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Will The Rock’s Red One be the worst Christmas movie ever?

βœ‡The Guardian
Stuart Heritage

The trailer for Amazon’s reportedly troubled $250m action-comedy shows that it might just be weightless action mush

Red One, the upcoming Christmas movie from Amazon, is arguably among the most talked-about of the year. However, until now, the conversation has had little to do with the film itself. Instead, Red One looks set to go down in history as the film that tanked Dwayne β€œThe Rock” Johnson’s reputation.

For the newcomers: in April, The Wrap ran a feature about exactly how troubled Red One’s production allegedly was, with several insiders pointing to The Rock’s chronic unwillingness to work as a key factor. Among claims of his wrongdoing, The Rock was accused of repeatedly showing up eight hours late to set, and also making his assistant dispose of bottles of his own urine that he’d fill when he couldn’t be bothered to walk to a bathroom.

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Β© Photograph: Frank Masi/Amazon Prime

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Β© Photograph: Frank Masi/Amazon Prime

"Wow, pinecone!" It's an apple.

βœ‡MetaFilter
JHarris
Tales In Mushroom Village is a Chinese computer-animated TV series from 2009. It's considered partly lost media. 2009 was 15 years ago, but that was the year Pixar's Up came out, and Toy Story was 14 years old by then, so the animation can't be that bad... right? Here's a trailer (2 minutes). Two compilations have been uploaded to Youtube (A, B, both 1h40m, Chinese with terrible English subtitles) How long can you survive them? There's also a trailer for a sequel series called Tales In Mushroom Village II: Alien Visitors, which you'd be forgiven for thinking was a completely different bad CGI thing edited into the original, but its oh so all too very much real.

I won't mince words: it's baaaaad, y'all. But it can be enjoyable to watch bad things, if you're of a certain diseased frame of mind. I have had that illness for a long time; maybe some of you are sufferers too. Each of the two long videos has five episodes. Things to look/listen for in the first episode alone: Disturbing character design throughout "What a bad lucky day! You will be accused by me." Unexpected cameos by Zelda music Unnecessary transitions in a shot, to the same shot Four Chinese sentences that get translated into "Ugh..." The ice cream cone that becomes a banana in an edit The door step that's clearly too tall for any character to climb "Bad brother, compensate us..." "Mum, he must compensate us." Endless rabbit whining Rabbits here have tapering tails instead of cottontails Baby rabbits suddenly spinning around the Fox elder's head Sheriff Volcano-head "Village head, my grandpa has said the misunderstanding is the devil! Or you'll be the devil!" "I have heard that impulse is the devil." Naonao sleeps at night resting stiffly on his bed in his clothes with his baseball cap over his face "Get up everybody...! Do cleaning...!"

Monsters of Flip

βœ‡MetaFilter
JHarris
Whether you're a wizard looking for a dark lair or a dragon needing a place to hoard gold, sorcerers and monsters alike need the Dungeon Flippers, fantasy real estate agents Maulie and Cleaveland. It's a new cartoon by Travis Fowler, and the pilot episode, "The Ace of Wands," is on Youtube. (17 minutes)

Runway’s latest AI video generator brings giant cotton candy monsters to life

βœ‡Ars Technica
Benj Edwards
Screen capture of a Runway Gen-3 Alpha video generated with the prompt

Enlarge / Screen capture of a Runway Gen-3 Alpha video generated with the prompt "A giant humanoid, made of fluffy blue cotton candy, stomping on the ground, and roaring to the sky, clear blue sky behind them." (credit: Runway)

On Sunday, Runway announced a new AI video synthesis model called Gen-3 Alpha that's still under development, but it appears to create video of similar quality to OpenAI's Sora, which debuted earlier this year (and has also not yet been released). It can generate novel, high-definition video from text prompts that range from realistic humans to surrealistic monsters stomping the countryside.

Unlike Runway's previous best model from June 2023, which could only create two-second-long clips, Gen-3 Alpha can reportedly create 10-second-long video segments of people, places, and things that have a consistency and coherency that easily surpasses Gen-2. If 10 seconds sounds short compared to Sora's full minute of video, consider that the company is working with a shoestring budget of compute compared to more lavishly funded OpenAIβ€”and actually has a history of shipping video generation capability to commercial users.

Gen-3 Alpha does not generate audio to accompany the video clips, and it's highly likely that temporally coherent generations (those that keep a character consistent over time) are dependent on similar high-quality training material. But Runway's improvement in visual fidelity over the past year is difficult to ignore.

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