Latest news with #TedTalk
The Guardian
an hour ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It felt like a scene from The Handmaid's Tale': US comics on the dangers of political satire
In April, comedian Jena Friedman had a strange encounter in Vancouver airport. She had just performed a Ted talk about the future of comedy and was heading home to the US, when someone she thought worked for airport security quizzed her about her visit. Thinking he was probing for visa infringements, 'I just said I was doing comedy. Then he asked: 'What do you joke about?' Stupidly, I lightly flirted with him, and was like: 'Everything other than airport security!' He didn't react at all. Then I realised he was US border control. He asked again: 'What do you joke about?'' Friedman is a veteran of The Daily Show and The Late Show, and her standup comedy often features excoriating routines at the expense of the political establishment. 'I just froze because I am a political comedian and I didn't know what to say. Then he said: 'Do you joke about politicians?'' She made it home, but the incident stuck with her. Friedman lives in LA, and the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement 'detaining anyone and everyone who looks a certain way' put her on high alert. 'It was such a quick, on its face benign, interaction,' she says. 'But it did feel like a scene out of The Handmaid's Tale. I'm a blonde, white woman who looks like a Republican's wife and I have an American passport. But what if I had said 'Yes?' Don't we want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians, where we can joke about anything?' Friedman incorporated that moment into her new standup show, Motherf*cker, which she's performing at the Edinburgh fringe. The show is a change of pace. She's generally resisted getting personal on stage, resenting the idea that women have to be relatable to succeed in comedy, but this time it felt unavoidable, as she explores the life-changing experience of becoming a parent while her own mother was dying. 'It's about grief, but it's also political,' she says. 'The vibe in certain circles does feel like we're grieving. So there's something about my show that's connecting to the larger moment.' Friedman is among a crop of US comedians with roots in topical comedy appearing at this year's fringe. Another stalwart of US political comedy, Michelle Wolf, is back, too, while standup and former Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay is making her festival debut. Wolf earned her stripes on The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Myers, and gained notoriety with her 2018 set at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, in which she roasted Trump and his collaborators. These days, she lives in Barcelona, although returns to the US regularly for comedy work. She's yet to encounter border trouble but, with reports of people with green cards and citizens being detained, she says: 'I'm keeping an eye on it.' Comedians Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres have both said that the state of US politics has forced them out of the country – O'Donnell to Ireland and DeGeneres to England. O'Donnell has written a show on just that, which she performed for the first week of the fringe. Wolf is happy with her move to Barcelona, and feels her comedy has benefited from other cultural perspectives, but returns to the US because 'the audiences are great' and there's plenty of work. While other US comedians have also discussed the idea of moving to Europe, she thinks it won't happen until there's 'an impetus to go, something I don't think is far off, like: you can't talk about this any more, you can't talk about that any more'. Last month, satirist Stephen Colbert announced that network CBS had cancelled The Late Show after 33 years. Many thought the timing, three days on from Colbert criticising CBS parent company Paramount for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, was suspect. Fellow late-night talkshow host Jon Stewart criticised the move on his podcast and pointed to wider fear across the industry.: 'There are a lot of things that will never be made, that you will never know about, that will be killed in the bed before they ever had a chance because of this chilling effect.' Friedman's glad to see Colbert and Stewart speaking out against Trump and his administration – and agrees there's a 'chill'. 'The industry has already been less supportive of political comedy than they were under Biden and Obama. However, 'seeing the most prominent comedians taking [Trump] to task, like Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] from South Park, Colbert and Stewart, that gives me hope'. Meanwhile, Michelle Wolf's standup merges the personal and political and her podcast, Wolf's Thought Box, tackles current affairs. Her new show, which she's performing while eight months pregnant at the fringe, explores life and society 'through the lens of being a mom now'. There are punchlines on societal pressures for working mothers, home birth, momfluencers, gender inequalities and more. 'We're in an era now where people are talking about motherhood realistically and that's very refreshing,' she says. Still, political comedy isn't absent. 'I feel like I have to address the whole America and Trump thing … people expect me to say something about it.' She plans to tailor topical jokes to the day's news but, 'I don't like making it a large part of my set, because it bores me. There's always something crazy happening, but it's hard to come up with creative angles other than: can you believe this?' It's been nine years since she first started writing jokes about Trump and, in that time, her life has transformed – she met her partner, moved abroad, and is about to have her second child. Her main feeling now is: 'How are we still talking about him? How are we still in the same spot?' Jay reflects that slow build in her show, We the People, in which she explores the state of America – looking back to the 'unconfident whites' who founded the nation. She describes the show as 'a fun, risky little ride' as she tries to get to the root of why the US feels so divided, and what we can do to better understand one another. 'It's this broader conversation I've been having about America and race,' Jay says. The whole world feels unsettled right now and there's an inability to consider other perspectives, Jay says. 'How did we get here as Americans? Of course, I think race plays a large part in it. And how did these race relations get to the way they are? Not just blaming white people, but exploring the type of white people we're dealing with, why they might be the way they are, their roots in England.' Trump came up plenty during Jay's time on SNL and appears in her fringe show as a 'braggadocious' fool, unable to keep state secrets, yet smartly appealing to the frustrations of America's poor white communities. But the conditions that created and elevated Trump are more interesting to Jay: 'He's the symptom of this, not the cause. This is a result of years and years of us doing it wrong … it's been building for a long time and for a lot of different reasons.' Friedman agrees: 'I started working at the Daily Show in 2012, I was at Letterman before that, so I started looking at politics on a daily basis since 2010, and this is a long time coming.' This also means that, among US audiences, not everyone wants political comedy. 'They're always looking for escapism. In the first term, there was definite Trump fatigue,' Friedman says. 'As a political comic, I've always done better in the UK than the US. It's the UK audiences who are like: what the hell's going on over there?' says Friedman. The mood in US comedy is, Jay says, 'the mood in America … chaos. There's no way to keep up. People are also very desensitised. Shit just keeps happening in more extreme ways that people are losing a metric for it.' All three agree that comedy can help share differing worldviews. 'Even if it's people we disagree with, the sign of a healthy democracy is when people can safely be on stage saying whatever we want, ideally in good faith,' Friedman says. 'I support all comedians, I support freedom of expression and I want to see more of it. I want to see people more open to people they disagree with. Whenever I do political comedy, the goal is not to preach to the choir, it's to get people to see things slightly differently.' Jay has said that comedy can be a tool for empathy. 'I look at it as a conversation. It can serve a purpose of actual understanding, understanding that we're all humans trying to figure out a thing that doesn't make a lot of sense – existing. Everybody is grappling with these things in their own way.' What does the future hold for US comedians? 'It's too soon to tell,' says Friedman. 'But I think everybody exercising the US first amendment in a way that's funny and disarming is really important right now.' Jay says: 'Once I'm on stage, I'm gonna say what I'm gonna say. If I can't come back as a result, I'll just have to have my girlfriend come meet me in Scotland.' Jena Friedman: Motherf*cker is at Hive 1 at Monkey Barrel Comedy until 24 August. Michelle Wolf is at various venues until 17 August. Sam Jay: We the People is at Pleasance Courtyard until 24 August
CNBC
10-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
2. OpenAI
Founders: Sam Altman (CEO), Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, Elon MuskLaunched: 2015Headquarters: San FranciscoFunding: $63.9 billion (PitchBook)Valuation: $300 billionKey Technologies: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, generative AI, machine learningIndustry: Enterprise technologyPrevious appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 2 (No. 1 in 2024) OpenAI's ChatGPT continues to grow fast, whether the metric is users, revenue, valuation or intelligence. In a recent Ted Talk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the rate of user growth had doubled in just a few weeks, and that was building off an existing user count he estimated at 500 million people. The company's recent $40 billion fundraising round, valuing it at a $300 billion, was the most ever raised by a private tech company. The generative AI company has come a long way from the breakout moment of ChatGPT's debut in November 2022. At the time of the historic April fundraising announcement, Altman noted in an X post that the company had added one million users in the five days after the chatbot's 2022 launch. Less than three years later, it is adding as many as one million users per hour. "People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it," OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said in a February interview with CNBC. "There's an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable," he added. The growth has been rewarded with increased investor bets on OpenAI's revenue and profit potential, with recent reports indicating revenue may reach $13 billion this year, and reach over $100 billion by 2029. The company, which is still losing money according to 2024 financials, has put the revenue goal for this year closer to $11 billion, with CFO Sarah Friar telling CNBC in February that was within "the realm of possibility." That would still be close to three times last year's revenue level. On Monday, the company announced that it had hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, a figure including sales from consumer products, ChatGPT business products and its application programming interface, or API. As a product, ChatGPT continues to push out new R&D breakthroughs, each one promising to disrupt multiple sectors of the economy and types of work. ChatGPT Search was unveiled in late 2024, and early this year, OpenAI launched Operator, an "agentic" AI assistant that can plan vacations, make dinner reservations, and order groceries, among other tasks. While its consumer-facing product growth gets the most attention, its enterprise service just reached the three-million user mark. The company is also beginning to put more of its cash to work by way of acquisitions, buying coding startup Windsurf, which was its biggest acquisition ever — until it bought iPhone designer Jony Ive's device startup for $6.4 billion in May. The biggest deal of all is Stargate, the $500 billion AI investment consortium that also includes OpenAI investor Softbank, as well as Oracle, and was first announced with President Trump in January. That was recently expanded on a global basis, with OpenAI and Oracle, alongside Nvidia and Cisco, announcing during Trump's trip to the Middle East that a Stargate project will be based in the United Arab Emirates. The past year has not been without challenges, most notable among them the emergence of China's DeepSeek, which continues to innovate with its large language models. While OpenAI faces healthy competition within the U.S. AI sector, from fellow Disruptor 50 company Anthropic, to Meta's open-source models and Google Gemini, DeepSeek, whose models are supposedly far less expensive and resource intensive, poses existential questions about the massive bets being placed on AI by U.S. firms, as well as questions about U.S. supremacy in the global AI race. OpenAI also faces a battle for control of the company and questions about its conversion from a nonprofit to for-profit entity, this time related to a hostile takeover bid from Elon Musk, which was quickly rejected by the board. In May, facing internal and external pressure, OpenAI announced that its nonprofit would retain control of the company even as it restructures into a public benefit corporation. Altman, who said in a blog post about the structural changes that trillions of dollars will be needed to serve its mission, dismissed the threat Musk poses to the future of the company. "You all are obsessed with Elon, that's your job — like, more power to you. But we are here to think about our mission and figure out how to enable that. And that mission has not changed," Altman wrote.
Express Tribune
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Wiz Khalifa says Earth is flat during Joe Budden Podcast appearance
Wiz Khalifa shared his belief in the flat Earth theory during a recent appearance on The Joe Budden Podcast, joining a small group of entertainers who have publicly embraced the idea. The rapper, best known for hits like Black & Yellow, responded 'I would say no' when co-host Melyssa Ford asked if he believed the Earth is round. He added, 'I just believe that we live on a flat plane, like a huge flat plane.' Khalifa attributed his views to his experiences as a touring artist, saying the flight routes he takes never seem to reflect the Earth's curvature. 'You're just going straight—that's the only reason I think that,' he explained. He also expressed skepticism about space travel, stating, 'I don't believe in space exploration at all. I don't believe that they explore space as much as they say that they do.' Notably, despite his comments, Khalifa's recent album Kush + Orange Juice 2 features cover art depicting a round Earth—a detail that has drawn attention online. His remarks align him with other public figures, including rapper B.O.B., who previously launched a failed crowdfunding campaign to prove the flat Earth theory via satellite. B.O.B. later defended his beliefs in the song Ted Talk, criticizing media personalities and arguing that his views were misrepresented. As of now, Wiz Khalifa has not issued any follow-up statements regarding his remarks. His appearance has sparked widespread reactions online, with many questioning his rejection of scientific consensus and the role of celebrities in spreading misinformation.
The Guardian
20-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
It's not too late to stop Trump and the Silicon Valley broligarchy from controlling our lives, but we must act now
To walk into the lion's den once might be considered foolhardy. To do so again after being mauled by the lion? It's what … ill-advised? Reckless? Suicidal? Six years ago I gave a talk at Ted, the world's leading technology and ideas conference. It led to a gruelling lawsuit and a series of consequences that reverberate through my life to this day. And last week I returned. To give another talk that would incorporate some of my experience: a Ted Talk about being sued for giving a Ted Talk, and how the lessons I'd learned from surviving all that were a model for surviving 'broligarchy' – a concept I first wrote about in the Observer in July last year: the alignment of Silicon Valley and autocracy, and a kind of power the world has never seen before. The key point I wanted to get across to this powerful and important audience is that politics is technology now. And technology is politics. But as I wrote several drafts in the week leading up to last week's talk in Vancouver, Canada, I had what felt like a slow-motion anxiety attack. One insistent question throbbed like toothache: why? Why, after everything that had happened last time, was I putting myself through it all over again? In 2019, my first Ted Talk, entitled 'Facebook's role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy', sent a shock wave across the conference, then the internet and then my life. I ended up facing a defamation suit over 19 words contained in it, that ate up my time, energy and, as time went on, my sanity. And now here we are. In the first weeks of the second Trump presidency, with Elon Musk ripping up the US government. The power of the tech titans – the subject I've been investigating and reporting and talking about for the past nine years – is now finally front and centre. But now it all feels too late. My warning then – that democracy may not survive technology – was not heeded. I'd be speaking, again, directly to Silicon Valley, to the men – because it is men – who are building the latest most powerful technology yet – AI – the runaway train that is coming for all our lives. Men who, crucially, are now marching in step with Donald Trump, the head of what is increasingly looking like a rogue state. And what could I say? How could I address the collapse of the postwar international order and the role that technology is playing in it in the 10 to 12 minutes I'd been allotted? It was absurd. Most Ted Talks are written and learned months in advance, but I was a late addition to the lineup and the day before I was due to depart I didn't even have a finished script. Things reached a head on a Zoom meeting with the two lead curators and the head of Ted, a British media entrepreneur and philanthropist, Chris Anderson, who gently tore apart my latest draft, based on a viral column I'd written for the Observer: How to Survive the Broligarchy, 20 lessons for the post-truth world, a cross between a manifesto and a handbook about what techno-authoritarianism is going to mean for us all. Did I really need a slide of Musk doing what looked like a Nazi salute, asked Anderson, given that Musk had denied it and it would alienate part of the audience from the off. Last time around, Anderson pointed out, I'd managed to take the audience with me as I laid out the story. Last time around, I told him, it felt like the situation was redeemable. In 2019, I thought that 'the gods of Silicon Valley', as I'd described them, could be persuaded to take measures to prevent the harms of their platforms. 'But that ship has now sailed.' In 2019, people in Silicon Valley could claim ignorance. Now, the leaders of Silicon Valley companies have made a clear and unmistakable choice. Anderson's counter was that people who work at these companies, and who would be in the room, 'are still the best chance of effecting change'. It was actually bracing to hear his pushback, but when he suggested that perhaps I remove a line about the lawsuit I became tearful. The line was about the importance of defending facts, and for me it was what lay at the heart of the entire case. 'It's just really profound for me,' I said. 'It's what it was all about.' 'Look,' he said at the end of the call. 'We invited you. It's up to you to choose what you want to say.' The weight, the freedom, the responsibility of that lay on me as I fiddled endlessly with my copy on the long flight across the Atlantic. Two days later I stood on the Ted stage and gave the opening talk of the conference. It began with an unexpected cheer when I put up a slide that read: 'It's a coup'. We can't fight it if we can't see it, I said, and we can't see it if we can't name it. I wasn't expecting the spontaneous response. It hadn't even seemed controversial to me. (All week, in the days after the talk, people told me what a 'release' it had been to have someone say the words out loud. 'It hit me somewhere beneath my solar plexus,' a fellow speaker said. 'I can't explain how powerful it was to have someone say that, especially here.') But as I went on, I became aware of another current in the room. I could feel a wave of hostility coming from one small section of the audience. I'd had cheers and whoops but I could also see folded arms, hostile stares. Later, I would meet one of them, a close friend of Musk's whose husband sat on the board of his companies. 'In 2019 I called out the gods of Silicon Valley. Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk,' I said in my closing statement. 'I was wrong. You are not gods. You are men and you are careless … You are collaborators. You are complicit in a regime of fear and cruelty.' Walking off stage, I gave a loud involuntary sigh that's audible on the film of the talk. I tried. I tried in 2019, and I've tried again now. It's my best effort to communicate why we face such profound risk. And that's the emotion that's visible, audible, all the way through the talk. It's why I put myself back out there. Because what happened to me is now coming for so many other people. Not just weaponised lawsuits against other journalists and online campaigns of harassment and abuse – though that is coming – but the everyday surveillance and data harvesting to which we are all subjected. In the new political landscapes, that carries new risks. I've been on the sharp end of that. I know how it feels. Terrifying. But it's also the business model of Silicon Valley, and it's why, as individuals, we must take steps to protect ourselves. What I can't stress enough is how much worse the situation is now, six years on. Most of us – and I include myself here – have no idea how fast this technology is accelerating and how much power we are voluntarily giving up, how exposed and vulnerable we are. I'm now back home. I did a follow-up interview with Anderson in which he called the talk 'an absolute blockbuster'. And it now has a life outside the conference; it's landed on YouTube where it's gainedalmost 1m views in less than a week. American friends and total strangers have sent me heartfelt notes. And two MPs, one Labour, one Conservative, and two members of the House of Lords have sent me messages about a specific reference I made to the UK government's proposed bill that is seeking to tear up our 300-year-old copyright laws to make it easier for AI companies to use artists' intellectual property for training their models. It's called the data use and access bill and it's currently working its way through the Commons despite protests from thousands of people across the entire UK creative industries, including the likes of Elton John and Paul McCartney. But none of that was a given. I almost didn't go through with it. I'd been unnerved by a back and forth with Tamsin Allen, a UK libel lawyer, hours before my talk. Ultimately, there was risk attached to me saying even the most seemingly innocuously factual things about the case, because it was me, because it was Ted, because the one lesson I've learned the hardest way is that when someone wants to attack you, they will find a way. 'Watch her talk from five years ago,' reads one of the thousands of comments on YouTube. 'She was much more animated, much more upbeat and bright. Now she looks and sounds completely terrified, dejected, exhausted and heartbroken.' The internet we've created, captured by big corporations and built on data tracking, was not inevitable. Nor is what's coming next. And it's why I wanted to write this piece. Because as hopeless as things are, there's no inevitability to what comes next. It's why I'm so appalled at the naivety of the British government, which, at the very moment that it should be seeking to strengthen UK national sovereignty against US tech power, is doing the exact opposite. This is not a partisan issue. David Davis, the Conservative MP, leaves me a voice note telling me that he views 'the proposed changes in copyright law somewhere between theft and intellectual slavery'. It is, he says, an inversion of property law. The big difference between Ted of six years ago and Ted in 2025 is AI. It dominates almost every conversation. The scale and pace of advancement in the technology is mind-blowing in the true sense of the word. AI's domination of Ted is just a snapshot of its domination of every coming aspect of our lives. It's going to blast away whole industries, concentrate even greater power in an even smaller group of men, deplete the planet's resources even further, and it's in the hands of reckless, careless people who seem to have no understanding of society. To them, it's just a race; a winner-takes-all competition. All while the world still looks much the same – same streets, same houses, same politicians talking on the same TVs. It's why it's so hard to get your head around it. In my talk I made a point of criticising Sam Altman, another Ted speaker and the chief executive of OpenAI, the company that rocked the world when it unveiled ChatGPT in 2022. And at the end of last week, Anderson interviewed him live on stage and put my words directly to him: 'In our opening session, Carole Cadwalladr showed ChatGPT give a Ted Talk in the style of Carole Cadwalladr and, sure enough, it gave a talk that wasn't quite as good as the talk she gave, but it was pretty impressive. And she said, 'OK, it's great, but I did not consent to this.'' Should OpenAI be using work of people who haven't consented, he asked. Shouldn't they be paid? Altman simply avoided the question. 'So right now if you use our image generation thing if you say I want something in the style of a living artist, it won't do that,' he said, referring to the new image generation tool and conveniently evading the fact that it does exactly that for writers and journalists. Instead, he talked about 'the creative spirit of humanity' that AI would now 'democratise'. New tools that would allow 'new people to make better art, better novels, better content that we all enjoy'. The point I'd made in my talk is that this entire AI gold rush is theft. So much of the training set for this entire industry is coming from us: our work, our words, our labour. Not just writers, but anyone who's ever written anything online, as well as photographers, film-makers, musicians. It's not innovation, it's theft. But in talk after talk at the conference, this inconvenient truth was glossed over. Afterwards, backstage, I ran into Altman himself. His security guard hovered. 'I don't want to intrude,' I said. 'No, I'm happy to answer questions,' he said. But the foundational question of taking other people's work without permission is something he just can't answer. 'What's the difference between me reading your work?' he asked. It's all free to read. What's the difference? You're outputting to potentially millions of people for commercial gain for no recompense, I said. It's fair use, he countered. It's really not, I said. You've ingested the entire body of my work. It's so easy to establish that. And he was gone. Back to the controls of the tank that is soon to roll over all of us. It wasn't just the AI dominance that had changed Ted. My talk was the only one that addressed the current political moment, and among the 1,700 people there, it dominated conversation after conversation. A Ted fellow, a next-gen rising star, told me that some of her cohort in the US on visas or green cards had cancelled their trips, worried that they might be detained at the border when returning home. A Canadian editor for the Globe and Mail told me they were now sending reporters to the US with burner phones and wiped laptops. A historian at a non-profit specialising in black history told me of cancelled grants. Even Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and popular science author who has documented what he sees as the upwards path of human progress, was uncharacteristically downbeat. The attacks on universities, including his own, had left him shaken. Meeting Pinker at the conference was another personal landmark. I first went to Ted 20 years ago as a guest of his. I watched Jimmy Wales give a talk on the online encyclopedia that anyone could write and anyone could edit and thought: 'Well, that'll never catch on', and then he demo-ed Wikipedia and it blew my mind. I wrote up the event for the Observer, and it was the spark that led to me writing about these topics in a 20-year career with the paper. In 2011 and 2012 we put on our own Ted event, TEDxObserver, which I co-curated with the Observer's former editor, John Mulholland. Ted and the Observer have been entwined in my understanding of this world, from excited tech-utopian to where we are now, witnessing Silicon Valley's merger with an axis of autocracy across the world. These vast data-harvesting tech monopolies that control our online world were never inevitable. And there is another way. We can go back to the future, to the democratic, inspiring, non-corporatised web that Wales proved was possible. We are not powerless. There are things we can do collectively. I learned that when 30,000 Observer readers rose up to support me in my legal case. Last week's talk is dedicated to them, because without them I don't know where I'd be now. But together, we were able to hold power to account. And in the darkness that's falling, I believe that rebuilding our information system – together – is the first step to getting out of this mess. This is my last signoff for the Observer. It's been a ride. Thanks for reading. Carole Cadwalladr can now be found at
The Independent
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Death of a Unicorn starring Jenna Ortega is as basic as creature features get
Death of a Unicorn might have been better if it were made for much less – let's say, somewhere between a million dollars and the spare change found at the back of the sofa. The extra fanfare feels unnecessary: the cast led by Jenna Ortega, Paul Rudd, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni, and Richard E Grant; the aspirational modern interiors masked by bare minimum 'eat the rich' sentiment; the fact it's distributed by A24 and produced by a company co-founded by Midsommar 's Ari Aster; the herd of CGI-rendered unicorns engaged in an impalement rampage. In terms of substance, this is really about as basic as creature features get. It might have benefited from embracing some of the (intentional or unintentional) camp of real-deal, low-budget horror – the kind birthed on scuzzy VHS tapes, with their robotic performances, vats of corn syrup, and puppets that look like they've been through the wash a few times. There's a mixture of practical and digital effects here, yet debuting writer-director Alex Scharfman leans too enthusiastically into Jurassic Park homage. It's hardly sincere enough to be Spielberg, so instead just ends up a little dry. The problem is already there, in the bones of its script: Ortega and Rudd, as Ridley and Elliot, are a rigidly straight-faced, father-daughter duo whose already icy relationship has only worsened after the death of the family's matriarch. He buried himself in work, serving as a compliance lawyer for a pharmaceutical company run by Grant's Odell Leopold. And he's now dragged poor Ridley along to the dying CEO's wilderness retreat under the illusion he's about to be promoted to the executive board. Only – smack – he hits a unicorn with his car on the drive up. And what happens when the 1 per cent find out that unicorn blood possesses magical healing properties? They lock into exploitation mode. Bloody, equine vengeance ensues. Odell and his wife Belinda (Leoni) cover the basic territory of the nefarious elite: greed, vanity, callousness towards the staff (Jessica Hynes and Anthony Carrigan), white silk blouses. Yet, there's none of that demented glee of a good caricature, nothing like how Parker Posey has been pronouncing the word 'Buddhism' over on The White Lotus. Save, crucially, for Poulter as their son Shepard. He's the engine that keeps Death of a Unicorn running through its predictable plot, turning up in the very first scene in a double-breasted robe, and delivering every line with an exquisite combination of flat-out aggression and Ted Talk speaker-style energisation. Every use of the word 'hot tub' as a verb sounds more foul than the last, while there's just enough boyish piteousness to him that it's truly a delight to watch him suffer. Because that is, ultimately, all that Death of a Unicorn can really offer its audience – an imaginary, schadenfreude slaughterhouse for the very worst in society, even if the method of torture has arrived in the form of a rather silly, 'horror-ified' take on a legendary creature, with extra talons, sharp teeth, and what Belinda describes as a 'rather girthsome' horn. If only the film could have had some more fun with that.
