Review: ‘Joker’ standalone feature is a chilling origin story

“Smile, though your heart is aching

Smile, even though it’s breaking

When there are clouds in the sky

you’ll get by” – Nat King Cole


Although the song itself encapsulates Joker’s state of mind, it beggars a question as to what causes the heartaches to the emerald haired villain. If one wants to know about the proverbial and sometimes literal pushes that drove Joker to lunacy, look no further than Todd Phillip’s standalone feature.

Until now, we harboured empathy for the whole gunning down of Wayne family and the way Bruce grows up to be Batman but here Todd Phillips offers a deep and visceral insight into the mind of DC’s most noted arch-nemesis.

Joaquin Phoenix

Delivering a career-defining performance, Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of Joker evokes the most raw emotions felt by the victims of late-era capitalism where the class-divide is characterised by establishment’s stigmatisation of the poor, jobless and disenfranchised.

Living in a squalor with his old mother, Arthur Pleck makes ends meet with lowering stabs at stand-up comedy and clown performances. Afflicted by pathological laughter, the character’s gradual descent into insanity also marks a precursor to a grotesque form of self-discovery.  Pleck’s criminality is a direct response to the torment meted out by society that is torn asunder by dire poverty and protests. While Thomas Wayne’s dismissal of the ignored section of society reflects his complacency, Joker’s crimes, by extension, ignite a Lenin-style city-wide movement albeit with the slant of clown-masks against the 80’s Gotham City’s bourgeois.


“Afflicted by pathological laughter, the character’s gradual descent into insanity also marks a precursor to a grotesque form of self-discovery.”


Todd Phillips takes liberty with the origin story, advancing his own spin to it. The movie takes chilling turns in joker’s journey. From being a failed comedian to a menacing Clown Prince of Crime, we see the gradual character development and the motivations that were hitherto enigmatic and nebulous to most of us, made clear through the course of the screenplay.


What makes Joker the biggest archvillain?

History of child abuse?  Mental illness? Society’s heartlessness? or Something even larger than all of that put together? The overarching theme is pretty relevant in the current scenario. The movie could very well be a clarion call to the shape that the world could take. It calls upon humanity to have a collective introspection about the way we treat one another. It’s the erosion of regard and sensitivity for the impoverished that creates monsters like him.

Between jaw-dropping violence, vintage backdrops, chase scenes and slender dance movements, Gotham’s most grotesque arch-nemesis is established.

A must watch movie that merits an Oscar! ••

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From nothing to something

Feeling uninspired? That likely won’t be the case after watching this amazing collaboration from Andrew Vucko and co.

Outfit7 celebrates its 10th anniversary and 10 Bn downloads of of ‘Talking Tom’

From a start-up with a chart-topping virtual friend game to an entertainment company with fans in every country on the planet, Outfit7 extraordinary journey is the mobile gaming success story known around the world. This year, on its 10th anniversary, the company behind the award-winning Talking Tom and Friends franchise is celebrating an incredible 10 billion downloads of its mobile games, solidifying its place as one of the top 10 mobile gaming publishers in the world.

“It’s amazing to think an entire generation has grown up with Talking Tom. We’ve connected with people from all over the world and brought them excitement, friendship and, most importantly, fun. It’s been an amazing 10 years with so much growth and so many humbling accomplishments, but we’re not slowing down anytime soon. Ten years and 10 billion downloads – this is only the beginning,” said Outfit7 CEO Xinyu Qian.

In 2009, Outfit7 set out to entertain the world. By 2010, its original Talking Tom Cat game became the most downloaded game of the year. From there, the company only grew, with games like My Talking Tom, Talking Tom Gold Run, My Talking Angela, and Talking Tom Hero Dash ranking in the top 10 charts in more than 100 countries. With the highly successful release of My Talking Tom 2 in 2018, Outfit7 had become the world’s leading publisher for Tamagotchi-style mobile games.

As Outfit7 enters its second decade of business, the company embarks on an ambitious new phase, as announced at its 10th-anniversary event in Barcelona last week. First, it is set to release a bigger and better virtual friend game, further solidifying the company’s reputation as the leading innovator in this category. In addition to other much-loved characters, the game will star the franchise’s brand new character, Talking Becca, who will be making her dramatic debut in Season 4 of the award-winning “Talking Tom and Friends” animated series. Fast on its way to being a multi-brand powerhouse, Outfit7 also announced the upcoming release of a completely new IP, a team-based PvP arena game with a twist.

It’s been a decade rich with fun, laughter, and high-quality entertainment for Outfit7. And, with so many new adventures on the horizon, fans can expect the excitement, wonder, and game-changing innovations to continue for many years to come. Happy Birthday, Outfit7!

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Logitech G introduces PRO X Mechanical Gaming Keyboard with new swappable switches

Logitech G, a brand of Logitech and innovator of gaming technologies and gear, unveiled the Logitech G PRO X Mechanical Gaming Keyboard. This new keyboard features multiple switch types including Clicky, Linear and Tactile in a tenkeyless design to fit the needs of current and aspiring esports pros.

“I loved the original PRO keyboard, but really wanted a version with clicky switches. Now that I have a PRO keyboard with blue switches, I can’t wait to use this in our next tournament,”  said League of Legends  TSM Broken Blade.

Designed to the exacting standards of the world’s top esports professionals, the PRO X gaming keyboard is built to provide esports professionals and competitive gamers with competition-grade reliability and features designed to enhance gaming without getting in the way.

“Gamers, especially pros, have different preferences when it comes to keyboard switches.That’s why we wanted to design and build a new PRO keyboard that featured swappable switches. By giving gamers the ability to choose the right switch to match their style of play, we’ve delivered a new level of performance that is optimized for each individual’s unique needs,” said Logitech Gaming vice president and general manager Ujesh Desai.

The new keyboard builds upon the pre-approved Logitech G PRO Gaming Keyboard’s space-saving tenkeyless design, making it easy to pack for tournament travel and freeing up table space for low-sensitivity mouse movement. In addition, a detachable Micro-USB connector ensures that the cable won’t break at the connection point when bouncing around in a bag and transported between events. The three-pronged design features support arms for an easy, reliable connection. The keyboard also features customizable RGB lighting which can be stored to an onboard memory profile.

The Logitech G PRO Mechanical Gaming Keyboard comes in two variants which are expected to be available in October of 2019; the Logitech G PRO X Mechanical Gaming Keyboard retails for $149.99 with user-swappable GX Clicky, Linear or Tactile switches, and the Logitech PRO Mechanical Gaming Keyboard with non-swappable clicky switches retails for $129.99. Packs of 92 replacement GX Clicky, Linear or Tactile switches for the PRO X keyboard can be purchased for $49.99.

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Little Airplane Productions, Fantawild Animation and Studio 100 Media join forces for Doctor Space

Little Airplane Productions, Fantawild Animation (China), and Studio 100 Media announced today that they will collaborate on Doctor Space, a new animated comedy for four to  seven year-olds.  The companies plan to co-invest in the production of the brand-new TV series and IP initiated by Little Airplane.

The team behind Doctor Space is impressive: The pilot was written by Emmy Award- winning creator/writer/composer Billy Lopez (Welcome To The Wayne), ( The Wonder Pets ) and the show’s educational curriculum was written by Beth Richman, Ed.M. (Super Wings).  Doctor Space is the first new series that was created by Josh Selig since his New York-based studio, Little Airplane, was acquired by Studio 100.

Little Airplane CEO Josh Selig says, “I’m thrilled to be reconnecting with Billy Lopez. He’s absolutely the funniest writer I know, and Doctor Space is the first comedy we’ve worked closely on together since ‘The Wonder Pets!’.  I’m really excited to see the show come to life with great partners like Fantawild and Studio 100 Media.”

Studio 100 Media CEO Martin Krieger comments, “For me, Doctor Space is one of the most hilarious, whacky and witty show concepts that I have seen lately. Collaborating with the brilliant teams of Fantawild and Little Airplane on the series and IP will be extraordinary.”

Fantawild Animation Inc Executive President of Fantawild Holdings Inc. & General Manager Daisy Shang says, “Doctor Space is full of imagination and humor, and it has great potential to become a phenomenal space-themed hit among kids in China and all over the world.  We’re very excited to be teaming up with our friends from Studio 100 and Little Airplane to co-develop this show.”

Doctor Space follows the misadventures of Doctor Space, a brilliant  nine year old doctor who runs Healox, the galaxy’s first and only floating alien emergency room. Here, Doctor Space and his oddball ER team treat a wide range of bizarre alien ailments, such as Two-Headed Typhus, which causes its victims to grow a second head that won’t stop digressing. (Doctor Space also developed the universe’s first holographic bottom-sling to help a teenaged Pythagor who sprained his behind whilst surfing the Milky Way.)  Every episode is filled with raucous and non-stop alien medical ridiculousness.  Doctor Space relies heavily on his friend and business partner, Azod, a ten year old girl who keeps Doctor Space and Healox from falling apart each day.

Doctor Space is an animated comedy (52 x 11min) for four to seven year-old kids and has a soft educational curriculum with a focus on Learning Through Trial and Error and Helping Others.  The series will be introduced at MIPJunior. and MIPCOM.

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Japanese Film Festival 2019 launches with the India Premiere of ‘Weathering with You’

Japanese Film Festival 2019 in India hosted by the Japan Foundation, New Delhi, in partnership with PVR Cinemas, and powered by ENEOS, opened with the screening of “Weathering with You” at PVR Select CITYWALK, New Delhi. The movie will be released pan-India across nearly 25 cities. The highly anticipated and acclaimed anime film is scheduled for a nationwide release on 11 October 2019 by VKAAO- India’s first theatre-on-demand platform backed by BookMyShow and PVR Pictures.

The Opening Ceremony of the Festival in Delhi was attended by the widely celebrated director of Weathering with You Makoto Shinkai. The ceremony witnessed the presence of Japanese bureaucrats, industry stalwarts, film critics, and members of the Japan Foundation. The event was graced by Japan Embassy Ambassador Extraordinary His Excellency Kenji Hiramatsu and Plenipotentiary and Japan Foundation New Delhi director-general Kaoru Miyamoto.

The evening marked the first-ever India Premiere of a Japanese film with the screening of Weathering with You, which has become a global phenomenon since its release in Japan in July 2019. The film is Japan’s Official entry to the Academy Awards 2020, becoming the first anime film to be submitted by Japan for the Oscars in over 20 years.

Marking the occasion, Makoto Shinkai, Japanese filmmaker said, “I am very excited to be here in India for the premiere of Weathering With You. The enthusiasm and response have been overwhelming so far. Anime is a popular genre in Japan and it makes me so happy to see a similar popularity in India too. I hope the audience will love my film. I would like to thank Japan Foundation, PVR Cinemas and VKAAO for making this happen. I wish all the luck for a successful Japanese Film Festival 2019.”

PVR CEO Cinemas Gautam Dutta said, “Quality, diversity and expansion have always been the three focus areas for us. Being a part of the entertainment industry, it is important to explore and strive to offer enhanced experiences. With an increase in exposure to global content, there is a significant surge in demand for international projects across markets. The strategy is to empower people with quality choices and cater to a wider set of audience.”

Commenting on the festival, he said, “We congratulate the Japan Embassy and the Japan Foundation on the opening of the third edition of the Festival. The response so far has been overwhelming so we are very positive about the success of the Festival.”

The six-month-long touring Festival will showcase several popular titles like Dance with Me, Lu over the Wall, Shoplifters, Your Name, Perfect World, Bento Harassment, Children of the sea, Kingdom, My Dad is a Heel Wrestler! Tokyo Ghoul, The Fable etc. Starting in Delhi and Gurugram, today; the Japanese Film Festival will travel to five cities of India, namely Mumbai, Kolkata, Guwahati, Bengaluru, and Chennai. The films selected will be screened in Japanese with English subtitles for the viewer’s convenience.

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Making The Lonely Island’s Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience

How production studio Lord Danger helped The Lonely Island realize their crazy Netflix visual poem tribute to ‘80s baseball.

Comedy Trio, The Lonely Island—Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone—met in junior high and have been collaborating on creative projects for years. After a longtime stint with Saturday Night Live, the troupe has lately become known for producing their own viral videos and studio albums.

Among their recent releases is a Netflix comedy special called The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience. Billed as a “visual poem,” the half-hour mockumentary features Samberg and Schaffer as 1980’s baseball legends Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire (a.k.a. the Bash Brothers). The storyline imagines what their rap album and accompanying videos might have been like if they had really captured their experiences chasing the ladies, taking steroids, working out, being rich, and occasionally pondering questions of love and the meaning of life and fame.

For “IHOP Parking Lot” freelance artist Josh Johnson used a modified TurboSquid model, the Everyday Material Collection, C4D and Octane to create a Back to the Future-like car scene.

Mike Diva (Dahlquist), of the LA-based production company, Lord Danger, teamed up with Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer to co-direct the special. Diva also assembled and led Lord Danger’s team of global freelancers who worked on the show from concepting to completion over four months using a combination of Cinema 4D, After Effects, Blender, and Nuke.

A musician and VFX artist, Diva’s career began on YouTube. Millions of people follow his cross-platform work, and he became a sought-after director after co-writing and directing the unsettling Halo Top commercial “Eat the Ice Cream,” which AdWeek named among their Top-10 Ads of 2017.

I asked Diva, and freelance contributors Ethan Chancer, Nick DenBoer, and Josh Johnson to talk about Lord Danger’s work on The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience, which features seven distinctly different music videos sung primarily by Samberg and Schaefer. Here’s what they had to say.

Meleah Maynard: Mike, tell me about Lord Danger.

Mike Diva: Lord Danger is kind of an all-in-one shop, and we specialize in doing stuff that’s a little weird. Josh Shadid, our executive producer, founded the company a few years ago. I do a lot of our music videos and commercials, and we’re dipping our toes into the feature realm as well.

My YouTube work is part of the reason for that. When I started there, I was uploading weird little videos that went viral, and I was able to move on to more commercial work because people liked my style. I kind of pride myself on making stuff that will capture the internet’s attention in one way or another.

After struggling to make the baseball stadium in “Jose and Mark” look cool, Lord Danger brought in artist FMK7 (Vincent Viriot) to design the field in Cinema 4D.

MM: Has Lord Danger worked with The Lonely Island before?

MD: No, but I have. I’ve been a Lonely Island fan for over a decade, and they’re part of the reason I’m so into comedy. I had a meeting with a producer a while ago who told Akiva about me. I didn’t think much would come of it, but then Akiva hit me up to direct some visuals for their live show. They really liked what I did, so they brought me on to co-direct Bash Brothers and this was a very different project for me. I’m used to having three weeks to do a music video, but we had one month for post on seven music videos. It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

MM: How did the process go?

MD: They pretty much dumped all of the songs in my lap and I had a couple of months to come up with styles and treatments for each video. They were super down for everything and we went forward from there.

We shot the majority of the content in four days and had one pickup day in Griffith Park where we shot Andy and Akiva wandering around looking confused. It was funny because I’d be like, ‘Okay, we need a shot of you guys in blindfolds and we’ll figure out where that goes later.’ Those guys are comedic geniuses, but they gave me a lot more creative say than I thought I would have.

FMK7 used C4D to design the mall in “Jose and Mark” before handing it off to Ethan Chancer for camera placement, compositing and lighting.

MM: Ethan, talk about your role.

Ethan Chancer: I’m a freelance director and VFX artist, and Mike and I work together quite frequently. I was really kind of a generalist on this project. I did a lot of 3D modeling, compositing, rendering, lighting, rotoscoping, and camera movement. Whatever was needed, I did. The music videos had different workflows, and some of them I helped with and some I was fully in charge of.

Andy Samberg in a reworked shot from Chancer’s short film, Amara.

MD: Ethan made this really great short film, Amara, when he was teaching himself to use Cinema 4D. It’s really cool, so when we needed artsy shots for some of the special’s interstitial moments, Ethan said we could use some from his short film. We also did some new shots where we took the actress out and replaced her with Andy Samberg doing the same stuff. We all got a kick out of throwing Andy into that beautiful environment, and it worked really well.

EC: I also worked with Mike on a fun scene where Andy’s in a room with a bunch of carboard cutouts of Kathy Ireland. We got the Shutterstock shot of her and I extruded it with a vector spline and projected it on there, using Cinema and Octane. I rebuilt that set in 3D so the light would match the live footage, and I tracked everything in C4D. The only thing real in the shot is Andy. This was more difficult than usual because the lens was so wide.

Of course ‘80s baseball stars dream of having a room filled with Kathy Ireland cutouts.

MM: Josh, what parts of this did you work on?

Josh Johnson: I worked on the intro, “Oakland Nights” and “IHOP Parking Lot”. Officially, I was credited as lead compositor, but I also did a lot of 3D work and some tracking.

Essentially, I was a generalist, which is often my role on projects I work on. For the “IHOP Parking Lot” sequence I handled the shots where a car needed to fly and land. The Back to the Future-like landing shot was complex. I had to make a CG car that looked like the real car in the shot that follows.

Simulations and photoreal cars are not normally things you would greenlight knowing you only had a matter of days to work. But this project was so exciting, everyone on it just wanted to do their best. I started by camera projecting the shot.

Smoke simulation for the car landing shot was made in Turbulence FD inside C4D.

Final comp with CG car and smoke.

JJ: We bought a model online because of our budget and time constraints. I modified it to match the real car as best as possible. I also used Greyscalegorilla’s Everday Material Collection plus I built a car paint material that looked realistically like the real car that was shot.

This was the third time I’ve worked with Mike and Ethan and it was great. It helps that we’re all night owls. I work out of St. Louis, Missouri, so it was important to communicate a lot on Slack and Skype. I think the key to working remotely is communication and kindness.

MM: Nick, describe your contributions the project?

Nick DenBoer: I did some compositing and animation on a couple of sequences in “Bikini Babe Workout.” One of them was a bunch of floating rocks where you see the four of them standing together in a formation that somehow creates a four-parent-baseball baby. I also animated the baby in the floating bubble.

The team at Lord Danger provided me with a pile of assets—3D models, rotoscoped video clips, and green screen footage. With Mike’s direction, I built out the scenes, rendered various objects in Cinema 4D, and composited it all together in After Effects.

Artist Nick DenBoer used C4D, After Effects and Octane Render for these scenes in which some kind of four-parent baseball baby is magically conceived.

MM: “Oakland Nights” stars Jenny Slate and a bunch of silk robes. Talk about that video.

MD: I can say that before this I had no idea how difficult it can be to get silk to look right. We had four different artists work on it and, finally, we found a team that got it right, Mix Collective in Mexico. But even after that, Andy and Akiva wanted changes, so I had to saturate the color to make it black and I added these bouquet crystal lens flares to try to hide the problems as much as possible

MM: What’s Lord Danger working on now?

MD: We just made a video for Lil Nas X’s new single, “Panini”, which just dropped. It was another challenging feat, but I think we made something pretty cool. We’re currently in the process of getting a feature off the ground, too.


Meleah Maynard is a writer and editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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