Oliver Stone’s upcoming film Snowden will delve deep into the NSA’s government surveillance activities, but in the meantime, the director is busy talking about it cell phone tracking and spying himself. Open Road Films has released a new PSA in which Stone urges moviegoers to turn off their cell phones, using some scary information to make his case.
The reason moviegoers are typically given to power down their phones is to show courtesy to the rest of the people sitting in the theater, so although Stone makes that point as well, his approach is very different. Holding up a smartphone, he talks about the amazing tasks the device is capable of, from sharing our thoughts with millions to keeping in touch with people around the world. He even lets us watch a cute clip of a cat video.
The little creatures are the last warm and fuzzy part of the video, though. Stone takes a darker path, pointing out that our cell phones provide outside parties with the ability to track our moves whenever we make calls and send texts.
“We are giving them access,” the director says in the PSA. “The information you put out into the world voluntarily is enough to burn your life to the ground. This will be our undoing.”
The message is a harsh one and he realizes it, so he transitions to the rest of his announcement. “Think I’m being dramatic?” he says. “Then don’t take my word for it, but do the rest of the people in the audience a big favor: Turn off your phone during the movie.”
If Stone didn’t convince viewers, the movie itself may do the job. Snowden tells the story of real-life former NSA contractor Edward Snowden (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who revealed that the government agency was spying on ordinary citizens. The film hits theaters on September 16.
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?