The world has been deprived of Chris Rock’s salient insight on the world for too long, but the wait is soon coming to an end. On Tuesday, February 13, Rock and Netflix announced the stand-up comedian’s long-awaited special on the streaming service will arrive on Valentine’s Day.
The special, Chris Rock: Tamborine, is directed by comedian Bo Burnham. Tamborine was filmed at New York City’s Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Rock performed in November for two intimate shows during his Total Blackout tour in 2017. Rock released the trailer announcing the Valentine’s Day release date on his Instagram:
The world’s been waiting for this special since news got out that Rock signed a reported $40 million deal with Netflix for two specials in October 2016. Based on reviews of his Total Blackout tour stops, Tamborine should be full of jokes about President Donald Trump, religious extremism, and child abuse. Nothing less controversial than what we have come to expect from the comedian with endless classic stand-up jokes about Monica Lewinsky, Michael Jackson, and Barack Obama. Rock’s first Netflix performance will also be his first special since HBO’s Kill The Messenger in 2008.
Rock’s venture back into stand-up specials will be the latest in a string of high-profile, and even higher priced comedy specials Netflix has commissioned over the last year. Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, and Dave Chappelle all released Netflix specials since the start of 2017, after inking highly lucrative deals for each. Chappelle released his two Netflix specials, The Age of Spin, and Deep in the Heart of Texas as a comedy album, and won a Grammy Award for best comedy album at the 60th Grammy Awards.
There is no word on when we can expect the second special part of his Netflix deal, but we will definitely get more Rock streaming this year. In 2017, he teamed up with his longtime friend, and Netflix cash cow Adam Sandler to film a family comedy film, The Week Of. In April, Netflix announced plans for The Week Of to see global release sometime in 2018.
Time to snuggle up with your Valentine, and warm your hearts with Rock’s red-hot humor.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?