Entertainment
Christian Bale Grunts His Way Into A Dead Woman's Pants For The Worst Movie In Theaters
By Chris Sawin
| Published
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is set in 1936 Chicago, but takes inspiration from Mary Shelley’s renowned Frankenstein novel, published in 1818. The events of Frankenstein have actually occurred, but Mary Shelley’s existence is also a part of the same timeline.
Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) goes by Frank in the film and has become hopelessly lonely over the past century and some change. He craves companionship and the stinkiest form of sex since The Bride! goes out of its way on multiple occasions to point out how much Frank smells.
“The Bride! is a two-hour hodgepodge of dancing, movie-obsessed nonsense.”
A woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) dies after making a scene at a restaurant. Ida’s husband Clyde (John Magaro) works for a mob boss named Lupino (Zlatko Buric), and all of these factors play into how Ida dies. Frank seeks help from Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Bening), a scientist.
Euphronius’ research and publications have led Frank to believe that she could create a mate for him. The two of them dig up Ida’s body and bring her back to life, but Ida has no memory of who she used to be or even what her name is. Frank spends the entirety of the film trying to convince her to stay with him for eternity, while the bride just wants to discover her own identity.
The Bride! has a lot going on with its narrative, and there’s even more to divulge. Det. Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penelope Cruz), are the ones investigating Frank and his bride as they travel from Chicago to New York. Frank has a fascination with movie theaters and movies in general, particularly any film with singing, dancing, and starring Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). The bride’s actions, mostly seen as a woman in 1936 exercising independent thought, spark a female movement that not only inspires them but also prompts women to dress like her and copy the black marks on her face and the rest of her body.
“Christian Bale is pure excrement as Frank.”
Who Ida has become as the bride, and what happens right before her death, are important yet highly spoilerish. Ida is now this split person, and that concept triggers this truly unhinged performance from Jessie Buckley.
The script is borderline atrocious with Buckley spewing a never-ending line of synonyms at the top of her lungs as if she’s about to crap out every edition of The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus right there in the back alleys of Chicago. Something is trapped within her that will seemingly never leave or escape. This is all happening while she struggles to remember who she is. Buckley has a mesmerizing on-screen presence, even if the gibberish she’s saying makes you fight the urge to turn away.
I take no joy in saying that Christian Bale is pure excrement as Frank. The character is written as a feeble monstrosity ashamed to exist, and it feels like Bale takes the role too seriously for it to work.
“The script is borderline atrocious with Buckley spewing a never-ending line of synonyms at the top of her lungs as if she’s about to crap out every edition of The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus.”
The character is somewhat intriguing at first, but slowly morphs into Jared Leto as Joker in the Suicide Squad version of Frankenstein’s monster. Yes, he licks the bride’s black vomit (it’s like brought-back-to-life phlegm or something), he also has sex with her while getting a tattoo of her “name” on his chest, while knowing it isn’t her actual name.
The Gothic romance film can’t really decide what type of film it wants to be. Apart from an American History X curb stomp and the biting off of someone’s tongue, The Bride! is not a horror film. Its few moments of comedy aren’t funny, and nothing in the film is entertaining. The film feels like it’s trying to have some sort of female uprising moment, but the sexual violence in the film kills that momentum at nearly every turn. It may be accurate for the time period, but it doesn’t really add anything to the film as a whole.
The film also builds up Myrna’s big moment as a detective, trying to get recognized as one and going out on her own. The concept is literally introduced in her first scene. Just as that recognition seems within her grasp, she ultimately lets it slip away in the final sequence, leading to a familiar, expected ending.
“Nothing makes a monster movie come together like a bunch of Goddamn dancing.”
Several characters in The Bride! are just as wishy-washy as the storytelling. Halfway through the film, the bride contemplates whether or not being with Frank is what she wants, and there’s this giant standoff where someone gets shot, and she goes off with Frank anyway. This is all after she made a point to thrust Frank’s underpants monster into her mouth, and after they’ve had a bunch of sex anyway.
Nothing makes a monster movie come together like a bunch of Goddamn dancing. Frank and the bride bounce from movie theater to movie theater after every crime they commit. One sequence sees Jake and Myrna go to one theater while Frank and the bride literally go to one across the street; splitting up to cover both theaters apparently wasn’t an option. Frank also bounces around to Ronnie Reed’s pictures. How it takes so long for this detective, and his secretary (that’s what she starts off as), for them to catch up to Frank and the bride is legitimately mind-boggling.
Every time Frank watches a movie, he imagines himself in the picture, usually dancing or singing. The drive-in sequence is bizarre, though, since everyone there can hear Frank and the bride’s dialogue that was previously seemingly only in his head. Slight spoiler, but Frank gets shot at one point and refuses to go to the hospital. The bride scoffs at the idea and takes him to a movie instead. You can bleed out somewhere where Mommy can fetch some Sour Patch Kids.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is going for something here, but the problem is that The Bride! has far too many things going on at once and never capitalizes on any of them; even the romance isn’t constant. The idea of these two born-again corpses having nothing together is this half-baked idea drowned out by Frank’s sobbing dick and the bride constantly reminding everyone with a pair of eyes and working ears that she’s an entitled, calamitous shrew. The Bride! is a two-hour hodgepodge of dancing, movie-obsessed nonsense.
The Bride! is now playing in theaters everywhere. Stay home and watch any other version of Frankenstein instead.
Entertainment
Peter Jackson Is Making A New Lord Of The Rings Movie, It's About Tom Bombadil
By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson is working on a new Lord of the Rings movie, and to make it, he’s teaming up with talk show host Stephen Colbert. This is not a joke or a drill; it’s happening, and they’re already writing the script.
Stephen Colbert, long known as one of Hollywood’s most obsessive Tolkien fans, is co-writing the film alongside his son, Peter McGee, and returning franchise writer Philippa Boyens. They’re using the working title The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past to refer to the project. It’s not clear yet if that will be the movie’s final title.
Here’s the announcement recorded by Peter Jackson…
The story they’re developing is based on six specific chapters from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring. Those chapters are numbers three through eight, often referred to as “Three Is Company through Fog on the Barrow Downs.” They involve Frodo first leaving the Shire, encountering his first Black Rider, and, most notably of all, encountering Tom Bombadil.
Tolkien fans will no doubt remember that Tom Bombadil was the biggest omission from the original Lord of the Rings movies. Jackson will now remedy that by making an entire, dedicated Tom Bombadil story.
Tom Bombadil is one of the strangest and most mysterious figures in The Lord of the Rings. Living in the Old Forest with his wife Goldberry, in Tolkien’s book, he appears cheerful and harmless, yet possesses immense, unexplained power. He’s so powerful that he’s totally unaffected by the One Ring.
Bombadil rescues the hobbits from multiple dangers, including the Barrow-downs, but exists completely outside the main conflict of Middle-earth, seemingly untouched by its wars, politics, or even its rules.
Peter Jackson is mostly involved in The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past on the production side, reuniting with key members of the original creative team, signaling that this isn’t a reboot but another attempt to mine unused Tolkien material with the same people who built the franchise the first time. This new project is slated for release after Lord of the Rings: Hunt For Gollum, a feature film in production under the direction of Lord of the Rings alum Andy Serkis.
Entertainment
NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for March 25, 2026
The NYT Connections puzzle today is not too difficult if you keep up with the news.
Connections is the one of the most popular New York Times word games that’s captured the public’s attention. The game is all about finding the “common threads between words.” And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we’ve served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today’s puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for today’s Connections solution. But if you’d rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
What is Connections?
The NYT‘s latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications’ Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
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Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there’s only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Mashable Top Stories
Here’s a hint for today’s Connections categories
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Here are today’s Connections categories
Need a little extra help? Today’s connections fall into the following categories:
Looking for Wordle today? Here’s the answer to today’s Wordle.
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today’s puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to today’s Connections #1018 is…
What is the answer to Connections today
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Obfuscate: BLUR, CLOUD, MUDDY, OBSCURE
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Magazines: FORTUNE, PEOPLE, SPIN, TIME
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Payment methods: CASH, CHARGE, CHECK, WIRE
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Units of volume with last letter changed: CUR, GALLOP, PING, QUARK
Don’t feel down if you didn’t manage to guess it this time. There will be new Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we’ll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? Get all the Strands hints you need for today’s puzzle.
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you’re after? Here’s the solution to yesterday’s Connections.
Entertainment
Starfleet Academy Is Dead, Schrödinger’s Fans Blamed
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
My relationship with Starfleet Academy has been, as Facebook would call it, complicated. It’s a show I absolutely despised at first, but I grew to like more as Season 1 progressed. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the show was doomed from the start. That’s because it never cracked the Nielsen Top 10 Streaming list, and it very rarely made it into the top 10 for Paramount +, its own streamer. The network is cagey about releasing any actual viewership numbers, but from the outside looking in, it never seemed like enough people were watching to justify this show’s rumored per-episode price tag.
Schrödinger’s Fans (noun, plural) — A paradoxical audience state in which a fanbase is simultaneously dismissed as too small to matter and blamed as large enough to determine a project’s success or failure, depending on which argument is more convenient.
Now that the show is dead, the fandom has been conducting its inevitable autopsy. Equally inevitable is who they have chosen to blame for the show’s failure. Those mean, older fans who criticized the show from the start. Those haters warned of SFA’s doom from the beginning, but were always told they were simply a vocal, hateful minority. Now, these haters are being blamed for the death of Starfleet Academy, which has revealed these harsh critics to be Schrödinger’s fans; a group so small their opinion don’t matter, but so big that their lack of interest can ruin an entire show.
Cultural Collision
When it comes to Starfleet Academy, the division between Star Trek fans is pretty obvious. Most of the show’s biggest defenders skew younger, and the formative sci-fi of their youth was things like the Star Wars prequels (or, God help us, the Star Wars sequels). Conversely, most of the show’s biggest critics skew older, and they grew up watching shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation. A collision between these groups was inevitable: older Star Trek fans wanted Starfleet Academy to be more like older Star Trek. Newer fans wanted the franchise to do something new.
Paramount obviously chose to tailor Starfleet Academy to younger viewers. It’s an understandable impulse, of course. As the franchise warps to its 60th anniversary, the majority of the fandom isn’t getting any younger. The network decided to address this problem fairly directly by creating a show filled with young people speaking in modern slang and constantly enjoying sophomoric humor. Unfortunately, this decision ultimately drove away the older fans that, as Paramount found out the hard way, were more important than anyone could have guessed.
Understanding Schrödinger’s Fans
In case you need a quick refresher, Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment in quantum physics. It refers to the idea that particles exist in every possible state until they are directly observed. This idea (known as “superposition”) works well in theory, but the thought experiment shows how silly this notion is when applied to something as simple as a cat in a sealed box. You see, until you open the box and check, quantum mechanics tells us that the cat is, paradoxically, both alive and dead.
What does this have to do with Star Trek? Fans of Starfleet Academy have been looking for someone to blame for the show’s cancellation, and many of them are blaming the older fans who have hated the show from the beginning. These superfans seemingly believe that if the haters had tuned in or simply stopped saying anything negative about the show, SFA would still be around.
To these fans, I must make a blunt request: pick a lane! Before Starfleet Academy was canceled, critical voices were dismissed as a vocal minority who just didn’t understand the subtle genius of this new Star Trek show (the one with the dick and fart jokes).
Now, haters are being told that their refusal to watch SFA somehow screwed the show. Just like that, older Star Trek lovers became Schrödinger’s fans. There are so few of us that our thoughts and opinions don’t matter, yet there are so many of us that our opinions can either save or doom a show.
An Expensive Lesson, But Will Paramount Learn?
It feels self-serving saying this (since I’m a middle-aged, lifelong lover of the franchise), but the clear lesson here is that Paramount needs to give older Star Trek fans what we want. We are not some tiny minority group to be ignored. We are the group that has kept this franchise alive for 60 years. Ironically, most of us started watching The Next Generation at a young age because, get this, it was a slick update to The Original Series!
Star Trek doesn’t have to radically change direction to gain younger fans. Instead, creators need to work on updating the classic formula for modern audiences. This is why Strange New Worlds has proven popular with younger and older fans alike. Aging Trek fans like its homages to The Original Series, while younger fans enjoy the humor and jokes. Hindsight is always 20/20, but there was no need to make Starfleet Academy so radically different than what came before. As it turns out, if a show is Star Trek in name only, not that many Star Trek fans will tune in.
At the end of the day, this is a numbers game, and Starfleet Academy just didn’t have that many viewers. Paramount tried to do something completely new, and it blew up in their faces. Now is the time to embrace the Golden Age of the franchise: kick Alex Kurtzman to the curb, bring back Terry Matalas for Star Trek: Legacy, and focus on capable, competent adults exploring strange new worlds. Otherwise, Paramount’s attempts to reach younger viewers will ultimately result in no viewers, finally killing the greatest sci-fi franchise ever made.
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