The Weekly Roast and Toast and Movie Review Extravaganza have both been rescheduled this week! Wednesday, December 17th will be the Weekly Roast and Toast and Thursday (12/18) will be the Movie Review Extravaganza! We’ll see you then! Stay Toasty!
Korey’s still flying back home so tonight there will not be a Roast and Toast – However, Wednesday (December 3rd) the toasty goodness will return!
NO SHOW TONIGHT! | The Movie Review Extravaganza
Hey there, toasties! Unfortunately there will not be a Movie Review Extravaganza tonight, but we hope that you join us for tomorrow’s show as it could be a combination of both the ‘Ganza as well as 8 Bit Crumbs! Will that be the case? Check Doubletoasted.com tomorrow to find out!
Hello there, toasties! Unfortunately we will not be doing a show tonight for the Weekly Roast and Toast because of some scheduling situations as well as us having a show earlier today interviewing the great Keith David! (Which we strongly recommend you go watch!)
We will definitely be back though for tomorrow’s Movie Review Extravaganza, and will be catching up on some news in the world, trailer reactions, and giving you some of that toasty goodness!
TOASTIES! The Lion King may not have satisfied Korey Coleman and Martin Thomas but what does satisfy them is your ability to bring us YOUR version of the Lion King with some of your art! Vote down below to see who did the best Lion King/Double Toasted crossover event in this month’s fan-art contest! Check out our Fan Art Page to upload your fan art and take a gander at all the great work the toasties have put together!
Joshua Williams found our last character. Thanks everyone! We’ll announce the drawing soon.
In celebration of Spidey’s second solo outing in the MCU we thought it might be fun to play a game with all you Toasties. Help us fill in the blank spots in our Spider-man themed picture by finding the characters. Starting at 10 am CST they’ll be popping up in various posts on the site in our comment sections. First one to find them as they pop up gets added to our drawing for an item of their choice from DTMERCH.COM or an AMAZON GIFT CERTIFICATE. When you find the character email us at KCOOLMANZ@GMAIL.COM and we’ll place you in our drawing.
Good luck and have fun, and make sure to check out our review for ‘Spider-man: Far From Home’ here!
TOASTIES! Dark Phoenix may have left a bad taste in our mouths but it’s our duty to wash it out with some great fan art from the Double Toasted community! Check out our Fan Art Page to upload your fan art and take a gander at all the great work the toasties have put together for your viewing pleasure, and scroll down below to vote on what you feel is the best fan art merging the lores of Double Toasted and X-Men!
PS5 specs keep coming, a tease for possible new God of War, more hints ‘The Last of Us 2’ may be coming this year, an ‘Alien’ game too cool to exist, and more.
Tonight is the last stretch as Korey and Chris attempt to finally finish the game and move onto Resident Evil 4?Stream starts at 8:30 pm CST.
Double Toasted is honored to be doing their first international live show in beautiful Toronto! Join us for a night of comedy, games, and music. Price of admission also includes entry into our afterparty, so come out and help make our first show up North a memorable one.
GET TICKETS AT OUR EVENBRITE PAGE: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/double-toasted-live-in-toronto-tickets-57529726962
Double Toasted Live: Chicago
Location: Park West
322 W Armitage Ave, Chicago, IL 60614
Date: June 30th, 2018
Show: 8:00pm – 1:00am / Doors Open: 7:00pm
Tickets $35
On Sale Soon!
More Details Coming Soon!
It’s a brave new world.. but it’s also an inevitable one. On humanities continued quest to bring sex to… itself.. society has embarked on a new chapter into the absurd self reflective, Black Mirror nightmare that’s been the mid twenty-teens so far. If you’ve spent anytime on Reddit in the past month, you may be privy to a mushrooming trend of homebrew celebrity based porn, called DeepFakes.
What are “DeepFakes”? Essentially, the Reddit user by the same name, has built a software that can take the face of anyone and have it superimposed over the face of another person. Only this time, it’s video and not just flat image based compositing. The user, DeepFakes, then open sourced the app for download to anyone willing to experiment, and what followed was a bevy of celebrity based porn being updated hourly. I obviously can’t post any examples here, but a quick google search will yield you a heap of results.
It’s not a secret that porn is the first stop for new technology when being brought to the masses. We saw it with: photography, film, print, photoshop, websites, web video, and now video alteration.
So is DeepFakes the biggest thing to hit porn since… porn? It could be. And while many may fantasize about how they could use such a program for nefarious purposes, I wonder what and or how it will be implemented in HollyWood. We saw it used to varying degrees in ‘Star Wars: Rogue One’ in 2016, but now this skill has been added to the tool box of amateurs, filmmakers, and otherwise. I suspect we’ll see fan made ‘Star Wars’ movies with Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, or ‘Ghostbusters 3’ with Harold Ramis. I’d love to see a redux fan-edit of ‘Batman Forever’ with Michael Keaton and Billy Dee Williams. In a way, the possibilities are limitless, and the uncanny valley effect is barely noticeable because the algorithm for the software uses existing footage of the actor as it’s assets, and not computer renderings or 3D wire-mesh composites.
Of course the effect is in a very limited capacity now. There’s plenty of clipping or soft edges around the heads of even the best edits. But in 5 years time, I truly believe we will see an entire era of nostalgia based films that are sequels to movies that just weren’t possible until now. I’m not saying I want to see a direct sequel to ‘Casablanca’, starring Humphrey Bogart, but the option will soon be here; and the results could be indistinguishable from the real thing.
But until that time, expect the internet to usher in the creative cycle for the forceable future. Between Trump memes gone haywire or whatever current celebrity is in hot water, videos will be made. I do suspect though that this will be a future art form. We’ll have professional level “DeepFakes” and terrible “DeepFakes”. The term “DeepFakes” might even be used like “photoshopped” is now for image adjusting.
And, with image alteration becoming such a mainstay in modern society, it begs the question of ones and zeros. I don’t want to get too deep into the theoretical conversation about “simulated realities”, but anyone keeping up with the hypothetical existence of “Quasicrystals”, is aware that the proposed new “Theory of Everything”, suggests that matter is just information; and if information (or data) can be altered, what’s keeping us from building movies backwards with algorithms instead of filming them directly? If you could circumvent the process of physical content creation, and instead focus the raw binary code into a desired output, you could conceivably build anything you’ve ever wanted to see.. ever! It’d be like going straight to the encoding process on a DVD.
Don’t like the ending to ‘The Last Jedi’? Change it! Wanna see that fabled Snyder cut of ‘Justice League’? Just type it in and hit enter! Hated the last episode of ‘Seinfeld’? Fixed! These are going to be real possibilities and it won’t be too long until it’s ubiquitous in all realms of entertainment, or otherwise.
It does raise a broader question though, and that’s one of ethics. It’s difficult to police ethics; especially online. What’s to keep someone from putting their bosses face in a compromising position, or using the software to create a political video aimed at undermining the opposite base?
With a barrage of new possibilities, expect an accompanying set of new laws or rules to follow. With photoshop, if anyone was to “image adjust” you’d need to be skilled enough to make the image look realistic, and even at the best of times, it can still look awkward. But with DeepFakes doing so much of the work for you, Trump and politicians alike may need to coin a new term, like: “Deep Fake News”.
-Will Valle
In what appears to be a case of something being way too good to be true, MoviePass has hit the scene like a bat out of hell (on it’s way to the latest Marvel flick). In instances like these, the question inevitably arises about the longevity of such an endeavor. I remember when Netflix came out, and it almost seemed like the business model itself was unsustainable. Netflix now boasts over 99 million subscriptions; and to follow suit, MoviePass announced today that they have over 1.5 million users. A monthly subscription that pays for itself after only one use seems a bit like a scam to many; as well it should. But is it? I’ve been using the card for over two months now with the new locked in $10 a month rate, and these are my findings.
Less then a month after I signed up I received an email from MoviePass offering a discounted rate with a one time annual fee of $70 instead of the $10 monthly expense I previously agreed to. I found this to be highly suspect. What if they’re not around in 6 months? Then I would have forfeited over possibly $40 or $50 bucks instead of only being charged for the months I used it. It made me question MoviePass’ projected earnings and future success; that is until I realized who was truly benefiting from this. Hint: It’s not MoviePass directly…
To begin, this may actually be a better deal for studios than their consumers. Imagine the service is akin to a gym membership. I bought my Planet Fitness membership 8 years ago for $10 a month. I go maybe 4 months a year, but it’s nice knowing I can go whenever I want. To me the service is worth the price due to my infrequency of use. Now if I was to spend on average $75 a month on a gym membership, I feel I would need to move into that place to make my subscription worth that price. I don’t go every single day, so such a high entrance fee is anything but nominal.
Originally MoviePass offered unlimited movies for $40 a month. But is “unlimited” truly unlimited? If the average ticket price is $10, this averages out to one movie per week. But that price is still a bit steep. Cinephile or not, frequenting a theater once a week for non-critics and casual movie-goers isn’t realistic. But with the price lowered to $10 a month, that’s a guaranteed $120 annual profit that the studios get a cut of regardless of audience attendance. Will the average consumer spend $120 a year on movie tickets? Maybe, maybe not. But those who go, make up for those who don’t. And for those who go possibly once a month or so, it’s still worth having the MoviePass for the convenience of going whenever they want.
Right now, it’s not hard to find a million articles telling you how to use your MoviePass to it’s full potential, or how movie studios are shaking in their boots because of possible revenue loss incurred by the red plastic card. The Verge posted an article last month with the headline: “Theater Chains are Terrified of MoviePass Because of People Like Me.” To cut to the chase, this is total bullshit. These theaters thrive off of articles like these, because they want their consumers to think they’re gaming the system. What they won’t tell you is that once through the door, with a minimal entrance fee, patrons are now more likely to buy popcorn, soda and candy on site because of the perceived ticket discount. This is a revenue stream not shared with studios. That’s now all cash being directly funneled into AMC, and Galaxy, etc etc. Movie theaters are not movie theaters. They’re candy stores.
Let’s also be real for a minute. Yes you can go to one movie a day for a month, but will you? Could you even do it? The terms and conditions state that you can’t see more than one movie per day. So the possibility of abusing the system becomes difficult because on average no more than three new movies are released per week; so even at full force, you wouldn’t be able to see 30 movies in a month unless you wanted to see the same ones over and over. Which brings us to our next point; the issue of timing.
It’s no secret that January is a dumping ground for studios. It’s when they unload their shelved garbage and begin to prep for their summer lineup. MoviePass making it’s big foray into public consciousnesses now is an odd choice. It doesn’t have the backing of a guaranteed knock-out summer programming schedule to rely on. Granted, I purchased my card early enough that I was able to see ‘Thor’, ‘Justice League’, and ‘The Last Jedi’ with it, but even for studio blockbusters, those were all oddly timed releases. Historically those three movies would be guaranteed summer fare. This month so far I’ve only used it to see ‘All the Money in the World’… and maybe I’ll see ‘Downsizing’..? Neither movie I could in all honestly tell you I would have paid to see in theaters in the past. Those are both by definition, a Netflix/HBO offering to me. But I went because I could. Meaning what exactly? For the consumers it’s not a great time to purchase the card but it’s money in the bank for the studios.
In fact, you could make the argument that MoviePass is the win the studios need right now, and desperately so. The line-up for 2018 is bleak. Now this doesn’t take into account the possibility of sleeper hits lying dormant until their release date. We’re all waiting with baited breath for the next ‘Get Out’ or ‘Baby Driver’, but as far as anticipated big budget blockbusters go, there’s like 4 in the queue? Maybe? This is a pretty paltry offering compared to the last few years.
It’s no secret the overdue Superhero Film Franchise collapse is closing in. DC doesn’t have anything really interesting coming out this year. I mean ‘Aqua-man’ might be tremendous, but I would never consider paying to see it. ‘Justice League’ soured me so badly that it made me want to swear off all new DC films. And I liked ‘Batman vs Superman’!!! And this is why MoviePass is the right service at the right time…for the studios; not for general audiences.
People are just not going to the movies like they used to. And with VOD and DTO, why would they?
Recently we had to play the world’s smallest violin for the film industry as another report surfaced that Hollywood had it’s worst fiscal year in over two decades. 2017’s ticket sales were the lowest anyone had seen since 1992. By 1994, the film industry would begin to find a way out of it’s rut. It also had one of the biggest human interest stories ever to hit households. As a way to break the ice with it’s millions of viewers, TV stations brought the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan rivalry directly into their living rooms. Now, in 2018, as a way to get assess back in seats, the same story is being told over a quarter of a century later with: ‘I, Tonya’. The comparison may seem silly, until you realize that the only reason a huge subset of movie goers even saw “I, Tonya” was because they used their MoviePass to do it. Begging the question, who’s really the ones getting their legs snapped here?
-Will Valle
With so much going on in the news as of late, it was difficult to settle on just one topic for this week’s article. Should I touch on Net Neutrality, or the continuing murmurings of Trump’s impending impeachment? Or maybe still, Marvel and DC’s ongoing rivalry? Rotten Tomatoes and the firestorm of surfacing sexual allegations in Hollywood, although came and went, still somehow find their way into the mainstream media on the regular. If 2016 will be forever known as the year it killed Hollywood’s greats, 2017 is shaping up to be the year it killed their careers. And of course we have the occasional mass shooting, that much like the suicide bombings in the middle east, have unfortunately become a way of life here in the US.
It occurred to me in a sense as I was jotting down notes for this week’s editorial, in a way, although dissonant, these topics are all sort of related. Related in the sense that they are brought to you mainly by the same key delivery system of the internet, and tend to have the same knee-jerk reactionary commentary by those who assume to know, espousing responses like their lively hoods depend on it. And for some, (maybe too many) that holds true.
Exacerbating current events has become a way of life. Postulation by way of hyperbole is now so common, the idea of irony immediately correlates to cynicism. It reminds me of the joke in ‘The Simpsons’ where when asked if someone was being sarcastic at a Smashing Pumpkins concert, the concert goer replies: “I don’t even know anymore.” Begging the question, when is it all enough? AND, when will we stop caring? I posit, soon.
We have a content issue right now. There’s too much of it. So much, that everything has become ancillary and throwaway. You can binge watch an entire season of ‘The Punisher’ in a weekend, all while succumbing to the posts of a speed scrolling nation; addicted to preview GIFs for teasers for trailers for movies… We constantly absorb ‘Now This’ videos by the boat load, but retain close to none of it. In fact, it’s not content anymore. It’s “non-tent”. It’s the illusion of information, disguised by being revealing or explanatory, but really just obfuscating from any actual usefully obtained fact. Knowledge has become entertainment.
Recently, Rotten Tomatoes made a jump to advertising itself on social media. A movie review site is now holding reviews hostage in a way to drum up numbers from it’s audiences. On top of that, they’re also celebrating good reviews for movies by placing ads for them; publicly declaring themselves as the go-to source for credibility. That’s not their job. That’s the people’s job. In fact, doing so lowers them to the likes of Fox News, proclaiming themselves as “Fair and balanced”. Part of being a critic isn’t boasting about what you think is good. It’s their job to review movies; not promote them.
When everyone vies for the same spot, the pool gets diluted. Less barriers into today’s industries means skill matters less. Roadblocks no longer holdback those who shouldn’t partake, and as a result we have flooded industries like Advertising with too many graphic designers or Web Development with too many programmers. This in turn causes companies to take zero risk on future endeavors. Risk is what pushes the future of any industry. But instead, movie studios stick with big budget action schlock and known characters, or the music biz clings to it’s top 40 hit list of musicians.
This, ironically and theoretically, suggests to me the possible unforeseen benefits of abolishing Net Neutrality. Price gating the internet would be an indirect way to keep out those who shouldn’t be in the field. The internet is currently an ecosystem littered with amateurs and laymans, over saturating itself; barricading it from those who have the chops to make legitimate headway, and as a result we see a latent swelling of homage based pop-art or underdeveloped music like mumble rap, pop up like it’s a legitimate art form. I fully agree that people have the right to free speech, but throwing your hat into a creative ring online at this point is like everyone on earth owning a car and driving it at the exact same time. Progress takes a backseat to complacency.
There is another benefit too.
Let me be clear, I’m not advocating for the termination of Net Neutrality, however I have no qualms about a corporate conglomerate using it’s own resources and clout to shoot itself in the foot either. Rising prices passed down to the consumers usually means less consumers.
If EA Game’s recent ‘Battlefronts 2’ debacle has taught us anything, it’s that when forced with the choice to pay for more access or not, people will refuse. The internet offers too much. Sometimes for better. Sometimes for worse. The problem becomes when an industry competes with itself, and any industry that is too large to see itself as it’s own competitor is poised to fail. There are other options to ‘Battlefronts 2’s’ controversial “all-access passes” or “loot crates”; like not playing at all.
I got an email the other day reminding me of all of the Netflix shows that will soon be gone in December. It also reminded me of the price hike to take place at the same time. As I started to reexamine my stakes in Netflix and the deluge of garbage content I’m currently rifling through on a day to day basis, in addition to paying more, it occurred to me that Netflix left something off of their list of things not returning in December: ……me.
-Will Valle
