Latest news with #Severance
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Chase Bets Ben Stiller and David Chang Can Cook Up Excitement Around Sapphire Reserve Revamp
This week Chase shook up the world of premium credit cards with a major revamp of its Sapphire Reserve card. The premium credit card is turning to heavy hitters from the worlds of pop culture and food to help reintroduce the product to the market. Actor-director Ben Stiller, Nobody Wants This producers Erin and Sara Foster, singer-songwriter Ella Langley, and chef and Netflix host David Chang are among those featured in the campaign, which will combine personal narratives, humor and some perks from the new card in its spots. More from The Hollywood Reporter "Who Gives a F*** What Other People Think": Walton Goggins, Adam Scott and the Drama Actor Roundtable YouTube Aims to Democratize Branded Content Just Like It Did With Videos Global Ad Forecast Downgraded as Creator Platforms Poised to Overtake Pro Content 'I liked the tone that they wanted to do with this campaign, in terms of just talking and telling stories and having it being personal, but also having it have a little bit of a humorous, self-deprecating edge to it,' Stiller tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. It helps, of course, to have a personal connection. And both Stiller and Chang fit that bill. 'If I want to partner with somebody, it's got to be stuff that I use on a day to day basis,' Chang says. 'That's just who I am and it makes it easy to talk about, because I've been a long time Chase Sapphire Reserve card member. I think inherent in that Sapphire program is that it's probably the single best card that links diners together with eating in restaurants.' Stiller, meanwhile, notes that the refreshed card will offer perks that personal to a few things close to him, namely The New York Knicks, and his Apple TV+ series Severance. Among the perks offered via the Sapphire Reserve will be a special dinner event in New York, where cardmembers can dine on the court at Madison Square Garden, joined by Knicks legends. Stiller, who is frequently seen courtside at MSG, knows what it's like (in fact he jokes about it in one the campaign spots). 'For me, that's a great thing to be able to offer people that's unique, and having experienced it myself, knowing how much I love that and I appreciate it, I thought, 'oh, that's a cool thing to be able to offer people that is not necessarily something you'd be able to get to do elsewhere,' he says of the perk. And the refreshed card will also offer members credits for Apple TV+ and Apple Music, effectively including them as a benefit of the card. That means that Severance could be seen by an audience that hasn't already been exposed. 'Selfishly, I think it's great because more people get to see our show. I think with these streamers, it's an interesting time, because the way people watch things has changed completely,' Stiller says, noting that the complicated and crowded streaming landscape means that standout out asa creative can be challenging. 'To be able to broaden the audience for certain shows that sometimes people might not just be able to watch because they're having to make choices on streamers — which I understand, too, it's just a strange new time in terms of how you make these choices to watch things. 'We've had a long partnership [with Apple] since they started, and working on the show has been kind of my main job for the last five years,' Stiller added. 'So to be able to tie that in and to feel like it just makes sense in terms of what I'm doing creatively, to be able to expand that audience, for people to be able to sample it is really cool, and it felt like a natural fit. Chang, too, sees things through the creative lens. While the Momofuku mogul gained national attention for his restaurants, he has since become a bona fide media personality via his Majordomo Media. 'I don't think of it as any different between the media and the restaurants. And what I mean by that is content is what we create — I spend more time doing that these days — but you just consume that in a different way,' Chang says. 'And I think our values in what we do in the restaurants is no different than the values that we try to do in media, which is education, giving value. And I think it's one of the reasons why our partnership with Chase makes sense as well. I think these are all the same things to sort of make you think about things in a different way, and to widen your scope of what you thought was possible.' And both say that the perks of the card connect to things that are meaningful to them: Travel, food, discovery. 'As a filmmaker, as a kid, I wanted to be making these kind of big, epic movies that I grew up watching,' Stiller says, recalling that people still come up to him say that his 2013 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty inspired them to travel and explore. 'That's an amazing connection that you can have with people through movies too. I feel like it's very personal, you make something as a filmmaker that you want to see, and then people can connect with that. Because for me, it's always going into nature, and that aspect of movies has always been something that I've loved.' Chang, meanwhile, says that the nature of where we can find good food is changing, citing Japan as an example, where some of the best restaurants are found in subway stations, or atop office buildings. 'I've long said that the future of food is going to be in places that you at least expect it,' he said, adding that Chase has helped shore up food in one of those places: The airport lounge. The bank is opening Sapphire Lounges in airports across the country, and partnering with chefs to help curate their menus. 'It is an oasis when you're in an airport for a lot of reasons, whether you're headed to a business meeting or now I have a family, two kids, you need place that you can sort of regroup,' Chang says, expressing frustration at the status quo outside the lounges. 'With Chase, the lounges that are in growing numbers in airports around the country, are going to be delicious. And I can say that without any BS, because it's true.' Best of The Hollywood Reporter How the Warner Brothers Got Their Film Business Started Meet the World Builders: Hollywood's Top Physical Production Executives of 2023 Men in Blazers, Hollywood's Favorite Soccer Podcast, Aims for a Global Empire
Atlantic
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Cure for Guilty Memories
If literature and pop culture are to be trusted, many of us are drawn to the idea of eliminating memories—cordoning them off, storing them outside ourselves, or getting rid of them completely. In the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a former couple pays to have their memories of each other erased after a bad breakup. Jennifer Egan's 2022 novel, The Candy House, features a technology called Own Your Unconscious, which extracts and packages characters' memories to be revisited, or not, at will. And most recently, on the television show Severance, a corporation offers its employees a procedure that splits their consciousness in two, creating workers untroubled by their outside self's emotions. All of these narratives rely on the sense that memories—good and bad—are a burden. Implicitly, they ask their audience whether they'd like to be free of their recollections too. Often, such stories suggest a real personal cost to getting rid of one's memories, and The Candy House and Severance both have broader dystopian elements as well. But the acclaimed short-story writer Karen Russell's second novel, The Antidote, takes a much more sweeping and historically minded approach to the idea of memory erasure and its pitfalls. Set during the Dust Bowl in a small Nebraska town called Uz, the book is named after a so-called prairie witch, one of a number of women in the area who perform a mysterious service: For a fee, they store memories for their drought-stricken neighbors, who whisper their secrets to the witches while they're in a trance. One of the Antidote's clients confesses to resenting their chronically ill child; others store beautiful memories 'like bouquets preserved under glass,' not wanting them to lose their bloom; still others, prodded by the town's corrupt sheriff, use her service to lock away details about crimes they've witnessed. Awake, the Antidote has no idea what she's heard. She operates, essentially, as temporary remote storage for the townspeople's recollections, making them inaccessible to anyone until the sharer chooses to retrieve the memory. But the Antidote and her colleagues aren't the only memory-erasers in the novel. When a huge dust storm (the one known as Black Sunday, which, Woody Guthrie famously wrote, 'blocked out the traffic an' blocked out the sun') hits Uz, it somehow eliminates the Antidote's cache of memories. On realizing what has happened, she panics. Of course, this is an existential issue for her—prairie witching is how she supports herself—but her response also has a moral dimension: Although she doesn't know what secrets she's lost, she suspects that justice won't be done until many of them are aired publicly. But not even Black Sunday can erase Uz's founding shame: the theft of land from American Indians, and the devastation that ensued. One of Russell's narrators, a kindhearted farmer named Harp Oletsky, puts this bluntly to his peers, telling them that the 'land is blowing because we stole it from the people who knew how to take care of it. Before we uprooted the prairie, we uprooted human beings.' Of course, to Harp, this uprooting, of which he is deeply ashamed, isn't history. His parents, Polish immigrants who fled German conquest and discrimination, took Indian land—and felt shame over doing so, having been uprooted themselves. But rather than changing course, they used prairie witches to get rid of their guilt toward the people whose homes they'd stolen. The Antidote has her own complex relationship to this history. The daughter of poor, urban Italian immigrants, she tells herself that she and her family had nothing to do with the land theft—that, in fact, its wealthy perpetrators are her enemies too. But over the course of the novel, she comes to understand that her magic—her ability to bank ugly memories so that families such as the Oletskys can prosper without pain—is a form of complicity. The Antidote comes to this realization as she befriends one of the novel's other narrators, a photographer named Cleo who comes to Nebraska through the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program designed to address rural poverty. On the road, Cleo buys a camera that seems to be able to see through time. Its images, once developed, show the future or past of the site Cleo meant to photograph. Often, she can tell she's looking at a time other than her own, but can't begin to guess when it is. By collapsing time, Russell yanks her audience into the book. Cleo may not recognize the 21st century when she develops a picture of it, but we do. Some of the novel's agenda—it very much has an agenda—is to create a history of the prairie that, in the Antidote's words, is one not 'of Manifest Destiny, but Invisible Loss.' Russell clearly wants to complicate John Steinbeck–type tales of the Dust Bowl, ones that tend to concentrate on white farmers' suffering without considering the pain their arrival in the West caused. For Americans to forget the latter, Russell seems to argue, would be a loss of identity on a national scale—something worth grieving and, indeed, something dystopian. But The Antidote doesn't stop there. Its true project is to defeat the very fantasy it starts with: that of getting rid of the past. In the novel, memories, like money, need to be kept in circulation for the health of society. They don't do anybody much good in a vault. The Antidote 's characters tend to struggle with describing their memories to anyone but the Antidote—and to the reader. Russell writes in what can feel like a series of monologues. As in her first novel, the highly inventive and fun Swamplandia!, her prose is just dense and unusual enough to insist on being read slowly. At the same time, it's direct and intimate. Especially in the first half of the novel, her narrators seem to be pouring their guts out to us in order to avoid talking to one another. Harp, who is raising his orphaned niece, Dell, after her mother is murdered, never reminisces with Dell about his sister; the Antidote and Cleo both do their best not to have meaningful conversations with anyone at all. Only when Russell puts these four characters into proximity do they start getting some of their memories out into the air. For Dell, Harp, and the Antidote, talking is straightforwardly healing. Dell and Harp get to grieve Dell's mom; Harp gets to work through his unsettled feelings about his family's acquisition of its land; the Antidote gets to reckon with the nature of her work. For Cleo, the book's outsider, however, things are more complex. Her explicit duty as a government photographer is to contribute to 'public recollection, 'a rich fund of memories' for every present and future American,' but even before her camera begins showing her scenes that aren't there, she has little faith in the veracity of photography. As an artist, she knows that she can manipulate the images she makes: 'People are wary of my camera,' she admits, 'with good reason. Each flash ran a stake through your heart. Now you were nailed to one spot, wearing this forlorn or broken expression. The wrinkling ocean of human thinking and feeling that ripples across a face, over a lifetime—the camera cannot capture any of that.' In fact, it's Cleo's assignment to catch her subjects looking pitiable, though without letting them know she's doing so. Her images are meant not only to become memory but also to get Congress to give struggling farmers money. For Cleo, who is Black, this is a fraught mission; she knows—and her boss often reminds her—that it is likeliest to succeed if she makes portraits of the 'faces that carried the most weight with Congress. The need that triggered avalanches of compassion was White need.' Russell includes real images from the Resettlement Administration in her book—the sorts of images that were by and large taken to represent white suffering, even when, as in the case of Dorothea Lange's famous ' Migrant Mother,' their subject was not white. Their presence is a reminder that public memory can hide as much as it preserves. The Antidote, in part, is a reaction to the hidden history of the Dust Bowl, an effort to return to circulation the fact that the land 'blew away,' as Harp puts it, because white settlers stole it from its stewards. By the end of the novel, Russell's characters are all on a mission to get people talking not only about this painful collective memory but also about all the bits of their past that they've tried to stifle or pack away. The more we share our memories, they realize, the less they burden us—and, crucially, the more we can know ourselves through them. This is especially true for Dell: As she begins to allow herself to talk about her mother, whom she misses acutely, she grows more able to feel happiness in her new life with Harp. Russell makes this point about memory in other ways too—through an exhibition of Cleo's photographs and a subplot concerning Uz's sheriff, who is both the Antidote's enemy and one of her biggest clients. Sometimes he deposits his own memories with her; more often, though, he uses her to hide evidence, hence her moral distress after Black Sunday. If the happy memories some people deposit in the Antidote's vaults are treasures, then so, in a sense, are the ones that could have brought justice. Taken together, these lost stories demonstrate that in The Antidote, hiding memories—whatever the reason—is never a good thing. The poor farmer who deposited his first kiss in the prairie witch loses it forever on Black Sunday. Dell, meanwhile, loses her chance at knowing who killed her mother, due to the sheriff's machinations. These are very different losses, but both suggest a cost in refusing to engage with the past. If a person or a group of people can't look back on the ills they've perpetrated, they can't undo their damage or aspire to do better in the future. And if they can't summon the joys of their life—well, then what's there to hope for?
Business Insider
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Apple's 'F1' is yet another big-budget, big-screen movie. I'm not sure why Apple keeps making them.
I might. Partly because I'm a big fan of air conditioning right now. And partly because the movie, directed by the same guy who made the "Top Gun" sequel, looks like it could have very cool racing sequences, at the very minimum. Bigger question, which isn't a new one: Why is Apple making big-budget movies and putting them in theaters? Like I said, this isn't a new query. Lots of people in media and tech have been trying to understand Apple's approach to Hollywood for years now. Since Apple launched Apple TV+ in 2019, it has spent tons of money making its own TV shows and movies for its streaming service. It remains unclear why. The two operating theories, which are not mutually exclusive: This is a very expensive marketing operation — if you like "Severance" or "F1," maybe it will make you that much more inclined to keep buying phones or Macs from Apple. Maybe this will actually be a real business for Apple one day — part of its "services" push it has been on as its iPhone sales plateau. Those theories are starting to make a bit more sense now that Apple seems to be gaining some buzz around some of its TV shows — though its streaming service still doesn't have anything like the reach of Netflix, Disney, or even Amazon. But Apple's approach to movie-making remains as confusing as ever. Up until recently, Apple was spending lots of money on all kinds of movies, and it was unclear what it was getting out of that. Apple did grab an Oscar for "Coda" in 2022 — which is a thing lots of streamers would love to have — and some of its other movies, like "Napoleon," have gotten respectful notices from critics. But in general, Apple's movie arm has seemed like a money pit. That's why Apple's move to pull back on movie spending last year made sense, as did its decision to turn "Wolfs," a made-for-theaters movie starring Pitt and George Clooney, into a streaming-only thing. (That one did bruise some feelings, though.) Which brings us back to "F1," and what it does and doesn't tell us about Apple's movie ambitions. The conventional wisdom is that it's hard to get audiences to see anything in a theater that isn't already connected to characters or brands they already know. But that's not always the case — see this year's " Sinners" — and Formula 1 racing is very popular worldwide, and to some degree in the US. So maybe "F1" will turn out to be a full-blown hit for Apple. And the company will make more big-budget bets on movies people will see in theaters, and eventually on Apple's own streaming service. But Apple doesn't seem convinced: As Puck's Matt Belloni notes, after F1, Apple has zero big movies planned for theatrical releases the rest of this year or 2026. Again: That doesn't mean the other movies Apple makes won't succeed solely as something you watch online. But going online-only makes it harder to get top talent for your stuff — that's why Netflix grudgingly agreed to put Greta Gerwig's "Narnia" movie in theaters next year — and it also makes it harder to build interest in those movies for a streaming audience. I've asked Apple reps for comment, but this is one they never seem inclined to talk about. So I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, if you want to hear Apple executives try to explain why the company is making movies, you can check out this Variety feature, which includes photos of CEO Tim Cook and actual racing star Lewis Hamilton standing and walking around Apple's headquarters. But if you are skeptical about this stuff, you may not come away convinced that you're wrong. Here's Cook, for example: "I know there's a lot of different views out there about why we're into it. We're into it to tell great stories, and we want it to be a great business as well. That's why we're into it, just plain and simple." Got it? Me neither.
USA Today
3 days ago
- Sport
- USA Today
Fresh off championship, 5 reasons why Thunder fans should care about 2025 NBA draft
Like going down the work elevator in "Severance," the Oklahoma City Thunder are back to it. They've shifted their focus back to work mode with the 2025 NBA draft a day after they celebrated their 2025 NBA championship on Tuesday. The schedule-makers continue to put the Thunder in a tough spot. They did it one last time in the 2024-25 NBA calendar with the NBA draft taking place just a couple of days after their Game 7 win over the Indiana Pacers in the 2025 NBA Finals. The Thunder have three draft picks ahead of the 2025 NBA draft. They own the No. 15 pick (via Heat), No. 24 pick (via Clippers) and No. 44 pick (via Hawks). Not a bad haul. Especially since the average champion only has the No. 30 pick. Nonetheless, while most fans didn't have the emotional bandwidth to focus on the predraft process, here are five reasons why they should still tune in to the two-day event. The Thunder have climbed the mountaintop after coming up short for nearly two decades. But that doesn't mean they can rest on their laurels. One of the best days of the NBA year The NBA draft is one of the best days of the year. Even with Adam Silver weirdly breaking it up to two days, the extravaganza is the unofficial start to the following season. All 30 teams enter with the hope of a brighter future. Adding new talent is always a novelty that fans enjoy. It feeds their interest through most of the offseason with summer league overreactions. It's also one of the busiest transaction days of the NBA year. Teams move up and down the board. Veteran players on rebuild teams are dealt to contenders for draft picks. A chunk of prospects are forced to wear the wrong team hat because of league rules. Even though it's quite a whiplash, Thunder fans should enjoy this year's NBA draft. Cooper Flagg is set to join the Dallas Mavericks. That could reignite a classic rivalry that was prematurely ended when Luka Doncic was traded. Lifeblood of the Thunder As you should know by now, small-market teams can only upgrade their rosters with either drafts or trades. The Thunder won an NBA championship because of their 2022 haul of Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams. Cason Wallace was added in 2021. Lu Dort was an undrafted free agent in 2019. Let's see if the Thunder can keep it up. With impending extensions to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Holmgren and Williams, the best way to navigate the second apron is by cycling through rookie-scale role players. The Thunder have the resume to show they can pull it off. This class could help them with that. There's also the chance of a trade-up. It's already been reported by multiple outlets that the Thunder could look into doing that. History suggests they could be aggressive. We've already seen them overpay to move up for guys like Ousmane Dieng and Dillon Jones. Intriguing choices at No. 15 The rich get richer. Even with an NBA championship, the Thunder are smack dab in the middle of the draft. The Rockets gifted them Nikola Topic with the No. 12 pick last year. The Heat did the same with the No. 15 pick. While not technically a lottery pick, it's still a valuable spot that could get you a solid role player. Thoma Sorber and Derik Queen could be interesting center options. The Thunder will need to find a new backup big. Hartenstein is only under contract for two more seasons. Jaylin Williams will likely get priced out by another team. Cedric Coward and Danny Wolf are also other options. Coward has been a late riser. Wolf is a skilled center. Good chance that most of these folks will be there at No. 15. It'll add excitement to summer league and give fans somebody other than Topic to pay attention to. Hear NBA broadcast praise Thunder This is the real reason why Thunder fans should slog through ESPN's four-hour broadcast. With the NBA Finals still fresh on everybody's minds, expect the Thunder to get plenty of praise from the broadcast crew. They're the standard now in the NBA. The copycat league will see other teams try to emulate their roster-building techniques. But like Coca-Cola, there can only be one. Expect folks to say the Thunder are the blueprint. And that homegrown talent is the most efficient way to on-court success. Get ready to hear an entire summer's worth of praise for the Thunder. Like Williams said at Tuesday's parade, nobody can say anything bad about OKC with an NBA championship finally on its long list of achievements. Find out OKC's long-term plans Even with an NBA championship, the business never stops. The Thunder are well-positioned to threaten a repeat next year. Everybody is under contract for one more year. After that, though, they might need to replenish their depth for the 2026-27 season and beyond. This could be the draft class to do it. A backup center will likely be needed. As explained earlier by Hartenstein's and Williams' situations. A backup guard could also be in play. You can never have enough of those. Also, this team is in desperate need of some outside shooters. They won a championship despite being one of the worst 3-point shooting teams in the playoffs. The Thunder will have a lengthy title window solely because of their Big 3. But if they hope to win multiple championships, they need to continue to hit on draft picks for role players. They have enough draft capital to be afforded those types of luxuries.
Mint
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Record-breaking web series of 2025; from Adolescence to Daredevil: Born Again
The year 2025 has been phenomenal when it comes to web series. Be it Netflix's hit Adolescence or the third instalment of The White Lotus, several shows have captured the imagination of audiences and shattered records. These shows released in 2025 can be called record-breaking for a reason. These shows could have an impact on Hollywood too as directors like Greta Gerwig and Rian Johnson enter into partnerships with streaming services like Netflix. Adolescence: The Netflix show became an unlikely hit for the OTT giant. Starring Stephen Graham, Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty, Adolescence follows a 13-year-old schoolboy Jamie Miller, who is arrested for the murder of a classmate. The show became Netflix's most watched show ever, as per Variety. It garnered an unprecedented 66.3 million views in two weeks alone. Severance season 2: The series surpassed Ted Lasso to become Apple TV+'s most-watched show ever, as per Deadline. The outlet claimed that Severance led to a 126 per cent increase in new Apple TV+ subscribers between January 1 and 19, 2025, as compared to December 1-19, 2024. The White Lotus season 3: The show managed to garner a lot of interest from the very first episode itself. The penultimate and final episode of the series edged out season 2 of the show to become its most-watched episode ever, reported Deadline. The season revolved around a cast of characters vacationing in Thailand, where secrets and lies turn an idyllic vacation spot into one filled with anger, grief and death. The Last of Us season 2: Pedro Pascal's return as Joel Miller was a moment of joy for many fans. This was short-lived as his character was killed off in a brutal manner in the second episode. Despite polarising views on Joel's death, the Last of Us season 2, episode 2 held a 9.5-star rating out of 10, making it the highest-rated episode of the entire series as of writing, as per Screenrant. Daredevil: Born Again: The show managed to grab attention from the get go with 7.5 million views on Disney+ in its first five days. This was the biggest streaming debut on the platform in 2025, as per Variety. Charlie Cox reprises his role as Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer with super senses who masquerades as a vigilante. Severance season 2, The White Lotus season 3 and Adolescence have managed to attract a lot of viewers. The plot centres around a 13-year-old accused of murdering his classmate. Pedro Pascal's character was killed off in the second episode of the season.
