Movies Gossip

The passengers of Manifest‘s Flight 828 share a very surprising connection, it is hinted in a sizzle reel that premiered Saturday at New York Comic Con and now can only be seen on TVLine.

Much of the three-plus minute video recaps the events of the hit freshman drama’s first two episodes. But at the 2:45 mark, it begins sampling scenes from Episode 3, which is titled “Turbulence” and airs this Monday at 10/9c.

In that episode, Michaela (played by Melissa Roxburgh) and Ben (Josh Dallas) investigate the murder of Kelly, the fellow passenger who had just been on the news sharing conspiracy theories about the flight that somehow landed five-and-a-half years into the future. Afterward, a shadowy… something… showed up at Kelly’s home to splatter her brain matter across her flat screen.

Why did Kelly defy the feds to go on TV? What has medical researcher Saanvi (Parveen Kaur) discovered about the passengers’ deeper connection? And whom in her life should Michaela now be concerned about? Press play above to get those new reveals.

Elsewhere in Episode 3, Ben struggles to accept the life Grace led in his absence, while Olive and Cal realize that after years apart, being twins is harder than they thought.

Want more scoop on Manifest, or for any other show? Email [email protected] and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line.

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TORONTO (Reuters) - “Hotel Mumbai,” about the 2008 attack on a hotel in the Indian city, received a standing ovation at its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, and the cast and filmmakers said they believe that’s because of the human portrayal not only of the victims but also the perpetrators.`

Actor Nazanin Boniadi arrives for the world premiere of Hotel Mumbai at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in Toronto, Canada, September 7, 2018. REUTERS/Chris Helgren

The film, starring Dev Patel, Armie Hammer and Jason Isaacs, recounts the attack on Mumbai’s luxury Taj Mahal hotel, where dozens of guests and hotel workers were killed during a three-day siege carried out by Pakistan-based Islamist militants.

Actor Dev Patel meets with fans as he arrives for the world premiere of Hotel Mumbai at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in Toronto, Canada, September 7, 2018. REUTERS/Chris Helgren

Most of the film is told from the point of view of those trapped in the hotel, and also from that of the gunmen.

“You had a whole lot of people from different backgrounds, racial, ethnic, from different socioeconomic groups who came together in the face of real adversity to survive,” Australian director Anthony Maras told a news conference on Saturday.

“As Dev (Patel) said yesterday, ‘it’s an anthem of resistance.’”

Slideshow (5 Images)

The cast said the film, which also uses television footage of the siege, brought some of them to tears when they watched the finished version for the first time. Hammer, who plays American hotel guest David, said that the script was “dripping in humanity.”

“You see the toll the attack has on the guests and the staff of the hotel, but you also see it, really for the first time that I can think of, on the actual perpetrators,” Hammer said.

The Hollywood Reporter praised the film’s “nail-biting detail and ... an impressive you-are-there quality,” while The Wrap said it “delivers a show-stopping account.”

The siege at the Taj Mahal Hotel was one of a coordinated series of attacks across Mumbai in which more than 160 people were killed and hundreds wounded.

“Hotel Mumbai” follows a 2013 Bollywood film, “The Attacks of 26/11,” that was told from the point of view of the Mumbai police.

Lucy Mecklenburgh slams Roxanne Pallett's apology as a 'performance' and says star 'needs help'... as she reveals she's more in love with Ryan Thomas than ever

By Charlotte Dean For Mailonline

Published: 00:02 BST, 10 September 2018 | Updated: 01:12 BST, 10 September 2018

Adrianne Lenker dies within two minutes of her solo record abysskiss. It is not a dramatic passing. Over feather-light fingerpicking, she simply sings, “See my death become a trail/And the trail leads to a flower.” Her voice is sweet, the tone muted, nothing but her breath and guitar strings. The transformation sounds peaceful, maybe even a relief, a dispersing of stored energies.

Lenker recorded abysskiss quickly, in about a week, and the entire album has this exhaled quality. It doesn’t feel worked over, or rushed—it feels focused and unconcerned with your comprehension. The palette is muted and spare, exactly one electric guitar chugging away quietly on one song (“out of your mind.”) The rest of the album seems to be rustling toward some private horizon, a gleam in its eye. You don’t listen to it so much as follow it, the way you might track a wild animal that showed up in your yard. It is pastoral music, but not a barefoot-in-a-field way; more of a don’t-eat-these-berries sort of way, a world of mystery and menace whose secrets will always be held from us.

As the leader of Big Thief and on her own, Lenker writes powerfully about secrets of all kinds. The shared secrets of intimacy, the buried secrets of family, the impenetrable secrets of nature—they all swirl like sediment in a wine glass. abysskiss thrums quietly with the unease of these secrets, of mingled trauma and love. “Hold me in your heat” she whispers on “terminal paradise”—an animal plea, a child’s plea. On “out of your mind,” she sings, “My love pulls the trigger on you,” and on “10 miles” she kisses a lover “very hard and wild.” Her path is a prickly one, somewhere between savage and tender.

You don’t hear the savagery at first. It takes several listens before the delicate fingerpicking and the whisper of her voice turns dark. Her lyrics accrete alarming imagery in quick clumps, in the “little red flower on your wrist” on “blue and red horses,” or the “sharp glass loosing of your best friend” on “what can you say.” The characters in her songs always seem one wrong step away from leaking blood or spilling someone else’s. The more time you spend cocking an ear to her music, the more foreboding her world seems, the more likely it will end in pain.

This world is not that far removed from her work in Big Thief, but there is a solitary chill here that isn’t only or entirely because this is her solo work. Her songs for Big Thief bustle with characters, people with places and names and specific histories. She was a person rooted in and tethered to society, tweaking and exploring its bonds with her writing but still embedded within it. abysskiss is a taste of what Lenker’s imagination can do when it is set free down its own dreamy paths, away from these shared histories. There are almost no names here, just a world of beauty and terror, of worms dropped into beaks, horse tails flicking away flies. She is like Annie Dillard in her 1974 Pulitzer prize-winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a dreamy soul wandering alone in nature and marveling at the brutality and the grace she finds there.

The album is also a quiet showcase for her melodic imagination. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar is the sort of medium that reveals the kind of musician you are at your core—like playing solo Bach, it leaves you with nothing to hide behind. You can learn the basics of the technique in two hours and then spend a lifetime getting lost inside the possibilities. The best and most inventive players treat the acoustic guitar more like a harp—Elliott Smith, Kurt Vile, Jessica Pratt—and Lenker has this same flickering touch. In her hands, guitar notes fan outward into little constellations. The chord voicings never settle entirely, just like her voice, which can sound soothing or alien, depending on her inflection. The mix of feelings—seething disquiet, lurking menace, breath-to-ear intimacy, lurching uncertainty—brings to mind the Elliott Smith. As with his music, you can read detect almost any intense emotion in its quiet thrum if you need to find it there.

She closes the album, as she opens it, with her own death. She is in someone’s arms this time, and there is a brief hint of the older, more sexualized meaning of “to die.” The song is called “10 miles,” and it is the closest we get to the warmth of Big Thief. She and her lover wake early on a farm. They feed horses. They read together. But it turns out that “nothing is real,” and this too has been a figment of Lenker’s imagination—the woman of the song is ten miles away. Lenker is still alone, dreaming aloud, and as the album ends, she is once dying once more, gazing up into the sky.

Q4 may not be quite as intense a period for many people in the music industry as it used to be in the physical era, given the fact that an album released early in the year (or in Ed Sheeran’s case, early in the previous year) can still be streaming up a storm in December. But when it comes to smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home, Q4 absolutely is the bumper sales quarter, as people rush to get their first (or second, third, fourth…) talking speaker for Christmas.

Focus on the ‘first’ there – millions of people are going to be interacting with a smart speaker for the first time this Christmas, so improvements to the capabilities of those speakers’ voice assistants (especially for music) are notable. Which brings us to Amazon Alexa’s latest new features, which add to its music-discovery capabilities in an interesting way.

It’s partly about a proper conversation: rather than making a single request (‘Alexa, play Drake’ or ‘Alexa, play Christmas songs’ etc) people will now be able to start a request with ‘Alexa, help me find…’. For example, ‘help me find dinner music’ or ‘help me find a holiday playlist’. Alexa will then ask some more questions to fine-tune whatever it eventually plays in response.

Amazon also says that there’ll soon be an ‘Alexa, recommend some new music’ command as well as ‘Alexa, what should I play?’ – in both cases, Alexa will also follow up with more questions, using the answers and its existing data on your listening habits to refine its recommendations. Meanwhile, new commands including ‘Alexa, I like this song’ and ‘Alexa, I don’t like this’ will also help people to tune Alexa’s understanding of their tastes – complete with a follow-up ‘Alexa, play music I like’ command to focus playback on songs that have this seal of approval.

This is all fun for owners of Echos and other Alexa-powered devices, as is the nudge towards a generic ‘Alexa, play music’ command that will use the new conversational features, as well as that archive of listening data. It’s a concept that’s been talked about and explored a lot in recent years, from Spotify’s Paul Lamere dreaming of “a music player where you hit the play button” back in 2014 to Deezer’s early launch of its ‘Flow’ feature the same year.

In the smart-speaker context, the thought of people’s commands getting simpler and more general, requiring the recommendation algorithms to be even smarter, is an important trend. Not least if you’re one of the growing number of label staff tasked with trying to better understand (if not quite reverse-engineer) these algorithms, to understand how to give your music the best chance of being chosen by Alexa (or Google Assistant, or Siri…) as they get more conversational with their users – and smarter about interpreting their listening habits.

Stuart Dredge

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Allen gets credit for establishing the blueprint for most late-night TV talk shows: his Tonight! presented an opening monologue, a faithful announcer-sidekick (in this case, Gene Rayburn), a desk and living-room arrangement of furniture for guests, room for "real people" to participate via outdoor segments and (for those with strange talents, like one wood-crunching man billed as the "human termite") guest appearances, and a mix of sketch comedy, musical performances, and casual talk. ...

Because Allen's Tonight! show was performed entirely live and so few tapes or kinescopes survived, most of the memories attached with that show are blurred with his work on subsequent talk and variety series, for which he recycled many of his most successful characters and bits—this time for posterity. Yet every incarnation of The Tonight Show since Steve Allen has borrowed from him to varying degrees, while making their own stamp on the show and on TV history. "Let me give you the bad news first," Allen had said as part of his opening remarks on that very first Tonight! episode. "This program is going to go on forever." He meant until the wee hours of the morning—but was telling the truth in more ways than one.

—Excerpted from Dictionary of Teleliteracy: Television's 500 Biggest Hits, Misses and Events