Latest news with #Flawless
The Age
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Read my lips: AI-dubbed films are debuting in cinemas
Foreign language cinephiles can be split into two distinct categories – subtitle-lovers and those who swear by the dubbed version. Dubbing critics have long grumbled about the pitfalls of mismatched audio and awkward lip-syncing, but new technology is quietly changing the face (and mouths) of international cinema. Last week, Swedish sci-fi film Watch The Skies opened in US theatres – marketed as the world's first full-length theatrical feature to use AI for an immersive dubbing – a process that makes the characters look as though they are speaking English. XYZ Films partnered with AI start-up Flawless, which uses TrueSync, a visual tool which alters the character's mouth movements and speech to appear perfectly synced for an English-speaking audience. 'For the movie industry, this is a game changer,' producer Albin Pettersson declared in a behind-the-scenes trailer for the film. 'The Swedish language is a barrier when you want to reach out around the world.' It's important to note the AI tool has not replaced the actors – the original cast of Watch The Skies, having shot the film in Swedish, then recorded their English lines in a studio. This kept them compliant with SAG-AFTRA guidelines. 'I think a lot of filmmakers and a lot of actors will be afraid of this new technology at first,' added writer and director Victor Danell. 'But we have creative control and to act out the film in English was a real exciting experience.' Watch The Skies is the start of a long list of AI-dubbed international film collaborations between XYZ Films and Flawless set to be released in the US. They include French film The Book of Solutions, Korean flick Smugglers, Persian-language film Tatami, and German film The Light.
Sydney Morning Herald
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Read my lips: AI-dubbed films are debuting in cinemas
Foreign language cinephiles can be split into two distinct categories – subtitle-lovers and those who swear by the dubbed version. Dubbing critics have long grumbled about the pitfalls of mismatched audio and awkward lip-syncing, but new technology is quietly changing the face (and mouths) of international cinema. Last week, Swedish sci-fi film Watch The Skies opened in US theatres – marketed as the world's first full-length theatrical feature to use AI for an immersive dubbing – a process that makes the characters look as though they are speaking English. XYZ Films partnered with AI start-up Flawless, which uses TrueSync, a visual tool which alters the character's mouth movements and speech to appear perfectly synced for an English-speaking audience. 'For the movie industry, this is a game changer,' producer Albin Pettersson declared in a behind-the-scenes trailer for the film. 'The Swedish language is a barrier when you want to reach out around the world.' It's important to note the AI tool has not replaced the actors – the original cast of Watch The Skies, having shot the film in Swedish, then recorded their English lines in a studio. This kept them compliant with SAG-AFTRA guidelines. 'I think a lot of filmmakers and a lot of actors will be afraid of this new technology at first,' added writer and director Victor Danell. 'But we have creative control and to act out the film in English was a real exciting experience.' Watch The Skies is the start of a long list of AI-dubbed international film collaborations between XYZ Films and Flawless set to be released in the US. They include French film The Book of Solutions, Korean flick Smugglers, Persian-language film Tatami, and German film The Light.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
JCPenney Welcomes PROUDLY's Baby Apparel Collection from Power Couple Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade
The exclusive collection features high-quality apparel that stops strollers in their tracks PLANO, Texas, May 15, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Big fashion for the little ones has arrived. JCPenney is teaming up with award-winning actress, NBA Hall of Famer and entrepreneurial co-founders Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade to launch an exclusive baby apparel line from PROUDLY. Best known for their trusted baby care products designed to center the needs of diverse families, PROUDLY is now expanding into apparel with high-quality, thoughtfully crafted pieces made with every child – and every parent – in mind. For too long, parents have had to choose between affordability and style. Enter PROUDLY: a vibrant, thoughtfully designed collection that celebrates every baby, every milestone, every moment – at prices that feel almost too good to be true. Launching today, exclusively at JCPenney, PROUDLY delivers joyful, inclusive and irresistibly stylish essentials designed to embrace the real (and messy) magic of parenthood. "We wanted PROUDLY's first step into apparel to be with a partner who truly understands our vision – and JCPenney does," said Gabrielle Union. "It's about representation, quality and celebrating all families. We aim to provide parents options they can trust and feel good about, ensuring every child, regardless of their background, has access to something special." The exclusive line features adorable, yet practical essentials that every parent will love, including two-piece sets, cozy footed sleepers, breathable onesies in four soothing colorways, super-soft hooded towels, turbans, sleeveless rompers and playful two-piece beanie sets in two coordinating color combinations – all made from hypoallergenic, baby-friendly fabrics with comfort and style stitched into every detail. (Yes, even tiny real pockets!) A soft, modern color palette and whimsical watercolor safari animal prints add a gentle, imaginative touch to the collection, making each piece as delightful to look at as it is to wear. JCPenney will also feature curated baby care gift sets – perfect for baby showers, new arrivals or everyday essentials. "At JCPenney, we believe that every parent deserves access to stylish and high-quality baby apparel that reflects their love and commitment to their little ones," said JCPenney Senior Vice President, General Merchandise Manager, Chris Phillips. "The PROUDLY collection offers not only beautiful designs but also prioritizes comfort and affordability, ensuring that families can celebrate every cherished moment together without compromise." The PROUDLY baby apparel line is yet another testament to the retailer's relationship with the iconic couple as it joins the portfolio of Flawless by Gabrielle Union and the SimStyled salon experience – all available at JCPenney. JCPenney's strong reputation for quality, inclusive design and commitment to making fashion accessible to all perfectly aligns with PROUDLY's mission to deliver the finest for babies. Building on the brand's established leadership in baby care, which includes diverse skincare and haircare offerings, PROUDLY marks an exciting new chapter. This collection embodies the retailer's successful new campaign - Yes, JCPenney! - where high-quality fashion and unbeatable value speak for themselves. When asked where their baby's clothes are from, parents can now proudly say, "Yes, JCPenney!" For further information about PROUDLY and JCPenney's partnership, please visit or contact your local JCPenney. About JCPenney JCPenney, part of Catalyst Brands, is the shopping destination for America's diverse, working families. With inclusivity at its core, the Company's product assortment meets customers' everyday needs and helps them commemorate every special occasion with style, quality and value. JCPenney offers a broad portfolio of fashion, apparel, home, beauty and jewelry from national and private brands and provides personal services including salon, portrait and optical. The Company and its 50,000 associates worldwide serve customers where, when and how they want to shop – from to more than 650 stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. In 2022, JCPenney celebrated 120 years as an iconic American brand by continuing its legacy of connecting with customers through shopping and community engagement. Please visit JCPenney's Newsroom to learn more and follow JCPenney on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. About PROUDLY PROUDLY is on a mission to center the needs of today's richly diverse families. The company's skin, hair, and bum care are designed to meet the needs of our littlest loves with moisture-rich goodness, gentle formulas, and "No Sketchy Stuff." PROUDLY was co-founded by Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade in partnership with A-Frame Brands, and is proud to be Black-owned and run by a diverse group of professionals and parents. View source version on Contacts Media Contact: JCPenney Mediajcpnews@ Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Telegraph
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returns – with a novel that misses the mark
In December 2011, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Nigeria's leading contemporary novelist – published an essay in The Daily Beast about Nafissatou Diallo, the woman who that May had accused the French economist and politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn of assaulting her in the New York hotel where she worked as a housekeeper. Adichie expressed dismay that, because Diallo had been found to have lied about unrelated matters, 'she becomes nothing but a liar' – leading prosecutors to drop the case. The following year, Adichie was catapulted from literary renown to global celebrity when she gave a TEDx talk titled 'We Should All Be Feminists'. It has been viewed online more than six million times to date, sampled by Beyoncé in her song '***Flawless', quoted on a T-shirt by Dior, and published as a freestanding book, copies of which were at one point being distributed to every 16-year-old schoolchild in Sweden. Her third novel, Americanah (2013), won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in the US and sold more than two million copies worldwide. In 2017, however, Adichie experienced one of the downsides of 21st-century fame after she declined, during an interview with Channel 4 News, to give an unqualified endorsement of the formula 'trans women are women'. Speaking engagements were cancelled; she faced calls for her literary prizes to be rescinded. The essay that she published in response, 'It Is Obscene', in which she railed against 'ideological orthodoxy', was viewed so many times that her website crashed. Throughout all this, the situation of Nafissatou Diallo has remained close to her heart. A five-page author's note at the end of Dream Count, Adichie's first novel in 12 years, explains that Diallo was the inspiration for one of the four women whose interlinked stories comprise the plot. Kadiatou, the character in question, is a magnificent creation – downtrodden but spirited, ignorant but intelligent, superstitious but worldly – and her section of the novel is enormously compelling. We're shown her childhood in a remote Guinean village, where she's subjected to FGM and an arranged marriage, the sudden loss of her husband, and her emigration to America with her daughter Binta in search of a better life. The descriptions of the assault at the hotel and its immediate aftermath are peppered with heart-rending psychological detail. At the hospital, Kadiatou is horrified to learn that she must give up her uniform for evidence. 'She has two sets, but already this feels like a loss, a failure.' Later, when she's given a small bag containing toothpaste, soap and deodorant, she feels embarrassed, 'as if she's being rewarded for her own violation'. It's hard to say why Adichie felt moved to wrap this potent story up with those of three wealthy, educated Nigerian women in their thirties and forties: Chiamaka, a travel writer for whom Kadiatou cooks and cleans; Chiamaka's friend Zikora, a lawyer; and Omelogor, Chiamaka's cousin, who has a high-flying job in a bank and writes a feminist blog in her spare time. Unlike Kadiatou, these women are global citizens, equally at home in Lagos, London or New York. They're capable of amusing swipes at the sanctimony and provincialism of American intellectuals, but they lack the vivid estrangement of Kadiatou's perspective on Western culture. Instead, their sections are largely structured around the disillusionments of middle age. Chiamaka and Zikora, in particular, are coming to terms with the withering of their childhood dreams. They wanted to marry and have children, but the men who've come their way over the years haven't been up to much. We're treated to a rogues' gallery: humourless boyfriends, shallow boyfriends, boyfriends made insufferable by success or embittered by failure, boyfriends inordinately proud of their 'inadequate' genitals, boyfriends who neglect to mention that they're already married. These stories do quicken some sympathy, but it's of a different order to that aroused by Kadiatou's plight, and the other characters suffer from the juxtaposition. Perhaps that wouldn't matter if their role in Dream Count was simply to throw hers into relief, but each of the four sections is given equal billing. A bigger problem is that by endowing Kadiatou with a supportive network of rich, well-connected friends – which her real-life model never had – Adichie dramatically lowers the stakes. The same goes for some of her other departures from the historical record. When the criminal case was dropped, Diallo brought a civil action against Strauss-Kahn – he settled out of court for a rumoured $1.5 million – as well as a separate case against The New York Post, which had alleged that she was a prostitute. Kadiatou, by contrast, is delighted to hear that the charges against her attacker have been dismissed, freeing her from the humiliations of the American legal system, and allowing her to move on with her life. Dream Count concludes on a surprisingly hopeful image: 'Kadiatou and Binta, these two thoroughly decent people, mother and daughter, sitting on a sofa holding hands, their faces bathed in light.' It's strange that a book about disenchantment should end by serving up a fantasy.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Chimamanda Adichie's Anti-Romance Novel
On the same day that the Access Hollywood tape landed, a month before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton at the ballot box, the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie drew a surprising gender-related battle line of her own. In an October 2016 interview, she expressed mild displeasure that on Beyoncé's track 'Flawless,' the pop star had sampled (with permission) from Adichie's by-then-famous 2013 TED Talk, 'We Should All Be Feminists.' 'Her type of feminism is not mine,' she observed, politely calling Beyoncé out for giving 'quite a lot of space to the necessity of men.' Hastening to say that she thinks 'men are lovely,' Adichie envisioned a recalibration: 'We women should spend about 20 percent of our time on men … but otherwise we should also be talking about our own stuff.' Dream Count, her fourth novel, is about how difficult this task actually is. Adichie is interested in women who, in certain ways, shrug off the patriarchal straitjacket of decades past, yet who also can't quite manage to focus on their 'own stuff,' letting men monopolize more than their allotted 20 percent. This is provocative cultural terrain—rife with historical and social and psychological (and biological) tensions—and the sort of ground that Adichie has nimbly traversed in her fiction before. In Dream Count's predecessor, Americanah, she casts a satiric eye on race in America. Her well-heeled Nigerian protagonist Ifemelu navigates postcollege life—and sex and romance—in the United States, recording her reflections in a blog titled Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Like her creator, Ifemelu has an outsider's knack for spotlighting the cruelties, vacuous niceties, and comic absurdities of race relations in a country caught between the past evils of slavery and Jim Crow, and the aspirational multiculturalism of a semi-enlightened 21st century. But Adichie also provided Ifemelu a comparatively sanguine view of relations between the sexes. And it is precisely this optimism that has been scrubbed, more than a decade later, from Dream Count, an unusually dispiriting novel. Americanah's incisive critique of race was set within a rom-com arc: Ifemelu ends up back home and in the arms of her high-school-and-college boyfriend, Obinze, whose own story of a brutal immigrant sojourn in Britain shares center stage in the novel. This time, Adichie's protagonists are all women: three globally mobile Nigerians from the kind of upper-class backgrounds familiar from her earlier fiction, and one Guinean immigrant who has taken refuge in America, following her romantic partner. Each is accorded her own section of Dream Count, yet their stories intersect and share a basic trajectory and bleak tone: Men enter their lives like meteors entering the atmosphere, leaving a trail of heat and light but always burning out. Whose fault this is—the women's, the men's—is for the most part unclear. Adichie's protagonists are independent and deeply ambivalent, not so much aloof as detached, both from their love interests and from their own desires and aspirations. In a novel stuffed with reminiscences of past relationships, regret is startlingly absent. If Adichie the feminist-manifesto writer is comfortable dispensing advice in the form of shoulds and should nots, Adichie the novelist seems allergic to such judgments. Dream Count unfolds during the peak of the COVID era, yet reaches back to a time before Zoom screens and hoarded toilet paper. Chiamaka, a struggling travel writer quarantined in a suburban Maryland house purchased for her by her father, is the hub of the group, and her first-person narration opens and closes the novel. At 44, she's been based in the U.S. for years but has resisted putting down roots, and she spends much of the novel reflecting on her history with men. She calls her self-imposed audit her 'dream count,' which she uses as a softer-edged synonym for 'body count.' This effort to reckon with her flings and love affairs speaks to the novel's broader project: a bricolage of confusion, set against a backdrop of 21st-century feminism, with its unsatisfying forms of liberation, and traditionalist African patriarchy, with its equally unsatisfying constraints and at-times-violent indignities. [Chimamanda Adichie: How I became Black in America] Adichie quite deliberately presents us with protagonists who have trouble sticking to that one-fifth time limit of thinking about men. Her quartet of characters is a lineup of familiar female archetypes. Chia is a romantic intent on true love, an adventurer forever seeking a soulmate. Her best friend, Zikora, is a striver eager to have it all—a lucrative legal career and a husband and children. Omelogor is Chia's cousin, recently back home after a leave from her Nigerian finance job to study pornography in American graduate school; she's an acerbic pragmatist who avoids serious relationships. And Kadiatou, Chia's hired help, has been lured from Guinea by dreams and is shocked by permissive American mores. Motherhood, real and hypothetical, is front of mind for all, and expectations veer off course for each of them. In Omelogor, Adichie seems to be reaching for another satirical guide on the model of Ifemelu, Americanah's race-blogger protagonist: a participant observer of fraying gender dynamics, emotionally preoccupied with the opposite sex while also bemusedly untethered. For several years, Omelogor has been running a popular website, For Men Only, which takes off during the pandemic. There she dispenses anonymous but clearly female counsel about gender, sex, and romance, having decided that men need more than the pornographic tutelage they're steeped in. She signs her missives with a lightly pandering flourish: 'Remember, I'm on your side, dear men.' But Omelogor is angry too (sometimes a symptom of depression, Chia notes). She's well aware that despite the persona she creates for her blog, she is no expert on serious relationships, and she suspects that she may be too cynical and disillusioned to be on anyone's side in the gender war, including her own. She cops to having returned from her American sojourn with 'a jaundiced spirit and a mood like midnight.' Instead of enjoying the restorative break she'd hoped for (money laundering loomed large in her African banking work), she felt lonely and alienated, not least by 'perfect righteous American liberals,' insistent that 'you board their ideological train.' Omelogor, who bridles at pigeonholing and being pigeonholed, is a study in contradictions. Online, she urges her readers to shower their partners with verbal affection—because 'love needs tending'—while out in the world, she breaks off relationships at the first sign of a possible 'emotion happening,' her term for falling in love. Dream Count is peppered with excerpts of For Men Only's invariably banal advice (there are many ways to be a man, etc.), blog entries so anemic that you're left wondering whether that's the point: Nobody's heart is really in communicating. Omelogor herself is skeptical that she can commit to truly opening up to others, in either her public or private life. When she was young, she chose aloofness because she 'wanted to be free.' Now her general self-diagnosis is 'disappointed disenchantment, or disenchanted disappointment.' That spirit pervades the COVID-haunted novel, as Adichie undercuts conventional assumptions about gender roles and attitudes. Tucked into Chia's romantic quest for a 'merging of souls' is a self-reliant ruthlessness more often associated with the male script. 'I did want a husband and child, but not under any circumstances,' she reflects early on. 'I didn't want to be single, but being single was not intolerable.' In the relationship that stands out most in her memory—with a kindhearted Nigerian named Chuka, eager to marry and have kids, and great in bed—he's the one left protesting that 'I told you my intentions from day one.' She cannot come up with a reason for torpedoing it that will satisfy either him or herself, and instead admits simply: 'I did not want what I wanted to want.' [Read: America's blindness to the racism all around us] Adichie counterposes a more recognizable script for Zikora, who for all her confidence at work lacks Chia and Omelogor's bold assurance with men. She's endured a few insufferable boyfriends—classic narcissists—when she finds Kwame, a fellow lawyer with a background very different from hers: Reared in northern Virginia, he's been pushed hard by his Ghanaian father and African American mother, 'his dreams already dreamed for him.' But she's thrilled to discover what feels like true intimacy: 'So this was happiness, to live in the first person plural.' When he abruptly disappears at the news that she's pregnant, she is stunned and can't stop wondering how she could have made herself any clearer. In some sense, Dream Count is a novel about inscrutable intentions: our own and those of other people. Why does Chia leave Chuka? Why does Omelogor cut and run at the first tremor of an 'emotion happening'? Why does Zikora's seemingly forthright boyfriend abandon her? Even as Adichie scatters hints (was Kwame more of a cowed son than Zikora grasped?), she is also explicit, in a closing 'author's note,' that sometimes the goal of a successful novel is to leave its tangles tangled. 'To attempt to fictionally humanize a person,' she writes, means confronting how we let ourselves and others down, how we emerge or don't from our failings, how we are petty, how we try to overcome and strive to improve, how we seethe in our self-pity, how we fail, how we hold on tenaciously to hope. Adichie, with her focus squarely on women, doesn't hold back in Dream Count from revealing how her protagonists, in their romantic relationships, can be as deluded about themselves and their desires as they are about men and theirs. 'Each day with Chuka, I encountered his otherness,' Chia reflects in a patronizing tone as she cites examples of his shirt-tucked-in, methodical ways: 'sturdy, reassuring, uncreative.' However, Adichie also resists turning these uncoupled couplings into cautionary tales: Years later, Chia feels a belated tug of uncertainty about her decision to leave Chuka, but the reader is given no clear sense that she made the wrong choice, only that she made a sad one. [Chimamanda Adichie: Nigeria's hollow democracy] Nor do conflicting African and American values get resolved, melded into a best-of-both-worlds fusion of beliefs. Zikora, overwhelmed with shame at being a single mother, is jolted into a new perspective on her own mother, who comes to help with her baby: She learns that a long-ago family rupture when her father took a second wife—an Igbo tradition when the first hasn't produced a male heir—is more complicated than she had guessed. Kadiatou is a victim of female genital mutilation, and yet she's taken aback when her Guinean boyfriend describes the practice as 'barbaric.' She initially balks at his suggestion that she seek asylum on the pretext of sparing her own daughter from the cutting. Asylum is not what Kadiatou, who is the most burdened of the four yet who also unexpectedly emerges feeling the most liberated, finds in America. She gets caught up in a justice system clearly not designed to serve people like her after she is assaulted by a rich and powerful man in the hotel where she has found work as a maid. The scene is harrowing but short, the procedural aftermath briefly hope-instilling. The police are called, the evidence gathered, the perpetrator identified. And then Kadiatou's ordeal goes on and on: grueling interrogations that make her feel guilty and trip her up, while the monstrous VIP uses his fame and fortune to delay and delay. The author's note reveals that Kadiatou's story is based on the real-life case of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant and hotel maid who accused the head of the International Monetary Fund of assault in 2011. The case, Adichie reminds readers, was dismissed—not because prosecutors had proved the accused was innocent, but because the defendant's lawyers felt that she had lied too much about her past for a jury to trust her. In the novel, Adichie vividly imagines the lawyerly grilling, the media hounding, the experience of being ambushed and isolated. And then, taking artistic license, she dispenses a fate that departs from Diallo's; Kadiatou is granted a resolution that brings her huge relief, even if it undercuts the convictions of her far wealthier Nigerian friends. In We Should All Be Feminists, the book that grew out of the TED Talk, Adichie observed that women are habituated to give up 'a job, a career goal, a dream'; ultimately, as she put it, 'compromise is what a woman is more likely to do.' In the end, none of Dream Count's protagonists compromises, yet Adichie seems uninterested in turning this refusal into a feminist triumph. Their dreams don't pan out. Her characters experience no cathartic epiphany that they are better off without men after all. Nor do they truly second-guess their life choices: We get no sense that they would be better off with men either. We aren't treated to a valorization of the nuclear family, or an African spin on resurgent tradwifery, or a paeon to the miracles of motherhood. 'What am I supposed to do with him?' Zikora wonders about her baby. 'There would be more days and weeks of this, not knowing what to do with a squalling person whose needs she feared she could never know.' Omelogor doesn't hesitate to take a closing swipe at the special proclivity to pontificate that she encountered everywhere in the U.S.: 'They want your life to match their soft half-baked theories,' she once ranted in a For Men Only entry that she deleted before posting but shares with us. She claims to detest the 'provincial certainty' of Americans who are overconfident in their quick cultural judgments, yet Dream Count makes clear that the cosmopolitan uncertainty of the wealthy African abroad is not much better. Article originally published at The Atlantic
