Kategori: Fashion

13 Juni 2025

“Resident Evil” Is Fun, but Soulless. What Else Could It Be?

Post By Minda Fashion, Lifestyle

The most successful ever, spans thirty-odd games—many of which are very good—and has spawned multiple live-action film adaptations and television shows, nearly all of which have been terrible. The games, which follow the survivors of a zombie outbreak induced by a corporate bioweapon, popularized a genre known as survival horror, in which a normie character—as opposed to the typical overpowered hero—must carefully navigate a dangerous environment, conserving ammo and other resources, solving puzzles, and evading enemies almost as often as fighting them. (One can imagine how this would appeal to a certain kind of personality.) These games, alongside their first film adaptation, in 2002, helped revive the zombie-film genre, which had peaked in 1978 with George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” before dying out in the late nineteen-eighties, as audiences moved on to smarter monsters: vampires, serial killers, Chucky.

Có thể là hình ảnh về văn bản

Today, the Resident Evil franchise holds the record for the most live-action films based on a video-game series. The movies occupy a strange cultural position, though, making up a commercially successful franchise with basically zero critical acclaim. Salon described the first installment as “mildly grisly, assaultively noisy and tremendously boring”; Roger Ebert put the film and its sequel, “Resident Evil: Apocalypse,” on his most-hated-films list. The movies have been most controversial among fans of the games because of their distance from the original source material. (It certainly didn’t help that the writer and director, Paul W. S. Anderson, created a new protagonist for his films, an ass-kicking yet spiritually empty heroine named Alice—played by Milla Jovovich, his wife.) Hollywood has long puzzled over the problem of video-game adaptations: change the plot too much and alienate the fans; hew too closely to the game and alienate the masses. Either way, these adaptations—even the well-respected ones, such as “The Last of Us,” on HBO, or “Fallout,” on Prime Video—necessarily lack the thing that makes a video game enjoyable: the experience of playing it.

24 Mei 2025

Pernyataan Hak Cipta Gambar – Keindahan Malam Perkotaan

Post By Minda Fashion, Lifestyle

Selamat datang di situs web resmi kami.
Hari này, kami ingin membagikan sebuah karya seni fotografi jalanan yang memukau, menangkap pesona modern dan elegan seorang wanita di tengah gemerlap lampu kota di malam hari.
Detail Karya Fotografi
–Judul Karya: Jalan Malam di Perkotaan
–Deskripsi: Gambar ini mengabadikan momen spontan seorang model wanita yang tampil anggun dengan kaos putih minimalis, celana panjang hitam, và sandal santai yang modis. Karakter utama tampak mempesona dengan rambut panjangnya saat menyeberang di jalur pejalan kaki (zebra cross). Latar belakang menampilkan pemandangan jalanan malam yang indah dengan pencahayaan gedung-gedung tinggi và pepohonan rindang.
–Format: Gambar Digital Resolusi Tinggi (High-Resolution Digital Image).

Mô tả ảnh

PERNYATAAN HAK CIPTA DAN PERLINDUNGAN HUKUM (COPYRIGHT NOTICE)
HAK CIPTA DILINDUNGI UNDANG-UNDANG (ALL RIGHTS RESERVED).
1. Hak Kepemilikan Eksklusif:
Gambar di atas adalah kekayaan intelektual và hak cipta eksklusif milik kami (Minda). Foto ini diambil, diredaksi, dan dipublikasikan secara eksklusif oleh tim kami.
2. Larangan Penggunaan Tanpa Izin:
Setiap tindakan menyalin, mengunggah ulang (reupload), mengedit, memotong, mendistribusikan, atau menggunakan gambar ini untuk keperluan komersial maupun media sosial apa pun (termasuk TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, dll.) tanpa izin tertulis dari kami merupakan PELANGGARAN HAK CIPTA SANGAT SERIUS berdasarkan Undang-Undang Hak Cipta yang berlaku dan Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
3. Penindakan Pelanggaran:
Kami secara aktif memantau dan melindungi hak cipta karya kami. Setiap konten yang secara sengaja menggunakan gambar ini ở TikTok atau platform lain tanpa izin akan segera dilaporkan untuk dihapus (Takedown Request) melalui Pusat Hak Cipta TikTok và dapat dikenakan sanksi hukum.

21 Mei 2025

How Rick Bragg Became His Generation’s Bard of the South

Post By Minda Art, Fashion, Lifestyle

The first time I spoke with the writer Rick Bragg, he was driving his truck in Calhoun County, where he grew up, a rural area fifty miles east of Birmingham, Alabama, surrounded by what he once called “the endless, beautiful, hateful rows of cotton.” As he recounts in his 1997 memoir, “All Over but the Shoutin’,” his mother, Margaret, picked that cotton while his father, Charles, was off getting drunk. These days, Bragg lives with Margaret nearby, in a red-cedar cabin on forty acres of pastureland grazed upon by two miniature donkeys. The day before we first spoke, over the phone in July, Bragg had brought Margaret home from the hospital, where she’d been recovering from pneumonia. At eighty-nine, she has also survived colon cancer and congestive heart failure. “More than that, she survived my daddy and my little brother, Mark,” Bragg told me. Mark died last year, at sixty-two, from cancer; Bragg’s older brother, Sam, had also succumbed to the disease a few years earlier, at sixty-four. Charles died of complications from alcoholism in 1975. “I’m the last one left,” Bragg said.

Mô tả ảnh

When Bragg takes calls from his truck, he tends to finish them there. He parked beside a stand of old pine trees where he remained for most of an hour. “There aren’t that many people to talk writing with,” he said, sounding lonesome. Since the mid-nineteen-nineties, Bragg has been among the most popular Southern writers of nonfiction and memoir. He recited a favorite line from “Land O’Goshen,” a book by another Alabamian, the novelist Charles McNair: “If the biggest, fanciest chandelier in the whole world fell off the back of a pickup truck doing ninety miles an hour, the blacktop road would look like the sky that night over The Secret Place.” “That’s pretty damn good, right?” Bragg said.

Bragg was born near Possum Trot, Alabama, in 1959. He and his brothers spent their summers stacking pulpwood for minimum wage, and each of them tried, in his own way, to protect their mother from the rages of their father, a veteran of the Korean War. But they did not grow up to be close. “The only thing we ever really had to talk about was this truck,” Bragg told me, referring to the red 1986 Ford Bronco that he’d bought in 1993. “Trucks mean something to us.” Bragg purchased the Bronco when he was a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, in Florida. He’d spotted an ad for it in the newspaper. He was thirty-four, at his first big paper, a decade into a career that had emerged from his realization that he loved writing in an all-consuming way—“like some men love women.” At the St. Petersburg Times, he was a feature writer, free to roam. The truck ferried him from story to story. “I buried it in mud and cottonmouths,” he said. “I drove it through a hurricane, a wildfire, a Mardi Gras. I did things with it that you need a tank for.” Then he headed west, to the Los Angeles Times, before turning around and joining the New York Times, in 1994, where he became a national correspondent and eventually won a Pulitzer.

Your window is closing.
Don’t lose these views. Get full access for $2.50 $1 a week for one year, plus a free tote. Cancel or pause anytime.
See Offers
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Subscription Offer
Unlock this story for just $2.50 $1 a week for 1 year.

Subscribe »
When Bragg got back to the East Coast from L.A., he gave the truck to his brother Sam, who worked in a cotton mill and volunteered in search and rescue. “He drove it over every mountain in northeast Alabama,” Bragg said. “He drove it for a decade, to do the things that good men do.” When Bragg returned again to Alabama, in 2003, to write books, Sam gave the truck back to him. Bragg had it for the next several years. “Then my little brother, Mark, went to Holman prison,” he said. “He did two years down there, essentially for having more D.U.I.s than any other human being in the history of the state of Alabama.” When Mark was released, Bragg gave him the keys to the Bronco. “And that’s the way that truck’s history developed: it passed not from the oldest to the youngest but to the one who needed it most.”

Looking for new books, TV, and music? Get the Goings On newsletter for picks from our writers and critics.

SIGN UP
By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.
Now the Bronco is a story vehicle: Bragg is writing about the thirty years and three hundred thousand miles that he and his brothers shared in that truck. He began reciting what he’d got down so far. “The first line in the book is—and I’m cursed with this kind of memory about writing—‘My little brother,’ comma, ‘too drunk to know better and running from the law,’ comma, ‘missed his turn at Reads Mill and sank our truck in Ohatchee Creek.’ Period. And the next line is ‘It was only three feet deep,’ comma, ‘but he was too hammered to tell.’ Period. ‘So he climbed up on the hood and kind of posed there,’ comma, ‘kind of listing and wobbling,’ comma, ‘but proud.’ ”

Bragg told me other stories that he planned to include in the book, some of which seemed to seek gallows humor in alcoholism: the time, for instance, that Mark got so drunk on homemade liquor that he “hallucinated a road through a forest.” “He made it a half mile, knocking down little trees. Then he hit a giant elm just head on,” Bragg said. “And so I guess—in journalism, we call it the ‘kicker’ to that graf—the kicker is ‘God’s own drunk,’ in quotes, ‘my mama called him.’ Period. And then my big brother said, ‘More likely Ford just made one mean damn truck.’ And so, once I wrote that paragraph, I thought, Yeah, I think we got a book.” Bragg went on, “The point of the book is that no matter what we did to the truck it always started right back up again. Idling in that kind of . . . you know how old Fords have that thumping sound? That thumping idle? The graf ends with ‘Idling in that thumping sound like it was immortal. And as long as we were behind the wheel, so were we.’ ”

“Bronco Boys,” as Bragg is calling the work in progress, will be his thirteenth and, probably, final book. Bragg is sixty-seven, and his kidneys are not in good shape. He told me, “I wake up in the morning and I go sit in my chair like the old guy that I am. I look at that array of medicine, and then I mix it all together like a chemist. I get it all down. And I’m grateful, quite frankly, because I still have a lot to do.”

17 Mei 2025

An Unlikely Taylor Swift Fan Gets Out of Prison, in “Daylight”

Post By Minda Fashion, Lifestyle

The New York Film Festival is a feast of many parts, but its divisions are mainly symbolic. Such major festivals as those in Cannes, Berlin, and Venice are competitive; they offer prizes and make a distinction between movies in the main competition and those in other sections. Thus, the value judgments in those programming decisions have practical effects. The New York Film Festival is different: it was conceived as a “festival of festivals,” presenting movies that made their débuts at other festivals. The N.Y.F.F. also reliably features some world premières, but they’re nestled among a throng of movies already seen elsewhere. The festival’s parsing of films into its Main Slate and its other sections (principally Spotlight, Currents, and Revivals) is an unofficial consumer guide. The Main Slate is the prime showcase of what’s deemed best in the year of world cinema; the Spotlight offers what’s widely anticipated; and, in this year’s program guide, Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, calls Currents “our home for films that push against the conventions of cinematic form.”

Snapinsta

As a result, it should come as no surprise that one of the best films of the festival (and of the year) is screening in Currents: “Red Rocks,” by the French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. He’s among the world’s great directors of children—from the tough North Sea adolescents in his political crime comedy “Li’l Quinquin” (2014) to the child Joan of Arc in his rock opera “Jeannette” (2017). But the most original work he has done with children is in this new film (which premièred at Cannes in May). “Red Rocks” is a high-tension melodrama, set mainly in a calm, gentrified town on the French Riviera, about two groups of idle youths who meet by chance and clash when a girl from one group and a boy from the other become romantically involved. The characters, like the actors who portray them, are somewhere between five and seven years old.

13 Mei 2025

Anthony Scaramucci Says the Universe Did Katie Zacharia a Favor

Post By Minda Art, Fashion

No job is forever. Some barely exceed the lifespan of a mayfly. In the late nineteen-seventies, Madonna moved to New York to try to make it as a dancer and lasted about a week working at Dunkin’ Donuts. As she once explained breezily to Howard Stern, “I was playing with the jelly-squirter machine.”

Katie Zacharia, late of the Zhong Lun law firm, in Beijing (though not, strictly speaking, an attorney, as it turns out), has just set a new American record for shortest tenure as White House press secretary. She lasted about as long as Madonna did at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Mô tả ảnh

The Lede
Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today.

Zacharia brought to her work a gossamer résumé in the field of communications: a brief stint as a commentator at Newsmax and less than two months as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. The cynical might glance at Zacharia and remark upon her outward similarity to others in the Trump circle, including Natalie Harp, the aide known in the White House as “the human printer,” and two previous press secretaries, Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt. But that would be wrong. She did bring to the job a certain conspiratorial frame of mind. Several years ago, seemingly under the influence of the now largely forgotten Pizzagate scandal, she called John Podesta, the former Clinton and Obama Administration adviser, a pedophile. (This was both false and unkind.) Working the same set of obsessions, she has written that “the radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals.” (Ditto.) Zacharia has also shared phony medical information, including this: “8 in 10 women had a miscarriage after getting the COVID vaccine.”

27 April 2025

Why America Looks the Way It Does

Post By Minda Fashion, Lifestyle

To Europeans, the early United States was a curiosity: rich in resources yet poor in history. They were used to a storied landscape, where it was impossible to go for a stroll without tripping over the lithic remnants of some distant era. America, by contrast, seemed blank. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville scoffed at the “day-old ruins” of deserted log cabins—the closest thing to historical depth that this pathetically young country could manage.

Snapinsta

He should have spent more time in Ohio. Settlers there were finding thousands of ancient Native mounds and earthworks, some bafflingly large. Refusing to believe that the ancestors of Native Americans could have built such monumental structures, writers floated bizarre theories as to who had. Perhaps it was a lost tribe of Israel, or an extinct race of giants. (Why not both?)

If oversized Jews were indeed behind it, they must have been especially fond of Pickaway County. It boasted mounds aplenty and the earthen remains of two forts, one circular and another square, constructed with startling geometric precision. In 1810, surveyors latched on to the circle and founded a city, named Circleville, in concentric arcs around it. This was “probably the only city in North America developed in a radio-concentric plan,” the historian John W. Reps wrote in 1955. (There’ve been others since.) It was also, he observed, probably the only settler city built around an Indigenous form.

14 April 2025

Justine Kurland’s Photographs Keep Us on Edge

Post By Minda Art, Fashion

When Barbara Trapido was in her late twenties, a friend told her that she was lazy: she told such good stories, but she never wrote them down. Trapido did not think that she was lazy. Each morning, she took a bus from Durham, in northeast England, where she lived with her husband, Stanley, a lecturer at the university there, to Sunderland, an industrial town on the coast, where she taught drama and literature at a continuing-education college. Trapido loved her students. They were in their late teens, earnest and tasting freedom for the first time. She wrote her own abridged versions of difficult texts, to help them pass their exams. Trapido didn’t think she was lazy at all. Besides, the friend who’d said that she was—Margo Russell—was an overachiever. Like the Trapidos, Russell and her husband were political exiles from South Africa, where they had opposed the apartheid regime. The Russells were sociologists. They had young children and had blown up power lines belonging to the state.

Mô tả ảnh

But it was true that Trapido didn’t have ambitions to speak of. She never had. As a child, she had been small and wheezy, held close by her mother, Anneliese, who was herself an exile. Trapido was hopeless at sports and other worldly pursuits. Her sister, Fran, who was a year older, was much better at all that. In school, Trapido loved fiction and poetry, but she noticed that, where all the bright boys in her classes had plans—for future careers or to study abroad—there was no plan for her. She just assumed, if she even did that, that she would meet a man and get married and learn to cook and sew and have children and live in a bungalow like the one her parents had in Durban.

Mô tả ảnh

Russell was insistent. The Guardian was holding a short-story competition, and Trapido had to enter it. When she tried to come up with a story, she heard, very distinctly, the voices of a large family, talking loud, fast, and over one another. She closed her eyes and entered a soundscape. “I didn’t actually see them clearly,” Trapido told me recently. “What I saw was kind of shapes and the way people moved, the way people come to you in dreams.” More than anything, the experience reminded Trapido of her early childhood, when she would spend hours hiding in bamboo clumps in Durban, talking to people in her head. “I thought, Hey, this is playing. This is what I used to do—and I got really addicted to it.”

Her imaginary family—the Goldmans—became her constant companions. They accompanied her to the movies and to the seaside. She wrote down what they said: reams of argument and love. There were five—no, six—children. The mother, Jane, was beautiful and strong, but displaced from her own well-bred family. The two eldest sons, Roger and Jonathan, were captivating in different ways. Trapido wondered what would happen to the middle daughter, Rosie, who wasn’t as clever as her older brothers.

21 Maret 2025

Pete Hegseth Just Declared Victory in the Wrong War

Post By Minda Art, Fashion

On Wednesday, Pete Hegseth convened hundreds of the U.S. military’s junior officers and enlisted service members in a cavernous auditorium on a military base in Virginia to hear what he called the first of a new annual tradition—a “State of the Force” report to the troops from their self-styled “Secretary of War.” The key moment came when Hegseth, strutting across an American flag-swathed stage in one of his trademark too-tight TV-man’s suits, announced victory over the enemies whose defeat has been the signature focus of his tenure. “We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department,” he declared. “Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos. No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”

Mô tả ảnh

Listening to the address, you might be forgiven for thinking it was a live-action rerun of one of Hegseth’s old Fox News shows, complete with the vilification of bad guys you didn’t even really know were a problem. (Since when was the U.S. military ever the home of wimps and radicals?) But if the antagonists were a bit opaque, the message came through clearly: the only war that this secretary wants to prosecute is the one at home—against the forces of political correctness, against the military’s own generals, some ten per cent of whom Hegseth has already fired, with plans to dismiss ten per cent more, and, above all, against the “fake news,” which he accused of “treason” for accurately reporting the challenges imposed on U.S. forces by an actual war in the Middle East that went all but unmentioned in his nearly hourlong speech.

Hegseth’s main nod to the ongoing conflict with Iran, in fact, came when he asserted that the war, which the Trump Administration is currently asking Congress to provide tens of billions of emergency funding for, was both over and a roaring success “that every red-blooded American is proud of.”

His speech, it should also be noted, came on a day when the Pentagon announced that it had closed the last major U.S. military base in Iraq, thus ending the twenty-three-year, $1.7-trillion American presence there that began with George W. Bush’s ill-fated invasion in 2003—the last time a Republican President embarked on an unpopular war of choice in the region. This also was not mentioned. It wasn’t just the Middle East that Hegseth omitted, though. The entire rest of the world was also left out. As in, no China, no Russia, no Europe or Africa. In Donald Trump’s Pentagon, there are no geopolitics; only the divisive domestic politics of us versus them.

21 Maret 2025

The New York Film Festival, Week Two: Loose Talk, Bold Action

Post By Minda Fashion

The New York Film Festival is a feast of many parts, but its divisions are mainly symbolic. Such major festivals as those in Cannes, Berlin, and Venice are competitive; they offer prizes and make a distinction between movies in the main competition and those in other sections. Thus, the value judgments in those programming decisions have practical effects. The New York Film Festival is different: it was conceived as a “festival of festivals,” presenting movies that made their débuts at other festivals. The N.Y.F.F. also reliably features some world premières, but they’re nestled among a throng of movies already seen elsewhere. The festival’s parsing of films into its Main Slate and its other sections (principally Spotlight, Currents, and Revivals) is an unofficial consumer guide. The Main Slate is the prime showcase of what’s deemed best in the year of world cinema; the Spotlight offers what’s widely anticipated; and, in this year’s program guide, Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, calls Currents “our home for films that push against the conventions of cinematic form.”

Mô tả ảnh

As a result, it should come as no surprise that one of the best films of the festival (and of the year) is screening in Currents: “Red Rocks,” by the French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. He’s among the world’s great directors of children—from the tough North Sea adolescents in his political crime comedy “Li’l Quinquin” (2014) to the child Joan of Arc in his rock opera “Jeannette” (2017). But the most original work he has done with children is in this new film (which premièred at Cannes in May). “Red Rocks” is a high-tension melodrama, set mainly in a calm, gentrified town on the French Riviera, about two groups of idle youths who meet by chance and clash when a girl from one group and a boy from the other become romantically involved. The characters, like the actors who portray them, are somewhere between five and seven years old.

These are precocious, free-range kids. Géo (Kaylon Lancel), the short and cocky leader of one group—a pint-size James Cagney—tools around town on a quad bike with his two friends, Manon (Louise Podolski) and Rouben (Mohamed Coly). Manon and Géo are something of a couple, and Dumont delights in classic cinematic gestures of romance, as when Manon catches a lift with Rouben to a meeting place and then hops off his quad and onto Géo’s. The trio’s main amusement is jumping into the Mediterranean from the terrifying heights of the titular clifflike crags. That’s where they meet the other group of kids, two girls and a boy. Géo helps one of them, Eve (Kelsie Verdeilles), up a steep hill, and soon, when all six children are chased away from the rocks by police, she and he are walking hand in hand. She warns him, however, that she already has a boyfriend, the boy in her trio, called B (Alessandro Piquera), who’s tall, phlegmatic, glowering, and mortally jealous.

16 Maret 2025

Inside Meta’s Efforts to Prevent School Shootings

Post By Minda Fashion, Lifestyle

arry Baimbridge spent thirty-one years with the Houston Police Department, including stints as a homicide detective and as commander of the SWAT team. In 2023, he took a job as chief of police for the Spring Branch Independent School District, most of which is within the city. The job was more low-key—no more shootouts with snipers—but it came with its own challenges. After the 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left nineteen elementary-school students and two teachers dead, the state legislature had neglected to pass any meaningful restrictions on guns; instead, the state required that every school campus have an armed security officer. “Of course, they didn’t provide enough funding for it, but that was the mandate,” Baimbridge said.

Snapinsta

The Spring Branch district served thirty-one thousand students across forty-odd campuses—“a very wealthy area on one side of the freeway and a very poor area on the other side,” Baimbridge said. Late in the school year, on February 18, 2025, he got a phone call from Brian Ennesser, a supervisory special agent at the F.B.I.’s Houston field office. The two men had met the year before, when Ennesser formed a threat-mitigation task force, a group that specializes in disrupting targeted mass violence, including at schools. Baimbridge knew right away that something was up; Ennesser usually texted or e-mailed. “Hey, man, we’ve got a problem,” Ennesser said.

The F.B.I. had received a tip about a potential threat to a local school. It involved two teen-agers, one a student at Spring Branch, the other at a school district north of Houston. Both were girls. “Once we identified it being two females, we were double-checking our work,” Ennesser later told me.