Month: June 2019

A series adaptation of the Wondery podcast “Over My Dead Body” is in development at the WarnerMedia streaming service from Elizabeth Banks, Variety has learned exclusively from sources. Banks is attached to executive produce and direct the series, which follows Dan and Wendi, two attorneys whose wedding is featured in the New York Times. But
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Expect to have longer conversations with your smart speaker soon: Amazon revealed plans at its Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas Wednesday to give its Alexa smart assistant capabilities to carry on longer conversations, and help consumers with services across different providers. Alexa head scientist Rohit Prasad demonstrated the assistant’s new conversational capabilities, dubbed Alexa Conversations,
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Michael Wolff’s “Siege: Trump Under Fire” looks at the 45th president’s second year in office, detailing everything from a potential indictment to Melania Trump’s mysterious hospitalization. It’s the follow-up to Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” and though this installment likely won’t reach the commercial heights of its predecessor, it’s certainly not lacking in titillating reveals. Several
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BuzzFeed has recruited Shari Cleary, a Viacom veteran who most recently headed Comedy Central’s research team, as senior VP of research and insights. Cleary will oversee all of BuzzFeed’s advertising analytics and will lead the digital-media company’s efforts to establish accurate and standardized distributed, cross-platform measurement. She replaces Edwin Wong, who left BuzzFeed earlier this
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Rolling off Cannes Directors’ Fortnight hit “I Lost My Body,” Charades has boarded another artful animated film, “Unicorn Wars,” Alberto Vázquez’s solo follow-up to “Birdboy: the Forgotten Children.” “Unicorn Wars” tracks two brother teddy bear soldiers, Azulín, who yearn for unicorn blood to be beautiful for ever; and Gordi, who just wants to be accepted
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The bucket bag climbed the ranks of handbag fame four years ago, due in part to minimalist accessories label Mansur Gavriel. It. Was. Everywhere. It’s omniscient presence has caused some to denounce the bag in 2018, but we’re hesitant to give up on the roomy style just yet. Designers are reworking it in oversized beads,
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Amazon worldwide consumer CEO Jeff Wilke gave attendees of the company’s Re:Mars conference a look behind the curtain of content recommendation for Prime Video Wednesday, explaining how the company improved its recommendation algorithms to become twice as good in recommending movies, TV shows and more. “Product discovery was heavily based on human curation and bestsellers
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The recent, and long-deferred, backlash to prosecutor Linda Fairstein’s role in wrongfully convicting the so-called “Central Park Five” has been fascinating to watch unfold — not least because Fairstein’s most significant failing has been understood as such for quite so long, to no apparent effect. The conviction Fairstein obtained was overturned in 2002; since then,
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Nicolas Schmerkin’s Paris-based Autour de Minuit has boarded Alfredo Soderguit and Alejo Schettini’s “Two Little Birds” (“Dos pajaritos”), the first winner of La Liga contest, an award created by Argentina’s Animation!, Spain’s Quirino Awards and Mexico’s Pixelatl Festival, three major events in Ibero-American animation. The project will be pitched at the upcoming Annecy Intl. Animation
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Suggesting once more that audiences are underserved by high-quality independent animation, Studiocanal has closed multiple major territories to “Samsam,” the latest movie from Folivari, headed by Didier Brunner whose producer credits include the Academy Award nominated “The Old Lady and the Pidgeons,” “The Triplets of Belleville,” “The Secret of Kells” and “Ernest & Celestine.” A
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