Be a Tourist: Events around town February 14-17
Celebrate three years of cat adoptions, coffee and community in Downtown Erie! Purrista Raffle Basket Giveaway – receive a complimentary ticket for a free chance to win a basket!In the Cafe: Write the kitties valentine lettersIn Cat Lounge: Crappy Ex? You're covered. Come write your ex's name in the kitty litter box and the cats will take care of the rest. For more information, click here.
The best way to get inside Cathy Ladman's head is to see her live. As one of the country's top comedians, Ladman's show is a self-probing vehicle which draws laughter from exposing personal neuroses. For tickets and show times, click here.
The adventure begins at the Erie RV & Outdoor Adventure Expo. Explore and shop the latest in campers, RVs, camping, travel, off-roading, and more! Top brands, local dealers, vendors, and the Power Sports Pavilion will all be featured. Find tickets and times here.
Enjoy a self-guided romantic stroll through Asbury Woods' meandering trails, following the flickering lights of luminaries lighting a path through the woods, then warm up with a cozy fire, sweet treats, adult beverages, and music in the picnic shelter. All attendees will get a special Valentine's Day gift. Purchase tickets here.
Bring your family, a date, friends or come solo. Poverty Knob is partnering with Edinboro Chocolaterie and have handpicked delicious chocolates that pair perfectly with our flights. Treat yourself to one of the delicious food specials, craft beer, wine, cocktails & mocktails. There will be live music by Savage Daughter Trio on Friday from 5-8 p.m.. Chocolate will be available to purchase without a flight. For more information, click here.
Scotty McCreery has been a household name for nearly half his life. With his latest album Rise & Fall, McCreery explores classic themes of heartbreak, rowdy nights, nostalgia, faith, newfound joy, fatherhood, and enduring love. For tickets and more information, click here.
The selections will include gently used books in a variety of genres, fiction and nonfiction, as well as children's books, puzzles, audiobooks and DVDs. For times and dates, click here.
Celebrate love and wildlife at the Erie Zoo's Winter hours weekend, on February 15 & 16. HOO Do You Love will include a craft station where you can create Valentine-themed enrichment for some of your favorite zoo animals along with an owl-themed craft, Keeper talks, and more! To find more information, click here.
Justin Willman's ILLUSIONATI tour is an interactive evening of magic, comedy and mind-control for the whole family. Prepare to join a secret society of wonder where the only conspiracy theories are about how the hell he does these things. For tickets, click here.
Start off the season with our 4-mile fun run! This non-timed event is all about enjoying year-round outdoor recreation and fitness on the trails of Asbury Woods. Post-race warm-up with chili compliments of Cali's West Catering and beverages from Erie Beer. For more information, click here.
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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
How Does the Cast of "American Love Story" Compare to Their Real-Life Counterparts?
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Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
De-aged stars, cloned voices, resuscitated dead icons: AI is changing the art and business of acting
For filmmaker Scott Mann, three dozen F-bombs had the makings of a million-dollar headache. When Mann wrapped 'Fall,' a 2022 thriller about two women stranded atop a 2,000-foot radio tower, he figured the hard part was over. Shot in the Mojave Desert on a $3-million budget, the film didn't have money to burn and seemed on course. But Lionsgate wanted a PG-13 rating and, with 35 expletives, 'Fall' was headed for an R. Reshoots would cost more than $1 million — far beyond what the production could afford. In the past, a director might have taken out a second mortgage or thrown themselves at the mercy of the ratings board. Mann instead turned to AI. A few years earlier, he had been dismayed by how a German dub of his 2015 thriller 'Heist' flattened the performances, including a key scene with Robert De Niro, to match stiff, mistranslated dialogue. That frustration led Mann to co-found Flawless, an AI startup aimed at preserving the integrity of an actor's performance across languages. As a proof of concept, he used the company's tech to subtly reshape De Niro's mouth movements and restore the emotional nuance of the original scene. On 'Fall,' Mann applied that same technology to clean up the profanity without reshoots, digitally modifying the actors' mouths to match PG-13-friendly lines like 'freaking' — at a fraction of the cost. As AI stirs both hype and anxiety in Hollywood, Mann understands why even such subtle digital tweaks can feel like a violation. That tension came to a head during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, in which AI became the defining flash point in the fight over acting's future. 'Ours is a rights-based industry,' says Mann, 45, who helped develop a digital rights management platform at Flawless to ensure performers approve any changes to their work. 'It's built on protecting human creativity, the contributions of actors, directors, editors, and if those rights aren't protected, that value gets lost.' 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Background actors were among the first to sound the alarm during the 2023 strike, protesting studio proposals to scan them once and reuse their likenesses indefinitely. That scenario is already beginning to unfold: In China, a state-backed initiative will use AI to reimagine 100 kung fu classics, including films starring Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, through animation and other digital enhancements. Lee's estate said it was unaware of the project, raising questions about how these actors' likenesses might be used, decades after filming. If the soul of acting is a human presence, what remains when even that can be simulated? 'You want to feel breath — you want to feel life,' said actor and director Ethan Hawke during a panel at 2023's Telluride Film Festival, where strike-era unease over AI was palpable. 'When we see a great painting, we feel a human being's blood, sweat and tears. That's what we're all looking for, that connection with the present moment. And AI can't do that.' Justine Bateman may seem like an unlikely crusader in Hollywood's fight against AI. Launched to fame as Mallory Keaton on the 1980s sitcom 'Family Ties,' she later became a filmmaker and earned a computer science degree from UCLA. Now, as founder of the advocacy group CREDO23, Bateman has become one of the industry's fiercest voices urging filmmakers to reject AI-generated content and defend the integrity of human-made work. Loosely modeled on Dogme 95, CREDO23 offers a certification of films made without AI, using minimal VFX and union crews. It's a pledge backed by a council including 'Mad Men' creator Matthew Weiner, 'The Handmaid's Tale' director Reed Morano and actor Juliette Lewis. The 2023 SAG-AFTRA contract set new guardrails: Studios must get actors' consent to create or use digital replicas of their likenesses, and those replicas can't generate new performances without a separate deal. Actors must also be compensated and credited when their digital likeness is used. But to Bateman, a former SAG-AFTRA board member and negotiating committee rep, those protections are little more than sandbags against an inevitable AI flood: hard-won but already straining to keep the technology at bay. 'The allowances in the contract are pretty astounding,' Bateman says by phone, her voice tight with exasperation. 'If you can picture the Teamsters allowing self-driving trucks in their contract — that's on par with what SAG did. If you're not making sure human roles are played by human actors, I'm not sure what the union is for.' To Bateman, the idea that AI expands access to filmmaking — a central tenet of its utopian sales pitch — is a dangerous myth, one that obscures deeper questions about authorship and the value of creative labor. 'Anyone can make a film — my last two, I shot on an iPhone,' Bateman says. 'The idea that AI is 'democratizing film' doesn't even make sense. What it really does is remove the barrier of skill. It lets people pretend they're filmmakers when they're not, by prompting software that wouldn't even function without having stolen a hundred years of film and TV production made by real filmmakers.' Bateman's opposition to AI is rooted in a deep distrust of Silicon Valley's expanding influence over the creative process and a belief that filmmaking should be driven by artists, not algorithms. 'The tech bro business completely jumped the shark with generative AI,' she says. 'Is it solving plastics in the ocean? Homelessness? L.A. traffic? Not that I'm aware of.' She scoffs at the supposed efficiencies AI brings to the filmmaking process: 'It's like saying, whatever somebody enjoys — sex or an ice cream sundae — 'Hey, now you can do it in a quarter of the time.' OK, but then what do you think life is for?' To Bateman, an actor's voice, face, movements or even their choice of costume is not raw material to be reshaped but an expression of authorship. AI, in her view, erases those choices and the intent behind them. 'I'm deeply against changing what the actor did,' she says. 'It's not right to have the actor doing things or saying things they didn't do — or to alter their hair, makeup or clothes in postproduction using AI. The actor knows what they did.' While Bateman has been public and unwavering in her stance, many actors remain unsure whether to raise their voices. In the wake of the strikes, much of the conversation around AI has moved behind closed doors, leaving those who do speak out feeling at times exposed and alone. Scarlett Johansson, who lent her smoky, hypnotic voice to the fictional AI in Spike Jonze's Oscar-winning 2013 film 'Her,' now finds herself in a uniquely uncomfortable position: She's both a symbol of our collective fascination with artificial performance and a real-world example of what's at stake when that line is crossed. Last year, she accused OpenAI of using a chatbot voice that sounded 'eerily similar' to hers, months after she declined to license it. OpenAI denied the claim and pulled the voice, but the incident reignited concern over consent and control. Johansson has long spoken out against the unauthorized use of her image, including her appearance in deepfake pornography, and has pushed for stronger safeguards against digital impersonation. To date, though, she is one of the few major stars to publicly push back against the creeping mimicry enabled by AI — and she's frustrated that more haven't joined her. 'There has to be some agreed-upon set of boundaries in order for [AI] to not be detrimental,' she told Vanity Fair in May. 'I wish more people in the public eye would support and speak out about that. I don't know why that's not the case.' Ed Ulbrich, 60, a pioneering visual effects producer and co-founder of Digital Domain, has spent his career helping actors do the impossible, one pixel at a time. In 2008's 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,' he led the team of more than 150 artists in building a fully digital version of Brad Pitt's face so the actor could convincingly age in reverse — a two-year effort that earned Ulbrich and three colleagues an Oscar for visual effects and set a new benchmark for digital performance. (Nearly two decades later, the achievement is still impressive, although some scenes, especially those with Pitt's aged face composited on a child's body, now show their digital seams.) For 2010's 'Tron: Legacy,' Ulbrich helped digitally transform Jeff Bridges into his 1982 self using motion capture and CGI. Working on last year's 'Here' — Robert Zemeckis' technically daring drama starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as a couple whose lives play out across decades in a single New Jersey living room — showed Ulbrich just how far things have come. For someone who jokes he has 'real estate in the uncanny valley,' it wasn't just the AI-enabled realism that floored him. It was the immediacy. On set, AI wasn't enhancing footage after the fact; it was visually reshaping the performance in real time. 'You look up and see 67-year-old Tom Hanks. You look down at the monitor — he's 20, and it looks better than the best CGI,' Ulbrich says. 'In my world, the human face is the holy grail. That is the most complicated thing you can do. And now it's getting done in near real time before your eyes. The actor can come back and look at the monitor and get new ideas, because they're seeing a different version of themselves: younger, older, as an alien or whatever.' This kind of seamless AI-driven alteration marks a new frontier in postproduction. Modern AI systems can now 'beautify' actors' faces, like some would with a Instagram or Zoom filter: smooth out wrinkles, alter skin tone, sharpen jawlines, subtly nudge eye position to better match a desired gaze. What once required painstaking VFX can now be handled by fast, flexible AI tools, often with results invisible to audiences. Once limited to only big-budget sci-fi and fantasy productions, this digital touch-up capability is expanding into rom-coms, prestige dramas, high-end TV and even some indie films. Dialogue can be rewritten and re-lipped in post. Facial expressions can be smoothed or swapped without reshoots. More and more, viewers may have no way of knowing what's real and what's been subtly adjusted. 'Here' was largely rejected by both audiences and critics, with some deeming its digitally de-aged performances more unsettling than moving. But Ulbrich says digitally enhanced performance is already well underway. Talent agency CAA has built a vault of client scans, a kind of biometric asset library for future productions. Some stars now negotiate contracts that reduce their time on set, skipping hours in the makeup chair or performance-capture gear, knowing AI can fill in the gaps. 'Robert Downey, Brad Pitt, Will Smith — they've all been scanned many times,' says Ulbrich, who recently joined the AI-driven media company Moonvalley, which pitches itself as a more ethical, artist-centered player in the space. 'If you've done a studio tentpole, you've been scanned. 'There is a lot of fear around AI and it's founded,' he adds. 'Unless you do something about it, you can just get run over. But there are people out there that are harnessing this. At this point, fighting AI is like fighting against electricity.' While many in Hollywood wrestle with what AI means for the oldest component of moviemaking, others take a more pragmatic view, treating it as a tool to solve problems and keep productions on track. Jerry Bruckheimer, the powerhouse producer behind 'Top Gun,' 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and this summer's 'F1,' is among those embracing its utility. 'AI is not going anywhere and it's only going to get more useful for people in our business,' he said in a recent interview with The Times. He recalled one such moment during post-production on his new Brad Pitt–led Formula One drama, a logistical feat filmed during actual Formula One races across Europe and the Middle East, with a budget north of $200 million. 'Brad was in the wilds of New Zealand, and we had test screenings coming up,' Bruckheimer says. 'We couldn't get his voice to do some looping, so we used an app that could mimic Brad Pitt. I'm sure the union will come after me if you write that, but it wasn't used in the movie because he became available.' While he's skeptical of AI's ability to generate truly original ideas — 'We're always going to need writers,' he says — Bruckheimer, whose films have grossed more than $16 billion worldwide, sees AI as a powerful tool for global reach. 'They can take Brad's voice from the movie and turn it into other languages so it's actually his voice, rather than another actor,' he says. 'If it's not available yet, it will be.' The debate over AI in performance flared earlier this year with 'The Brutalist,' Brady Corbet's award-winning drama about a Hungarian architect. After the film's editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that AI voice-cloning software had been used to subtly modify the Hungarian accents of stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, the backlash followed swiftly. Some critics accused the film of using AI to smooth over performances while presenting itself as handcrafted, a move one viral post derided as trying to 'cheap out without soul.' Corbet later clarified that AI was used sparingly, only to adjust vowel sounds, but the decision left some viewers uneasy — even as Brody went on to win the Oscar for lead actor. If the controversy over 'The Brutalist' struck some as a moral crisis, David Cronenberg found the whole thing overblown. Few filmmakers have probed the entanglement of flesh, identity and technology as relentlessly as the director of 'Videodrome,' 'The Fly' and last year's 'The Shrouds,' so he's not particularly rattled by the rise of AI-assisted performances. 'All directors have always messed around with actors' performances — that's what editing is,' Cronenberg told The Times in April. 'Filmmaking isn't theater. It's not sacred. We've been using versions of this for years. It's another tool in the toolbox. And it's not controlling you — you can choose not to use it.' Long before digital tools, Cronenberg recalls adjusting actor John Lone's vocal pitch in his 1993 film 'M. Butterfly,' in which Lone played a Chinese opera singer and spy who presents as a woman to seduce a French diplomat. The director raised the pitch when the character appeared as a woman and lowered it when he didn't — a subtle manipulation to reinforce the illusion. Far from alarmed, Cronenberg is intrigued by AI's creative potential as a way of reshaping authorship itself. With new platforms like OpenAI's Sora and Google's Veo 3 now capable of generating increasingly photorealistic clips from simple text prompts, an entire performance could conceivably be conjured from a writer's keyboard. 'Suddenly you can write a scene — a woman is walking down the street, she looks like this, she's wearing that, it's raining, whatever — and AI can create a video for you,' Cronenberg says. 'To me, this is all exciting. It absolutely can threaten all kinds of jobs and that has to be dealt with, but every technological advance has done that and we just have to adapt and figure it out.' In the Hollywood of the late 1970s, there was no AI to tweak an actor's face. So when 'Star Wars' star Mark Hamill fractured his nose and left cheekbone in a serious car crash between shooting the first and second films, the solution was to tweak the story. The 1980 sequel 'The Empire Strikes Back' opened with Luke Skywalker being attacked by a nine-foot-tall snow beast called a wampa on the ice planet Hoth, partly to account for the change in his appearance. Decades later, when Hamill was invited to return as a younger version of himself in the 2020 Season 2 finale of 'The Mandalorian,' the chance to show Luke 'at the height of his powers was irresistible,' he says. But the reality left him feeling oddly detached from the character that made him famous. Hamill shared the role with a younger body double, and digital de-aging tools recreated his face from decades earlier. The character's voice, meanwhile, was synthesized using Respeecher, a neural network trained on old recordings of Hamill to mimic his speech from the original trilogy era. 'I didn't have that much dialogue: 'Are you Luke Skywalker?' 'I am,'' Hamill recalled in an interview with The Times earlier this year. 'I don't know what they do when they take it away, in terms of tweaking it and making your voice go up in pitch or whatever.' When fans speculated online that he hadn't participated at all, Hamill declined to correct the record. 'My agent said, 'Do you want me to put out a statement or something?'' Hamill recalls. 'I said, 'Eh, people are going to say what they want to say.' Maybe if you deny it, they say, 'See? That proves it — he's denying it.'' When Luke returned again in a 2022 episode of 'The Book of Boba Fett,' the process was even more synthetic: Hamill was minimally involved on camera and the character was built almost entirely from digital parts: a de-aged face mapped onto a body double with an AI-generated voice delivering his lines. Hamill was credited and compensated, though the exact terms of the arrangement haven't been made public. The visual effect was notably improved from earlier efforts, thanks in part to a viral deepfake artist known as Shamook, whose YouTube video improving the VFX in 'The Mandalorian' finale had racked up millions of views. He was soon hired by Industrial Light & Magic — a rare case of fan-made tech critique turning into a studio job. 'In essence, yes, I did participate,' Hamill says. It's one thing to be digitally altered while you're still alive. It's another to keep performing after you're gone. Before his death last year, James Earl Jones — whose resonant baritone helped define Darth Vader for generations — gave Lucasfilm permission to recreate his voice using AI. In a recent collaboration with Disney, Epic Games deployed that digital voice in Fortnite, allowing players to team up with Vader and hear new lines delivered in Jones' unmistakable tones, scripted by Google's Gemini AI. In May, SAG-AFTRA later filed a labor charge, saying the use of Jones' voice hadn't been cleared with the union. Last year's 'Alien: Romulus' sparked similar backlash over the digital resurrection of Ian Holm's android character Ash nearly a decade after Holm's death. Reconstructed using a blend of AI and archival footage, the scenes were slammed by some fans as a form of 'digital necromancy.' For the film's home video release, director Fede Álvarez quietly issued an alternate cut that relied more heavily on practical effects, including an animatronic head modeled from a preexisting cast of Holm's face. For Hollywood, AI allows nostalgia to become a renewable resource, endlessly reprocessed and resold. Familiar faces can be altered, repurposed and inserted into entirely new stories. The audience never has to say goodbye and the industry never has to take the risk of introducing someone new. Hamill, for his part, seems ready to let go of Luke. After his final arc in 2017's 'The Last Jedi,' he says he feels a sense of closure. 'I don't know the full impact AI will have but I find it very ominous,' he says. 'I'm fine. I had my time. Now the spotlight should be on the current and future actors and I hope they enjoy it as much as I did.' Actor Tye Sheridan knows how dark an AI future could get. After all, he starred in Steven Spielberg's 2018 'Ready Player One,' a sci-fi thriller set inside a corporate-controlled world of digital avatars. But Sheridan isn't trying to escape into that world — he's trying to shape the one ahead. With VFX supervisor Nikola Todorovic, Sheridan co-founded Wonder Dynamics in 2017 to explore how AI can expand what's possible on screen. Their platform uses AI to insert digital characters into live-action scenes without green screens or motion-capture suits, making high-end VFX more accessible to low-budget filmmakers. Backed by Spielberg and 'Avengers' co-director Joe Russo, Wonder Dynamics was acquired last year by Autodesk, the software firm behind many animation and design tools. 'Since the advent of the camera, technology has been pushing this industry forward,' Sheridan, 28, says on a video call. 'AI is just another part of that path. It can make filmmaking more accessible, help discover new voices. Maybe the next James Cameron will find their way into the industry through some AI avenue. I think that's really exciting.' With production costs spiraling, Todorovic sees AI as a way to lower the barrier to entry and make riskier, more ambitious projects possible. 'We really see AI going in that direction, where you can get those A24-grounded stories with Marvel visuals,' he says. 'That's what younger audiences are hungry for.' The shift, Todorovic argues, could lead to more films overall and more opportunities for actors. 'Maybe instead of 10,000 people making five movies, it'll be 1,000 people making 50,' he says. Still, Todorovic sees a threshold approaching, one where synthetic actors could, in theory, carry a film. 'I do think technically it is going to get solved,' Todorovic says. 'But the question remains — is that what we really want? Do we really want the top five movies of the year to star humans who don't exist? I sure hope not.' For him, the boundary isn't just about realism. It's about human truth. 'You can't prompt a performance,' he says. 'You can't explain certain movements of the body and it's very hard to describe emotions. Acting is all about reacting. That's why when you make a movie, you do five takes — or 40. Because it's hard to communicate.' Sheridan, who has appeared in the 'X-Men' franchise as well as smaller dramas like 'The Card Counter' and 'The Tender Bar,' understands that instinctively and personally. 'I started acting in films when I was 11 years old,' he says. 'I wouldn't ever want to build something that put me out of a job. That's the fun part — performing, exploring, discovering the nuances. That's why we fall in love with certain artists: their unique sensibility, the way they do what no one else can.' He knows that may sound contradictory coming from the co-founder of an AI company. That's exactly why he believes it's critical that artists, not Silicon Valley CEOs, are the ones shaping how the technology is used. 'We should be skeptical of AI and its bad uses,' he says. 'It's a tool that can be used for good or bad. How are we going to apply it to create more access and opportunity in this industry and have more voices heard? We're focused on keeping the artist as an essential part of the process, not replacing them.' For now, Sheridan lives inside that paradox, navigating a technology that could both elevate and imperil the stories he cares most about. His next acting gig? 'The Housewife,' a psychological drama co-starring Naomi Watts and Michael Imperioli, in which he plays a 1960s New York Times reporter investigating a suspected Nazi hiding in Queens. No AI. No doubles. Just people pretending to be other people the old way, while it lasts.
Yahoo
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- Yahoo
Lady Gaga Takes Scary Fall During Mayhem Tour Performance
Lady Gaga Takes Scary Fall During Mayhem Tour Performance originally appeared on Parade. Lady Gaga is no stranger to surprising her audience, but during one of her latest concerts, she found herself taking an unexpected tumble in front of the crowd. During one of her Las Vegas shows on The Mayhem Ball tour — either July 16, 18, or 19 — the 39-year-old shocked fans when she took a slip while performing "Vanish Into You.' A video circulating on social media Monday, July 21, shows the pop star's cameraman losing his footing first, with Gaga quickly helping to steady his equipment. However, as she continued to move forward, she slipped once, then fell hard again as she attempted to take a corner. New video of Lady Gaga slipping and falling during one of her shows in Las Vegas, even the camera man slipped beforehand! — 𝙈𝘼𝙔𝙃𝙀𝙈 💥 (@mayhembygaga) July 21, 2025 The "Bad Romance" singer, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, made a quick recovery, however. She quickly jumped back up on her feet and finished the performance with a seamless recovery, the crowd gasping, then letting out a cheer as she continued to sing. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬During her third and final Las Vegas show on July 19, Gaga left fans in awe when she performed without any makeup. As she started the emotional ballad "How Bad Do U Want Me," — which was also the concert's encore — the pop icon started off the performance by wiping off her full face of makeup backstage before walking back out on stage. Wearing a black sleeveless leather trench coat and a black bodysuit, she completed the outfit with a beanie under a black baseball cap. For the song's finale, she ditched the coat, revealing fishnet tights and thigh-high black leather boots. After the Vegas shows, Gaga has some downtime before heading to her next stop in San Francisco on July 22. The shows are part of her 63-stop tour across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Lady Gaga Takes Scary Fall During Mayhem Tour Performance first appeared on Parade on Jul 22, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 22, 2025, where it first appeared.
