Parkland parents criticize video game
A computer video game that would allow players to recreate school shootings by stalking school hallways and racking up kills has been condemned as insensitive and inappropriate by the parents of students who were shot to death during the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
The game is titled Active Shooter and is slated for a June 6 release. It is branded as a “SWAT simulator” that lets players choose between being an active shooter terrorizing a school or the SWAT team responding to the shooting.
It was developed by Revived Games and published by the company Acid, which has said it plans to sell the game for $5 to $10 (U.S.) on the video-game marketplace Steam and release an alternate “civilian” mode.
Acid said in a blog post last week that its game does not promote violence and that it might remove the shooter’s role in the game.
On Sunday, Ryan Petty, the father of a 14-year-old Marjory Stoneman Douglas High student killed during the Feb. 14 shooting, called for the game’s release to be cancelled.
“It’s disgusting that Valve Corp. is trying to profit from the glamourization of tragedies affecting our schools across the country,” Petty, who is running for Broward County School Board, said in a statement.
Andrew Pollack, the father of 18-year-old Meadow Pollack, who was killed at the high school, said “sick people” are behind the game’s creation and release. He said these kinds of games desensitize young people to the tragedy that befell his daughter. The Associated Press
Oscar winner to direct new Bond
James Bond will return under the command of a new director.
Eon Productions and MetroGoldwyn-Mayer Studios have announced that Danny Boyle, who won the Best Director Oscar in 2009 for Slumdog Millionaire, will direct the series’ latest instalment. Daniel Craig, as previously announced, will reprise his role as the suave and increasingly surly British spy.
Boyle will direct a screenplay written by a longtime collaborator, John Hodge, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1997 for his screenplay for Boyle’s Trainspotting.
Last year, it was announced that Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who collaborated on the screenplays for the last six Bond films, would return to write the new script. Those plans have apparently changed.
The new film will also be the first Bond movie since 2008’s Quantum of Solace not to be directed by Sam Mendes.
Filming is to start in December. The movie will be released first in Britain on Oct. 25, 2019, with a North American release on Nov. 8, 2019. The New York Times
Solo’s 4-day box office just $103M
Never tell Han Solo the odds. And given the woeful opening of Solo: A Star Wars Story, Han might have a bad feeling about other less than stellar numbers.
Solo defied weeks of industry projections by landing below even conservative estimates, which had the first Skywalkerfree Star Wars feature film opening in the ball park of $130 million (all figures U.S.) for the Memorial Day weekend.
Disney/Lucasfilm’s Solo instead had a $103 million domestic debut for the four-day holiday and grossed just $84.8 million for the standard three-day weekend — or barely one-third of what Disney’s first Star Wars reboot, The Force Awakens, opened to ($248 million) less than three years ago.
Even worse news for Solo was how badly it tallied overseas. Failing to gain much traction in such major markets as China ($10 million), Solo grossed only $65 million on foreign shores. The Washington Post
K-pop album hits No. 1 in U.S.
K-pop has finally gone to No. 1.
Love Yourself: Tear, the new album by the Korean boy band BTS, has opened at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. This makes it the first entrant of the exuberant Korean K-pop genre to reach the top of the album chart, six years after Psy’s song and video “Gangnam Style” brought the style to the U.S. mainstream.
Love Yourself: Tear had the equivalent of 135,000 sales in the United States in its first week out, of which 100,000 were copies sold as a full album, according to Nielsen. The seven-member group performed its hit “Fake Love” at the Billboard Music Awards last week, where BTS also won top social artist.
Not only is Love Yourself: Tear the first K-pop album to reach No. 1, but it is the first foreignlanguage album to go to the top since Il Divo’s Ancora in 2006. The New York Times
It’s marriage, actually for Grant
Love, Actually star Hugh Grant is a married man for the first time at 57.
The British star tied the knot with his Swedish television producer girlfriend Anna Eberstein, 39, in a low-key civil ceremony Friday.
“I’m not really a believer in marriage,” Grant told People in 2015. “I’ve seen very few good examples, maybe five, in my life, but I think otherwise it’s a recipe for mutual misery.” USA Today