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News.com.au
an hour ago
- News.com.au
Fans stunned by large red marks on American tennis star Ben Shelton at Wimbledon
Tennis fans couldn't help but notice large red marks on the arm of Ben Shelton. The American wore his trademark tank top for a Wimbledon clash with Lorenzo Sonego. And fans watching the action were distracted by the patches on his body. Shelton, 22, had two noticeable large red marks on his left shoulder. The No. 10 seed takes incredible care of his body. And one of the methods he uses is cupping therapy, The Sun reports. It involves suction to draw fluid into the area but can leave marks like the ones on Shelton's arm. The marks are due to broken blood vessels just beneath the skin and can look like a bruise. One viewer said, 'Shelton with suction marks on his body. 'He's about to unleash the dragon lol.' Fans first noticed Shelton was using cupping therapy at the 2023 US Open. He played Frances Tiafoe in an all-American clash at the grand slam. 'What are those circles on Ben Shelton's l arm? A rash? On Ashe?' one fan asked. Another suggested, 'Ben Shelton has been doing cupping on his shoulders and upper arms.' Shelton beat Italian player Sonego in four sets on No. 1 Court to book a place in the quarterfinals. The No. 10 seed never previously went beyond the fourth round at Wimbledon. His best grand slam return was the semi-finals twice. He reached that stage of the 2023 US Open as well as the 2025 Australian Open. The American is dating USWNT star Trinity Rodman. The soccer player is also the daughter of basketball icon Dennis Rodman. She supported Shelton from the player's box on Monday. Rodman looked glamorous in a two-piece blue outfit while her partner starred on the court.
ABC News
2 hours ago
- ABC News
David Cronenberg made The Shrouds as a way to process the grief over his wife's death
Body horror is having a moment, while its dad has a phone in front of his face. The gushing critical and cultural success of The Substance — the first body horror nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars — is just the tip of a resurgence, following the likes of Fresh, A Different Man, Infinity Pool, Malignant and Palme d'Or winner Titane. Fast Facts about The Shrouds What: Necrophilic-leaning tech CEO misses his dead wife. Starring: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce Directed by: David Cronenberg Where: In cinemas now Likely to make you feel: Unsettled and cold (whether that's positive will depend on you) The biggest signifier of the genre's resurgence, though, was 2022's Crimes of The Future, the long-awaited return to body horror from David Cronenburg — the man who defined the genre in the 70s and 80s with The Fly, Videodrome and Scanners among others. Despite Crime's acclaim, Cronenberg has again shifted away from body horror with his follow-up The Shrouds, a relatively restrained and cold drama — despite a crazed premise. Even if it's not filled with the squelches and screams of a body keeping, ignoring or sublimating to the score, it will leave you deeply affected — if you can accept its stilted dialogue and convoluted plot as purposeful. The Shrouds follows Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a grieving widow who founded GraveTech — a cemetery that offers grievers a live-streamed image of their loved ones' decomposing corpse, viewable in 3D and 8K from a tombstone screen, after logging in via an app. GraveTech is a nascent tech start-up, with only a dozen or so clients, and the Toronto graveyard doubling as a showroom. At its centre is a sleek restaurant with floor-to-ceiling windows, resembling an austere contemporary art gallery with outdoor activations. At the film's beginning, Karsh takes a blind date there and, after a subdued lunch, shows her the live footage of his late wife Becca's (Diane Kruger) skeleton while they stand before her grave, calling it "digital penetration". She's repulsed and soon leaves. But before she does, she can't help but revert her gaze to his stream, remarking how the footage — a high-tech shroud over the body, which renders corpses as though floating through space — is somewhat beautiful. "It has drained away the fluid of grief that was drowning me," says Karsh. "That was killing me." Not exactly first date material — and neither is The Shrouds, though there's romance hiding deep within. When the cemetery is vandalised, Karsh, Becca's sister Terry (also Kruger) and Terry's ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce) are consumed by conspiracies, investigating whether strange growths on Becca's skeleton suggest a medical cover-up or interference from China, Russia or some other shadowy force. Despite the premise, Cronenberg bills The Shrouds as his most personal work ever. Now 82, he wrote the screenplay after his long-term wife, the filmmaker Carolyn Zeifman, died in 2017. With short white hair and a gangly intensity, Karsh is clearly a proxy for Cronenberg. It's also clear that Karsh is consumed by grief — and it often emerges via a desire for Becca's body, whether looking at her skeleton, her identical sister, or through dreams where Becca appears naked, increasingly scarred and amputated by surgeries. But Karsh's necrophilic impulses are at odds with The Shrouds' sense of cleanliness: It's hard to imagine him or the film with dirt under their nails, let alone digging through the earth. This is a deeply clinical visual world, far removed from the visceral sounds and throbbing violence of, say, his 1999 film Existenz. There's a tech-world cleanliness to Karsh's life, which is designed to be as frictionless as possible — from his nondescript wardrobe, to his self-driving Tesla, to his AI personal assistant Hunny (also voiced by Kruger). Together with the production designer Carol Spier, cinematographer Douglas Koch creates a pristine Toronto closer to the quiet luxury sheen of Succession than any of Cronenberg's more surreal works. It approaches blandness, but that seems to be the point, given The Shrouds is fixated on screens. Where most filmmakers try to avoid shooting characters staring at their phones or at least explore different ways to shoot, Cronenberg has gone verité when it comes to how often Karsh is on a laptop, phone or tablet. Not only are there several elongated scenes where Karsh talks with Hunny — who is as visually soulless as a Metaverse avatar — but we're often shown footage on iPhones, with Koch holding the frame on a hand holding the screen. The videos shown are, true-to-life, often poorly shot, with ugly or obstructive angles of scenes, where faces are cut off in favour of their torso. It'll be followed by a technically wonderful shot, with gorgeous lighting and framing, but of a self-driving Tesla, no life present. Dialogue, too, is ceaseless and often stilted — given Pearce, Cassel and Kruger's previous work, it's hard to believe they weren't encouraged into jarring, awkward line reads. Combined, the janky, occasionally ugly elements of The Shrouds give the film its own dream-like atmosphere, both banal and deeply strange. If The Shrouds was a debut film, it might be hard to give it so much grace, and many people won't have the patience to, finding it too austere and removed for a film about grief. But Cronenberg could have easily created a visceral, violent body horror about grief. Instead, late into his career, he's making something much more daring. By sitting in the visual horror of a tech-sanitised world, where texture and substance is erased in favour of ease, The Shrouds has a technical unease to it, as if something is missing. Cronenberg recently said he "lost the will to make movies" after Zeifman died. And while he proved that he could create an excellent return-to-form just two years ago with Crimes of The Future, nothing quite works here. That might make it one of the most quietly profound films about grief he could make.
News.com.au
2 hours ago
- News.com.au
AI video becomes more convincing, rattling creative industry
Gone are the days of six-fingered hands or distorted faces -- AI-generated video is becoming increasingly convincing, attracting Hollywood, artists, and advertisers, while shaking the foundations of the creative industry. To measure the progress of AI video, you need only look at Will Smith eating spaghetti. Since 2023, this unlikely sequence -- entirely fabricated -- has become a technological benchmark for the industry. Two years ago, the actor appeared blurry, his eyes too far apart, his forehead exaggeratedly protruding, his movements jerky, and the spaghetti didn't even reach his mouth. The version published a few weeks ago by a user of Google's Veo 3 platform showed no apparent flaws whatsoever. "Every week, sometimes every day, a different one comes out that's even more stunning than the next," said Elizabeth Strickler, a professor at Georgia State University. Between Luma Labs' Dream Machine launched in June 2024, OpenAI's Sora in December, Runway AI's Gen-4 in March 2025, and Veo 3 in May, the sector has crossed several milestones in just a few months. Runway has signed deals with Lionsgate studio and AMC Networks television group. Lionsgate vice president Michael Burns told New York Magazine about the possibility of using artificial intelligence to generate animated, family-friendly versions from films like the "John Wick" or "Hunger Games" franchises, rather than creating entirely new projects. "Some use it for storyboarding or previsualization" -- steps that come before filming -- "others for visual effects or inserts," said Jamie Umpherson, Runway's creative director. Burns gave the example of a script for which Lionsgate has to decide whether to shoot a scene or not. To help make that decision, they can now create a 10-second clip "with 10,000 soldiers in a snowstorm." That kind of pre-visualization would have cost millions before. In October, the first AI feature film was released -- "Where the Robots Grow" -- an animated film without anything resembling live action footage. For Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, Runway's co-founder, an AI-generated feature film is not the end goal, but a way of demonstrating to a production team that "this is possible." - 'Resistance everywhere' - Still, some see an opportunity. In March, startup Staircase Studio made waves by announcing plans to produce seven to eight films per year using AI for less than $500,000 each, while ensuring it would rely on unionized professionals wherever possible. "The market is there," said Andrew White, co-founder of small production house Indie Studios. People "don't want to talk about how it's made," White pointed out. "That's inside baseball. People want to enjoy the movie because of the movie." But White himself refuses to adopt the technology, considering that using AI would compromise his creative process. Jamie Umpherson argues that AI allows creators to stick closer to their artistic vision than ever before, since it enables unlimited revisions, unlike the traditional system constrained by costs. "I see resistance everywhere" to this movement, observed Georgia State's Strickler. This is particularly true among her students, who are concerned about AI's massive energy and water consumption as well as the use of original works to train models, not to mention the social impact. But refusing to accept the shift is "kind of like having a business without having the internet," she said. "You can try for a little while." In 2023, the American actors' union SAG-AFTRA secured concessions on the use of their image through AI. Strickler sees AI diminishing Hollywood's role as the arbiter of creation and taste, instead allowing more artists and creators to reach a significant audience. Runway's founders, who are as much trained artists as they are computer scientists, have gained an edge over their AI video rivals in film, television, and advertising. But they're already looking further ahead, considering expansion into augmented reality and virtual reality -- for example creating a metaverse where films could be shot. "The most exciting applications aren't necessarily the ones that we have in mind," said Umpherson. "The ultimate goal is to see what artists do with technology."
