Nightmarish

There are few films so horrifying, brutal and still so stunning as Andrew Dominik's latest feature, Blonde. The closest association I can tether it to is Darren Aronofsky's Mother! and Requiem For A Dream. Both divisive, both gorgeous and both absolutely impossible to watch more than once. Blonde is a reimagined, fictional biopic on the woman the world just cannot let rest, Marilyn Monroe. Dominik brings Marilyn back from grave and gives her the worst life one can imagine. With multiple scenes of rape, harassment, child…

Blonde, the new Netflix film from Andrew Dominik, adds as much nuance to the idea of Marilyn Monroe as can be gleaned from a gynaecological exam. The bombshell movie star has long been established as a tragic figure, a woman who was abused by Hollywood studios, her husband Joe DiMaggio, and, as a child, her unwell mother. Rather than challenge the conventional narrative, director Dominik’s nightmarish film, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalised 2000 novel, takes it somewhere even darker and even more invasive. If…

Photo by Dominik Bindl/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival The list of actors to have almost played Superman is every bit as long as the roll-call of names to have actually donned the costume and played the Kryptonian superhero, such are the vast number of projects revolving around the DC Comics icon to have stalled in development hell at one time or another. Kirk Alyn, George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, Brandon Routh, Tom Welling, Dean Cain, Tyler Hoechlin, and Henry Cavill have all gotten their shot, but…

Welcome back to Chain Reaction. Last week, we looked at the near-term future for crypto gaming as VCs zero in on where to place consumer bets. This week, we’re looking at hardware wallets and the endless journey towards feeling safe in the crypto world. To get this in your inbox every Thursday, you can subscribe on TechCrunch’s newsletter page. nowhere to hide A weekly dispatch from the desk of TechCrunch crypto editor Lucas Matney: The world of crypto can be a cruel and unforgiving place, and while VCs and crypto…

via Warner Bros. Development hell is a difficult place to escape from, but even when projects to have lingered in the nothingness for years and/or decades eventually do escape, in many cases their troubles are far from over, something 1989’s cult favorite psychological thriller Dead Calm knows all too well. Based on the novel of the same name by Charles Williams, no less a talent than Orson Welles began filming a feature-length version starring himself in the late 1960s, but it was never completed. The legendary…

Screenshot: Shoshana Wodinsky (Gizmodo)Artificial intelligence is (rightfully) lampooned for all sorts of reasons, but credit where credit is due: neural networks really know how to make some freakishly beautiful art. Or at least, that’s my opinion after seeing the recent surge of platforms like Midjourney and Google’s Imagen that are designed to swallow basic strings of text—“a painting of a flower,” say—and spit out such a painting right back at you. And if you haven’t any of tried those, maybe you’ve heard of what has…