Inanna Sarkis, Gregg Sulkin, Timothy Granaderos & Paris Berelc Sign For Adam Green's Hot Air Balloon Thriller ‘Ascent' Ahead Of Malta Shoot
EXCLUSIVE: Inanna Sarkis (Marked Men, The Prince, Maintenance Required), Gregg Sulkin (Six Triple Eight, World on Fire), Timothy Granaderos (13 Reasons Why, Runaways) and Paris Berelc (Alexa & Katie) are set to star in survival thriller Ascent by Adam Green (Frozen, Hatchet).
The production, which is set to begin shooting in Malta later this month, follows a group of friends attending a destination wedding in Europe who find themselves stranded on a hot air balloon 3,000 feet above the ground.
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'I'm incredibly excited to be returning to the survival thriller genre,' said Green. 'Ascent's story about a recreational activity gone terribly wrong is going to play with people's real life fears and be a total thrill ride for the audience.'
The film is being produced by Simple House Films' and is the first title to be sold under its recently announced international sales unit, spearheaded by Anastazja Bankowska.
The sales and distribution veteran was previously Global Sales Executive at Kino Swiat, a leading Polish distributor and part of Canal+ Group, and had held senior positions
'The film is a high intensity thriller, set entirely in real time,' said Simple House Films' Volodymyr Artemenko. 'The gripping and anxiety ridden experience will be captured for the screen by a talented and creative team.'
Simple House Films launched last year as an international independent production company, dedicated to developing and producing diverse films, and being a platform for diverse stories and voices.
Artemenko launched international independent production company Simple House Films last year with Addam Bramich and Ryan Hamilton.
Its line-up also features Zipline, a survival thriller currently in post-production being sold worldwide by Black Bear, and Shiver, a screen adaptation of the first book in the best-selling young adult fantasy series written by Maggie Stiefvater.
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Time Business News
a day ago
- Time Business News
10 Pressing Questions for Internet Star Omar Parker Ahead of His First Feature Film
With a decade-long career in content creation and digital storytelling, Omar Parker is stepping behind the camera in a new way: directing his first feature film. Best known for his work online blending humor, insight, and cinematic flair Parker is now taking on one of the most ambitious genres imaginable: the historical epic. We caught up with him during a scouting trip in Europe to talk about the journey, the inspiration, and what it takes to make the leap from the internet to the big screen. Not really. I've been doing this in some form since 2015 producing, directing, writing, editing, it's all been part of my daily life for over a decade now. So this isn't a leap of faith; it's more like the next step in something I've been training for, consciously or unconsciously, for years. When you hit that point where you realize you've been preparing for this for a long time, it actually feels like the most natural thing in the world. I've always been a huge fan of history and mythology. It's my favorite rabbit hole to fall into. I was deep in some research about the Phoenicians and stumbled across a Greek myth that featured a Phoenician character. That really pulled me in. I started reading everything I could about that story and realized almost no one I knew had ever heard of it. It's one of those rare tales that's dramatic, wild, cinematic. And just begging for someone to bring it into the spotlight. You can get a preview of the story's world via The Prince, The Sister & The Serpent, which offers a glimpse into Parker's sweeping historical vision. Definitely. Between today's technology, CGI, AI, the insane tools available to creators, along with the years of content production and set-building I've already done, I feel more than equipped. I'm not just doing this because it's 'impressive.' I genuinely love the genre. And I think there's real commercial appeal here, too, which makes it even more exciting to bring to life. It's all of those. Audiences today are super savvy. They don't need a movie to stay in one lane. I'm a big believer in genre blending, and I think the best films don't fit neatly in a box. If I had to compare the tone to something, I'd say The Mummy from 1999 with Brendan Fraser. That movie had everything: suspense, laughs, action, even romance. And audiences loved it. If I can capture even half of that balance, I'll feel like I did my job. I think anyone in the industry has thought about directing at some point. It's such a natural dream. For me, it wasn't always the number one goal, but when a project like this comes together, and you know the vision better than anyone else, it just makes sense to step into that role. Sometimes, the opportunity finds you. Not particularly. This is a stylized film, and most of it is designed to be shot on studio sets. We're agile. The production can move where it needs to. Of course, I'd love to shoot in places like Crete who wouldn't? But nothing's going to stop this train. If we have to adapt, we adapt. That's part of the process. Well, we originally planned to develop Side Quest as a show, but given how unpredictable the world's been lately, we pivoted that concept into our feature. But I was set on getting out there regardless. So I turned this summer into a scouting mission. One big side quest across Europe and the Middle East to get inspired, soak up history, and figure out what the film needs to feel real. So far, I've been to Greece, Italy, the Vatican, France, the UK, Switzerland, Malta, and Egypt. It's been a wild ride. Each place has added something different to my perspective, and I'm definitely not done yet. This has been one of the most creatively fulfilling experiences I've ever had. Probably Greece. It reminds me a lot of my Lebanese family the culture, the warmth, the food, the sun. But Italy is a close second. I could eat Greek and Italian food all day and be perfectly happy. Plus, the beaches, the ancient ruins, the people, there's just so much history and heart in those places. Everyone's been incredibly welcoming, and that's something I'll never forget. Parker has been documenting much of this journey on his official Tumbleweed Instagram, giving fans a behind-the-scenes look at his travels and creative process. Honestly? I just want to make something people enjoy. If we can get it on a major streaming platform and audiences have a good time watching it llaughing, gasping, maybe even learning a thing or two then I've done what I set out to do. That's the dream. That's the win. TIME BUSINESS NEWS
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Yahoo
Milwaukee's Anna Mae Robertson, one of last surviving members of World War II's famed Six Triple Eight unit, dies at 101
Anna Mae Robertson, one of the last surviving members of the famed Six Triple Eight unit, has died. She was 101. Robertson was among the 855 women in the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black female unit stationed overseas during World War II. The women were sent to Birmingham, England, to clear a nearly three-year logjam of mail. Sacks of letters were piled ceiling-high in a dark and damp warehouse, destined for homesick soldiers fighting in Europe. They came up with their own system — some were only addressed to "Junior, U.S. Army" or "Bob Smith." The battalion was charged with clearing it in six months. They cleared it in three, breaking all Army records. With the slogan 'No Mail, Low Morale,' the unit worked 24 hours a day, processing an average of 195,000 pieces of mail in three eight-hour shifts. They did it again in France. In 2022, Robertson, then 98, and other members of the Six Triple Eight received the Congressional Gold Medal. At the time, there were only six known living veterans of the unit. 'They broke barriers,' granddaughter Kenya Robertson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at the time. 'It took about 70 or so years for the world to know the role of Anna Robertson and the women of Six Triple Eight played in War World II.' Robertson was born in Mississippi and was living in Arkansas when her mother died. She had no way to support herself and decided to join the Army at 19 years old. Her brother, Zeredee Griffin, served in the Navy. "I felt as though we were relieving a man who could go over and fight. We could do what the men had been doing," Robertson told Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Meg Jones in 2014. After the war, Robertson visited Milwaukee to attend the wedding of a fellow Six Triple Eight member. She found a job as a nurse's aide at the VA hospital and lived in Milwaukee since. Her husband, John Robertson, died in 1982. In a May 31 statement about Robertson's passing, Democratic U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore said she joins the community in mourning her loss and remembering her trailblazing legacy. "I am thankful that my constituent, Ms. Robertson, was able to receive her flowers while she could still smell them," Moore said. More: Barrier breaker: Anna Mae Robertson played key role in stabilizing soldiers' morale during WWII After decades of little recognition or honor for their service, the story of Robertson's unit reached the big screen. "The Six Triple Eight," written and directed by Tyler Perry and starring Kerry Washington, began streaming on Netflix in December. It received an Academy Award nomination for best original song. The battalion was also featured in a 2019 documentary, produced by Wisconsin native James Theres, and the subject of a musical. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ahead of the film's release, Sheree Robertson described her mother as a "quiet warrior." She worked hard, raised eight children and lived a good life, Sheree said. She never expected anything in return but enjoyed the love and attention she received in recent years, she said. 'People need to realize the contributions those women made to their country and the sacrifices they made to their country when their country did not treat them with respect and dignity,' Sheree said. 'They still felt a duty to go in there and do an outstanding job.' American military units were segregated by race and gender during World War II. Members of the Six Triple Eight could not eat meals with other American soldiers. They ran their own dining facility and slept in separate barracks. Washington, who portrayed Six Triple Eight's leader Maj. Charity Adams in the film, said in a May 31 Facebook post that the day she met Robertson will be "forever cherished deeply in my heart." "Your legacy will live on through the strength of your beautiful family and in the hearts of Black people everywhere," Washington wrote. "You, and the extraordinary women of (the Six Triple Eight) you're meeting up in heaven, paved the way with grace, grit and bravery." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter La Risa R. Lynch contributed to this report. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Anna Mae Robertson, member of Six Triple Eight battalion, dies at 101
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Yahoo
Are we reading Machiavelli wrong?
There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don't know where they came from. Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception. I don't know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word 'Machiavellian' means. It's someone who's cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, 'the teacher of evil.' But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work? Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like the Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli's most famous work, The Prince. For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it's actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts. In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government). I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he's very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What's incomplete or wrong about that view? What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgments into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn't think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we've got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn't think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn't see them as devils when they behave badly. But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don't put yourself above other humans because you're one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist? I take it you think his most famous book, , is not well understood? I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It's a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that's the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that's a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he's a moral writer. Rousseau says, 'He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.' If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don't read them that carefully because they're kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom. And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it's like, Wow! It's about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he's probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up. So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens? It's complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn't know what's going to happen next. He's absolutely gutted that Florence's republican experiment has failed and he can't speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It's taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can't be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he's really writing to expose the ways of tyrants. Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist? He's a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you're not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it's very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words 'tyrant' or 'tyranny.' So if there's a guiding political view, whether you call it 'ideology' or not, it's republicanism. And that's an ideology of shared power. It's all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone's got to have a share. Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today? If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He'd totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He's pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don't want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics? This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they're very subtle, you start to see that he's exposing a lot of the stuff that we're seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that's when you're going to clash. And he says, That's when you as a leader — and he's playing like he's on the leader's side — that's when you've got to decide if you're going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit? What would he make of Trump? He would put Trump in two categories. He's got different classifications of princes. He's got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he'd also call him this word 'astutia' — astuteness, which doesn't really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people's weaknesses and dissatisfactions. This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don't know how to build a solid state. That's what he would say on a domestic front. I think there's an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don't think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty's sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that's not really Machiavellian. Exactly. I wouldn't say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I've often felt like he's getting advice from people who haven't really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they're picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You're absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You're going to get pure hate. So if you think it's ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again. This obviously isn't an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there's real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed? This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had 'great men' coming up and saying, 'I'll save you,' and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally 'saved' them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn't as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
