While Trump on SNL sounded like a recipe for comedy, awkwardness, disaster, and any number of potentially entertaining things, his actual appearance was sort of a dud.
The sketches that centered around The Donald were mostly unmemorable, but we recently got a bit that was cut for time and, ironically, it might have been the best of the bunch.
Here’s the hook: A group of elite Navy Seals are shrunk down to microscopic size so that they can wrangle Donald Trump’s famously finicky hair for a showdown with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The premise of the sketch alone is funnier than most of what we saw this past Saturday and — after watching the clip — so is the execution.
“Scalp Team 6” employs a number of remedies in pursuit of follicular stabilization, but after Cecily Strong’s medium-hold hairspray cannon fails, Taran Killam is forced to stay behind and detonate an LA Looks hair gel bomb.
The skit was quite obviously patterned after Fantastic Voyage and was very well done. That being said, the fact that it was cut leaves us scratching our head … and not because we have our own team of mini-soldiers working on our hair.
We wonder if Trump himself wasn’t thrilled with this sketch and that’s why it was left out. That’s just speculation, of course, but it’s just a little hard to buy the whole “cut for time” explanation. This was certainly funnier than the bits that saw the candidate appear as laser harpist Gene Breadz, and skeevy Startraxxx producer Scasey Steves. Why not cut one (or both) of those?
The next two weeks will bring onstage at SNL actor Matthew McConaughey and superstar songstress Adele, both of whom are a much more natural fit for the program.
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?