• Ms. Marvel Just Introduced a Long-Awaited Addition to the MCU

    Superhero fans have been wondering how mutants – and therefore the X-Men – would be introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe ever since Disney purchased Fox in 2019, but that question has finally been answered thanks to the Ms. Marvel series.

    Warning: The following paragraphs include spoilers for the Ms. Marvel Disney+ series.

    Early on in the series we learned that the magic bangle worn by Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel herself, only activated something already within her, and we're later told that she's a djinn, a new type of supernatural being for the MCU.

    In the sixth and final episode, however, Khan and Bruno discuss her genes further before he comments there's something different about her still, "like a mutation".

    While this could still be open to interpretation given how many directions the MCU is currently going, a quick soundbite of the actual X-Men: The Animated Series theme song plays on top of the scene, making it pretty clear that Ms. Marvel is the first stepping stone towards a full mutant and X-Men introduction.

    Marvel hasn't said anything about the X-Men's introduction to the MCU previously but it is focusing resources into the franchise elsewhere with the X-Men '97 series that's coming to Disney+ next year. One of Fox's other major franchises, The Fantastic Four, is being introduced as the final film in Phase 4, perhaps leaving Phase 5 wide open for a full X-Men introduction.

    This would include characters including Wolverine (a role that's currently being pursued by Taron Egerton of the Kingsman franchise), Professor X (that featured briefly in one of the latest Doctor Strange film's alternate universe), and Magneto.

    Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

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    The 12 Best Prime Day Deals Under £25 in the UK Right Now

    Prime Day is now into its second day. There are few better times throughout the year to grab yourself some top-quality savings on all your favourite games, accessories, and hardware. For starters, you can currently get a PS5 compatible 1GB SSD with Heatsink for just £99, that's a crazy good deal, do not miss out on this one. There is also an amazing offer on Amazon gift cards where you can top up by £80 and get £9 free.

    A lot of the items we've run articles on have been bigger purchases with higher price tags. This article is for those of you who are looking for the real, proper thrifty deals. Here are our top picks for Prime Day deals under £25.

    1. Get 3-Months of Audible Premium for Free

    Yes, we're going to be rattling on about this deal throughout the whole of Prime Day. It's already available, and it's probably one of the best discounts we've ever seen during the Prime Day sales. Prime members can currently get 3-months of Audible absolutely free.

    3-months would normally put you back almost £24, so getting this for free instead is an absolute bargain. Just so you know, you'll need a Prime membership to take advantage of this deal, and it's also only for This for new Audible members. (Those in the US can also get the same deal at the moment, 3-months of Audible Premium Plus, absolutely free for Prime members.)

    2. Over 50% on Amazon Fire TV Sticks

    We know we've only included subscriptions so far, so here's a mega saving on a great bit of Amazon tech. The amazing Fire TV stick includes access to a number of HD streaming services and comes with an Alexa voice remote. The discount on this is amazing, a whopping 54% in fact, coming down to £23.

    3. Kindle Unlimited 3-Months Free

    Thought you'd only get Audible for free this Prime Day? Think again. Amazon is running an incredibly similar offer for a Kindle Unlimited subscription. Prime members can now bag themselves three whole months of Kindle Unlimited for absolutely nothing.

    Kindle Unlimited is an extensive library of over a million books, magazines, and other amazing publications. This is an absolutely unmissable deal for any of you bookworms out there.

    4. Free PC Games from Amazon Prime Gaming

    Amazon Prime gaming are giving Prime members access to over 30 free PC games over the course of Prime Day. You can grab some absolutely amazing titles through this deal and you do not want to miss out on them.

    You can get titles such as Mass Effect Legendary Edition, GRID Legends, Need for Speed Heat, Star Wars Jedi Knight – Jedi Academy, and many many more.

    5. Amazon Music 3-Months for Free

    Let's round off this list with another excellent free offer from Amazon. For the remainder of Prime Day, you can grab yourself 3 months of Amazon Music Unlimited for absolutely nothing. The clock is ticking on this deal though so be sure to snap it up as soon as you can.

    The Best of the Rest: More Great Prime Day Deals Under £25

    Here's a little round-up of some of our other favourite deals for under £25 this Prime Day.

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    Amazon Prime Day Deal Still Live: 55″ Sony Bravia XR A80J 4K OLED TV for Under $1K

    For the second half of Prime Day, Amazon has dropped the price on two sizes of the 2021 Sony A80J 4K OLED TV. The 55" model is only $998 and the 77" model is $2399.99. The 55" model is $100 cheaper than LG's 55" C1 model while the price drop on the 77" model brings it to within the same price point as LG's 77" C1 model. That's pretty impressive considering the fact that Sony OLED TVs are usually more expensive than their LG counterparts.

    Amazon Prime Day Deal: Sony A80J 4K OLED TVs

    Supports 4K @ 120Hz for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X gamers

    The Sony A80J is a true OLED 4K TV. It boasts unrivalled response times, so ghosting is non-existent. Compared to traditional LED LCD TVs, OLED TVs offer better image quality, deeper blacks, better contrast ratio, and wider color gamut. Not only does this translate to better gaming, but also better image quality overall, including with 4K HDR content. It also has HDMI 2.1 inputs that support 120Hz refresh rates at 4K resolution. If you own a PS5, Xbox Series X, or a gaming PC with an RTX 30 series video card, you'll have access to games that can run at 4K @ 120Hz, with more supported games coming in the near future. The Sony A80J now supports variable refresh rate (VRR) thanks to a firmware update that was released earlier this year. It's also G-SYNC compatible for PC gamers.

    The Sony A80J uses Google TV for its smart TV experience. Google TV is a more intuitive version of Android TV and works just as well as Roku, Fire TV or Apple TV, even more so if you use an Android phone or tablet.

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    Amazon Prime Day Deal: Score a 4-Pack of Apple AirTag Keyfinders for $84.99

    To kick off the back half of Prime Day 2022, Amazon is offering yet another great discount on an Apple product. A 4-pack of practical Apple AirTags keyfinders is available for only $84.99. That's 15% off the original MSRP of $100 and averages out to just over $21 per AirTag.

    Amazon Prime Day Deal: 4-Pack Apple Airtags for $85

    The Apple Airtag is a small coin shaped device that you can put in your wallet or attach to your phones, keys, remote, or anything small enough to be easily misplaced. It works as a little WiFi keyfinder that helps you locate your lost objects by pinging the exact location to your iPhone. In my personal experience, it works more reliably than the Tile keyfinder. At close range, your iPhone will look for the device using Bluetooth 5.0, or Ultra Wideband on newer iPhones. At longer range, the AirTag will actually use every available Apple device in the immediate vicinity to triangulate the exact position of the item at large. That's a lot inadvertent help. This is a very convenient gadget for anyone who already has an iPhone and thends to lose his or her small essentials around the house.

    Amazon Prime Day Deal: 70% Off AirTag Loops

    The AirTag Loop securely and easily fits your AirTag to your bag, backpack, keychain, or anything else that has a loop for this to attach to. It's made out of durable polyurethane and although $29 is a bit much for this, $9 (70% off) is a great price. Three colors are available.

    Looking for More Amazon Prime Day Deals?

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    Why (And How) You Should Watch RRR

    Each year, usually around Oscar season, a handful of non-English films cross over to American viewers; recent examples include Korean class thriller Parasite, languid Japanese drama Drive My Car, and reflective Norwegian romance The Worst Person In The World. It wasn’t until 2022 that one of these surprise successes both bucked the Academy’s timeline and hailed from India, despite the country being a global cinematic leader (it produces nearly 2,000 films a year, spread across dozens of languages and industries). The movie in question is S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR — or Rise, Roar, Revolt — a ludicrous three hour piece of anti-colonial historical fiction that functions as its own highlight reel, showcasing some of the best fight scenes, comedy, bromance and explosive musical numbers modern cinema has to offer.

    The good news is that the film is now widely available (on Netflix, and on the globally accessible Indian streaming platform Zee5). The slightly less good news is that wading through RRR’s language availability can be complicated, but this hasn’t stopped Western fans, critics and filmmakers from gradually discovering it like an underground cult film through word of mouth, even though it was an immediate blockbuster success in South Asia.

    Just how successful has RRR been in the United States? Its initial release was on March 24th, but nearly four months later, it’s still going strong in theaters across the country (thanks, in part, to a widely-publicized re-release), despite the fact that it’s been available on Netflix for over a month. You can stream it, or you can try finding a screening near you. Either way, you’re in for a rollercoaster of a time, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the party-like atmosphere created by big Telugu-language productions (or “Tollywood,” a sister industry to India’s Hindi-language “Bollywood,” which it surpassed financially in 2017). Between the film’s expert control over massive tonal swings, the clarity of its fiery action, and the sincerity of its devastating melodrama, it’s become a “this is how it’s done” rallying cry for American viewers who want better from the rushed corporate homogeneity of modern Hollywood franchises. In simple terms: it slaps, thanks to its unapologetic, adrenaline-fueled fan fiction about two real historical freedom fighters — who never actually met in real life — teaming up in the 1920s to battle the British empire amidst a flurry of superhero poses emphasizing their masculine stature, and physics-bending action whose staging emanates directly from their emotional journeys.

    The best way to watch RRR is undoubtedly subtitled in cinemas, because a major selling point is just how vocal the reactions have been, between people clapping, cheering, and even getting up to dance. Granted, at this late stage of its theatrical run, watching it on the big screen might not be feasible in every part of the country (not to mention, the fact that several theaters continue to lack disability access, and the ongoing pandemic is still a danger to many). Streaming is, therefore, the next best thing, as an ever-widening window into media from all corners of the globe (Squid Game, anyone?). But the downside to watching RRR on Netflix isn’t just a matter of settling for a smaller screen.

    For one thing, the film’s widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio is cropped horizontally to a TV-shaped 16:9, so you get a little less of the image. For another, the version found on Netflix is dubbed in Hindi. You can still watch it in Telugu on Zee5 if you’re keen to sign up — the platform has plenty of other great Indian films — but this version is not quite the original either, thanks to the scattered English language dialog also being dubbed in Telugu, and the persisting issue of cropping, which it shares with the Hindi version.

    Thanks to Indian distribution models, which sub-divide streaming deals by language for various different local markets, cinema from the country faces an uphill battle when it comes to curious outsiders. For instance, Rajamouli’s previous two films, the over-the-top sword and sandal epics Baahubali: The Beginning and Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, also found relative success among western viewers online, but their language options can be complicated. They were filmed in Telugu and Tamil simultaneously — as in, each dialogue scene was shot twice — but only their Tamil versions are available on Netflix, in addition to dubs in Hindi and Malayalam (and in English, but only for the first one). What’s more, because of the aforementioned streaming deals, each version shows up as a separate asset, rather than one movie with the option to toggle between spoken languages.

    Perhaps watching RRR in Hindi is all the same to viewers who don’t speak any Indian language — even though Hindi and Telugu are as different from each other as English and Korean — and the Netflix version does, in fact, have slight a leg up on most other dubbed movies, since its original lead actors (mega-stars Ram Charan and N.T. Rama Rao Jr.) lent their voices to the Hindi track themselves. However, the larger differences between the two versions go slightly beyond authenticity and accurate lip-syncing. Just like English is considered the de-facto language in the U.S., and other widely spoken languages like Spanish are designated as “foreign” or lesser, there’s a more complicated political dimension to Hindi being the default for Western viewers experiencing Indian cinema.

    The issue is partially geographical — Hindi is more common in India’s northern states, and tends to be prioritized over southern languages like Telugu, Tamil and Kannada, which have their own major blockbusters — and, when it comes to movies, the issue overlaps with the way Indian cinema is viewed from the outside, under the “Bollywood” umbrella. This is a term often used by non-Indians to group all Indian movies together, even though the Hindi-speaking Bollywood industry only produces some 20% of the nation’s massive cinematic output, while films in other languages don’t get their due. Of course, blockbusters like RRR have been responsible for expanding the conversation on what Indian cinema actually is, even within India itself (filmmakers like Rajamouli have shifted the understanding of the Indian mainstream, or the “pan-Indian” film, which was previously Bollywood’s domain).

    However, learning these nuances — or even knowing to look for them in the first place — before signing up for a new streaming service isn’t always feasible for new audiences. It becomes especially difficult for some in the case of watching RRR in Telugu, since Zee5 only has yearly and quarterly subscriptions, with no monthly options or free trials; the platform may have launched in the U.S. last year, but it still feels aimed largely at South Asian diaspora viewers who are already familiar with the films, stars, and languages in question. It isn’t nearly as curatorial towards new and curious eyes, the way MUBI or The Criterion Channel are (more art-house centric platforms which provide a wider context for each movie).

    That being said, if RRR’s crossover success proves one thing, it’s that while language is an important political dimension — especially in a film about colonial power structures, and featuring language difference as a key fixture of a comedic sublot — it’s also a barrier that great cinema can transcend with its use of powerful and rousing imagery. And while that imagery comes loaded with its own set of politics which may be unfamiliar to outsiders, the film is absolutely a worthwhile experience (and a stepping stone to Indian cinema) no matter which way you’re able to watch it, practically guaranteeing something you haven’t seen, heard or felt before about once every fifteen minutes.

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