Author: admin

A newlywed couple who married in Greece have said they feared the worst when three kittens they rescued from Crete went missing after being left in the hold of an aeroplane.

They first travelled to the island in September 2023 and found the mother cat, who “had a very distinctive bulging eye that needed to be removed”, Bethany Mulcahy-Stephenson, a veterinary nurse, said.

When they returned to Crete for their wedding in May, they went to look for the cat, whom they had named Abba, and found her with four kittens and pregnant again. Two of the kittens had eye infections and one was blind. The couple later named them Benny, Bjorn, Agnetha and Frida.

Mulcahy-Stephenson, 34, and her husband, Adam, 39, contacted a local rescuer who said she could take the kittens in temporarily, but they would have to find homes for them.

“It was a life or death decision,” said Mulcahy-Stephenson. “No doubt at least the blind one and probably one of the other ones would be dead by now. So we were a bit like, OK, well, it’s a no-brainer.”

After having the cats treated by a vet and vaccinated, they arranged for them to be flown to Paris, where they would then drive down from their home in Barrowford in Lancashire to collect them from Calais.

The cats were flown with Aegean airlines; only two cats were allowed in the cabin and three of the kittens were placed in a crate in the hold.

Mulcahy-Stephenson said: “When we arrived at the Eurotunnel shuttle terminal, we got a text from Lida, our rescuer in Greece, saying: ‘Bethany, the airline has lost three of the kittens,’ and it was absolute panic.

“I immediately went into complete shock panic, just absolute bedlam,” she said. “We didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t even know where they were, if they [had] left Greece, if they were in France or if they had been left on the tarmac.”

Eventually, they were told the kittens had been located, having been flown from Thessaloniki to Paris, but had not been unloaded in France.

Mulcahy-Stephenson said: “They were somehow forgotten in the hold, or not seen. They didn’t come off the plane at all, and the plane got sent straight back to Thessaloniki, which is another three-hour flight.”

When the kittens did not arrive in France, the couple immediately feared the worst. “I thought they were going to be dead, never found again, to be honest,” said Mulcahy-Stephenson. “I thought even if they weren’t lost, the shock of being in the noisy hold, [where] it’s cold, they’ve had no food, water … There was a lot of stuff going through my mind, but I didn’t think we were going to see them again.”

After initially telling the couple, via their rescuer who spoke Greek and acted as a go-between, it was a two-day wait for another plane back to Paris, the airline agreed to send the cats back via Athens, in the cabin, with a dedicated handler.

When Mulcahy-Stephenson was finally reunited with the kittens, she said: “I was shining the torch in there to count them all 10 times. I was so relieved to see them and have them in the car, safe.”

She added: “When they arrived, they were absolutely traumatised, they wouldn’t eat, we had them in the emergency vet.”

The couple said they had still not had a proper explanation as to why the cats had been left behind in the hold, or an apology from Aegean.

Adam Mulcahy-Stephenson said: “We’d like the airline to acknowledge what the problem is here, and in an ideal world we’d love to force some kind of change … to not have animals in the hold.”

Aegean airlines said: “With regard to the three kittens you mentioned, we would like to clarify that they were never lost at any time. Upon the arrival of the flight in Paris, they were not immediately disembarked due to operational reasons. As soon as this was identified, a coordinated response was promptly activated among all involved stations and our customer service department, in order to safeguard their care and security until their reunion with their guardians.

“The kittens continued their journey the same day under the direct care of the Aegean crew, which provided them with food and water during the flight, ensuring constant supervision. The same evening, they were safely reunited with their guardians in Paris.”

It’s a perfectly dreary Saturday in Seattle as the morning rain has subsided and cooled off an unseasonably warm September. Earlier in the day, the doors of the Museum of Pop Culture, or MoPop as it’s colloquially called, opens its doors for what they know will be its busiest day in years. A month ago, the museum announced their unpopular decision to close its ever-popular Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibit after 14 years, with a farewell gala planned for September 6. 

Thousands of Nirvana fans made the pilgrimage Saturday to see many of the artifacts one last time: Kurt Cobain’s artworks, smashed and un-smashed guitars, stage-worn clothes, rare photographs, personal letters, the MTV Unplugged setlist, and more, all displayed in chronological order to tell the story of the band’s Aberdeen beginnings and punk rock escapism to their meteoric rise and sudden, tragic end. 

The exhibit, which also shined a spotlight on the Pacific Northwest grunge movement that orbited around Nirvana — think Screaming Trees, Tad, Mudhoney, etc. — had resided at the Experience Music Project (EMP), and then the rebranded MoPop, in various forms for nearly 15 years, and was a constant draw for Seattle tourism, siphoning off foot traffic from the nearby Space Needle. Over 30 years after Cobain’s death, Nirvana remains as popular as ever, and have become not just the Pacific Northwest’s defining band, but perhaps the entire country’s. So, why is the exhibit now closing?

“It wasn’t really one thing, it was a number of things,” MoPop curator Jacob McMurray, who created the Nirvana exhibit, tells Rolling Stone a day before the closing ceremony. “An exhibition is a living, evolving creature. I wanted it to be very community-oriented. I wanted the primary sources to be telling the tale and kind of providing those objects. So there’s 20 different lenders to that show who provided different objects. We also have objects in our permanent collection that are in that exhibition as well. So there’s a bit of that, where lenders want their stuff back because they miss it, or because they want to sell stuff at auction or they have other ideas for other projects.

“The Nirvana exhibit has been up for longer than any other exhibit that we’ve ever had,” McMurray adds. “Let’s use it as an opportunity to recast our Seattle music story. Have an exhibit that still includes Nirvana and all of these other bands, but also as the opportunity to tell some broader, more inclusive stories.”

These Pacific Northwest stories extend outside of grunge: McMurray cited the city’s early hip-hop movement, glam rock band Ze Whiz Kids, and Portland’s the Kingsmen of “Louie Louie” fame as other artists that played a crucial role in the region’s musical history.

“What if we created an exhibit that told 15 to 20 vignette stories across time and genre that will always include [grunge] — the stuff that people really want to see as tourists or when you think of Seattle music — but where we’re able to constantly highlight these stories that were also very important, but maybe don’t get as much airplay.,” McMurray says. “Nirvana is part of MoPop’s DNA and will always be here, but as a museum, we also just want to tell different stories all of the time.”

McMurray’s personal favorite items in the exhibit: A handwritten letter that Melvins singer Buzz Osborne sent his friend Krist Novoselic forecasting that this Cobain kid “might have some kind of future in music,” as well as the reassembled remains of a guitar Cobain smashed at an Evergreen State College dorm show in 1988. 

“Maybe there’s 50 people in the audience, and [Cobain] probably doesn’t have enough money to pay rent, much less buy another guitar, and for some reason, he smashes that guitar out of the spirit of punk rock nihilism,” McMurray says. “That idea that one, [Cobain] was so moved to do that, and then two, somebody in the audience was so fucking psyched about that that they grabbed that guitar and held onto it for like another 10 years before we acquired it.”

Longtime MoPop museum guide and resident music expert Neal Kosaly-Meyer, who on Saturday led the final two guided tours for a select number of fans, also pointed to the Osborne letter to Novoselic about Cobain as one of the items he’ll miss the most. “There’s that prophetic line at the end: ‘I think he might have some kind of future in music if he keeps at it.’ I think that’s beautiful,” Kosaly-Meyer says. 

(This writer’s favorite items: The sacred text that is the printed MTV Unplugged set list housed behind plexiglass, and early photo proofs of the naked baby on the Nevermind cover with the handwritten note: “If anyone has a problem with his dick we can remove it.”)

In addition to one last walk through the exhibit, Saturday’s closing ceremony touted extracurricular activities like shirt screen-printing, zine-making, DJs spinning grunge classics, a theater showing Nirvana’s concert films and music videos, and a panel of Seattle area music folk — including McMurray, Sub Pop CEO Megan Jasper, and Recording Academy executive (and Seattle native) Jessica Toon — discussing the grunge era, the exhibit’s impact, and the museum’s future. What wasn’t on the lineup, however, was the biggest (and definitely tallest) surprise of the afternoon: An unannounced appearance by Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who provided the opening remarks prior to the panel.

“I started to get involved with, it was EMP, Experience Music Project, then MoPop, and it was just a great place to keep my stuff,” Novoselic joked. “Like, ‘Why is this guitar under my bed? Or, ‘why am I playing this guitar at a gig when I’m going to lose it and it’s gonna get ripped off. These are basses I played with Nirvana.’ So I donated to the museum. ‘Here you go.’ And people enjoyed them.”

Novoselic added, “Just that thinking and foresight like, ‘This is a vault with certain conditioned air and certain fire suppression. Security, white gloves… this is a bass that I bought for like 300 bucks at a pawn shop, and now it’s this artifact. It’s priceless.”

Following the panel, Novoselic hung around to chat and take photos with every Nirvana-shirted adult and Cobain-looking teenager that approached him. Sidling up to the towering figure, I asked him how he felt about the exhibit coming to an end. “Grateful,” Novoselic said, and not because he’s getting his stuff back.

“Grateful, because all this” — motioning to the still-packed theater, the dozens of fans waiting to meet him, the throngs of people still waiting on the hours-long line to walk the exhibit one last time — “just shows how much we meant to people.”

The exhibit spans just seven years, from 1988 to 1994. For the band, less than half that time was spent in the mainstream. One of the displays captured Cobain’s quote about why he chose the name Nirvana: “In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering, and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of punk rock.” During his guided tour, Kosaly-Meyer extensively quoted Buddhist text about the meaning of nirvana. The astrophysicist Michio Kaku once described it more succinctly, “Never-ending, no beginning, no end.”

“The Conjuring: Last Rites” has resurrected the box office, collecting a sensational $83 million in its first weekend of release.

That’s a new opening weekend record for Warner Bros. and New Line’s “Conjuring” universe, supplanting the benchmark held by 2018’s spinoff “The Nun” with $53.8 million. Among other achievements, it’s the best start this year for a horror movie (above May’s “Final Destination: Bloodlines” with $51.6 million) and the third-largest for the genre in box office history (after two other Warner Bros. titles, 2017’s “It” with $123 million and 2019’s “It: Chapter Two” with $91 million).

Heading into the weekend, independent tracking services suggested that “The Conjuring: Last Rites” would debut to $50 million or $60 million. However, pent-up demand to go to the movies (there hasn’t been a new blockbuster in weeks), as well as great word-of-mouth and goodwill toward the franchise, sent the ticket sales into the stratosphere. Reviews were mixed, but that rarely makes a difference for the genre of horror. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprised their roles as paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, who in this entry are trying to vanquish a demon from a family’s home. It’s billed as the final installment in the “Conjuring” world, though that’s unlikely to be the case after this weekend’s box office performance.

Internationally, “The Conjuring: Last Rites” earned $104 million from 66 territories for a stunning global launch of $187 million. In yet another record, these ticket sales overtook “It: Chapter Two” ($92 million) for the largest overseas debut for a horror film.

“This is a smash,” says analyst David A. Gross of Franchise Entertainment Research. “Horror fans can’t get enough of Lorraine and Ed Warren.”

Across nine films (spinoffs include “Annabelle” and “The Nun”), the “Conjuring” universe has become the highest-grossing horror franchise in history with a combined $2.3 billion. This installment cost $55 million to produce, which will make for some scary-good profit margins. Michael Chaves, who directed the prior film in the series, returned behind the camera while James Wan, who created the occult-tilted property, and Peter Safran were back as producers.

“The Conjuring: Last Rites” has extended a remarkable streak for Warner Bros. as the seventh consecutive release to open above $40 million this year, a first for any Hollywood studio. After a terrible box office run with “Joker: Folie a Deux,” “Mickey 17,” and “The Alto Knights,” Warner Bros. rebounded with April’s “A Minecraft Movie” followed by “Sinners,” “Final Destination Bloodlines,” “F1: The Movie” (which the studio distributed for Apple), “Superman” and “Weapons.” These outsized wins have taken the pressure off the studio’s next gamble, Paul Thomas Anderson’s $130 million-budgeted “One Battle After Another,” which opens at the end of September.

In a distant second place, Disney’s filmed version of “Hamilton” earned a notable $10 million from
1,825 theaters in its first weekend on the big screen. It’s an impressive figure since the taping of the Broadway sensation has been available to watch on Disney+ since 2020. Though touted as a limited one-week engagement, “Hamilton” will stay in theaters as long as people keep returning to the room where it happens.

This weekend has been a huge boon to movie theater owners after the vital summer season ended with a whimper. Comparisons to the same frame in 2024 are tough — down nearly 22% — because that’s when the Warner Bros. sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” launched to $111 million. However, the year-to-date box office remains 3.8% ahead of last year, according to Comscore.

“After a rather quiet month of August, the industry needed a boost — and ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites’ has provided both a box office and a morale booster,” says senior Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “There is no better way to kick off a fall movie season than an overperforming film. This sets the stage for movies set to release in the coming weeks.”

Several holdover titles rounded out the top five on North American charts. “Weapons” landed in third place with $5.3 million in its third weekend of release. A late-summer sleeper hit, “Weapons” has generated a huge $143 million domestically and $251 million globally to date.

“Freakier Friday” and director Darren Aronofsky’s crime thriller “Caught Stealing” followed in close succession with $3.8 million and $3.2 million in their fifth and second outings, respectively. Disney’s sequel to “Freaky Friday” has been a modest performer with $87 million in North America and $142 million worldwide. Meanwhile, “Caught Stealing,” which sharply declined by 60% from its debut, hasn’t connected with audiences, having earned just $14.9 million domestically and $24.3 million globally so far.

This will be a spoiler-free review of Wake Up Dead Man. Mostly.

We will tell you that it is Rian Johnson‘s third movie in his murder-mystery franchise involving a deductive sleuth mixing it up with a host of classic murder-mystery archetypes. We will list its cast members, which — as with Johnson’s previous excursions into a musty genre he has almost singlehandedly woken up from the dead, Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022) — is a truly all-star affair. Two big-time Joshs, O’Connor and Brolin, are in it. So is Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Jeffrey Wright, Jeremy Renner, Thomas Haden Church, Mila Kunis, Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla), and Daryl McCormack (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande). And, of course, it features Daniel Craig, still playing Benoit Blanc, the world’s greatest detective, or at least a detective that would place high on Top 10 Greatest Detectives, as a Sondheim-loving Southern dandy with impeccable taste in three-piece suits.

We may mention in passing that its underwritten by Netflix, and that their continued distribution of Johnson’s series almost makes up for the fact that they continually foist “content” like Red Notice and The Electric State on us with numbing regularity. (Almost.) We will duly note it’s 144 minutes long, including credits.

What we won’t do is reveal the parties responsible for any and all crimes committed within this old-fashioned potboiler, but then again, who done it is usually the least interesting part of any real whodunnit. You do not need to have read every Agatha Christie novel twice, or own a comically large magnifying glass and deerstalker cap, or even be a filmmaker who can somehow spin gold out of century-old clichés and red herrings and the pulpiest of pulp-fiction tropes, to recognize that it’s always the journey, not the destination that matters when it comes to this literary staple. You might not remember who killed Roger Ackroyd or whether Colonel Mustard met his maker in the billiards room with a lead pipe. But you almost certainly recall the sense of engagement you felt when you’re in the hands of someone who truly understands the give-and-take game in this mode of storytelling. There are always two people solving a whodunnit’s central puzzle: the professional detective on the page or screen, and the reader/viewer filtering through clues along with them.

Johnson was a fan of Christie, et al., long before he started constructing twisty, turn-filled narratives around Craig’s natty gumshoe, and his scholarship around these tales of mystery and imagination is matched only by his affection for them. Before Dead Man‘s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Saturday night, he mentioned that the previous films fell into the well-worn categories of the family-estate murder and the vacation whodunnit. Number Three belongs to a deeper subgenre within the canon: the church murder mystery. He also namechecked G.K. Chesterton, Edgar Allen Poe and John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, a classic of the “locked room” homicide variety; a dog-eared paperback edition of that book plays a key part, in fact. Johnson thus drops a few hints as to what he’s channeling here, in terms of influences, styles and even bigger-picture concerns. The game’s now afoot.

Once upon a time, Father Jud Duplenticy (O’Connor, again convincing you that he’s one of the most interesting actors working today) was a boxer. An accident led him to the priesthood, but old habits like cold-cocking assholes still die hard. So his superior (Wright) transfers this man of the cloth to a parish in the quaint New York town of Chimney Rock. His new home is the Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a church ruled with a iron fist by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Brolin). He isn’t overjoyed at having another clergyman sitting at his right hand, yet that doesn’t stop him tending to his flock. Wicks’ sermons tend toward the extreme fire-and-brimstone, vengeance-is-mine variety. His appearance could be characterized as Jesus with stronger jawline. Any resemblance to real-life megalomaniacal blowhards in positions of power are anything but coincidental.

Long story short, Wicks finds himself entering the kingdom of heaven sooner than anticipated. (Look, the word “mostly” is in that above paragraph about spoilers for a reason. We gave you all the clues, Mister Police!) The suspects, naturally, are many, and include a MAGA-friendly sci-fi author (Scott), a heartbroken doctor (Renner), a grudge-holding lawyer (Washington), a politically ambitious influencer (McCormack), a cellist (Spaeny) in need of a miracle, the parish’s groundskeeper (Church), and the most pious woman (Close) in town. Oh, and Duplenticy, of course. He’s actually the most obvious candidate for being the culprit behind “the Good Friday Murder,” given his checkered past, his anger issues and the fact that he was filmed threatening Wicks. Enter Benoit Blanc.

Despite a brief glimpse of our man Blanc at the very beginning, reading through a letter that details the wheredunnit and howdunnit and several intriguing theories behind a possible whydunnit, Craig’s master investigator doesn’t truly show up until almost an hour in to Wake Up Dead Man. He then proceeds to make up for lost time via a good amount of hamming it up and giving viewers 10ccs of the character’s patented mix of Hercule Poirot, Lt. Columbo, Jessica Fletcher, and Foghorn Leghorn. The evident fun that the actor is having onscreen is infectious, and even if he wasn’t playing against associations with other, more iconic characters — no names mentioned — the anything-goes aspect of his collaboration with Johnson fits the actor’s strengths like the sleuth’s well-tailored suits. Craig is still playing within the genre’s parameters, yet the color he brings to Blanc remains a key part of why these movies work as well as they do.

Everyone seems to be having a blast, and the filmmaker knows how to take both the ensemble he’s assembled and his congregation of Knives Out fans — call us Blanc-heads — to church, literally and figuratively. (All of the cast is on point here, though we should point out that both O’Connor and Close are tied for first among equals here.) Johnson also knows how let a sermon play in the muted background of his murder mystery rather than jockeying for space with a story, and unlike Glass Onion, which occasionally fell victim to a little too much nudge-wink direct messaging about the rich and infamous, Wake Up plays things closer to the vestment.

And yet: A dead man could see that Wicks is not just a holy terror but a cult leader in all but name. He’s not exactly appealing to folks’ better angels, and he treats his desire to force a dangerously reactionary agenda on people as if he’s been given a mandate from God. Like many of the telltale clues that will help Blanc solve the case, the resemblance is hiding in plain sight. And while this is designed as an entertainment, there’s a sneaking suspicion that, when all is said and done, the creators of this romp through religious murder-mystery riffing would very much like people to clock how certain strains of manipulation work and wake the fuck up.