Airplane TVs

Delta Will Add A ‘Binge Button’ To Its In-Flight Entertainment Screens

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Delta Air Lines has announced a new set of features and technologies to its inflight entertainment experience at CES 2020, including a “binge button” and the ability to watch Delta-sourced content from the moment you check into your flight. And it’s adding wireless seatback screens to its airplanes with possible new capabilities, like the ability to use Bluetooth headphones.

Some airlines have scaled back their inflight entertainment technology in favor of having passengers watch content on their smartphones, tablets, and computers. But others, like JetBlue and Delta, are pushing forward, upgrading their seatback screens, striking new deals with content partners like Spotify, and adding new features.

During its CES 2020 keynote, Delta laid out some of the ways it’s trying to enhance its own experience. Beyond the binge button — which, of course, will let passengers watch back-to-back episodes of one particular show instead of making them select each episode individually — Delta is also making the content it licenses for its flights available through its app from the moment people check in. The company will also roll out a “recommended for you” tab, which will suggest new things to watch based on your viewing history. And it announced a partnership with the ReFrame project, which will supply the airline with a lineup of gender-balanced TV shows and movies.

Delta recently started retrofitting its planes with new wireless seatback screens, which frees up more room underneath each seat. Delta is also testing the ability to use Bluetooth headphones with the screens during flights, meaning people who forget to bring a pair with a traditional headphone jack wouldn’t have to settle for the company’s commodity earbuds. (Whether it can make sure all that Bluetooth radio interference isn’t a problem will be a challenge of its own.) The screens will also be able to mirror your smartphone, and Delta says other new features will be added at a quicker pace than in the past.

The wireless nature of these screens means Delta can bring them to smaller planes, too. And the company is also looking to become a provider of this technology, according to chief operating officer Gil West. “We’re pivoting to outside sales. It’s a big market, it’s an almost 20 billion a year market which is growing at a really fast clip,” West tells The Verge.

But the content deals and the Netflix-ification of Delta’s inflight product are signs of a sort of arms race happening in the industry right now. Unlike five years ago when pretty much every wide-body airplane had a TFT touchscreen with just a few movies and TV shows, often for sale, the airlines are almost all now moving in different directions. And as they do, each one is making its own bet on what it believes will be the future of the inflight experience will be.

 

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Books

2020 Books: Ring in New Decade with Fiction, Non-Fiction Releases

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Another year, another decade.

But before you start getting nostalgic about how fast time is just sprinting by, there are many upsides to celebrating another year. New goals, plans and resolutions along with some fantastic books coming your way.

So come on, browse this year’s most anticipated fiction and start prepping your “To Be Read” list.

FICTION

“The Sun Down Motel” by Simone St. James: in 1982, Viv Delaney disappears from the Sun Down Motel in Fell, NY where she had taken a job as a night clerk. More than 30 years later, Carly Kirk decides to move to Fell in an attempt to find out what happened to her aunt Viv, who vanished into thin air before Carly was born. But something isn’t right at the motel, something haunting and scary. Feb. 18. Berkley.

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Film

Rewind 2019: Coming-of-age Drama ‘Little Women’ Tops List

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The past year’s film viewing started with the comedy “The Upside” and ended 170 movies later with the pulse-pounding “Midnight Family,” a documentary about private ambulance workers in Mexico City. In between there were gems, both uncut and precious, and not from Disney or Marvel, which takes the year’s five top grossing movies: “Avengers: Endgame,” “The Lion King,” “Toy Story 4,” “Captain Marvel” and “Frozen 2.” None of those titles make my list of favorites, though I have a soft spot for “Endgame.” My picks might not be cinematic masterpieces in the snobby auteur sense, but, boy, did they make me feel alive. Per usual, it was a challenge to come up with just 10 favorite films. This list changed daily, but since deadline is hovering, I’ll leave you with this lineup:

1. “LITTLE WOMEN”: Louisa May Alcott’s 150-year-old novel about four sisters coming-of-age in Civil War-era Massachusetts fit our modern sensibilities like a glove. In the hands of writer-director Greta Gerwig, it’s a perfect match of artist and material, all fortified by a stellar cast of Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Timothee Chalamet, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper. I’ve seen it twice, and the second viewing wrecked me more than the first. Alexandre Desplat’s evocative score is the cherry on top. (In theaters)

2. “ONCE UPON A TIME IN … HOLLYWOOD”: Quentin Tarantino films are so much fun to watch. And this one, his valentine to Tinseltown set against a revisionist take on the Manson Murders, is no exception. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt do their best work in years as fictional, fading movie star and his longtime stunt double. Margo Robbie adds a ghostly presence as doomed starlet Sharon Tate. What results is hilarious, gruesome and perfectly Tarantino. Anyone know where I can get a flamethrower? (Available on demand and all the streaming spots)

3. “THE IRISHMAN”: If you didn’t see this in theaters, then you really missed out. Martin Scorsese’s takes the gangster genre on a last hurrah with a dream cast of Robert Di Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel. It’s de riguer Scorsese, gripping, tense, violent, but it’s also something more: profound. This is the director, and cast, playing on the back nine of their careers and looking back through a lens clouded with regrets, the biggest being the daughter who will never come to visit. It’s an unexpected gut punch from a bunch of wise guys. (Netflix)

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Baby Girl Clothing Line

Cameron Diaz Announces Birth of Daughter With Husband Benji Madden

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Surprise! Cameron Diaz is a mom.

This is the first child for both Diaz and 40-year-old Madden.

“We are so happy, blessed and grateful to begin this new decade by announcing the birth of our daughter, Raddix Madden,” Diaz’s post reads. “She has instantly captured our hearts and completed our family. While we are overjoyed to share this news, we also feel a strong instinct to protect our little one’s privacy. So we won’t be posting pictures or sharing any more details, other than the fact that she is really really cute!! Some would even say RAD :)”

Diaz and Madden have been married since January 2015. Diaz has talked about potentially having kids before, and has said she wasn’t particularly looking to be a mother before she married the Good Charlotte guitarist.

In a rare interview in August, Diaz told InStyle that Madden was the best thing that’s ever happened to her.

“Getting married to him was the best thing that ever happened to me. My husband’s the best,” she said. “He’s the greatest human being, and he’s my great partner. Marriage is certainly hard, and it’s a lot of work. You need somebody who’s willing to do the work with you, because there’s no 60-40 in marriage. It’s 50-50 period. All the time.”

“I don’t know if I was ready [when I got married], but I knew Benji was special,” she added. “He’s just a good man. There’s no bulls**t. It’s really refreshing. I’m grateful for him.”

 

Award

Golden Globes Will Serve Plant-Based Meal at Awards Ceremony

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Golden Globes, known as the “party of the year,” is going with a meatless menu for its 77th annual awards show.

Guests will be served a 100% plant-based meal just ahead of showtime Sunday. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association said Thursday that it wants the initiative to raise environmental awareness about food consumption and waste.

“If there’s a way we can, not change the world, but save the planet, maybe we can get the Golden Globes to send a signal and draw attention to the issue about climate change,” HFPA president Lorenzo Soria said. “The food we eat, the way we grow the food we eat, the way we dispose of the food is one of the large contributors to the climate crisis.”

The annual awards ceremony will air on NBC and be held at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California.

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Fashion Designer

Innovative Fashion Designers Lead the Way on Sustainability

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Innovative fashion designers are turning to such things as horseradish and nettles to make sustainable clothing and accessories to the delight of a growing number of buyers.

While more consumers are paying closer attention to how the production of goods impacts the environment, old habits die hard. A buy-and-toss mentality persists despite a boost from celebrities helping to drive the upcycle and vintage movements.

Actress Maggie Q, who created an activewear line from recycled fabrics, is among activists who see plenty of room for improvement. She says she feels “sick about fast fashion.”

“You hear people say, ‘Well, it was cheap and you need to wear it once, you throw it away,'” she said.

The British design duo behind Vin + Omi, a brand worn by Michelle Obama, Beyonce and Lady Gaga, is forever on the hunt for creative solutions to sustainability. They sourced latex from Malaysia, for example. However, they found the conditions for plantation workers appalling and bought the operation.

At their studios in the Cotswolds, in the heart of the English countryside, they grow a range of crops and plants for textile development, including chestnuts and horseradish. Their latest collection features garments made from nettles, alpaca fleece and recycled plastic from paint tubes. English designer Zoe Corsellis keeps the carbon footprint of her garments low by manufacturing them in London, with fabrics sourced in the U.K. and Germany. She makes them from wood pulp, sea waste and peace silk, considered more humane to silk worms than traditional production processes. A wood pulp gown feels like jersey to the touch.

Belgian designer Sebastiaan de Neubourg is recycling plastic bottles, car dashboards and refrigerators for sunglasses for his brand, W.R.YUMA. Plastic waste is collected and shredded to make 3D printer filament. Transparent frames are made from soda bottles, white ones from refrigerators and black ones from car dashboards.

“Waste, I believe, is design failure,” he said. Fee Gilfeather, sustainability expert at the nonprofit Oxfam, said there’s hope on a larger scale.

“The textile industry is getting close to working out how to do fiber-to-fiber recycling,” she said. “So what that means is that when you take a garment that’s no longer needed, you can break it down into the fibers and turn that back into a raw material to make clothing.”

More celebrities are also playing a role, with some turning to vintage.

Amal Clooney, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle and Kim Kardashian West have been wearing more vintage pieces and re-wearing outfits, something unheard of among many celebrities. Billie Eilish recently wore a custom upcycled outfit from Burberry to the American Music Awards.

 

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Asian Americans

On Screen, Asian Americans Rarely Get Into Christmas Spirit

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With its multiple teenage characters, the Netflix movie “Let It Snow” is a mix of holiday feels and a John Hughes comedy. But unlike those genres, the movie, about a small town besieged by a Christmas Eve snowstorm, has Asian American characters front and center who aren’t there just to be comedic relief.

Jacob Batalon (Marvel’s “Spider-Man” movies) and Anna Akana (“Ant-Man”) play an aspiring deejay and closeted lesbian cheerleader, respectively. For Akana, nothing felt token about the role.

“I never felt like I’d been cast because ‘This girl checks the gay box and the Asian box,’” said Akana, who is of Japanese, Filipino and Hawaiian descent. “We were finally seeing the world as we’ve known about it, and Hollywood is slowly catching up.”

With the yuletide season in full swing, studios and TV networks have been unwrapping tales that are predominantly white Christmases. The diversity issue was skewered on “Saturday Night Live” in a skit about the Hallmark Channel, which generated a firestorm over the weekend for dropping ads featuring a same-sex couple. Except for Universal Pictures’ “Last Christmas” with “Crazy Rich Asians” stars Henry Golding and Michelle Yeoh, Asian American Pacific Islanders are rarely leads in the genre. Latinos also rarely make the cut. However, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of black actors in movies from Hallmark, Lifetime and niche outlets like the Oprah Winfrey Network.

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Striped Cat

‘Cats’ Reviews: Everyone Hates the Movie ‘Cats,’ and it’s so Funny

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The movie Cats is coming out this weekend. Starting with the first glimpse of the trailer, which showed bizarre, nightmarish people-cats played by celebrities, prancing and singing around, it became clear that this movie was going to be something.

The reviews are in now, and yes, this movie SURE IS SOMETHING. It’s also apparently terrible, but in the best kind of way that has reviewers not even bother to hem and haw like they usually do, instead just rejoicing in how terrible this ridiculous movie is.

“Oh God, my eyes,” wrote Ty Burr in the Boston Globe.

“Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it’s hard to know if you ever really knew anything – except that C is for Cats, C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves,” Leah Greenblatt wrote in EW.

 

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Star Wars Rise of Skywalker

J.J. Abrams Reveals His Biggest ‘Star Wars’ Regret

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Movie directors tend to be their own biggest critics, often bemoaning how difficult it can be to watch their finished films while their inner perfectionist nitpicks the most minuscule details and wishes they’d made different decisions in the filming and editing processes.

For J.J. Abrams, he has one big regret when it comes to 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens — a specific scene at the end that still haunts him.

“There’s this moment where [Chewbacca] is with Finn, who’s been wounded and they’re taking him in and he passes Leia,” Abrams explained to Yahoo Enteratinment while promoting the Skywalker Saga closer, The Rise of Skywalker, out Friday. Leia (Carrie Fisher) is still in the mourning process, having just lost (spoiler) Han Solo (Harrison Ford), and, as fans pointed out. Han was also Chewie’s long-term co-pilot and best friend. And in that scene, Chewie and Leia, who have known each other for 30-plus years, completely ignore each other: Chewie walks into the base carrying Finn, while Leia rushes to embrace Rey.

“What it looks like is Chewy is walking past Leia and not acknowledging her or giving her [a] moment. Meanwhile, Leia’s looking at Rey,” Abrams explained. “But in my mind it was Chewie was focusing on Finn and Leia was focusing on Rey, and vice versa. So it seemed like Chewie was just a stranger to Leia in the shadow of this unbearable tragedy. So that was one of those things that was unintended and completely my responsibility.”

Fans bemoaned the lost interaction between two of Star Wars’ most iconic characters, with some theorizing why Chewie and Leia failed to embrace each other. Turns out there was no reason: It was a gaffe.

“The truth is there are always going to be things that you,  as well intended as one might be, that will miss or not quite see. And I find in most cases the fans are right,” Abrams said.

“I felt badly about it. But it was one of those things that I should have been more on top of in that moment. But there are a number of things that you’re juggling, it can get pretty overwhelming. But again it was totally my fault.”

 

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Earth

Entertainment Earth Has Everything You Need For Under The Tree!

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From the Simpsons to Transformers to the MCU, Entertainment Earth has Christmas gifts for you!

Entertainment Earth has announced its five-day “Under the Tree” sale which can save customers up to 75% off select toys and collectibles, making the Christmas shopping even easier this season! We’ve selected a few of our favorite items and deals to share with you as the sale starts today and runs until December 15th!

Bring home The Simpsons today with these fun vinyl figures from Funko Pop! that feature a number of characters from the long-lasting animated sitcom. For over 30 seasons fans have tuned in every weekend to watch Homer and his all-too-relatable family go on one adventure after another in the city of Springfield and beyond.

We selected the sisters of The Simpsons family, Lisa (complete with saxophone) and Maggie as well as Grampa Abe Simpson to provide a solid base for any collection. And we just had to include this amazing Radioactive Man Funko vinyl figure as well. “Up and Atom!”

While it may seem like an odd couple situation at first, we love our aliens and they come in many cinematic forms, from Robots in Disguise to chest-bursting Xenomorphs! The War For Cybertron: Siege line is the latest from Hasbro’s Transformers: Generations figures and EE has an awesome Wave 2 case that includes Optimus Prime and Soundwave!

As for Alien, MAFEX has created this amazing Xenomorph figure based on the designs from the original film, which were created by artist H.R. Giger. The figure includes unique joints to replicate the posing of the Xenomorph in the film and comes with a Facehugger and Chestburster accessories!

Marvel fans can bring home a few dynamic pieces from Entertainment Earth this Christmas as well, with huge savings on action figures and statues. While we may have lost the cinematic version of the character in Avengers: Endgame, fans can still celebrate their love of Iron Man with this beautiful ARTFX statue 1:10 scale statue.

Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe can celebrate one of the film studios milestones with this amazing Black Panther resin statue based on the character as seen in the hit MCU film. The statue sits on a rock Panther base and stands at approx. 14″ tall.

 

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