“The Bye Man” is one of those unoriginal, unintelligent horror movies studios dump into theaters every so often, seen and quickly forgotten if they’re seen at all.
There are a couple of scary things about it, though: appearances by Carrie-Anne Moss and Faye Dunaway. Their agents must be terrified.
The film, directed by Stacy Title, is a kind of riff on the “Bloody Mary” story, or the “Candyman” films, even “Beetlejuice.” In those tales, you say the entity’s name a certain number of times and it appears, then kills you (except in the case of Beetlejuice, in which Michael Keaton shows up and makes you laugh).
The film begins with a prologue set in the 1960s when a man drives up to a house, asks the people inside if they told anyone the name and then shoots them to death.
Then he goes for the neighbors. And you thought solicitors were bad.
Cut to present time. College student Elliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and Elliot’s longtime friend John (Lucien Laviscount) move into an old house near campus. There are hints of tragedy in Elliot’s past, though they are not explored very deeply — fitting, because nothing else in the film is, either. There are strange noises and sightings and a coin that keeps appearing, along with a big coat that hangs in the corner and appears occasionally to be a scary-looking man.
Meanwhile Elliot finds a night stand with the words “Don’t say it” and “Don’t think it” written over and over in the drawer; underneath, carved into the wood, are the words “The Bye Man.”
Sasha’s friend Kim (Jenna Kanell) tries to purge the house of bad vibes or whatever, and she and the other three wind up talking to spirits (Kim’s got a gift for it). She senses the don’t-say-it warning and Elliot blurts out the name.
It’s all downhill from there.
They all start seeing things. Elliot does a little research and learns … almost nothing. We do find out that the man in the prologue was a reporter who had been writing about a teenage killer, and eventually everyone pieces together that if you say or think the Bye Man’s name, he’ll show up and kill you. Or possess you. And if you’re dead his big demon dog-type creature will eat you.
Also a train with the serial number 4241 shows up every so often.
Why?
Who knows? It’s not explained. There are a lot of holes in the story (Jonathan Penner’s script is based on Robert Damon Schneck’s story “The Bridge to Body Island,” which evidently goes into greater detail). So what we’re left with are a few PG-13 murders, uninspired performances, some not-so-scary urban legends and a couple of accomplished actresses who must be wondering how they got here.
Don’t say it. Don’t think it.
And whatever you do, don’t see it.

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© Source: http://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/dont-say-you-werent-warned-about-the-bye-bye-man/
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Martha Swope, whose crisp, compelling photographs of dancers and actors at work recorded nearly half a century of stage history, died Thursday in New York. She was 88.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Jeanne Fuchs, her longtime friend and executor.
From 1957, when Swope was invited by Jerome Robbins to shoot rehearsals of “West Side Story,” to 1994, when she shut down her Times Square studio and sold her archive, Swope produced hundreds of thousands of images of performers in action, capturing Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov in full flight, the cast of “La Cage aux Folles” in full drag and John Travolta in full Saturday night fever.
Those photographs made their way into newspapers (the arts pages of The New York Times frequently featured her work), magazines and books. They decorated sales brochures, posters and programs.
And they eventually garnered her a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater in 2004 and a lifetime achievement award from the League of Professional Theater Women in 2007.
As official photographer first for New York City Ballet and then for an honor roll of other dance troupes, Swope chronicled the working lives of George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Robbins and other key figures in 20th-century dance. At the same time, she was what Variety called “the go-to photog” for New York’s theater industry, documenting more than 800 productions.
Whether Swope was posing clients in her studio or capturing their live performances, whether on assignment for a publication, a dance company or a theater producer, her stated aim was to make a straightforward record of the artistry before her lens.
“I’m not interested in what’s going on my side of the camera,” she told an interviewer. “I’m interested in what’s happening on the other side.”
She took ballet lovers into the studio with Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky as they worked with the dancers on “Agon.” She was backstage as Baryshnikov and Liza Minnelli prepared their television special. And she brought Irene Worth and Kevin Spacey squabbling in “Lost in Yonkers,” Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera vamping in “Chicago” and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton canoodling in “Private Lives” to those who couldn’t buy tickets.
Swope never revealed her age, even to intimates, who laugh about how often they tried unsuccessfully to find out, looking for her passport in a purse left briefly unattended on a trip, or searching her apartment for clues while feeding her cats.
Martha Joan Swope was, in fact, born on Feb. 22, 1928, in Waco, Texas. It was Washington’s Birthday, and, Swope told friends, her parents, John Swope and the former Nellie Clark, named her for Martha Washington.
Even as a girl, she carried a little camera wherever she went. But her real passion was dance.
After a year at Baylor University in Waco, she was accepted at City Ballet’s training affiliate, the School of American Ballet. She left Texas to pursue a dance career – setting out, she recalled, with 17 hats and “visions of going to cocktail parties and meeting all those West Pointers.”
Instead she met Robbins, who had returned to ballet class to get into shape for directing and choreographing “West Side Story.” An amateur photographer, he offered his fellow shutterbug the use of his darkroom, and then, when rehearsals began, he invited her to bring her camera.
One of her pictures appeared in Life magazine, and her photography career took off.
“I didn’t even know what an interchangeable lens was, or a Leica,” she once recalled. But she was still hoping to become a dancer when Lincoln Kirstein, who ran the school and was general director of City Ballet, pulled her out of class one day to offer her a job recording the company’s work in pictures. She shelved her toe shoes.
Her routine was to attend rehearsals to become familiar with the choreography. She would then shoot the dress rehearsals for each cast, typically arranging her lanky frame in ballet’s fourth position, leaning back on her rear leg and switching between wide-angle and close-up lenses.
Sometimes – but only if she had to – she loaded a third camera with color film. She also took pictures, as unobtrusively as possible, at performances. Such sessions could yield as many as 300 negatives of a single work. But those that left her darkroom were the ones in which every toe, every fingertip was properly positioned, and dance and dancers looked flawless.
Delia Peters, a friend who danced with City Ballet, said in an interview: “Having been a dancer, she understood the timing. She understood what they were going to do, she understood where the pictures were going to be.”
Swope’s career began as technical advances and evolving tastes changed the way dance and theater performances could be photographed. Previously, slow shutter and film speeds had made it impractical to shoot dancers and actors unless they were prettily posed and carefully lighted in a studio.
Swope was able to catch them animated and sweaty and laboring onstage or in rehearsal. But she also pioneered the now commonplace practice of distilling the essence of a drama or musical by posing the performers tellingly and shooting them in close-up.
By 1978, she was photographing 60 to 70 percent of the Broadway roster, working out of the apartment below her own on West 72nd Street and using the bathroom as the darkroom.
Actors and producers valued not just her canny eye and instinct for flattery but also her ability to work swiftly and calmly. With her gentle temperament and Southern manners, Swope managed to get cranky, tired actors to do what she wanted without seeming bossy.
Back then, publicity photographs were printed from negatives one at a time for hand delivery to newspapers and magazines. Swope and her assistants regularly worked through the night preparing them for distribution the next morning.
“She was an incredible teacher,” said Carol Rosegg, one of several dance and theater photographers who learned their craft assisting Swope and then became her competition. “And she was a master retoucher. In those days you would sit with a single-edge razor blade scratching out wrinkles one at a time.”
In 1980, Swope moved her studio to a large storefront space in the midtown complex Manhattan Plaza, taking an apartment there as well. By the time she retired and gave away her cameras, the studio contained more than 1 million images, which she sold to Time and Life Pictures.
But the deal ended in acrimony and litigation, and she regained possession of her archive in an out-of-court settlement in 2002. In 2010 she donated her life’s work – contact sheets, negatives, prints, slides and digital files – to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. A selection of her photos was exhibited at the library for four months beginning in fall 2012.
She is survived by two nieces, a nephew and a great-niece.
Swope’s legacy was important to her, and she was determined not to separate her dance and theater images. She had hoped to compile a volume surveying them together, but she never found a taker. The closest she came to marrying her two worlds in one book was “Baryshnikov on Broadway: Photographs,” which documented the dancer’s acclaimed 1980 television special.
Other books for which she provided photographs include Tanaquil Le Clercq’s “Mourka: The Autobiography of a Cat,” Kenneth Laws’ “Physics and the Art of Dance” and Denny Martin Flinn’s “What They Did for Love: The Untold Story Behind the Making of ‘A Chorus Line.’”
Her friends remember an enthusiastic, card-playing traveler who loved animals and jigsaw puzzles. But Swope’s photographs will outlive those memories. They are in dozens of other dance and theater books, and they regularly pop up in web searches for graying Broadway actors or bygone ballet stars. They also reappear as her subjects die or when a reference to show business history needs to be illustrated. Only last month, a dramatic Martha Swope photograph appeared in The Times with an article about the 35th anniversary of “Dreamgirls.”

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© Source: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/nation-world/national/article126299769.html
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Each video starts the same way: with a disclaimer.
“I’m not in any way trying to brag,” says beauty vlogger Fleur De Force in her “What I Got For CHRISTMAS 2016!” video, before speaking for 13 minutes about her Christmas presents, which include a £209 dress, £220 earrings, and £805 ankle boots. Some variation of these words are uttered in the videos of YouTubers, big and small, who showcase their yuletide gifts for the world to see each year.
“I’m not doing this to show off my presents at all,” says vlogger Tanya Burr in her 2014 video (presents of note: a £180 duck egg Roberts radio and a £300 Kitchen Aid mixer). But if YouTubers aren’t creating “What I got for Christmas videos” to brag or to boast, why are they doing it?
Burr’s answer is simple. In that very same video she explains: “I’m doing this because so many of you have requested it”. This is the first and most important defence of the conspicuous consumption on display in these clips. “What I got for Christmas” videos have been widely requested by YouTubers’ fans since the tag began in the late Noughties, and are hardly causing the commercialisation of Christmas so much as reflecting it.
“I do get why people are horrified by the onslaught of perfectly-presented beauty and lifestyle gurus talking about all the designer things they got for Christmas,” says Lex Croucher, a lifestyle vlogger with over 129,000 subscribers, “but I still actually enjoy watching all types of haul videos.”
Sophia Grace via YouTube
Croucher no longer makes any haul videos herself, as her channel now focuses less on beauty and fashion and more on her vegan lifestyle, politics, and comedy. Her conflicted response to Christmas hauls – that they can be at once jarring but also incredibly entertaining – reflects the complexity of the situation.
Gemma Tomlinson, a blogger and vlogger with over 88,000 subscribers, has similarly nuanced opinions. She no longer makes Christmas hauls since switching to cruelty-free beauty products and attempting to make more ethical choices about her purchases, but is unsure as to whether vloggers are directly fuelling the rise of Christmas consumerism.
“I definitely think these types of videos have a place, it’s mostly escapism and can also be informative for people as they might spot things they like themselves,” she says. “I do think it can fuel comparison and an addiction to materialism but so does our society in general, I suppose. The fact of the matter is these videos get lots of views, so vloggers will make the content the audience demands.”
For YouTubers, more views mean more money, so it is possible that Christmas haulers are not acting entirely altruistically in fulfilling their fan’s fancies. Yet whilst it is unfair to criticise YouTubers for making money in this way (everyone has to eat, after all), some vloggers go further to legitimately profit from their “What I got for Christmas” videos. Underneath Fleur De Force’s video , for example, is a list of links as to where her viewers can purchase the presents on show. Each link is affiliated (you can tell because they have been shortened, and when you click on them the URL redirects via ShopStyle, who run an affiliate program) – meaning she directly profits every time it is clicked. YouTubers are legally free to use these affiliate links without disclaiming or disclosing that they profit from them, but many feel it is better, ethically, to tell their young viewers when they are doing so.
YouTubers must, however, disclose when they have been paid by a brand to feature a product in their video as an advertisement deal, and some are rumoured to charge up to £20,000 to feature a single item in their videos. The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) ruled in 2014 that vloggers must feature the word „ad“ in a video’s title or thumbnail if the video was a paid-for advert by a brand, ending an era of misleading advertisements. Since then, however, some YouTubers have got around this by accepting sponsorships instead of advertisement deals (the difference is that they do not have a script to follow, and that the ASA does not regulate sponsorships). This means that, without breaking any ASA rules, YouTubers can accept money from brands to stealthily market their products.
Claudia Sulewski via YouTube
This makes it hard to tell if any of these “What I got for Christmas” videos contain sponsorships. In this way, the videos are a perfect end to Vlogmas – the advent period in which YouTubers film a video every day before Christmas, often featuring an abundance of products about which they wax lyrical. Being unsure whether a YouTuber is sponsored or not can make viewers doubt their authenticity. Is it a coincidence that so many vloggers seem to fall in love with the same supermarket from autumn to Christmas time? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Yet even without any brand deals behind them, are “What I got for Christmas” videos still problematic?
On the one hand, it can be disturbing to see thousands of pounds worth of presents on display, and on the other, when I bought a £50 (£50!) device that cleaned my make-up brushes this week, I found myself taking to social media to tell others about how good it is. Personally, my main reservations about the videos probably come from the fact that, as a child, I hated coming back to school and my friends asking each other about their gifts, only for them to reveal they got Playstations and ponies before the question turned to me and I awkwardly stuttered out, „Erm… a calendar. “ (Note, dad, if you’re reading: it was a great calendar).
Yet although it can be jarring to watch these parades of presents, the fact of the matter is – I and many other people still watch them. We are fundamentally nosy about other people’s lives, and YouTubers are surely exhibiting some form of Christmas generosity by allowing us a peek into their own?
Still, it would be nice if these videos didn’t come immediately after Vlogmas – which ends, for many YouTubers, on December 24 th. If a YouTuber or two could take the time out to remind their fans that yes, it was still Christmas this week, then perhaps that would combat the materialism on show. Either that, or they could lend me their £805 ankle boots. Please.
If you read any film criticism at all last year, you will have read at least one journalist getting misty-eyed over Spotlight , the Oscar-winning film about, yes, journalists uncovering the sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests. I myself was gripped, leaning forward in my seat as Mark Ruffalo’s furious rage against injustice began to unfold – until a man’s phone rang loudly for the seventh time that screening.
We all know how annoying it is when a phone ruins a film, and now it seems that Apple wants to introduce a “theater mode” that aims to make phone usage in cinemas less distracting for the rest of the audience. A prolific Apple leaker, Sonny Dickson, tweeted that the option is planned to arrive on 10 January software update iOS 10.3 beta, and that it will be switched on and off via a popcorn-shaped Control Centre icon. AppleInsider added that the update may, “disable system sounds and haptic feedback, block incoming calls and messages and reduce initial screen brightness during a movie”.
For me, the cinema is a sacred space – the idea of a “theater mode” immediately frustrated me. The movies and the theatre are some of the only places that we can escape into a fantasy for significant periods of time without being interrupted by the hideous world we live in. Why encourage people to break out of that by making it more palatable for them to check their phones?
But I know that some people don’t have the luxury of true escape from life’s commitments. For new mothers, doctors and nurses on call, carers, or relatives of people who are very unwell, a trip to the cinema might be impossible without the option of occasionally checking one’s phone for emergency calls or messages. Why not make it a less disruptive, anxiety-inducing and embarrassing experience for everyone involved?
If that is who this update is aimed at, though, the rumoured features leave me puzzled. If theater mode does “block incoming calls and messages”, why would anyone need to check their phones at all? Who is this update for? Live-tweeters? People without watches? Someone involved in a very high-maintenance pre-wedding group WhatsApp?
If we take a closer look at a patent Apple filed in 2012 that outlines rough ideas surrounding a mode they’re calling “Movie Theater”, it suggests the following possible features. A Movie Theatre template would “(i) disable audible ringer; (ii) vibrating mode enabled (low); (iii) no wakeup for incoming calls or text messages; and (iv) display enabled for “dim” mode only.” So – your phone would be darker (many imagine dark mode would invert the basic display to a dark background with white text), it wouldn’t light up when you got a text, it would vibrate extra quietly, and, of course, it wouldn’t audibly ring.
The patent also suggests that, either by using GPS or WiFi network data, this mode could be automatically enabled whenever a user walks inside a cinema – a vaguely terrifying invasion of privacy, sure, but not one that strikes me as encouraging audiences to use their phones more.
I am a dedicated cinema-goer, one who uses it first and foremost as a way to zone out of real life for extended periods of time. I’d prefer it if nobody looked at their phones during a film, but I find it hard to feel outraged by Apple’s attempt to make checking one’s phone less disruptive. All I really want is to see Spotlight without a tinny ringer drowning out Ruffalo’s dulcet tones.

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© Source: http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2017/01/how-youtuber-stole-christmas
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