One woman’s atypical relationship recently came to an end, and she’s now explained the reason why.

Michele Köbke is a 36-year-old woman based in Berlin, Germany who has previously stated she was in a long-term relationship with a Boeing 737-800 airplane, one that lasted for roughly nine years.

However, despite her previously shared ambition to marry the airplane, Köbke has now revealed that she is no longer in a relationship.

Michele explained her situation to Blide, a German newspaper, in an interview that was later translated by the DailyMail UK: “We are separated, but we're still friends.”

While considered peculiar by many people across the world, Michele is what experts call an objectophile, or someone who is attracted to inanimate objects.

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She once said of her relationship: "My cheeks hurt from smiling, I'm the happiest woman in the world - when I'm with him I have everything I need.

“It's like a normal relationship, we have relaxing evenings together and when we go to bed, we cuddle and fall asleep together.

“When I touch his wings, I get immediately sweaty palms and get excited.”

She also spoke about the time she did get the chance to be up close and personal with her beloved aircraft, saying: “The time in the hangar was the most beautiful moment of my life and when I was with him, we enjoyed our time together, we kissed and I caressed him.”

But like all relationships, they had their difficulties.

Michele previously said: "A relationship with a plane is not easy and at times difficult.

"I can only get close to him when I fly with him or when I can get to him in the hangar, which has only happened once in my life."

The Boeing 737-800, which Michele took to calling Darling, was a major part of her life for nearly a decade, making her decision to disengage in the unique relationship a shocking one.

However, she also has said that the time she did get to spend with Darling were some of the best experiences of her life.

Now, in the wake of her relationship ending, Michele has sold most of her belongings related to the airplane but has not fully disengaged from her atypical relationship type.

"I now love wearing knight’s armor," Köbke explained, now a devoted lover of the Middle Ages.

One of the world’s rarest penguins has been crowned New Zealand’s bird of the year, in an unusually sedate year for the competition, free from the foreign interference and voting scandals of previous events.

The endangered yellow-eyed penguin, or hoiho, is the largest of New Zealand’s mainland penguin species and is distinctive for the pale yellow band of feathers linking the eyes.

The hoiho, meaning “noise shouter” in Māori due to its shrill call, lives along parts of the South Island’s east coast and in the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands. The shy, fishy-smelling species tends to live in native coastal forests, scrub or dense flax.

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Over the years, the contest has become a lightning-rod for scandal, from crowning a bat the winner in 2021, to accusations of Russian interference in 2019, and claims Australians attempted to rig the contest in favour of the shag in 2018.

The two-week competition attracted more than 52,000 verified votes – a significant drop compared with 2023’s event, which leapt to 350,000 votes across 195 countries after British-American comedian and talkshow host John Oliver ran a global campaign for the threatened pūteketeke – a grunting, puking bird with an unusual repertoire of mating rituals.

Oliver’s self-described “alarmingly aggressive” campaign, including buying up billboards in New Zealand, Japan, France, the UK, India and the US state of Wisconsin. A plane with a pūteketeke campaign banner also flew over the beaches of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

His efforts were rewarded when the pūteketeke was crowned the 2023 winner.

I am in a high-end coffee shop in a tech-heavy area of San Francisco, staring suspiciously into a cup of espresso. This is no conventional coffee: it is made without using a single coffee bean.

It comes from Atomo, one of a band of alt-coffee start-ups hoping to revolutionise the world of brewed coffee.

“We take great offence when someone says that we're a coffee substitute,” says Andy Kleitsch, the chief executive of Seattle based start-up Atomo, from whose pure, beanless ground product my espresso has been made.

Traditional coffee substitutes have a reputation for not tasting much like coffee and are usually caffeine-free.

However, the newcomers intend to replicate one of the world’s most popular beverages from taste, to caffeine punch, to drinking experience – and the first of this nascent industry’s beanless concoctions have begun to appear.

It's around here that a normal review would subtly transition to a summary of the plot. Unfortunately, Megalopolis is such a rambling, boring slog, I'm not sure I grasped the story writer and director Francis Ford Coppola actually had in mind.

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Inaccessible to the point of satire, Megalopolis also tarnishes Coppola's legacy. This is no Godfather. It is not The Rainmaker. It's not even Jack. It is, however, among the worst big-budget productions ever made — a late-career echo of Heaven's Gate, the sprawling vanity project by The Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino that was so monumentally awful it ruined Hollywood's trust in auteur directors for decades.

With mostly his own money at stake, Coppola's latest may not have as big an effect on the future of film. But navel-gazey to the point of irresponsibility, sanctimonious to the point of insulting, Megalopolis is still a cautionary tale — though not about the entropic nature of empires and civilization. It's a warning about what too much money, too much self-seriousness and too little editing can do to an artist.

The People’s Choice Award from the just-wrapped 2024 Toronto Film Festival has gone to The Life of Chuck, first runner-up is Emilia Pérez, and second runner-up is Anora. The Documentary Award goes to The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal, and the Midnight Madness winner is The Substance.

Both runners-up Emilia Pérez and Anora were big winners at Cannes in May (the latter taking the Palme d’Or), but Mike Flanagan’s Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck was a TIFF world premiere and a surprise winner of this award.

Tom Hiddleston stars in the film based on King’s novella about three chapters in the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz. It is an unusual winner here for this award as it currently is looking for distribution and has no set release date, which means it could be the first People’s Choice winner in recent memory to not be currently considered a contender in the 2024 awards-season race. It has been called “an apocalyptic version of It’s a Wonderful Life,” and no doubt this award will speed up a distribution deal for the movie, which is atypical of King’s bread and butter but closer in spirit to the likes of movies like Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, which both went on to Oscar nominations for Best Picture.

Social disadvantage is now so entrenched in “left behind” areas that a young person growing up poor in parts of London has a significantly better chance of going to university and getting a good job than a child of a similar background from the north-east of England, the UK’s social mobility commissioner has said.

Alun Francis, whose remit is to assess progress in improving social mobility in the UK and to promote social mobility in England, said the “geography of disadvantage” had become increasingly marked in recent years, with deprived northern post-industrial and rural areas and seaside towns falling further behind England’s thriving south-east in terms of economic and social opportunity.

Francis called for “decisive and bold” government action to drive economic growth in left-behind areas and narrow a widening north-south divide, arguing that past attempts to drive social mobility by focusing mainly on educational achievement to drive life chances had failed to shift the dial for many young people.

The report found that working-class teenagers in areas of London with high levels of poverty such as Islington, Hackney and Newham were 19 percentage points more likely to experience upward mobility than contemporaries in similarly deprived places in the north of England such as Sunderland, Hull, Gateshead and Barnsley.

The capital’s superior economic and job opportunities were likely to partly explain these differences, the commission suggested. Ethnicity could also be a factor, with London’s larger immigrant population more likely to see educational attainment as a tool to improve their children’s life chances.

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In an interview with the Guardian before the Social Mobility Commission’s 2024 State of the Nation report, Francis called for an “honest” assessment of why white British youngsters from the poorest backgrounds consistently under-attained educationally and were less socially mobile compared with their peers.

He said white British people were “at the top of the social mobility tree and the bottom, like bookends”, adding: “We need to ask harder questions about why, and not be constrained by being anxious about what we might find, because if we want to bridge people’s outcomes of life we need to be really honest, to find a better answer.”

Francis, who is principal of Blackpool and the Fylde further education college, said while white British children on free school meals persistently underperformed at school, children with a Chinese background on free school meals outperformed the national average for non-free school meal children at ages 11 and 16.

It was important to avoid “simplistic and misleading” accounts that assumed social mobility was getting worse on all counts, he said. Poverty was not the only determinant of life chances, he added: “What are the things that enable some people to do well despite their circumstances, where others really do not?”

Asked whether there was a link between the August riots and deprivation in many of the communities where disorder took place, Francis acknowledged many of those towns had been ignored in terms of economic opportunity, saying: “In those areas we certainly created a climate where people do feel left behind.”

He added: “I would say in those areas the vast majority of people in straitened circumstances feel frustrated, a bit defeated, sometimes a bit sad, but I don’t think they always go on to the streets and become violent about it.”

The Archival Producers Alliance (APA), a volunteer group of more than 300 documentary producers and researchers formed in response to concerns over the use of generative AI in nonfiction film, developed the guidelines over the course of a year, after publishing an open letter in the Hollywood Reporter demanding more guardrails for the industry. The guidelines, announced at the Camden Film Festival, are not intended to dismiss the possibilities of a technology that is already shaping all forms of visual storytelling, but to “to reaffirm the journalistic values that the documentary community has long held”.

“In a world where it is becoming difficult to distinguish between a real photograph and a generated one, we believe it’s absolutely pivotal to understand the ways generative AI could impact nonfiction storytelling,” said Stephanie Jenkins, APA’s co-director, in a statement.

Dozens of prominent documentary film organizations endorsed the guidelines at launch, including the Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA) and the International Documentary Association (IDA), as well as over 50 individual film-makers such as Michael Moore, Ken Burns and Rory Kennedy.

“Documentary is a truth-seeking art practice, but the nature of truth has always been mutable,” Dominic Willsdon, executive director of the IDA, said. “GenAI will bring all sorts of new and profound mutations, some fruitful, some harmful.” APA’s guidelines “can help the documentary field navigate this first phase of wider AI adoption”.

Rather than rejecting the use of generative AI outright, the group encourages consideration based in four overarching principles: the value of primary sources, transparency, legal considerations and ethical considerations of creating human simulations.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17484663

The 2020s have already been great for folk horror, but the current folk horror revival really got its start in the previous decade. The niche subgenre, which had been around since the 1960s and 1970s, didn't get a name until actor Mark Gatiss of Sherlock fame used the term "folk horror" in 2010 to describe a trio of influential films in his BBC documentary series, A History of Horror. Suddenly, a generation of writers and filmmakers who had grown up on the old British films and television programs were inspired to revisit the rural terrors of their youth.

Folk horror, which was initially recognized as a British phenomenon, became closely associated with imagery from the British Isles, such as stone circles, druids, and the green man. However, the modern folk horror revival has been more inclusive, as filmmakers from around the world draw inspiration from their countries' history and folklore. From Indonesia to Austria, these are the best folk horror movies of the 2010s.

1. Midsommar (2019)
2. Kill List (2011)
3. The Witch (2015)
4. The Borderlands (2013)
5. The Wailing (2016)
6. The Ritual (2017)
7. Impetigore (2019)
8. La Llorona (2019)
9. Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse (2017)
10. A Dark Song (2016)

Warning: the image used dod The Ritual is a massive spoiler - go watch it first, it's worth going in blind.

See also:

• 10 best Folk Horror movies of the 2020s (so far)

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17484663

The 2020s have already been great for folk horror, but the current folk horror revival really got its start in the previous decade. The niche subgenre, which had been around since the 1960s and 1970s, didn't get a name until actor Mark Gatiss of Sherlock fame used the term "folk horror" in 2010 to describe a trio of influential films in his BBC documentary series, A History of Horror. Suddenly, a generation of writers and filmmakers who had grown up on the old British films and television programs were inspired to revisit the rural terrors of their youth.

Folk horror, which was initially recognized as a British phenomenon, became closely associated with imagery from the British Isles, such as stone circles, druids, and the green man. However, the modern folk horror revival has been more inclusive, as filmmakers from around the world draw inspiration from their countries' history and folklore. From Indonesia to Austria, these are the best folk horror movies of the 2010s.

1. Midsommar (2019)
2. Kill List (2011)
3. The Witch (2015)
4. The Borderlands (2013)
5. The Wailing (2016)
6. The Ritual (2017)
7. Impetigore (2019)
8. La Llorona (2019)
9. Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse (2017)
10. A Dark Song (2016)

Warning: the image used dod The Ritual is a massive spoiler - go watch it first, it's worth going in blind.

See also:

• 10 best Folk Horror movies of the 2020s (so far)

Context

With Hollywood budgets being what they are, a budget under $10 million is practically tiny. Despite this, many films have gone on to make a killing at the box office from budgets that barely scratch the surface of their competition.

So, here are 14 smaller-budget movies that made the big bucks at the box office:

1. Juno
2. Mad Max
3. Paranormal Activity
4. Little Miss Sunshine
5. El Mariachi
6. The Blair Witch Project
7. Annabelle
8. Super Size Me
9. Rocky
10. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
11. The Devil Inside
12. Halloween
13. Moonlight
14. Napoleon Dynamite

Adreanna Shelton and her nine year old daughter Gray were at the Dollar Tree on South Bend Avenue shopping for a gift for Gray's teacher when Gray reached for a candle on the shelf.

"We're smelling candles, and she picked up a candle to smell and tilted it back and it literally, liquid, went down her. At first we were like maybe it's just water, and as we were just walking through the store we get a foul smell and Gray goes, 'mom my shirt really stinks,'" said Shelton.

That smell was urine sitting in the candle on the store shelf.

Appalled by the stain and smell on her daughters shirt, Shelton went to a manager searching for answers.

The store manager offered her a shirt as a replacement.

"They have been telling me this has been happening over a month, and they're not able to catch the person doing it, and there's no cameras down the aisle where he is doing it, so the store employees, the manager, has asked corporate to put in cameras in those areas. And corporate just doesn't want to pay for those,"said Shelton.