Month: December 2020

Chloë Grace Moretz (Kickass) plays a female WWII pilot on a secret mission who must contend with an evil gremlin attempting to dismantle her B-17 in mid-air in Shadow in the Cloud, a horror/action film that debuted at the Toronto International's Film Festival in September, and is now coming to VOD on New Year's Day.  Based on the trailer, it looks like a mashup of Gremlins meets Snakes on a Plane, with some over-the-top Vin Diesel-style action tossed in for good measure.

Set in 1943, the film had a somewhat rocky road on the way to completion. Max Landis—creator of the BBC's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, based on the Douglas Adams novels, and son of Director John Landis—penned the original draft script, and relative newcomer Roseanne Liang was hired to direct. Then Landis was accused of sexual and emotional abuse by eight women and dropped from the project. (In a since-deleted tweet, Director Josh Trank, who worked with Landis on the 2012 low budget superhero movie, Chronicle, said he believed the accusations and had even banned Landis from the set during Chronicle's principal photography.)

Liang overhauled the script herself, punching up the female empowerment angle while still maintaining the horror/action thriller sensibility. The film premiered at a Toronto drive-in, and proved hugely popular with festival attendees, even winning the People's Choice Award for Midnight Madness. (It already holds a 74 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) All that buzz led to a distribution deal with Vertical Entertainment and Redbox Entertainment, purportedly worth about $5 million—apparently the first "drive-in theater movie" to be so acquired, per Deadline Hollywood.

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  At 4:45pm CT on Wednesday, SN8 took to the skies. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

As the Sun sunk toward the South Texas horizon, a fantastical-looking spaceship rose into the reddening sky.

It was, in a word, epic.

Powered by three Raptor rocket engines, SpaceX's 50-meter-tall Starship vehicle climbed out over the Gulf of Mexico. After a couple of minutes, one by one, the Raptor engines blinked off by design. It was not immediately clear how high Starship reached, but the craft appeared to come close to the 12.5km ceiling on the flight test.

Enlarge (credit: Cruise)

Cruise, the self-driving company that counts Honda and GM as major shareholders, has begun testing self-driving Chevy Bolts with no one in the driver's seat, the company announced on Wednesday. A safety operator in the passenger seat has the ability to stop the car in an emergency but not "traditional driver controls," according to the company. The car will also be monitored remotely.

Cruise has been testing its self-driving cars for more than 2 million miles. But like other companies with advanced self-driving technologies, Cruise has to decide when and how to make the leap from testing prototypes to releasing a commercial product. Launching a product before it's ready could get someone killed.

Cruise's leading competitor, Alphabet-owned Waymo, launched a self-driving taxi service in the Phoenix suburbs in 2017. Initially, Waymo had safety drivers behind the wheel and its hand-picked passengers were all under nondisclosure agreements. It wasn't until October 2020—more than three years later—that Waymo finally began offering fully driverless rides to the general public with no NDA.