Category: 5. Entertainment

The BBC and the authorities’ response to the chants led by punk-rap band Bob Vylan show the regulatory system is working, says Northeastern professor Adrian Hillman.

LONDON — Members of the British punk-rap duo Bob Vylan have faced considerable backlash since they urged fans to chant “death to the IDF,” the acronym for the Israel Defense Forces, during a weekend show at the Glastonbury festival.

The men have reportedly been dropped by their agency, the United States has revoked their visas ahead of a North American tour this year and U.K. police are looking into whether the incident meets the threshold of a hate crime.

But the duo, who in a statement insisted that they are “not for death of jews, arabs or any other race,” are not the only ones facing flak for the comments made at Britain’s biggest festival — so is the BBC, the official broadcast partner of Glastonbury.

The broadcaster has apologized for allowing the comments by frontman Bobby Vylan to be livestreamed Saturday from the West Holts stage, with its 30,000-person capacity. But that has not stopped the BBC from being singled out for criticism.

The U.K.’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, called it a “national shame” that the chants were shared with a wider audience, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer said there were questions for the state broadcaster to answer.

Adrian Hillman, an assistant professor of communication at Northeastern University in London, says the BBC has a difficult path to tread when it comes to impartially airing views on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

“There is a catch-22 here because, let’s say the BBC editors had seen something coming,” says Hillman. “Let’s say they broadcast it on a delay and that they heard the chants and stopped it from airing. Can you imagine the outcry over freedom of speech if they had done that?

“Let’s be frank — this is a really hard subject to touch upon and not to tread on toes. The BBC has been criticized by the pro-Palestine lobbies and by pro-Israel lobbies for its coverage [of the war]. It is taking flak from everywhere.”

The BBC has a model that is unique in its funding and mission, explains Hillman. It is largely funded via a TV license fee where those who watch or record live television, or use the BBC’s iPlayer on-demand service, pay £174.50 ($239.60) annually. It negotiates a Royal Charter with the British government every decade that provides the constitutional basis for the BBC and sets out its mission and public purposes.

As well as having to remain impartial with its news coverage, another of its purposes is to provide and spread culture around the U.K., something Hillman argues it fulfills with its yearly wall-to-wall Glastonbury coverage.

And while the BBC has admitted it made an error by not pulling the plug on the livestream of Bob Vylan’s performance after the chants broke out, Hillman points out that it has promised to learn from its mistakes.

Celebrity stylist Liat Baruch and NBC Universal media executive David Vickter were set up by mutual friends in the summer of 2021 after a long-anticipated introduction. “I was traveling quite a bit at the time, so we started off as friends,” Liat, whose clients include Kirsten Dunst and the Richie sisters—she was the mastermind behind Sofia Richie Grainge’s viral wedding wardrobe—remembers. “But we quickly found ourselves spending most of our free time together. Whether it was grabbing coffee, running errands, meeting for lunch, or venting about the dating scene in L.A. over drinks, we always found an excuse to hang out.”

Eventually, their relationship evolved into a real-life When Harry Met Sally… story. “In November of 2024, we decided to give ‘us’ a real shot—and it just clicked,” Liat remembers. “We’re still best friends who genuinely love doing life together… only now, we get to do it as partners.”

The two got engaged in March of 2025. On Sunday mornings, they’d made a tradition of hiking Fryman Canyon, and on this particular Sunday, Liat geared up in her weighted vest and ankle weights, ready for their usual loop—but David suggested they take a quieter, less-traveled trail to the top. “It was one of those perfect L.A. days—clear skies, warm sun, and not a soul in sight,” Liat recalls. “As we reached a secluded spot overlooking the horizon, the world felt completely still. The only sounds were the birds and the soft breeze around us.”

And then, David proposed. “I was so surprised and overwhelmed with joy, that all I could say was, ‘This is so cool! And, of course, yes!’ which somehow felt exactly right.” They completed the trail, reveling in the moment, and letting their big news sink in before telling anyone. “It was simple, beautiful, and completely us,” Liat recalls.

Shortly after their engagement, they set their wedding date for June 15, 2025 at Hummingbird Nest Ranch in the Santa Susana Mountains—and jumped right into planning mode, which they somehow pulled off in just two-and-a-half months. “Thankfully, we had Rikki and Mal to help plan and coordinate everything, and it all came together so smoothly,” Liat explains. “With both of us juggling full schedules, we knew from the start that we needed support. Bringing in people we trusted to help guide the vision, handle the details, and make the whole experience feel fun—instead of overwhelming!—was key.”

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is not the first time an entire motion picture has been digitized and then converted back to film for distribution. Gary Ross did it on Pleasantville (shot by John Findley, ASC; AC Nov. ’98), and Jon Shear color-timed Urbania, a Super 16 film, in a digital suite (Shane Kelly; AC May ’00). George Lucas digitized The Phantom Menace (David Tattersall, BSC; AC Sept. ’99), but his purpose was to integrate visual effects and live action components in literally hundreds of shots.

Although O Brother, Where Art Thou? contains a number of visual effects shots, those scenes were incidental to the decision to digitize the film. In fact, the Coen brothers saw the computer as just another tool for extending the art and craft of cinematography. There is more than a little irony in that decision, however, since neither the Coens nor Deakins think of themselves as digital mavens. In fact, the Coens still edit on a traditional flatbed console because they feel that it gives them more tactile control of the film.

Writer-producer Ethan and writer-director Joel began making movies in 1984 with the acclaimed thriller Blood Simple (which was recently rereleased in theaters in a special “director’s cut”). Their films typically explore the dark side of humanity and feature characters who stick in viewers’ memories long after the last flickering images have disappeared from the screen. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is Deakins’ fifth collaboration with the brothers, following Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo and The Big Lebowski. (He is currently shooting the sixth, The Barber Project [The Man Who Wasn’t There].) Other notable credits in Deakins’ body of work include Sid and Nancy, Thunderheart, Stormy Monday, The Secret Garden, 1984 and The Hurricane. He earned a 1994 ASC Award and an Oscar nomination for The Shawshank Redemption, as well as both Academy and ASC Award nominations for Fargo and Kundun.

Also Read: Photographing The Shawshank Redemption

“Before I read the script [for O Brother, Where Art Thou?] Joel and Ethan told me they had a film they wanted to shoot in the South,” Deakins recalls. “They imagined something dry, dusty and very hot.” Texas was initially chosen as the primary location, but the filmmakers eventually switched to Mississippi. “I’ve worked in Louisiana and Alabama [on Passion Fish and The Long Walk Home,] so I knew that the region would be wet and the foliage would be various shades of lush green — and about half the picture would take place in exteriors.”

The filmmakers briefly considered changing locations again, but Mississippi’s unique delta landscapes drew them back. “It would have been a different scenario if we had been shooting in the winter or if we’d been able to take in fall colors, but our film was scheduled for a summer shoot,” Deakins recalls. “I had to find a way to desaturate the greens and give the images we were going to shoot the feeling of old, hand-tinted postcards, [which was the look] favored by Joel and Ethan.”

To prepare for the production, the filmmakers shot some footage at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, where the trees were particularly green and therefore similar to those they were about to be surrounded by in Mississippi. This footage was then subjected to a series of tests by Beverly Wood at Deluxe Laboratory. According to Deakins, tests such as bleach-bypass and ACE produced interesting desaturation but could not be applied in a selective way. The most promising option was a bi-pack system combining a black-and-white panchromatic dupe with the original color negative. Deakins notes that although this technique provided a great deal of control over saturation, it was not selective enough. “I remembered that some years ago, when we shot 1984, we’d had a similar problem,” he says. “We originally wanted to shoot in black-and-white, but the project’s backers wouldn’t allow it. Instead, we decided to go for a harsh, desaturated look using a bleach-bypass system at Kays Laboratory in Great Britain, where the staff was performing tests for us. The challenge was to create the very golden, colorful looks for the scenes that required them as a counterpoint to the starkness of the main body of the film. On those few scenes, we wound up using very heavy filtration to counteract the bleach-bypass.”

While doing tests at Deluxe for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Deakins began to consider the new digital technology at his disposal. He was aware of Lindley’s experience on Pleasantville and knew of Cinesite in Hollywood, which handled all of the film scanning and recording on that project. He thought that if he could scan the entire film into digital format, he would have infinite control over the look in the digital suite, but he wasn’t sure it would be affordable. Deakins discussed the concept with the Coen brothers, who were familiar with the technique, and they asked him to conduct more tests.

Some of the negative from the Griffith Park tests was scanned into digital format with a Philips Spirit DataCine at 2K resolution using a proprietary look-up table developed for this application. Deakins viewed the digital images with Cinesite colorist Julius Friede. Together, they worked on manipulating the saturation of the images, and in particular selecting the greens of the trees and grass and turning them into dry browns and yellows. At that point, Cinesite recorded the digital file onto the same 35mm Eastman EXR color intermediate film (5244) that labs use for making internegative and interpositive masters for release printing. A Kodak Lightning film recorder with a high-intensity laser light source was used to convert the digital files to analog images on the intermediate film. The film was then processed by Deluxe in Los Angeles, which also made a work print.

The tests convinced Deakins and the Coen brothers. “They like to try new things,” the cinematographer says. “We knew it would be taking a risk, but Cinesite gave us a good price, and quite honestly it was the only way we could see of achieving the look that all three of us wanted.”

O Brother, Where Art Thou? was also the Coen brothers’ first experience shooting in a widescreen format (2.4:1 aspect ratio), which Deakins had suggested because of the importance of the landscapes and the epic nature of the story. He recommended shooting in the Super 35 format, in part because he liked the perspective rendered by the spherical lenses he’d used on Kundun. “Every film defines its own palette of colors and textures,” he says. “I didn’t want glossy images. The spherical lenses have the effect of pulling the audience closer to the characters; it’s more intimate [than anamorphic]. To my mind, the feeling of depth recorded on Super 35 would augment the picture-book quality of the story.”

Deakins worked mainly with a single Arri 535 camera and the new Cooke S4 prime lenses. “I think it’s important to work with the sharpest lenses you can get — especially if you’re going to convert the film to digital format — but that’s what I typically do anyhow. I rarely use filters to soften a look, so it didn’t affect my decisions [regarding] lenses and filtration.” The cinematographer notes that the Cooke lenses record “very clean” images with very little flare. A number of times he shot directly into the sun without any glare. There also were a number of night shots motivated by very bright flames, including burning torches. He says the pictures were sharp and clean with no double images or kickbacks.

After testing, Deakins settled on three film stocks. He used Kodak Vision 500T 5279 for night interior and exterior scenes, and Eastman’s EXR 5248 100-speed emulsion for most daylight exteriors. While shooting daylight sequences in shadowy forest locations, he sometimes opted for the 200-speed Eastman EXR 5293, which he also used for recording bluescreen elements of composite shots.

The entire film was storyboarded, right down to exact angles of coverage. Deakins says there was considerable discussion about the boards during preproduction. “We stayed pretty close to the plan, veering from it only when something spontaneous presented an unexpected opportunity.”

The locations in and around Jackson, Mississippi, were relatively bare, though there were some shacks and buildings that could have passed for 1930s structures. “We built a couple of sets in a warehouse, because the weather is a bit unpredictable in that part of the country at that time of year,” Deakins says. “But we were only rained out once — lucky, I guess!”

The camerawork in the film is more objective than subjective, revealing the story to viewers as if they are spectators rather than participants. Deakins offers that the result is almost like watching a play, although he notes that the picture also has moments that are like musical interludes verging on fantasy (a tactic previously employed by Deakins and the Coens in The Big Lebowski). “Those moments aren’t structurally necessary for the plot,” he says. “It is almost an operatic or circus experience, like a Fellini film in many ways.”

The camera is almost constantly in motion, though not as much as it was in, say, Barton Fink. “I generally prefer to be on a crane arm with a remote head, but sometimes it proved more practical to use a Steadicam over rough ground,” Deakins says. Much of the film was shot utilizing a Power Pod remote head and an Aerocrane jib arm. “ [That rig] allows a lot of flexibility in terms of camera movement, and it’s often a great time-saver. For one campfire scene, which leads the three main characters into a baptism ceremony, we shot all five setups with the Aerocrane on the same piece of track. We had been rained out all morning, but it brightened up enough in the afternoon to start shooting. We were in very thick forest; I knew it would be getting dark very early, so we had to work quickly.

Mariah Carey confirmed Monday that she’s finished her upcoming 16th studio album.

She sat down with Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden at the new Apple Music Studios in Culver City, California, during a special live broadcast to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the streaming service. The three briefly chatted about her latest single “Type Dangerous,” which Lowe described as a “heavy record, it’s got real weight to it” before asking if fans can expect more new music from her soon.

“I’m trying not to tell too much about the new album. ‘It’s a special occasion/ Mimi’s emancipation’ — that’s a lyric from one of my songs,” Carey said quoting 2005’s “It’s Like That.” “What is next? The album coming out. I don’t wanna tell too much about it because I just don’t want to reveal the whole thing. It’s finished.”

Mimi also revealed there are 11 or 12 songs featured on the full-length project. “We got some Mariah ballads,” she told Darden, adding that “a second single is coming soon. I’m very excited about it. It’s very summery. I like the beat as well.”

Carey released “Type Dangerous” at the top of last month via gamma., the company founded by former Apple Music executive Larry Jackson in 2023. “Type Dangerous,” which samples Eric B. & Rakim‘s 1986 track “Eric B. Is President,” became her 50th Billboard Hot 100 hit and hit the top 10 of R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay. She performed the song alongside Rakim at the 2025 BET Awards last month, when she received her first BET Award ever: the Ultimate Icon Award.

“I’ve always loved ‘Eric B. Is President.’ It wasn’t something like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna flip this’ — I just wouldn’t think of doing it,” she explained to Darden and Lowe. “But then we were in this restaurant in Aspen and they had different music on, and they played ‘Eric B. Is President’ and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! I love this song!’ We ended up in the studio a couple months later and we did it.”

Chance the Rapper also briefly chatted with Lowe and Darden about his new music coming out soon. Ciara, Dominic Fike, Fuerza Regida, FLO, Hit Boy, Kamasi Washington, Kevin Abstract, kwn, Teezo Touchdown, Tommy Richman, Vince Staples and many more celebrated Apple Music’s 10th anniversary at the company’s newly opened studio space on Monday night.

Cosmoss, the premium skincare and wellness brand, founded by the supermodel Kate Moss has entered liquidation proceedings.

According to corporate filings, the company appointed liquidators on June 24, and filed to close its operations via the winding up process on June 25.

In its liquidation filing, the company declared it owed $4 million to creditors, including more than $3 million to Moss’ talent agency, Kate Moss Agency. It last filed company accounts in 2023 with the UK’s Companies House; it has never disclosed its revenue.

Originally founded in 2022, Cosmoss offered a range of perfumes, skincare and teas, ranging from $25 for tea to $155 for its Sacred Mist perfume. While Moss is a cultural icon and has been an ambassador for major brands including Calvin Klein and Diet Coke, she is famously private, rarely granting interviews – to some commentators, her public image was at odds with the brand’s wellness aims.

The brand was marketed with homeopathic and spiritual claims, and was carried in Liberty London and Fenwick department stores.

Moss is the company’s largest shareholder, alongside Warsaw Labs, a business incubator, the homeopath Victoria Young and other business partners.

Representatives for Moss did not respond to a request for comment.

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The Devil Wears Prada 2, has officially commenced filming, as per a Variety report. While Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt were always on board since the announcement, set to step into their iconic characters of Miranda Priestly and Emily Charlton, confirmation when it came to Anne Hathaway returning as Andrea Sachs was left in the lurch.

Well, the holy trinity is coming together (phew) — and so is Nigel! In addition to Meryl, Emily and Anne, Stanley Tucci too will be returning for the sequel to reprise his role of Nigel. Now someone whose NOT returning? Adrien Grenier, who played Nate, Andrea’s boyfriend. Now Miranda may or may not be the devil, but Nate? He definitely was.

While the 2006 release followed the templated expectations of the time — of the lead finding herself in simpler things as opposed to the glitz and the glam, the cult status of the film over nearly two decades has made one thing very, very clear. If anybody was holding Andy back from realising her true potential, it was her boyfriend, with his selfish demands and judgmental disposition. Now while there’s no gate for Adrien, there definitely is tons of it for Nate, and the OG fans of the film will only be more than happy to not deal with his negativity.

Finally, the Devil Wears Prada sequel has also welcomed a new cast member aboard. Kenneth Branagh, well known for having played Detective Poirot, and even better known for his Academy Award, BAFTA, Emmy and Golden Globe wins, will be playing Miranda’s husband in the part 2.

David Frankel, the OG director of the film, is also returning for the sequel in tow with writer Aline Brosh McKenna. 20th Century Studios, via their very chic intimation, announced that The Devil Wears Prada 2 would be in production right through summer.

Now as the film gets ready for its May 1 release next year, we always have the OG to stream on OTT.

Often when we listen to music, we just instinctually enjoy it. Sometimes, though, it’s worth dissecting a song or other composition to figure out how it’s built.

Take the 1953 jazz standard “Satin Doll,” written by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, whose subtle structure rewards a close listening. As it happens, MIT Professor Emeritus Samuel Jay Keyser, a distinguished linguist and an avid trombonist on the side, has given the song careful scrutiny.

To Keyser, “Satin Doll” is a glittering example of what he calls the “same/except” construction in art. A basic rhyme, like “rent” and “tent,” is another example of this construction, given the shared rhyming sound and the different starting consonants.

In “Satin Doll,” Keyser observes, both the music and words feature a “same/except” structure. For instance, the rhythm of the first two bars of “Satin Doll” is the same as the second two bars, but the pitch goes up a step in bars three and four. An intricate pattern of this prevails throughout the entire body of “Satin Doll,” which Keyser calls “a musical rhyme scheme.”

When lyricist Johnny Mercer wrote words for “Satin Doll,” he matched the musical rhyme scheme. One lyric for the first four bars is, “Cigarette holder / which wigs me / Over her shoulder / she digs me.” Other verses follow the same pattern.

“Both the lyrics and the melody have the same rhyme scheme in their separate mediums, words and music, namely, A-B-A-B,” says Keyser. “That’s how you write lyrics. If you understand the musical rhyme scheme, and write lyrics to match that, you are introducing a whole new level of repetition, one that enhances the experience.”

Now, Keyser has a new book out about repetition in art and its cognitive impact on us, scrutinizing “Satin Doll” along with many other works of music, poetry, painting, and photography. The volume, “Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts,” is published by the MIT Press. The title is partly a play on Keyser’s name.

Inspired by the Margulis experiment

The genesis of “Play It Again, Sam” dates back several years, when Keyser encountered an experiment conducted by musicologist Elizabeth Margulis, described in her 2014 book, “On Repeat.” Margulis found that when she altered modern atonal compositions to add repetition to them, audiences ranging from ordinary listeners to music theorists preferred these edited versions to the original works.

“The Margulis experiment really caused the ideas to materialize,” Keyser says. He then examined repetition across art forms that featured research on associated cognitive activity, especially music, poetry, and the visual arts. For instance, the brain has distinct locations dedicated to the recognition of faces, places, and bodies. Keyser suggests this is why, prior to the advent of modernism, painting was overwhelmingly mimetic.

Ideally, he suggests, it will be possible to more comprehensively study how our brains process art — to see if encountering repetition triggers an endorphin release, say. For now, Keyser postulates that repetition involves what he calls the 4 Ps: priming, parallelism, prediction, and pleasure. Essentially, hearing or seeing a motif sets the stage for it to be repeated, providing audiences with satisfaction when they discover the repetition.

With remarkable range, Keyser vigorously analyzes how artists deploy repetition and have thought about it, from “Beowulf” to Leonard Bernstein, from Gustave Caillebotte to Italo Calvino. Some artworks do deploy identical repetition of elements, such as the Homeric epics; others use the “same/except” technique.

Keyser is deeply interested in visual art displaying the “same/except” concept, such as Andy Warhol’s famous “Campbell Soup Cans” painting. It features four rows of eight soup cans, which are all the same — except for the kind of soup on each can.

“Discovering this ‘same/except’ repetition in a work of art brings pleasure,” Keyser says.

But why is this? Multiple experimental studies, Keyser notes, suggest that repeated exposure of a subject to an image — such as an infant’s exposure to its mother’s face — helps create a bond of affection. This is the “mere exposure” phenomenon, posited by social psychologist Robert Zajonc, who as Keyser notes in the book, studied in detail “the repetition of an arbitrary stimulus and the mild affection that people eventually have for it.”

This tendency also helps explain why product manufacturers create ads with just the name of their products in ads: Seen often enough, the viewer bonds with the name. However the mechanism connecting repetition with pleasure works, and whatever its original function, Keyser argues that many artists have successfully tapped into it, grasping that audiences like repetition in poetry, painting, and music.

A shadow dog in Albuquerque

In the book, Keyser’s emphasis on repetition generates some distinctive interpretive positions. In one chapter, he digs into Lee Friendlander’s well-known photo, “Albuquerque, New Mexico,” a street scene with a jumble of signs, wires, and buildings, often interpreted in symbolic terms: It’s the American West frontier being submerged under postwar concrete and commerce.

Keyser, however, has a really different view of the Friendlander photo. There is a dog sitting near the middle of it; to the right is the shadow of a street sign. Keyser believes the shadow resembles the dog, and thinks it creates playful repetition in the photo.

“This particular photograph is really two photographs that rhyme,” Keyser says.“They’re the same, except one is the dog and one is the shadow. And that’s why that photograph is pleasurable, because you see that, even if you may not be fully aware of it. Sensing repetition in a work of art brings pleasure.”

“Play It Again, Sam” has received praise from arts practitioners, among others. George Darrah, principal drummer and arranger of the Boston Pops Orchestra, has called the book “extraordinary” in its “demonstration of the ways that poetry, music, painting, and photography engender pleasure in their audiences by exploiting the ability of the brain to detect repetition.” He adds that “Keyser has an uncanny ability to simplify complex ideas so that difficult material is easily understandable.”

In certain ways “Play It Again, Sam” contains the classic intellectual outlook of an MIT linguist. For decades, MIT-linked linguistics research has identified the universal structures of human language, revealing important similarities despite the seemingly wild variation of global languages. And here too, Keyser finds patterns that help organize an apparently boundless world of art. “Play It Again, Sam” is a hunt for structure.

Asked about this, Keyser acknowledges the influence of his longtime field on his current intellectual explorations, while noting that his insights about art are part of a greater investigation into our works and minds.

“I’m bringing a linguistic habit of mind to art,” Keyser says. “But I’m also pointing an analytical lens in the direction of natural predilections of the brain. The idea is to investigate how our aesthetic sense depends on the way the mind works. I’m trying to show how art can exploit the brain’s capacity to produce pleasure from non-art related functions.”

In the mood to party like it is the 1970s? | Dazed and Confused

Return to the ‘70s with Richard Linklater’s American classic Dazed and Confused. On the last day of classes, the students of Lee High School—played by an extraordinary cast that includes Milla Jovovich, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey, Renée Zellweger, Cole Hauser, Ben Affleck, and Matthew McConaughey—throw a blow-out party to say good-bye to the year that was. From embarrassing initiation rites to thoughtful meditations on the meaning of life, the film depicts the joys and sorrows of high school in hilarious detail. Entertainment Weekly wrote, “Once every decade or so, a movie captures the hormone-drenched, fashion-crazed, pop-song-driven rituals of American youth culture with such loving authenticity that it comes to seem a kind of anthem, as innocently giddy and spirited as the teenagers it’s about.”

Stream Dazed and Confused on Peacock!