Media
When it comes to interracial romances, the movies need to catch up
"Interspecies love is in the air!" enthuses one movie fansite at the prospect of the forthcoming Warcraft movie. There's a lot to get up to speed with in Warcraft. The original video games were so wildly popular that their community of players exceeds the population of Norway, and the World of Warcraft wiki has over 100,000 pages. For novices, it's a fantasy world not far removed from Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons: a realm of elves, dwarves, mythical creatures and medieval weaponry. Warcraft the movie revolves around Azeroth, a kingdom apparently ruled by European humans.
First 'Assassin's Creed' trailer shows the sci-fi plot that sends Michael Fassbender back in time
Fans of the "Assassin's Creed" video game series got a look Wednesday at the first trailer for 20th Century Fox's upcoming film adaptation starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Fassbender ("X-Men: Apocalypse") plays Callum Lynch, a violent man who finds himself recruited by a corporation and dispatched through ancestral memory as a highly trained killing machine. The film is the latest iteration of the "Assassin's Creed" mythos, which has sold over 80 million copies of its games, as well as several spinoff comics and novels. Joining Fassbender in the cast of the 150-million adaptation are Academy Award winners Cotillard ("La Vie en Rose") and Jeremy Irons ("Reversal of Fortune") as Justin Kurzel, who worked with both Fassbender and Cotillard in his 2015 "Macbeth." While it's clear a large portion of that budget is dedicated to the special effects required to render a live-action version of a video game, it's unclear whether those moments will translate to anything approaching emotional resonance.
Filmmaker Duncan Jones still inspired by dad David Bowie
Filmmaker Duncan Jones says his dad, David Bowie, inspired him to make movies. The director of "Moon" and "Source Code" talked about his late father Wednesday at the Los Angeles premiere of Jones' latest film, the video-game adaptation "Warcraft." Bowie died in January at age 69. "My dad was obviously prolific in music, but he also acted and I think I had the most fun when we were on film sets... I think I got the (directing) bug back then," Jones said.
Is the Assassin's Creed movie actually going to be good?
It's a phrase likely to strike fear and dread into the heart of most gamers, and indeed most moviegoers. All of these classic, hugely acclaimed video games have been thrust onto the big screen (or the straight-to-DVD shelves) by people whose knowledge of the source materials seems to have been passing at best. The results have been ... horrible. Assassin's Creed, we are being told, is a different story. Produced by Ubisoft, the company that developed and published the bestselling games, it has actual star actors (Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons) and a talented director in the form of Justin Kurzel, who made the award-winning Snowtown and helmed Fassbender's gritty Macbeth movie.
Blade runner emotion detector could reveal if a person REALLY finds you attractive
First dates can be a nerve-wracking experience, filled with unease and uncertainty over whether or not the other person is interested. But new technology that could help clear up at least some of the mystery surrounding such dates might be on its way. An'emotion detector' has been created which researchers claim will be able to tell whether or not a person finds you attractive almost instantly. An'emotion detector' concept has been designed that can tell if a person finds you attractive on the first date by measuring skin and heart rate responses and a pupil-dilation measure. Researchers at the University of Lancaster were inspired to make the device by a gadget featured in the 1982 sci-fi fantasy film'Blade Runner'.
Assassin's Creed: five things we learned from the first trailer
Along with Duncan Jones's Warcraft it's been billed as the video game movie that might just make us forget all about the cinematic crimes of Uwe Boll and his ilk, that can induce glorious amnesia for those struggling to wipe clean memories of Prince of Persia, Hitman or Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. The omens so far are good. Assassin's Creed comes from the team behind last year's blistering new take on Macbeth, with director Justin Kurzel bringing back his stars Michael Fassbender (also a hands-on producer) and Marion Cotillard. Here are five takeaways from the first trailer for the film. How strange that the cute copine from France's hit Taxi comedies has developed into one of the most sublime screen beauties of modern Hollywood.
Using sentiment analysis to predict ratings of popular tv series
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you have probably heard of TV shows such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, How I Met Your Mother or Game of Thrones. While I generally don't spend a whole lot of time watching TV, I have also undergone some pretty intense binge-watching sessions in the past (they generally coincided with exam periods, which was actually not a coincidenceโฆ). As I was watching the epic final season of Breaking Bad, it got me thinking on how TV series compare to one another, and how their ratings evolve over time. I therefore decided to look a bit further into user rating trends of popular TV series (and by popular I mean the ones I know). For this, I simply had to define a quick scraping function in R that retrieves the average IMDB user ratings assigned to each episode of a given series.
Beyond Siri: The AI revolution coming from the web
Eric Poindessault is founder and CEO at Biggerpan. From HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Samantha in Spike Jonze's Her, for decades we have been obsessed with the idea that artificial intelligence powered-computers will one day be able to interact with people, follow spoken instructions and make decisions independently, like a human would. Since Siri hit our screens on the iPhone 4, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Baidu have entered the playing field, too. But while each new generation brings its lot of interesting new features or use cases, they are still far off from the AI representations in movies. It's hard to imagine anyone engaging in a romantic relationship with Siri, or NASA putting Alexa in control of a spacecraft just yet. Movies have set the bar pretty high, and we are still waiting for such ubiquitous voice-controlled AI assistants to enter the real world.
'Assassin's Creed' movie trailer has fighting and Fassbending
We won't have a new Assassin's Creed game this year, but what we will have is a movie. And now we know just what it'll look like when it hits theaters this December 21st, courtesy of a trailer that just debuted on the late-night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live. It looks appropriately stabby and features tons of the series' hallmark moments: a massive cityscape shot from above, an abducted protagonist by way of Michael Fassbender, eagles flying around spires, a leap of faith off of a very tall building, and, of course lots of folks in hoods looking ready to kill assassinate folks during the Spanish Inquisition.
How AI And Crowdsourcing Are Remaking The Legal Profession
"The legal industry is ripe for innovation," says attorney and journalist Robert Ambrogi, who covers the role of technology in law. In an influential April 13 blog post, Ambrogi proclaimed a boom in legal tech startups based on a more than doubling of listings on startup directory AngelList. Ambrogi has since produced his own streamlined listing that currently has nearly 500 companies offering technologies to the legal industry. Several are courting attorneys who need better, cheaper ways to sort through the avalanche of legal filings, rulings, and spiderwebs of citations between cases, from the local to federal level. The innovation upsurge may in part be generational.