Latest news with #It'sMe
New York Post
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
TikTok star Tinx on her favorite ‘Rich Mom energy' Hamptons hot spots
Tinx (real name: Christina Najjar) is a podcaster ('It's Me, Tinx'), content creator, advice guru and author of two books. The latest is novel 'Hotter in the Hamptons,' which published earlier this month and has already been optioned as a TV series for 20th Television (with the sisters behind 'Nobody Wants This,' Erin and Sara Foster, executive-producing). The Hamptons — and the colorful rich characters who inhabit it — were the inspiration for Najjar's book about a fallen influencer and the critic who brought her down. Confession: When the Stanford grad first came to the South Fork years ago, she absolutely hated it. 'I didn't get it,' admits Tinx, 34, who was born in Washington, DC, raised in London and now lives in LA. 'I felt so out of place.' But she remained intrigued. 'The Hamptons are known as a glamorous summer destination for the rich and famous. I think everyone's a little curious about what happens there. I certainly was!' Now that she's a regular, Tinx understands the exact formula for achieving the 'Rich Mom energy' she's so obsessed with (though she doesn't yet have kids herself): 'A huge house with lots of staff, a Pilates-toned body, Bottega Veneta everything and a vintage Bronco — so you can drive to Round Swamp Farm in style.' Sounds about right. Read on for her other Hamptons must-hangs. 11 Courtesy of Source Books 'My new book is very sexy, so it puts you in the mood to have a summer fling — or at least be nice to your boyfriend. And there's lots of beautiful imagery, so you can daydream while you're by the pool!' Crow's Nest | 4 Old West Lake Dr., Montauk 11 Courtesy of Crow's Nest 'God bless [the Crow's Nest] staff, who I harass every Wednesday for a Friday reservation for the entire month of July. I simply can't go one week without the lobster pasta or the ricotta with grilled ciabatta [served with lavender honey, truffle oil, black salt and pink peppercorn]. I have definitely rolled down that hill drunk, too! Carissa's The Bakery | 68 Newtown Lane, East Hampton 11 Courtesy of Carissa's The Bakery 'My favorite place to get breakfast is Carissa's. It feels very Nancy Meyers and it's simply the best coffee and pastries in town. I always get the croissant.' East Hampton Grill | 99 N. Main St., East Hampton 'The best martinis in the Hamptons. Love me a stuffed olive! Although they are rather strict about dress code and you can't get too rowdy here.' Blue Parrot | 33A Main St., East Hampton 11 Courtesy of The Blue Parrot 'I love to walk into town and go here to get spicy margaritas and lobster enchiladas. It's a fun casual vibe.' The Surf Lodge | 183 Edgemere St., Montauk 11 Courtesy of The Surf Lodge 'You'll have to drag me out of Surf Lodge at age 99 kicking and screaming. It's so fun to go and see who's there and dance with your friends all Saturday.' Parrish Art Museum | 279 Montauk Hwy., Water Mill 11 Universal Images Group via Getty 'It's so beautiful here. I love when brands throw events here as well, because it's just a really stunning backdrop for an Instagram photo. I'm sure that's what they had in mind when they were constructing this art museum … my Instagram photos.' Common Ground | 44 Three Mile Harbor Road, East Hampton 11 Courtesy of Common Ground East 'I think it's very important that we try to bring back clubbing. It's been my main platform for a while now. I'm going to go to Capitol Hill soon. Anyway, when I'm in the Hamptons, I love to go to Common Ground either to DJ or to dance. It's a great venue.' Lobster Roll Restaurant (AKA Lunch) | 1980 Montauk Hwy., Amagansett 11 Courtesy of The Lobster Roll 'There is a huge debate amongst the worst people you know as to whether Lunch [aka Lobster Roll Restaurant] or Clam Bar is better. After much deliberation, I prefer Lunch because they have more sauce options. I get the hot dog with coleslaw and mustard on the side and love to get chicken fingers for the table with lots of ranch and any mayo-based dips.' Isabel Marant | 66 Newtown Lane, East Hampton 11 Courtesy of Isabel Marant 'I love going in here to shop drunk after a glass of Sancerre or two! I find the cutest summer dresses and boots.' Round Swamp Farm | 97 School St., Bridgehampton 11 Courtesy of Round Swamp Farm 'Home of the $40 chicken tenders. Do I buy them? Absolutely! You only live once.'
Telegraph
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘I didn't know how I could make Judy Blume's Forever relevant to today'
Almost every woman who became a teenager in the 1980s and the 1990s remembers the first time they read Judy Blume's 1975 novel Forever... 'I was in middle grade, and we were passing that book around so hard, the pages fell out and had to be paper-clipped together,' says the 54-year-old screenwriter and producer Mara Brock Akil, who was 12 when someone pushed a copy into her hand. It was the early-1980s Midwest and Brock Akil was living with her mother following her parents' divorce. 'Missouri was a pretty conservative place, so the truth about that sort of stuff was harder to find. I went from innocently reading How to Eat Fried Worms to reading about sex with Judy Blume. Boom! All her books – Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret; Blubber – I barrelled through them. She was just hammering us. We all remember her because no one else was writing like her back then.' For the uninitiated, Forever... is the plainly told story of Kath and Michael, two New Jersey high-school seniors who, over several weeks, slowly fumble their way towards having sex for the first time: a satisfactory experience for Michael, considerably less so for Kath, who narrates the book. There have been many YA novels about teenage sex since, but none has the mythic patina and cultural reach of Forever..., a book widely credited with teaching otherwise ignorant and fearful young girls the truth about adulthood. For many, to read it was to feel initiated into a secret club that made them stronger, more curious and less lonely. 'It meant that by the time I sat down to have the chat with my mother about sex, when I was 15, I was ready to go,' says Brock Akil. 'I was like, 'Mum, just give me the birth-control pill!' Forever... enabled me to have that conversation.' On Thursday, Forever... gets its small-screen debut in a dreamy eight-part Netflix series created by Brock Akil, who has relocated the story from 1970s New Jersey to an affluent, sun-addled Los Angeles suburb in 2018. Where the world the novel inhabits is entirely white, the two families at the heart of this version are black, with Kath and Michael reimagined as the outwardly sexually confident Keisha (Lovie Simone) and the more socially sensitive, vastly more privileged Justin (Michael Cooper Jr), who meet at a plush New Year's Eve party and clumsily, giddily, fall in love. The many modern updates include a 'slut-shaming' subplot and a deeper awareness of race, family expectation and class (Keisha is the academically precocious daughter of a single mother; Justin the hemmed-in son of strict and overprotective parents). But the essence remains the same: two young people trying to navigate the confusions and complications of first romance, albeit this time often through the not always helpful technology of mobile phones. Yet Brock Akil – who created the wildly successful and influential Noughties show Girlfriends and is arguably the US's leading chronicler of black American lives on screen – was initially wary about adapting Blume's novel. In the tech-saturated world of today, where a reported one-third of children have seen porn online by the age of 10, very few prepubescents enter their teens with the same innocence as Kath and Michael. 'When Judy wrote Forever..., kids didn't have any understanding. There was nothing to read or watch,' agrees Brock Akil. 'But you only need to go onto Twitter and you are sexually propositioned immediately. Forever... was written against a backdrop of women's liberation – the birth-control pill had become this big new thing and, for the first time, women could explore their hearts and bodies, and know they weren't endangering their future. I knew I could translate the excitement of first love, but I didn't know how I could make it relevant to today.' Her brainwave was to make a virtue of the modern world's more complicated sexual climate, by emphasising both the perils of online communication and the confusions that can stem from the heightened discourse around issues of consent and assault. 'In the book, Kath is the most vulnerable, as a young woman trying to figure out her place in the world. But I'd argue that today it's young black men who are vulnerable. As a mother to boys myself [she has two teenage sons with her producer-director husband, Salim Akil], I find it heartbreaking that before you can talk to them about the birds and the bees, you have to introduce the idea of rape. You have to help them navigate all these complexities around language and behaviour, and that's before they've figured out if the girl even likes them. So, once I'd realised that was how we could tell the story, we were off to the races.' Lately, some of the most dominant tales on screen about young people have been nightmarish, be it the teenage killer at the heart of Adolescence or the sex-and-drugs nihilism of the HBO series Euphoria. Does Brock Akil see Forever... as a way to give back to teenagers a simpler, gooey, young love story? 'Ah, I love that idea! And while I recognise there are some very harrowing challenges in society right now, most people are not having those extreme experiences, right? As a writer, I like to show people's lives as they really are. One of the most radical things you can do today is write a young black male character who is simply a little unsure of what he wants.' Brock Akil has built a career on exploring precisely these everyday nuances. She created Girlfriends in 2000 in response to Sex and the City, because, as she has said many times before, 'on that show, black people had no seat at the table'. Her series – which focused on the chaotic, loving, up-and-down friendships between four black women and has influenced TV shows that explore black lives in relative fullness, such as I May Destroy You – not only broke with the prevailing tradition at the time of depicting black characters only in family sitcoms, it dared to show black women as flawed, messy and all too real. 'The producers didn't want [the actress] Tracee Ellis Ross to keep her natural curly hair for her character, Joan Clayton,' says Brock Akil. 'Can you imagine that? They wanted her to blow-dry it straight. But we won that battle, and over the course of the show's eight series, Tracee's curly hair became a real advert for natural hair.' Girlfriends also became an advert for the glorious reality of black women's sex lives, as something ordinary, untidy, and often imperfect. 'When I created it, the images of black sexuality on TV were extreme,' says Brock Akil. 'We were either represented as sexless lawyers or as marginalised sexually promiscuous women. So with Girlfriends the idea was very much to say, 'We black women are not just here for the pleasure of men'.' 'That idea of the strong black woman,' she says, 'it's a lie that I've been exploring through all of my work, because if you adopt that rigid concept of yourself, it leaves you no room for the full complexity of who we are.' Brock Akil sees a through-line between that show and her version of Forever... 'With Keisha, I wanted to create a black woman who is clever, but who also makes mistakes. She's a girl trying to figure it out – and what better image for young women is there than that?' Forever comes to Netflix on Thursday 8 May
Korea Herald
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
CGV launches Korea's first AI film contest
Competition offers 50 million won in prizes for generative AI-produced short films CGV announced on Tuesday that it is hosting an artificial intelligence film competition, becoming the first theater chain in Korea to do so. The contest invites filmmakers to submit original, previously unpublished short films ranging from 10 to 20 minutes in length, created using generative AI technology. Entries can explore either the theme of "heroes and villains" or tackle any subject of the creator's choosing. Submissions will be judged on storytelling (40 percent), creativity (30 percent) and technical execution (30 percent). After initial screenings in which 15 finalists will be selected, a panel of industry experts will choose five winners through a combination of juried evaluations and online audience voting. The panel of judges includes notable figures such as "Concrete Utopia" (2023) director Um Tae-hwa; science YouTuber Kim Jae-hyeok, known as Orbit; author Kim Jung-hyuk; and CJ ENM's AI production director Jung Chang-ik. The competition offers approximately 50 million won ($34,550) in total prizes, with the grand prize winner receiving theatrical distribution through CGV. CJ ENM is also offering a special award to support content creators. "We kicked off this AI film competition in response to the growing buzz around generative AI tech," said Kim Jae-in, CGV's content and marketing manager. "We're hoping filmmakers can connect with audiences through these AI creations and maybe spark some extra interest in the theater-going experience too." The submission deadline is April 25, and the winners will be announced on May 23. Details are available through the CGV mobile app and website. This contest adds to Korean cinema's growing wave of AI filmmaking experiments. The film "It's Me, Mun-hee," released on Christmas Eve last year, starred veteran actress Na Mun-hee without her ever appearing on set. The 17-minute short used generative AI to transform the 84-year-old actress into various characters, including Santa Claus, a CIA fugitive and an astronaut. The short film "M Hotel," which premiered on Dec. 11, was created entirely with generative AI tools. Produced by CJ ENM, the 6.5-minute film reportedly took less than a month to complete, with four AI experts using more than 10 different AI tools. The project has earned recognition at film festivals in Venice, New York and Cannes.
USA Today
17-03-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Best March Madness bracket names (that we could print) for 2025: The 9 funniest
Best March Madness bracket names (that we could print) for 2025: The 9 funniest You have mostly everything you need for that perfect men's March Madness bracket this year. There's the printable bracket itself, the definitive list of champs who could win it all, the best teams grouped by mascot, and a look at the potential Cinderellas. There's only one thing you're missing: The perfect, punny, standout name for your bracket in 2025. And that's what we're here to help with! You've come to the right place! So we've put together a list of the best names we've seen (that we could print), with links to those names that we got from another site. Let's do it: 1. Pedulla Oblongata For the Ole Miss guard Sean Pedulla. 2. This is How We Purdue it For all you Montell Jordan fans out there. 3. The Last Four Innies Obviously we needed a Severance reference. 4. Caleb Grillz If you're a Missouri and Caleb Grill fan. 5. JuJu Fruit A good one for JuJu Watkins from our pals at USA TODAY Sports. 6. OK, Broomer So many good ones for Auburn's Johni Broome. 7. Bride of Chucky Hepburn LOL so good. 8. It's Me, I'm the Bracket, It's Me For you Taylor Swift fans out there. 9. Brack to the Future An oldie but goodie.
