Alan Taylor, known for his work on Game of Thrones, Lost, Thor: The Dark World and Terminator Genisys, is reportedly set to direct a prequel film of The Sopranos.
According to The Wrap, Taylor has signed on to direct The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel film written and produced by David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos. Taylor won the 2007 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for The Sopranos’ sixth season episode “Kennedy and Heidi.”
The story is set in the 1960s during the peak of riots caused by racial tension in Newark, New Jersey. Various characters from the Sopranos are expected to appear in the film, though its cast will naturally be entirely new due to the age differences.
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The dog days of summer are upon us, and if you’re spending time outside, you definitely want to have some music playing to heighten the summer time vibe. Unfortunately when the weather is hot, headphones aren’t a lot of fun. Plus, if you’re in the pool you really shouldn’t wear them. Thankfully Bluetooth speakers exist to fill the summertime air with music.
On great thing about Bluetooth speakers is how inexpensive they are. You can get a decent speaker for as little as $20, but with this sale you can get even better versions and still not pay a lot of money. On top of producing surprising levels of volume, a lot of these speakers are waterproof or splash resistant, making them the best possible way to listen to music just about anywhere.
Top Gun: Maverick has cast Miles Teller as the young protégé to Tom Cruise’s Maverick.
Deadline reports Teller will portray the son of Maverick’s (Tom Cruise) late best friend Goose in what said to be a lead role in the sequel. Anthony Edwards portrayed Goose in the original Top Gun.
Magic: The Gathering is taking to San Diego Comic-Con with an exclusive new collection celebrating the brand’s return home to Dominaria.
Check out the limited edition run below, featuring all-new art by longtime Magic artist Terese Nielsen:
These five Planeswalker cards feature characters Gideon Jura, Jace Beleren, Liliana Vess, Chandra Nalaar and Nissa Revane. Each of the cards in the Timeless Legends set was designed to explore the ties that bind present Dominaria heroes to icons of the past
You can check out close-ups of Terese Nielson’s art below:
This Comic-Con exclusive will be available in San Diego’s biggest fan convention for $99.
The Purge movies have always been about the 1% versus the 99, the privileged against the underprivileged–the rich trying to exterminate the poor by pitting them against one another while sitting safe in fortified ivory towers. In the previous three movies, that theme served as the core, beneath a veneer of fantastically stylized violence, with gangs of roving murderers draping their cars with Christmas lights and donning exaggerated masks over preppy school uniforms. In The First Purge, that thin surface of fantasy is gone, leaving only a crude, gratuitous, vaguely exploitative movie about the government openly and mercilessly exterminating poor people.
Like The Purge: Anarchy, the second in the series, The First Purge wants to suggest that, with scattered exceptions, normal people aren’t inherently violent enough to Purge. They need a push, and that shove comes from the New Founding Fathers of America, the government that, in this movie, just recently emerged as the third option in America’s two party system and seized power from Republicans and Democrats alike. The First Purge explains how the NFFA was able to pull it off: Much like the politicians in power today, they exploited people’s fear. The movie spends an opening montage citing a grab bag of real world social unrest, from the Black Lives Matter movement to a housing crisis worse than 2008’s.
Now, it’s time for an “experiment” that Marisa Tomei’s Dr. Updale, a scientist working with the NFFA, promises will give the American people the outlet they need for all their hate, anger, and aggression. There’s an unintentionally silly scene late in the movie when Updale, seeing the actual results of her “experiment,” utters dramatically, “What have I done?” It’s unclear what results she was expecting from this whole thing.
The movie centers on a handful of characters on New York’s Staten Island, the isolated site of this first, experimental Purge. (Through their public representative Arlo Sabian (Patch Darragh), the government issues some hazy explanation about the island’s demographics being representative of the country as a whole, but behind closed doors the NFFA readily admit they just want to kill poor people.)
Dmitri (Y’lan Noel) is a drug kingpin who wants to keep his neighborhood safe while protecting his product and his business. Nya (Lex Scott Davis) is his ex-girlfriend, a conscientious protestor who opposes the experiment. Her little brother, Isaiah (Joivan Wade), was supposed to get off the island, but secretly stayed behind to get revenge on Skeletor (Rotimi Paul), a violent drug addict who attacked and humiliated him. These characters and those surrounding them–every single person the movie follows during the experiment–are non-white, while almost everyone actually causing violence during the Purge is white.
Early on, there are isolated scenes of NFFA officials interviewing Staten Islanders about their pent up rage, then offering them monetary compensation for remaining on the island and actively participating. The government implants them with tracking devices and issues them high tech contact lenses that will record the night’s events so the results can be broadcast to the world. Glowing red, green, or blue in the darkness, these contacts are one of the movie’s only creative aesthetic liberties, although they often verge on looking silly.
But when the would-be Purgers throw block parties instead of tearing one another apart, the NFFA sends in militaristic bands of mercenaries dressed in the regalia of the KKK, white supremacist biker gangs, and masked, Nazi-like soldiers. At times, The First Purge is hard to watch, and not in the fun way that horror movies are supposed to make you hide behind splayed fingers. Whatever thin veil of subtlety this series ever possessed is gone from this movie, murdered by flocks of heavily armed drones the New Founding Fathers of America sent to make sure the citizens of Staten Island “participated” in the experiment.
The First Purge doesn’t hesitate to mirror real world events, and never to its benefit. At one point, off screen (thankfully), a group of white mercenaries disguised as a biker gang guns down dozens of black, hispanic, and Asian people huddling for safety in a church–something that more or less happened in real life just three years ago. Later, white soldiers rampage through a towering housing project, systematically, inhumanly slaughtering the hundreds of non-white people inside, room by room and floor by floor. There were points in The First Purge I could have been watching last year’s Detroit, a movie about the real life terror inflicted on black people by white cops during Detroit’s 1967 12th Street Riot. That’s not imagery you want to evoke lightly, yet The First Purge uses it readily, in between scenes of cackling homeless ladies setting traps in alleyways and Dmitri’s gang members eagerly arming themselves to the teeth.
When Nya gets her foot caught in a trap and attackers burst from a grate nearby, hands scrabble furiously at her crotch. Running away, she yells behind her, “P***y grabbing motherf***er!” Somehow, despite being completely out of character, that line is predictable, too. It’s the exact kind of low-hanging fruit this movie hungrily plucks, scene after scene.
There’s nothing fun or thrilling about watching white people dressed up as real world hate groups efficiently murdering innocent victims. The Purge series’ veneer of fantasy is gone. It’s too on the nose, and it knows it. That The First Purge is a prequel means the people we see suffering in it are doomed to at least another 25 years of annual violence and oppression, a fact you’ll be acutely aware of as the dawn breaks on the first experiment, the few survivors limp down the street, and the tastelessly summoned Kendrick Lamar song “Alright” (“Alls my life I had to fight…”) thumps into life over your theater’s speakers.
2016’s The Purge: Election Year ended on a hopeful note. That movie tried to mirror the real world too, but the real life politics it mimicked turned out much differently than the film’s. In 2018, we could have used a movie where, for once, the good guys won. The fact that series creator James DeMonaco, who’s written all four entries and directed the three before this, chose to give us a prequel instead is empirical evidence that he may be out of good ideas.
Each year in July, Amazon runs a massive sale it calls Prime Day. This Black Friday-like event sees the online retailer dropping prices on a huge array of products, ranging from Echoes and Kindles to games, electronics, furniture, apparel, and just about every other category of items Amazon sells. The only catch is that you have to be an Amazon Prime member to take advantage of the sale prices. Now that July has begun, the company has finally confirmed the date for Prime Day 2018. It’s a 36-hour event that will kick off on July 16 at 12 PM PT (3PM ET / 12PM BT) and run through July 17.
If you’re not a Prime member already, you can sign up here. In addition to Prime Day discounts, Prime members get free two-day shipping on many products, access to Amazon Prime Video, Prime Music, free books, and a free Twitch Prime membership, which includes free PC games each month. This month, to build anticipation for Prime Day, Amazon/Twitch Prime members are getting 21 free PC games.
An Amazon Prime subscription costs $119 for a one-year membership or $13 for a single month. New members get a month-long free trial. Students get an even better deal: a free six-month trial, with a monthly price of only $6.49 after that.
Steam’s Summer Sale is such a massive event that you could miss out on some incredible savings if you don’t dig around a bit. A notable chunk of the best games on sale come from Bethesda, a company that’s going all out right now, with tons of deep discounts on its games on Steam. The Bethesda deals go up to 75% off, often on games that aren’t all that old. Here are some of the highlights.
For starters, the whole Fallout franchise is available at 50% off or more. You can get Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics for $2.50 each. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are only $3.29 right now, and Fallout 4 is only $15. All of the Game of the Year editions and individual expansions are also on sale.
The demonic kill-fest Doom is on sale for $15, but if you want to try it before you buy it, you can play the demo for free. If you have a Vive, you can turn demons inside out in virtual reality with Doom VFR for $21.
Rage 2, which is coming out next year, looks like a lot of fun, but there’s a good chance you haven’t played the original Rage. You can change that for just $2.49. If you like sneaking around and assassinating enemies, you can get Dishonored for the same price. Its sequel Dishonored 2 is available for $20, and the Death of the Outsider standalone expansion is on sale for $15.
