
Delightful Trailer for Richard Linklater's BLUE MOON Starring Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley — GeekTyrant
While Linklater is known for writing and directing heartfelt fictional dramas, this new film is based on a true story. The synopsis reads:
'Richard Linklater's Blue Moon tells the story of the legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart bravely facing the future as his professional and private life unravel during the opening night party for his former partner Richard Rodgers' hit stage show, Oklahoma! . In 100 minutes, the film unspools in real-time the events in Sardi's bar on the evening of March 31st, 1943.
'It is a meditation on friendship, art & love, featuring a rich tapestry of writers, actors, musicians, friends and protégés – a parade of the famous and the soon-to-be-famous. By the time this night is over, Hart will have confronted both a world irrevocably changed by the war, and the seeming impossibility of love.'
This looks like a great movie, and it has already received great reviews out of its premiere at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. Check out the trailer below, and watch Blue Moon in select theaters this fall, on October 17th.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Gizmodo
2 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
‘Freakier Friday' Barely Scrapes By on Its Nostalgic Charms
Freaky Friday is back after over two decades since we last saw Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan swap bodies thanks to a suitably freaky family curse. However, Disney's new follow-up, in theaters this week, leaning heavily on the charms of a stellar ensemble, is a sequel constantly threatening to fall apart under the weight of uneven execution. In Freaky Friday, it was just mother Tess Coleman (Curtis) and her daughter Anna (Lohan) who swapped bodies, a kooky way for mother and child to better understand each other and come to terms with their respective journeys in life. In Freakier, directed by Nisha Ganatra, Ana is now all grown up herself with a teen daughter (Harper, played by Julia Butters) and ready to marry the father of said daughter's high school nemesis (Eric and Lily, played by Manny Jacinto and Sophia Hammons, respectively). While Tess attempts to help glue the new family dynamic together, there are plenty of interesting cracks forming among all the different relationships among them as they prepare to adapt to this new normal. Which is where, of course, the Coleman family curse triggers, hitting Anna, Tess, Harper, and Lily. With more body swaps this time around, things get convoluted quickly. Lohan is now playing Harper in Anna's Body, while Curtis plays step-sister Lily, and the duo seamlessly falls back in step with one another as they did 22 years ago. They really shine through some of the film's silliest hijinks, even if the setup to those slapstick moments feels nonsensical, even for a comedy. When Lohan and Curtis get to play, however, they give some much-needed depth and heart to the core of the film. Lohan likewise gets to lean into her romantic comedy sensibilities opposite Jacinto, and they make for a sizzling pairing, both in the comedic moments and in the more touching family relationship drama—it's just a shame that there isn't enough of them together in the film to mine that chemistry for all its worth. It takes Freakier far too long to really let us get to know the newcomers in Eric and Lily, their arrival undercut by needlessly overcomplicating Anna's backstory, covering the time between the two films with former high school drama. And that's kind of Freakier's big problem: it feels overstuffed in a lot of ways. Many gags go on for just a bit too long, even before the film digs into body-switching shenanigans, and a lot of the comedy, especially between the two teens, feels more like adults trying to write Gen Z kids rather than feeling particularly contemporary. Butters and Hammons are definitely underserved, having to play Tess and Anna in their teen bodies compared to the other half of the body-swapping drama—Freakier just wastes them until the final act, but it comes too suddenly and too late in the game to have any impact. That overstuffing definitely hits hardest in Anna's arc in the film, having to balance solo-parenting her daughter with her career managing an upcoming music artist, Ella (the scene-stealing Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). There's just too much going on that the film never does justice to, especially when it comes to why Anna left behind her own musical career with Pinkslip. For a comedy that also happens to run nearly two hours long, Freakier feels like it has too many characters in the mix, leaving so many of them (and the film's gags) getting short-changed trying to balance it all. What is most frustrating is that Freakier's smart updates to the body-swapping 'lore,' combined with the ensemble cast's chemistry selling it all in the first place, really work, only for the film itself to buckle under stereotypical constraints of the comedy genre. It's a movie that feels like someone kept interfering to add more jokes, throwing off the vibe of the film (alongside some questionable soundtrack choices, including not one, but two Chappell Roan needle drops that really just make it feel like someone realized she was having her moment last year, and was needed to make the film feel contemporary). The sheer force of Lohan and Curtis' dynamic getting to return to these characters brings some appeal to Freakier Friday (as do Manny Jacinto's charms and arms), but it's only barely enough to make up for the film's messy, overstuffed feeling, making this long-awaited return more of a Forgettable Friday than a particularly Freaky one. Freakier Friday hits theaters August 8. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.


The Verge
2 minutes ago
- The Verge
Grok's ‘spicy' video setting instantly made me Taylor Swift nude deepfakes
The 'spicy' mode for Grok's new generative AI video tool feels like a lawsuit waiting to happen. While other video generators like Google's Veo and OpenAI's Sora have safeguards in place to prevent users from creating NSFW content and celebrity deepfakes, Grok Imagine is happy to do both simultaneously. In fact, it didn't hesitate to spit out fully uncensored topless videos of Taylor Swift the very first time I used it — without me even specifically asking the bot to take her clothes off. Grok's Imagine feature on iOS lets you generate pictures with a text prompt, then turn them quickly into video clips with four presets: 'Custom,' 'Normal,' 'Fun,' and 'Spicy.' While image generators often shy away from producing recognizable celebrities, I asked it to generate 'Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys' and was met with a sprawling feed of more than 30 images to pick from, several of which already depicted Swift in revealing clothes. From there, all I had to do was open a picture of Swift in a silver skirt and halter top, tap the 'make video' option in the bottom right corner, select 'spicy' from the drop-down menu, and confirm my birth year (something I wasn't asked to do upon downloading the app, despite living in the UK where the internet is now being age-gated.) The video promptly had Swift tear off her clothes and begin dancing in a thong for a largely indifferent AI-generated crowd. Swift's likeness wasn't perfect, given that most of the images Grok generated had an uncanny valley offness to them, but it was still recognizable as her. The text-to-image generator itself wouldn't produce full or partial nudity on request; asking for nude pictures of Swift or people in general produced blank squares. The 'spicy' preset also isn't guaranteed to result in nudity — some of the other AI Swift Coachella images I tried had her sexily swaying or suggestively motioning to her clothes, for example. But several defaulted to ripping off most of her clothing. The image generator will also make photorealistic pictures of children upon request, but thankfully refuses to animate them inappropriately, despite the 'spicy' option still being available. You can still select it, but in all my tests, it just added generic movement. You would think a company that already has a complicated history with Taylor Swift deepfakes, in a regulatory landscape with rules like the Take It Down Act, would be a little more careful. The xAI acceptable use policy does ban 'depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner,' Grok Imagine simply seems to do nothing to stop people creating likenesses of celebrities like Swift, while offering a service designed specifically to make suggestive videos including partial nudity. The age check only appeared once and was laughably easy to bypass, requesting no proof that I was the age I claimed to be. If I could do it, that means anyone with an iPhone and a $30 SuperGrok subscription can too. More than 34 million images have already been generated using Grok Imagine since Monday, according to xAI CEO Elon Musk, who said usage was 'growing like wildfire.' Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Jess Weatherbed Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Twitter - X Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All xAI


Bloomberg
3 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
In Freakier Friday, Lindsay Lohan Gives the Performance We Didn't Know We Needed
To describe just how meaningful the Lindsay Lohan-Jamie Lee Curtis remake of Freaky Friday was to a 13-year-old in 2003, I'll use an anecdote. Shortly after seeing the movie with my mom, she asked me if I wanted to get a second piercing in my ear, a gesture that meant the world to an awkward tween desperate for some edge. My mom understood that Lohan in that movie was the pinnacle of cool, and that she could in turn gain some cred, just like Curtis on screen, if she submitted to my whims. Meanwhile, I got a little closer to approximating Lohan's perfect teen aura. In the early 2000s she was an influencer before that was even a term, the most famous girl in the world, who seemed destined for unstoppable greatness. That was the magic of the movie, directed by Mark Waters, which updated the body-swap plot to the early '00s with a lot of heart and a little bit of pop punk. The movie succeeded because of how equally balanced it was to the perspectives of mother and daughter—with Curtis and Lohan both turning in genius comedic performances that were funny but never felt mocking.