located on the site of the original Woodstock festival.

Another event, Woodstock Experience 2019, has a lineup including a number of artists who played the original festival, like Melanie, Ten Years After and Jefferson Starship, an offshoot of Jefferson Airplane. It is to take place in West Jefferson, N.C., Aug. 9 to 11, and then in Palm Bay, Fla., Aug. 16 to 18.

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/technology/entertainment/best-of-late-night-joe-bidens-run-has-late-night-looking-for-a-fight/

Best of Late Night: Joe Biden’s Run Has Late Night Looking for a Fight

Biden once said that if he and Trump were in high school, he’d “take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” Noah thinks a public fight benefiting a charity is in order.

“Let’s get ready to stumble!” — TREVOR NOAH, in sports announcer voice

“It’s a win-win. Biden gets to stand up to Trump and Trump gets to secretly keep the money for charity. Everyone wins.” — TREVOR NOAH

Jay Leno Is Not Into Edibles

The former “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno made a return visit, introduced as an angry man Jimmy Fallon had seen shouting outside. Once on stage, Leno ranted about American fast food, the obesity epidemic and the pointlessness of edible underwear.

“There’s no other country in the world where people eat other people’s underpants. Even the Taliban did not eat other people’s underpants. I mean, why do we have this product? Are we so bored with lovemaking? Have we become that lazy? ‘You know, honey, I’d like to have sex. I’m also hungry. I don’t want to get up. Hey, let’s just eat each other’s underpants!’” — JAY LENO

The Punchiest Punchlines (Biden Edition)

“When asked about Joe Biden running for president, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris said, ‘Come on in, the water is warm.’ That’s what she said. That’s a true quote. That’s what she said. Then Bernie Sanders said, ‘That’s because I may have peed in it.’” — CONAN O’BRIEN

“Get this: Biden already has special campaign merchandise for sale on his website. Take a look. There’s Joe Biden mugs. Biden pins, Biden tote bags and, of course, Biden massagers.” — JIMMY FALLON

“It was reported today that Joe Biden is leading Bernie Sanders by eight points. Yeah, no, no, not in the polls — in their weekly game of shuffleboard.” — CONAN O’BRIEN

“[Biden] spent eight years as America’s vice president and surprise masseuse, but before that, he had a whole career that you might not know about. You know, kind of like how some people only know Billy Ray Cyrus from Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ remix. And like Billy Ray, Biden was doing his own thing for decades before he was made cool by a young black man.” — TREVOR NOAH

The Bits Worth Watching

After several days of mentioning (for some reason) Dead or Alive’s catchy 1985 hit “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” Jimmy Fallon enlisted Paul Rudd for a shot-by-shot re-creation of the video. It was their third video remake, and they spent most of Wednesday shooting it — the same day Wu-Tang Clan was performing on “The Tonight Show.”