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Here's your first look at the Justin Timberlake concert film that Netflix just purchased

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Justin Timberlake and The Tennessee Kids Official Trailer Netlfix

Netflix has bought the global rights to concert film "Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids," which is directed by Oscar-winning "Silence of the Lambs" director Jonathan Demme.

It's set to debut on the streaming video service on October 12.

Netflix made the announcement to press on Friday, just ahead of the film's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday. In addition, it released a teaser clip for the film.

Demme — who also directed the 2006 concert film "Neil Young: Heart of Gold"— documents the final stop on Timberlake's two-year, 134-show "20/20 Experience World Tour" at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas in 2015. Timberlake was joined on-stage by the 25 members of the band, The Tennessee Kids, a group of musicians, singers, and aspiring artists who regularly tour with Timberlake.

Grossing $231.6 million, the tour is Timberlake's most successful to date.

Watch the teaser trailer below:

 

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Chance the Rapper bought almost 2,000 scalper tickets to his own festival to re-sell to fans

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chance the rapper

When Chance The Rapper's star-studded "Magnificent Coloring Day" music festival in Chicago sold out and scalpers began to set high resale prices for tickets, the 23-year-old artist decided to take matters into his own hands for the sake of his fans.

Chance took to Twitter this week to announce that he had taken floor-seat tickets back from scalpers and made the tickets available on his website for $45 or $75 — much cheaper sums than the exorbitant prices listed on resale sites.  

Today, the tickets are once again sold out, but Chance has taken to Twitter to proudly reveal that he purchased nearly two thousand tickets to the festival from scalpers.

The "Magnificent Coloring Day" festival, which Chance bills as the "first ever music festival at U.S. Cellular Field on Chicago's Southside," features headlining acts like John Legend, Alicia Keys, Lil Wayne, and Chance himself. 

SEE ALSO: The Grammys made one big change to their rules — and now this rapper has a chance at winning

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Frank Ocean's acclaimed album 'Blonde' is now available on Spotify

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Frank Ocean

Frank Ocean's album "Blonde" is now available on Spotify, nearly three weeks after it was released as an Apple Music exclusive on August 20

Spotify confirmed to Business Insider that the album went live on the streaming service Friday.

The critically acclaimed album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart after selling 276,000 equivalent album units from iTunes purchases and Apple Music streams. It's the first time Ocean has charted in the No. 1 position.

Though it is available by search, "Blonde" notably does not appear on Spotify's New Releases section for this week. Spotify previously announced that it suppresses albums by artists who have signed exclusive deals with other streaming services. 

"Blonde" is still not on Tidal, Soundcloud Go, or Amazon Prime.

You can now stream the album below, via Spotify:

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Amazon is going after a market that Netflix refuses to touch (AMZN)

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Daniel Brands at the French OpenAmazon is vying for video rights on a “wide range” of sports, from French Open tennis to golf to car racing, according to Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, who cites people with knowledge of the matter.

The theme: Amazon wants sports with global appeal, Bloomberg’s sources said.

Amazon is also interested in marquee US sports like basketball and baseball, but unfortunately the rights for those are locked up pretty tight.

There could be ways around that, Bloomberg notes. Amazon could do deals that offered league streaming packages as an add-on to Prime, like it currently does with Showtime. The MLB, for instance, offers a single-team streaming package for $84.99 per year. Or Amazon could do deals that would give Prime members limited access as a way to promote and upsell the league’s own offering.

Amazon has even mulled the idea of snagging enough live sports programming to make an entirely separate streaming package, according to Bloomberg.

Clearly the details have yet to be worked out on how Amazon will tackle sports, but the fact that it's being so seriously pursued in significant. Amazon has been ramping up spending on TV shows and movies for its Prime offering, which competes with Netflix.

In July, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said that Amazon would "nearly double" its investment in all types of video, while "tripling" the amount of Amazon's original content, over the rest of 2016. This mirrors Netflix’s own gargantuan spending on TV shows and movies, particularly original ones.

But live sports would be something new.

Netflix executives have repeatedly said they have no interest in live sports programming, and that it simply wouldn’t jive with the nature of their service. Netflix is all about on-demand, and sports are appointment viewing.

Amazon has also been rumored, for awhile, to be creating its own cable-replacement live TV service. If the company brings it to market, it will compete with upcoming offerings from the likes of Hulu and AT&T, along with established “skinny bundle” player Sling TV, and Sony’s PlayStation Vue.

Additional reporting by Eugene Kim.

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How the sudden, tragic death of a famous composer inspired the music in the new 'Magnificent Seven'

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the magnificent seven Sony

Simon Franglen's work on the reboot of "The Magnificent Seven" was supposed to be similar to the numerous jobs he'd worked on with Oscar-winning composer James Horner.

Horner — the 38-year veteran responsible for the original scores of "Titanic" (for which he won an Oscar), "Aliens, "Field of Dreams," "Braveheart," "Apollo 13," "Avatar," and countless others — would create the original sound and Franglen would be his second-in-command, responsible for overseeing production.

The two had been teaming up together since "Titanic" in 1997, and for over a decade Franglen had become an integral part of how Horner works.

"We were a great team," Franglen recently told Business Insider. "It became evident that we loved working together."

Simon Franglen headshot website 1But that all suddenly ended on June 22, 2015, when Horner, while flying a single-turboprop plane by himself, was killed when the plane crashed in the Los Padres National Forest in Southern California. He was 61 years old.

"I have this text from him the night before he died and I had spoken to him earlier and he was in a great place," Franglen said. "Then the next morning there was this stream of texts and the phone calls started coming in — I would trade anything not to have this discussion."

At the time of Horner's death, he and Franglen had a full plate of projects.

Horner had signed on to do the scores for the Matt Damon thriller "The Great Wall" and the Mel Gibson-directed "Hacksaw Ridge," as well as for "Avatar" parts two, three, and four.

Then there was the project that needed their immediate attention, a remake of the 1960 classic Western "The Magnificent Seven" with Antoine Faqua directing and starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt.

Not only did Horner and Franglen have to fit the movie into a tight schedule, but they also had to go up against history. The original movie has what some might call an irreplaceable score written by Elmer Bernstein, a legend in his own right.

"Like anyone else in this business, I have Elmer in my DNA, and [James and I] talked at length about how could we reference it, how do we make sure that the audience knows we understand the heritage of the Bernstein score," Franglen said.

He and Horner thought they had cracked the code when Horner died.

When news hit of Horner's passing producers for projects like "The Great Wall" and "Hacksaw Ridge" began a search for new composers, but Franglen didn't want to let go of "The Magnificent Seven."

Franglen flew to Los Angeles and gathered Horner's team of music editors and lead orchestra conductors to create Horner's final score.

"I said to them, 'I don't want these things to just disappear, I want to at least play them for Antoine,'" Franglen said.

Franglen and company hired an orchestra and recorded Horner's ideas for the "Magnificent Seven" score. Franglen then flew to the set of the movie in Louisiana to play the music personally to Faqua.

James Horner Gareth Cattermole Getty"I said, 'Look, I have a gift from James, this is how I think he would like the score to have sounded and I just wanted to give it to you,'" Franglen said. "And it was emotional for us all. He sat down and played it and he listened and at the end he said, 'Let's do this. I want you guys to finish this score.'"

Franglen led the completion of the score, which took nine months and included the creation of some new pieces outside of Horner's work to have enough music for the entire movie.

The finished product is very distant from the Bernstein music in the original (which plays over the end credits in the new movie). Though at times it has the big orchestra sound like the original, there's a darker tone that mirrors Faqua's film.

And though everyone knew this would be the final score of a legendary composer, Franglen didn't want it to sound that way.

"The last thing we wanted to do was make this a mausoleum," he said. "It was meant to be a film score for a very specific film. Antoine needed music that reflected his film and that's the first job of a film composer, to serve the film and be the emotional heart. James would have been adamant that the score has to serve the film."

Franglen has recently completed the score for Terrence Malick's documentary "Voyage of Time: Life's Journey," and he hopes to continue in the footsteps of his mentor. Looking back, the experience he got from working alongside Horner for years is priceless. But the great loss remains: He is no longer alongside his friend.

"He was one of my closest friends," Franglen said. "It was a point where if he called the house and my son picked up the phone they would just chat away. We considered him part of the family. It was a horrendous loss."

"The Magnificent Seven" has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday and opens in theaters September 23.

SEE ALSO: The best movies and TV shows coming to Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, and more in September

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Tig Notaro: 'I now don't care' if people don't get my new show's brand of comedy

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AP tig notaro

Well-known stand-up comedian Tig Notaro had feared that "One Mississippi," her new Amazon series premiering on Friday, was being promoted as a traditional comedy, and that viewers would be misled.

"I think that I was really concerned about people being alarmed when they think it’s the next ‘Everyone Loves Raymond,’ and it’s 'trau-medy,'" Notaro, combining trauma and comedy to explain her show, told Business Insider during the recent summer Television Critics Association press tour.

Certainly dark, "One Mississippi" straddles the line between comedy and drama. Though a half-hour show is typically considered a comedy in television, "One Mississipi" is a semi-autobiographical portrayal of Notaro's life struggles.

"My mother died. I had cancer. I had an intestinal disease and couldn’t eat, and I went through a breakup," the openly lesbian comedian explained during the show's TCA session. "And I also had pneumonia. The list goes on. It was over a four-month period of time, and so the pilot captures all of that, but overlapping rather than spreading it out over the four months that it all happened."

The show picks up as Notaro arrives in Mississippi to see her mother, who's in a coma and pronounced brain-dead. It also explores Notaro's complicated relationships with her family.

one mississippi amazon"It’s been fun to watch the show, but it is so heavy, and people cry a lot of times watching it," Notaro told us. "I think my biggest fear was that people were going to tune in ready to just ‘LOL,’ and it takes these crazy intense turns, where people are like, ‘I was crying in the first five minutes.’"

Meanwhile, the definitions of comedy and drama have been plaguing the entertainment industry for years. This is most evident during the awards seasons.

Last year, Netflix's "Orange Is the New Black" was denied entry into the comedy category by the Emmys and had to enter the much more competitive drama category. Meanwhile, Showtime was able to successfully enter one-hour show "Shameless" into the comedy category against more likely half-hour comedies. 

It isn't just an issue for TV. Earlier this year, there was some controversy over Matt Damon's film "The Martian," about a man's death-defying experience surviving alone on Mars, being admitted into the comedy category by the Golden Globes.

Possibly in a move to sidestep the debate, Amazon Studios stopped referring to its original programs as comedies or dramas. Instead, it refers to them according to length.

"There are a lot of stories that are insightful and great and naturally a half-hour, and others are insightful and great and naturally an hour," Amazon Studios head Roy Price explained during TCA. "And we decided to pull back, let’s just stick to the length, and those are facts, and we organized it that way."

As for Notaro, she's been able to overcome her early fears. First, she believes that her fans already understand her brand of humor. And as for everyone else, Notaro gained some insight from attending screenings of the show.

"People have really taken to [the show] so easily and are moved," Notaro said. "I’ve sat in the back of screenings and listened to a packed room laugh hysterically and then during the devastating moments, you can feel everybody taking them in. I have so much confidence that I now don’t care. It’s like prep ‘em or don’t. I really don’t care."

Watch a trailer for "One Mississippi" below:

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Oscar favorite 'Arrival' is one of the best movies of the year — and a big surprise

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arrival amy adams

From the trailer for "Arrival," which just showed at the Toronto International Film Festival, you'd assume it's a CGI-heavy sci-fi movie about aliens coming to earth to make contact. If they come in peace or to destroy us is the question that's left open.

But that's just the hook to get you in the theater. The truth is "Arrival," directed by Denis Villeneuve ("Sicario," "Prisoners") and starring Amy Adams, is a moving story that is more about humanity than whether beings from the sky come in peace.

Based on a short story by sci-fi author Ted Chiang titled "Story of Your Life," "Arrival" follows linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Adams), whom the military calls on to help start a dialogue once the aliens have landed.

The world goes crazy when 12 large pod-shaped ships suddenly show up in different areas of the world. There's one placed in the US, in an open field in Montana. Dr. Banks and scientist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are the brains behind the US operation to figure out what the aliens want.

They communicate with all other countries investigating pods. But the head of the military arm of the operation, Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), is getting pressure from the White House to get answers. And the stakes grow higher when China decides to disband from the process and attack the pod that's within its borders.

It's all thrilling, and the science is not heavy-handed and very easy to understand, but it's all a MacGuffin, a device Alfred Hitchcock loved to use. It's a detail in a story that is important for the characters but turns out to be less important for the audience's needs.

The real story (and warning: spoilers here) is the relationship that Dr. Banks builds with the aliens inside the pod, playfully named Abbot and Costello, the legendary comedy duo. Through her continued conversations with the duo in trying to understand their language, she begins to uncover what they want, but by delving into her own memories.

There are certainly thrills, helped by a dramatic score and use of pauses for tension, but the movie really runs off of the captivating emotions of Dr. Banks, delivered perfectly (as usual) by Amy Adams — who will definitely receive an Oscar nomination for this performance.

Another way of capturing that emotion is the beautiful cinematography by Bradford Young, who gives the movie a very Terrence Malick-like quality with sweeping views of nature and closeups of intimate interaction.

All elements come together under the direction of director Villeneuve, who has taken one step closer to becoming a top auteur working in Hollywood.

"Arrival" will certainly be an Oscar contender in numerous categories, but outside of awards, it's a film that should be celebrated for its masterful storytelling. 

"Arrival" is currently screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and will hit theaters on November 11.

SEE ALSO: The 10 most influential sci-fi movies of all time

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Wisconsin is appealing the decision to free 'Making a Murderer' subject Brendan Dassey

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brendan dassey

A local Fox affiliate reports that Attorney General Brad Schimel, on behalf of Warden Michael Dittmann and the State of Wisconsin, has filed an appeal in the decision to free Brendan Dassey, a subject of the Netflix docuseries "Making a Murderer."

The now 26-year-old Dassey was convicted — along with his uncle, Steven Avery — at age 17 of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach. He was sentenced to life in prison.

On August 12, a federal magistrate ordered Dassey be freed within 90 days unless prosecutors decided to re-try him for the murder.

The state instead decided to appeal the decision. If the appeal is unsuccessful, state prosecutors can still decide to re-try Dassey for the crimes.

"We believe the magistrate judge's decision that Brendan Dassey's confession was coerced by investigators, and that no reasonable court could have concluded otherwise, is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law," Schimel said in a statement to reporters on Friday. "Two state courts carefully examined the evidence and properly concluded that Brendan Dassey's confession to sexually assaulting and murdering Teresa Halbach with his uncle, Steven Avery, was voluntary, and the investigators did not use constitutionally impermissible tactics."

Schimel also stated that the Halbach family had been notified of the state's appeal and fully supports its decision.

The August ruling by federal magistrate judge William Duffin in Milwaukee was primarily based on his belief that Dassey's constitutional rights were violated when authorities questioned him without an adult present.

Additionally, Duffin said that Dassey's learning disabilities made him more susceptible to coercion by interrogators.

Further, the judge disapproved of the interrogators' use of bluffing during Dassey's questioning. They told the teen at least 21 times that they knew exactly what happened to Halbach. The judge felt that would have had a larger than usual effect on Dassey.

The investigators' interrogations of Dassey were heavily featured on the Netflix series. Many who watched "Making a Murderer" were particularly aghast at the treatment of Dassey, who has learning disabilities and whose interrogation with police may have been marred by "interview contamination"— in which police let slip details to potential witnesses or suspects, leading them to believe and repeat certain facts.

As for Avery, his attorney, Kathleen Zellner, recently filed a request to retest evidence used in the trial against him in order to prove that local investigators planted evidence. She has also said new, "crucial" witnesses have come forward.

Netflix is currently in production on a second season of "Making a Murderer."

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How to get the top job in TV: showrunner

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odd mom out showrunners bravo

One of the most coveted jobs in television is that of the showrunner, but the career path to that gig isn't always clear-cut.

In short, a showrunner is the top dog on a TV show. He or she is responsible for approving everything from casting to scripts, from budgets to set designs. All the while, the showrunner has to protect the creative vision for the show.

Portia Doubleday Mr Robot set tour 2"You have to be an advocate for the creative aspect of the show, and that’s harder than it looks sometimes, especially when I have to sign the budget every week," veteran showrunner Remi Aubuchon recently told Business Insider. (Aubuchon has written or produced on "Caprica," "Falling Skies," "Powers," and "24.")

Typically, showrunners are writers who have worked themselves up the ladder in writers' rooms for several television shows (that's a whole other "how to" article). Julie Rottenberg — whose writing and producing credits include "Sex and the City," "SMASH," and "Love Bites" — is a first-time co-showrunner on Bravo comedy "Odd Mom Out." Rottenberg understands what it takes to get the job.

"For so long, we were writers on shows or producers, writer/producers on a number of shows," Rottenberg said. "And I realized comparing that to being a showrunner is basically like babysitting versus parenting. Because suddenly the baby is yours, you can’t just leave at six o’clock when it’s time. And you’re pretty much responsible for every aspect of the show."

AP odd mom out showrunners bravoYou might believe that if you create a great show, write a killer pilot script, and then get your show bought at a network, then you've earned the right to be its showrunner. The truth is that many show creators don't end up running their own shows. In some cases, the show creator has very little day-to-day involvement in their own show.

Television shows are multimillion-dollar operations, so studios and networks would rather an experienced showrunner helm a show. If you're lucky, that showrunner will work alongside you. (Sam Esmail, creator and showrunner of the acclaimed "Mr. Robot," who came into it with basically no TV experience, is a very rare exception.)

Rottenberg shares showrunning duties with Elisa Zuritsky, but they are extremely protective of "Odd Mom Out" creator and star Jill Karger's voice and desires for the show.

"A big part of our job was making sure her voice or her vision was represented even if she wasn't there," Rottenberg said of Karger. "For instance, we might get notes from the network, and we'd say, 'You know what? This is something Jill feels very strongly about. We have to find a way to make this work.' And there's a lot of trust in that, and there's a lot of communication often — you know, a lot of late-night calls and meetings and just working on drafts together."

AP rob lowe remi aubuchon lyons denAubuchon — whose first showrunning job was on a 2003 show he created, "The Lyon's Den," starring Rob Lowe — would have preferred some help back then.

"I think if I had to do it all over again," he said, "I might have liked to have had a close collaboration with someone who had more experience than I did in order to be able to overcome some of the hurdles that occurred in that time, which mostly were political really. I think I kind of knew what to do on a skill and production basis but being overwhelmed with actor demands, working with the studio and working with the network, all of that sort of stuff is incredibly overwhelming and it would have been nice to have someone there to have helped me with that."

SEE ALSO: Here's what a showrunner — the top job in TV — actually does

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The new 'Snowden' movie mixes plenty of fiction with fact — though it's wildly entertaining

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edward snowden filmThe new film "Snowden" is a wildly entertaining thriller centered around the most-wanted man in the world, though I was left with many more questions than when I started.

The Oliver Stone-directed film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden takes viewers through most of Snowden's adult life in a series of flashbacks amid interactions with journalists in a Hong Kong hotel.

While the story will be fascinating for many, it glosses over a number of unanswered questions in the Snowden saga.

To be clear, the movie is not supposed to be a documentary or definitive account of Snowden's life, but I hoped, nevertheless, it would shed at least some light on a younger version of the ex-NSA contractor who leaked thousands of documents to journalists in 2013, which it did not do.

Instead, it starts with his apparent Special Forces training with the US Army. The extent of his army career has never been all that clear, and the Pentagon only confirmed that he enlisted as a Special Forces recruit in May 2004 who was discharged four months later.

(Business Insider has tried unsuccessfully to get Snowden's military discharge document released, as has The Guardian).

The film shows Snowden going through what seems to be Army basic training where stress fractures wear and tear on his body until finally, he breaks his legs jumping from the top bunk during an early-morning wakeup. The real Snowden, for his part, told The Guardian his legs were broken in a training accident.

"There are plenty of other ways to serve your country," the doctor, who recommends an administrative discharge, tells him in the film.

The film's pace is brisk. Soon after his Army washout, Snowden is undergoing an intensive polygraph and interviewing for a position with the Central Intelligence Agency. Here we meet Corbin O'Brian, Snowden's CIA recruiter, instructor, and main antagonist in the film, who is quite obviously named after the villain in George Orwell's "1984."

He even says Orwellian things like, "Secrecy is security and security is victory."

'I'm going to give you a shot, Snowden'

corbin o'brian snowden film

Actor Rhys Ifans plays Corbin O'Brian quite well, offering a spooky and secretive man who appears to be the driving force in Snowden's career. In interviewing Snowden, O'Brian says he ordinarily would not have hired him, but in 2006 — the height of the Iraq war — "these are not ordinary times." He tells Snowden he's getting his shot, and in turn, Snowden promises he won't let him down.

At this point, the real CIA recruiter O'Brian is based on (if he exists) is probably kicking himself.

Still, Snowden is portrayed as something of a boy genius.

In his initial CIA training, he aces a five-hour-long test in 40 minutes. He rapidly moves up the chain and gets advanced training before heading to Geneva on an assignment — one that ultimately begins his slow disillusionment with the government and the messy business of intelligence gathering.

While Snowden's longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills was non-existent in Laura Poitras' documentary "Citizenfour" — except for a brief shot of her reuniting with him in a Moscow apartment — "Snowden" makes her a central character that moves along the plot and makes things much more interesting.

edward snowden film

That was a particularly good move since, despite various movies depicting exciting things happening in intelligence circles or in the military, the truth is that much of what is actually done is painfully boring. Sure, battles and spy craft happens, but Hollywood doesn't really care for the less glamorous work of reading through raw intelligence and writing endless reports, or Snowden's real job of taking clueless NSA employees step-by-step through the process of opening a document, for example.

Stone adds more action to the mix by having drone strikes on computer screens in the workplace, which often seem out of place. Gordon-Levitt sometimes delivers lines that make Snowden seem like the most important person in the intelligence field, instead of just one man among more than 800,000 people with top secret security clearances.

"Our government is hemorrhaging billions of dollars to Chinese hackers and I’ve been hired to shut them down," he tells his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, at one point in the film.

The crown jewels in the Rubik's Cube

snowden rubik's

Eventually, Snowden ends up working at the NSA facility in Hawaii, taking a contract systems administrator job with Dell and later, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Though I'm pretty sure it was just done for the sake of expedience and Hollywood being Hollywood, the facility there is somewhat open — almost like a Silicon Valley startup — with the offensive hackers hitting China over there, while Snowden and others protecting US networks sit over there. No doors, no key cards.

This seems far outside the reality — especially so for an NSA facility. Sensitive compartmentalized information (SCI) literally means compartmentalized, to the point where one NSA analyst wouldn't even know what the guy in the next cubicle is working on. But for "Snowden," the typical office banter happens regularly, and friendships are formed among coworkers in different departments.

One such friendship is integral to Snowden's later whistleblowing, according to the film, when he meets an NSA hacker named Gabriel Sol (played by Ben Schnetzer). Through Sol, he quickly gains access to top secret programs that would later be exposed.

Perhaps the most notable is Prism, which gave the agency direct access to data on the servers of Facebook, Google, and other tech giants. Sol later taps into a random woman's webcam and watches her live as Snowden looks on, uncomfortably — likely an allusion to a program exposed in 2014 called Optic Nerve, which allowed British spies to intercept millions of webcam images from Yahoo users.

snowden film

Another friend in particular actually keeps his mouth shut when he sees Snowden downloading the critical NSA files to an SD card. It's a moment of high drama, but it's doubtful this even happened, especially when the film's climactic scene is put up against the reality: Instead of grabbing all the files in one day, Snowden apparently started downloading the cache more than a year before he met with journalists in Hong Kong, according to a report from Mark Hosenball in Reuters.

That scene features this exchange: "The NSA may come after you," Snowden tells his coworker. He responds: "I don't know what you're talking about."

Then he just lets Snowden grab a bunch of top secret documents hidden inside a Rubik's Cube, finally walking out the front door with a smile on his face (Snowden has never said how he actually grabbed the files). And before he hops in the elevator, Snowden has an unspoken exchange of, I'm leaving right now with tons of files and you're never going to see me again, wink wink, with his old friend Gabriel.

These interactions make it seem like intelligence professionals support what Snowden did, but that's a sentiment not backed up in statements from various officials, on the record or said anonymously. One former hacker with NSA's elite hacker unit, Tailored Access Operations, put it this way: "I can't believe anyone listens to him," the source told Business Insider. "It's so infuriating. He was the help desk administrator for the government."

Unanswered questions

edward snowden film

Overall, the film was fairly good. If you're searching for a solid flick offering a look into the world of the CIA and the NSA, you'll get it. And if you're a fan of Edward Snowden and believe he's a patriot, this movie is going to support that viewpoint.

But Snowden skeptics will be left wanting.

Many important questions go unanswered or are breezed past, and it ultimately does a disservice to its subject matter and the viewer. These include the open question of what Snowden was doing for the 11 days he spent in Hong Kong before he met journalists, his somewhat questionable claim of being "stranded" in Moscow, and whether he took any stolen documents with him to Russia.

For example, in the film Snowden proclaims "I no longer have any access to the data myself" as he deletes files on his laptop in a Hong Kong hotel room. But his claim to have destroyed the documents was contradicted in an interview he gave to the South China Morning Post, in which he said he would like to leak more documents later to "journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published."

"Snowden" also moves a bit too quickly at times for its own good, leaving out any mention of Snowden's childhood or how he ended up in a CIA interview. He apparently first got a top secret clearance working as a security guard, for example, which is not in the film. There is also little revealed of his new life in Russia, where he has been living under asylum since 2013.

Neil deGrasse Tyson and his guest Edward Snowden on StarTalk

All that viewers see of that is a cameo appearance by the real Snowden at the end of the film where he delivers a powerful speech from the second home of Anatoly Kucharena — a Kremlin-connected lawyer who represents Snowden in Moscow and wrote a novel loosely based on his flight from the US. Stone optioned that book, and Luke Harding's "The Snowden Files," for the basis of the film.

"Snowden" is held up by strong performances, most notably in Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the title character. He absolutely nails Snowden's voice and mannerisms; so much so that it's often hard to distinguish him at times from the real thing. And then there are similarly strong performances turned in by Zachary Quinto as journalist Glenn Greenwald and Nicholas Cage as Hank Forrester, a disillusioned NSA employee who acts as a mentor to Snowden, ultimately praising his haul of top secret documents by the end of the film.

"He did it. The kid did it," Forrester says.

Forrester seems to be based on another NSA whistleblower named William Binney, who initially offered high praise for Snowden when NSA documents revealed a mass spying dragnet. But Binney eventually shifted his view after Snowden leaked specific NSA hacking targets to a Chinese newspaper: He told USA Today that Snowden seemed to be "transitioning from whistleblower to traitor."

"As I have said in the past, revealing specific targets or successes of US intelligence activities is not in the public interest," Binney told Business Insider in 2014.

"Snowden" leaves that part out.

The film is out in theaters on Sep. 15.

SEE ALSO: The infamous hacker who exposed Clinton's email server is going to prison for 4 years

Join the conversation about this story »

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These are 20 of the top songs people listen to in the shower

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ferris bueller singing in the shower

Spotify users like to sing along in the shower — or at least that's the implication of a fun fact shared by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.

At a conference late last year, Ek revealed that there were 39,000 active playlists named "Shower."

But what songs are these people listening to in the shower?

Business Insider reached out to Spotify at the time to find out which songs go best with suds. Spotify's data team crunched the numbers for us, and came up with a playlist of the top 20 songs from users' shower mixes.

These are 20 jams people love to play in the shower.

 

SEE ALSO: ESPN's digital boss has strong words for people who think ESPN is in decline

20. Maroon 5 - “Unkiss Me"

I lied to my heart 'cause I thought you felt it
You can't light a fire, if the candle's melted
No, you don't have to love me if you don't wanna
Don't act like I mean nothing
But if you're gonna, well, then you better



19. Bon Iver - “Skinny Love”

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
Now all your love is wasted?
Then who the hell was I?



18. Earth, Wind & Fire - “September”

Do you remember the 21st night of September?
Love was changing the minds of pretenders
While chasing the clouds away



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Everything Hollywood gets right and wrong about going undercover, according to a former DEA agent

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22 jump street guns

Undercover agents are pretty much a pop culture staple at this point.

It's no secret as to why. Throwing a character into an undercover assignment is an instant recipe for a story rife with danger, intrigue, and interpersonal drama.

That's why there's such a diverse sprawl of movies that depict undercover agents.

"The Departed" racked up four Oscars as an American remake of "Internal Affairs," depicting competing moles in the Boston mob and state police, respectively. Films like the classic noir "White Heat," crime drama "Donnie Brasco," and surfing thriller "Point Break" depicted undercover agents coming to sympathize with their targets.

"Face/Off" verged into sci-fi territory, while things just got ultra-violent in "Reservoir Dogs." "The Fast and the Furious" started as the tale of a LAPD detective infiltrating a drag, spawning what is now a massive movie franchise. "21 Jump Street" and its sequel put a comedic spin on its source material, an eighties procedural about undercover cops infiltrating a high school.

Business Insider recently spoke with former DEA agent, "Deal" author, and Cipher Brief contributor Mike Vigil about his own experience working as an undercover agent. Vigil worked for the DEA for 31 years and worked on numerous undercover operations against drug traffickers.

Pop culture actually inspired Vigil to pursue law enforcement — he grew up watching shows like "The Untouchables" and "Dragnet."

He revealed four things that Hollywood tends to get wrong about undercover work, along with three things it gets right.

SEE ALSO: What it's really like to work for the DEA

DON'T MISS: 4 telltale physical signs your coworker is up to something sketchy, according to a former DEA agent

DON'T FORGET: 11 things Hollywood gets wrong about being an FBI agent — and one thing it gets right

Myth: Undercover agents are required to participate in illegal activities, like doing drugs

You'd think that in order to gain acceptance with criminal elements, undercover agents would have to actively participate in the illicit activities they're trying to investigate — like drug use, thievery, or murder. This trope was recently played for laughs in the film "21 Jump Street," where the two protagonists had ingest a new synthetic drug as part of their investigation.

That wouldn't happen in real life, Vigil said. The reason is simple — undercover agents are working to build a case against the individuals they are investigating. If they take part in the criminal activity as well, they completely destroy their credibility. Their testimony would essentially fall apart in court.

And if an undercover agent was ever in a situation where someone attempted to force them to participate to prove themselves, they'd probably just be considered compromised and pulled from the case immediately.

Vigil spoke with Business Insider about how he'd simply decline when drug traffickers would ask him to sample their wares.

"Most of the big drug dealers would not want to deal with you anyway if you were an addict, because you'd be too unstable and if you got arrested, you would rat them out in a heartbeat just to be released so you could go out and score drugs," Vigil says.



Myth: The job is always dangerous and action-filled

Understandably, most fictional depictions of undercover agents skip the paperwork.

Some of Vigil's undercover operations stretched on for over a year. However, he'd always have to make sure to process drug evidence in the lab and file investigative reports, which were crucial to building a case for prosecutors.



Myth: Busting a small shipment makes a different

Vigil says that most of the drug busts he sees in police procedurals are pretty minor, in the scheme of things.

"They show, for the most part, undercover agents working on minor drug deals that really are totally insignificant," he says. "They have no impact. They're buying grams of cocaine and they make it appear like that's going to have a major impact on the distribution of drugs here in the United States. Unfortunately, it's not."



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Here are 13 American presidents' favorite movies of all time

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james bond

It seems a lot of presidents will "always have Paris."

The 1944 Oscar winner "Casablanca" tops a few different modern US presidents' lists of favorite movies. 

Other heads of state went for Westerns. One was crazy for James Bond. And another only really liked to watch himself.

From FDR to President Obama, here are US presidents' — and the 2016 presidential nominees' — favorite films:

SEE ALSO: Here are the surprising first movie roles of 27 A-list actors

DON'T MISS: Donald Trump's surprising list of favorite movies, TV shows, and music

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Mickey Mouse

FDR was president during one of the most troubling periods in US history: the Great Depression. Movies were an escape from reality then as they are now, so FDR often enjoyed watching Mickey Mouse cartoons while in office. On a different note, he also famously adored Myrna Loy — so much so that it is rumored he wanted to postpone the Yalta Conference in order to meet her when she finally made it to the White House.

Source: Entertainment Weekly, The Baltimore Sun



Harry Truman: "My Darling Clementine"

With Truman, a trend begins. Many US presidents have had an affinity for Westerns. For Truman, it was "My Darling Clementine," starring Henry Fonda. Focus Features wrote that Truman had a connection to the film because he and Fonda were both “plain-speakers.”



Dwight Eisenhower: “High Noon”

Eisenhower loved movies, having watched about 200 in the White House's private theater during his eight years in office. While he watched a lot of movies, Westerns were his favorite and one topped Eisenhower's list: "High Noon," starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. You’ll see this flick pop up later in the list, too.

Source: The White House Museum



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

'Birth of a Nation' is an ambitious slavery movie you should see despite the controversy

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The Birth of a Nation Elliot Davis

For the foreseeable future, Nate Parker's directorial debut "The Birth of a Nation," which was the big winner at Sundance earlier this year and just showed at the Toronto film festival, will be shrouded in the recent news of a rape accusation against its writer-director-star-producer while at Penn State in the late 1990s.

How that will affect the movie's box office and award-season chances is another story.

But we'll delve into the movie itself, which focuses on Nat Turner (played by Parker), the slave who led a rebellion against the white masters of Southampton County, Virginia, in the 1830s.

A passion project for Parker, who spent years putting it together on his own terms, the movie is an ambitious undertaking for a first-time director. Having enough money to pull off a period piece is essential, but so is possessing the talent to build a compelling story that looks at the life of a person few know about.

The production value and beautiful cinematography make for an authentic 1800s South, but the tone is a slow burn. At times the movie is a slog as we go through the childhood of Turner, who is taught to read by the wife of the plantation owner (played by Penelope Ann Miller). He's taught the Bible, as other books are only for whites and he "wouldn't understand them," he's told.

the birth of a nation fox searchlightIt's when Turner becomes an adult and is told by a master (Armie Hammer) to travel with him to other plantations to preach to fellow slaves to lift their spirits (as rumors have started of emancipation) that the movie finds its groove.

Powered by Parker's emotional portrayal of Turner, the sermons give a jolt the movie needs, and the momentum builds as we begin to see the other slaves on the plantation with Turner begin to flock to him as a person who can lead them to a better future. 

That future involves killing their masters and forming an army that can overtake a nearby armory, where with guns they can take on any foe who comes at them.

News has spread since "The Birth of a Nation" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year that one of the filmmakers Parker turned to for advice was Mel Gibson, and that is evident.

Parker's movie has a "Braveheart" feel, from the plot of a man attempting to overpower an oppressor to the bloody battle sequences. But you can also find an homage to an African-American writer-director-producer-star previous to Turner.

A shot of Turner running through the woods at the conclusion of the movie harks back to the end of Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 landmark "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," in which Sweetback runs into the night being chased by police with dogs.

The last 15 minutes of "Birth of a Nation" are its highlight. A stirring score matches the action on-screen, and among the savagery, Parker inserts lasting imagery, like a butterfly on the coat of a dead child.

Parker's talents in front of and behind the camera in this movie are undeniable. It remains to be seen if the open questions around the rape accusation, and subsequently the cloud hovering above the film itself, will cause audiences to miss that talent.

SEE ALSO: The 16 best Tom Hanks performances ever, ranked

Join the conversation about this story »

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How much money you can make working for Netflix (NFLX)

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narcos daniel daza netflix

Netflix is so popular that it uses over a third of internet bandwidth in the US. And keeping Netflix moving takes an army of designers, engineers, managers, and customer service reps. 

Netflix is famous for its unique company culture, which doesn't tolerate either failing employees or brilliant jerks. But for those that fit in, the company is willing to pay well.

Using data from Glassdoor, we compiled a list of the highest salaries you can earn while working at Netflix, ranked from lowest to highest. 

(Note: Some positions listed on Glassdoor were excluded because there weren't enough shared salaries. Each average salary included in this roundup has at least 5 reviews.)  

15. Customer Service Supervisor III

Salary: $70,791

A customer service supervisor oversees the work of customer service representatives, who at Netflix surely deal with at least a few angry people who just want to watch a movie. Glassdoor reviewers describe the customer service department as flexible and not built on a script. But one reviewer says that sometimes customer service is also the last department to know about changes in the company.



14. Operations Manager

Salary: $76,388

Operations managers deal with the day-to-day operations of a company, monitoring and managing operational costs, according to Payscale. Netflix is a company where the operations of the company has shifted significantly with the move away from DVD and toward streaming. As one Glassdoor reviewer wrote in about the DVD side in 2009, “Relax. You will all be out of work in 5-7 years when everything goes online streaming.”



13. Software Engineer

Salary: $131,673

Software engineers design and build software. At Netflix, this can span all the various different departments needed for such a complex product. One Glassdoor reviewer says, “If you are a passionate engineer who likes to solve hard problems, you will love Netflix.”



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

40 years ago, Led Zeppelin released its most difficult album — and it's still hard to listen to

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Zeppelin Presence

The surviving members of Led Zeppelin — Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones — recently won a court case in which they were accused of ripping off parts of a song called "Taurus" by the band Spirit to create their epic, "Stairway to Heaven."

"Stairway" is on Zep's fourth, unnamed album, from 1971. Fans usually refer to it as "Led Zeppelin IV," and it's the culmination of the band's early period, which began in 1969 with Led Zeppelin I.

Following Zep IV, the group released 1973's "Houses of the Holy," then 1975's double-album, "Physical Graffiti." The period from the early-to-mid-1970s was when the band's legend grew, as they set new concert attendance records, sold millions of records, dominated radio, and developed a reputation for unmatched rock 'n' roll excess.

Lost in much of the hoopla was Zep's impressive musical maturation. The first four records represent a cycle, with a hard-driving, post-Yardbirds blues quartet blended with a very heavy, progressive folk sensibility. Page was the band's all-purpose guitar hero and studio producer, and he was distinctive and skilled at both jobs. Plant's vocals were unique and versatile, and his stage presence was iconic. Jones could do anything, and drummer John Bonham was a force of nature.

After I-IV, Zep became far more progressive and eclectic, but 40 years ago this year, in 1976, they headed back to basics while created their most difficult album, under difficult circumstances.

It was 1976's "Presence," and it signaled a return, a departure, and the beginnings of Zep's disintegration. 

The end of alchemy

led zeppelin 02

Page started Led Zeppelin with two basic ideas: that it would be "dynamic" band, capable of traversing a broad spectrum of musical styles, tones, and moods; and that it would be four bandmates combining to form a fifth element, achieving an intangible alchemy that would give Zep a powerful legacy.

But with "Presence," the alchemy that had been so compelling up to that point began to fail. To edit a line from one of Zep's hits, "Ramble On" from Led Zeppelin II, magic no longer filled the air.

The main challenge was that while on vacation in Greece, Plant was involved in a car accident with his wife and wound up having to record "Presence" in a wheelchair. He didn't want to be there, but "Presence" would be the second album for the band under their own Swan Song label, so it was important.

For this reason, "Presence" became something of a Jimmy Page solo album, which makes sense, because the 1975-76 Page wasn't the introverted six-string geek and studio nerd of the band's early period, with a more than a passing interest in esoteric philosophy and art — he was Jimmy Page the mighty rock-star guitar god, shimmying on stage in his black dragon suit and beginning his flirtation with heavy drugs.

Zeppelin Presence

Epic sadness

The centerpiece of "Presence" is the epic, ten-and-half-minute guitar opera, "Achilles Last Stand," a tune into which Page put everything he knew about guitar playing and studio production. Zeppelin's lyrics, mostly composed by Plant, had often played with folk traditions in addition to messing with old-school blues motifs (and at times borrowing directly from them), but "Achilles" had a bold yet lamenting connection to classical themes, blended semi-autobiographically with Zep's own experience.

For example, "Oh to ride the wind/To tread the air above the din/Oh to laugh aloud/Dancing as we fought the crowd" is a lyric that comes off as timeless, but could just as easily be about a Led Zeppelin live performance in 1975.

There's always been a debate about what Led Zeppelin would have sounded like, if the band had endured into the 1980s and not folded after Bonham's death in 1980. Some folks come down on the side of "In Through the Out Door" from 1979, and specifically the track "All of My Love," a song that predicts the solo work that Plant would produce after the band's breakup, and that bears almost no stamp from Page.

Zeppelin Presence

For me, "Presence" has always been the Zep record that both looked like an eighties album, with its creepy yet not trippy cover art (four family members — the band? — contemplating a menacing black obelisk — their future?), and that had a "resetting" aspect: back to Led Zep I. But it's also a record that feels sort of angry and damaged, and I've typically read that as Page dialing into the impending punk revolution that would shake up pop music in 1977 and turn Zep into a dinosaur from another era, in the minds of all the newly minted Sex Pistols and Clash fans.

The first four Zep albums are a perfect listening experience — one long suite of songs, actually. "Houses of the Holy" and "Physical Graffiti" are a lot of fun — "The Song Remains the Same" from "Houses" is the most overtly joyful and uplifting tune in the entire Zep catalog and is glorious to watch the band play live (check it out here, it comes in at about 1:27:30). "Presence" is extremely fraught and hard to listen to.

Page's playing is astonishing — if you ever wondered why he's so revered as a genius of electric guitar, just put some headphones on an listen to the tonal textures he conjures on "Tea for One," an evolution from the similar "Since I've Been Loving You" from Zep III. Plant sings as if he might be about to collapse ("How come twenty four hours,/Baby sometimes slip into days?/A minute seems like a lifetime, baby when I feel this way"), Jones floats a weary groove, and Bonham lumbers behind it all. Tea for one, indeed.

Zeppelin Presence

Just listen

There remains a seemingly neverending interest in Led Zeppelin as the last great giant rock band of huge excess. But the band members themselves routinely dismiss all that stuff, in its sordid intricacy, and now in relatively advanced age ask that anyone who wants to understand Zep simply listen to the music and listen good. 

For me as a pretty thoroughgoing Zep fan — they were THE big rock band of my youth — "Presence" is a time machine, taking me back four decades and telling the story of Zep's overall frame of mind in the mid-1970s. It's the strangest and most challenging thing Zep ever did. But it was a strange and challenging period for the band and its members.

SEE ALSO: 'Stairway to Heaven' is an epic Led Zeppelin song, but there are 3 that outdo it

Join the conversation about this story »

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Oliver Stone attempts to make the Edward Snowden story into a thriller and fails

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edward snowden film

The current movie business has been a sobering wake-up call for a number of directors who were living high on the hog in Hollywood for most of the 1980s and 1990s, and one of them is certainly Oliver Stone.

At one time Stone taking on the likes of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden would have had the major studios going into a frenzied bidding war. But the times of studios making movies like Stone classics "Platoon," "JFK," and even "Natural Born Killers" is long gone.

If it doesn't have a superhero or franchise possibilities they won't touch it, and Stone isn't into doing either of those.

So with "Snowden" Stone hooked up with independent distributor Open Road Films, the same company that released last year's best picture Oscar winner, "Spotlight," but doesn't have the deep pockets of a major studio Stone is used to.

However, the project was able to land big names like Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play Snowden and Shailene Woodley as his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills.

In many ways, Stone looks at the major points in the Snowden whistle-blowing with a steady hand, blending in nicely the false promises during the Obama campaign for president of not being like the previous administration when it comes to NSA privacy tactics and the chemistry between Gordon-Levitt and Mills is very believable (I even got used to Gordon-Levitt's impersonation of Snowden's voice).

edward snowden filmBut then the movie suddenly tries to be a thriller and that's when everything falls off the rails.

The last third of the film follows Snowden while he's in Hawaii and a series of events leads him to grabbing classified files which he'll then hand to journalist Glenn Greenwald (played by Zachary Quinto) and filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) to release to the public.

The building of tension in these scenes and the race for Snowden to take the files from his office before anyone can notice is so forced it's comical.

Had Stone put these events in the continued dramatic tone of the rest of the movie, it would have had a better payoff in the end.

It's a tactic that movies often use to get people to the theater (I get it, hacking and displaying the world of computer geeks is a boring topic), embellish the "based on a true story" angle to fit in some things that will build the theatrics of the story. 

edward snowden film

In fact, one of the books the movie is based on is a fictionalized account of Snowden's story written by his Russian lawyer titled "Time of the Octopus." (The other book, "The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man," is authored by someone who has never met Snowden).

But trying to make the Snowden story a thriller wasn't convincing at all.

Want a better (and more truthful) story about Snowden, go stream Poitras' Oscar-winning documentary on the events that transpired after Snowden took the documents, "Citizenfour."

"Snowden" is currently screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be in theaters September 16.

SEE ALSO: Oscar favorite "Arrival" is one of the best movies of the year — and a big surprise

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A year-old Reddit post may have correctly predicted one of the biggest games coming out next year

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Warning: Potential spoilers for "Mass Effect: Andromeda" below.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

People make all kinds of unfounded claims on the internet that have seemingly no basis in reality. But sometimes, they're totally legit.

Back in April 2015, someone claiming to have taken a marketing survey for the forthcoming sci-fi game "Mass Effect: Andromeda" posted a ton of confidential details about the game's plot on Reddit. We finally got our first official look at in-game footage for "Mass Effect: Andromeda" during Sony's PlayStation event on Wednesday, and one small line of dialogue seems to have confirmed that earlier leak as completely true.

The very beginning of the Reddit post alleges that the next "Mass Effect" game takes place in the "Helius Cluster." It's a small detail in the overall scheme of the post, but in the aforementioned gameplay footage released Wednesday, one character mentions the Helius Cluster in passing.

Towards the end of the video, the player character, named Ryder, seems to accidentally activate some kind of conduit that generates a giant map.

Mass Effect Andromeda screenshot from PS4 Pro

"Is that the Helius Cluster?" One character asks, gesturing to the map overhead.

"Yeah," Ryder responds. "There we are."

This link between the Reddit post and the actual gameplay footage means that year-old leak probably came from a reputable source. Keep in mind that games are an iterative process, so some of those plot details could have changed since then, but it's nice to know that even the craziest things that surface on the internet can turn out to be totally legit.

Sometimes it just takes over a year to get there.

"Mass Effect: Andromeda" is expected to be released in early 2017. The gameplay footage released on Wednesday is embedded below.

SEE ALSO: Here's everything you should know about the newer, slimmer PlayStation 4

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This is the powerful speech the real Edward Snowden gives at the end of the new 'Snowden' movie

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The new Oliver Stone film "Snowden" mixes fiction and fact to retell the story of Edward Snowden's journey out of the shadows of intelligence to expose some of America's biggest secrets. And as the film comes to a close, viewers will know that the real Snowden is perfectly at peace with that.

Snowden makes a brief cameo at the end to put his mark on the film, delivering a passionate speech from the second home of his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucharena. 

"I am incredibly fortunate," Snowden says.

Before Snowden comes on screen, the fictionalized Snowden character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt appears on stage with a telepresence robot to deliver a speech from Moscow.

"Without the information to start a public debate, we're lost. You know, the people being able to question our government and hold it accountable — that's the principle that the United States of America was founded on. If we want to protect our national security, we should be protecting that principle," the Snowden character played by Gordon-Levitt says.

"I believe that if, nothing changes, more and more people all over the world will come forward. Whistleblowers and journalists but also, regular citizens. And when those in power try to hide by classifying everything, we will call them out on it. And when they try to scare us into sacrificing our basic human rights, we won't be intimidated, and we won't give up, and we will not be silenced."

Then, the real Snowden appears in the Moscow home, behind a laptop with a large red EFF sticker proclaiming "I Support Online Rights."

"When I left Hawaii, I lost everything. I had a stable life, stable love, family, future. And I lost that life, but, I've gained a new one, and I am incredibly fortunate," Snowden says. "And I think the greatest freedom that I've gained is the fact that I no longer have to worry about what happens tomorrow, because I'm happy with what I've done today."

Director Oliver Stone told The New York Times the shot took nine takes. "I mean, he’s not an actor," Stone said. "And I don’t think he became one that day."

Snowden has lived under asylum in Russia for more than three years. He left his home in Hawaii with thousands of top secret documents he gave to journalists in Hong Kong before fleeing to Moscow, where he remains to this day.

SEE ALSO: The new 'Snowden' movie mixes plenty of fiction with fact — though it's wildly entertaining

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We talked to the startup founder Erlich Bachman from HBO's 'Silicon Valley' is based on

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erlich bachmanOne of the reasons HBO’s “Silicon Valley” is such a hit rests in how effortlessly it skewers the tech scene.

The reality is often so ridiculous that the show even has to pull back sometimes, otherwise viewers would think it’s too absurd. Perhaps the show’s most beloved character is the extreme blowhard Erlich Bachman, played by TJ Miller, who takes credit for everything good that happens to Pied Piper while contributing little beyond platitudes.

Miller’s delivery and demeanor are priceless, and he claims the character is based on a particular person: Binu Girija, the founder of Way.com (or just Way).

“He really was an arrogant blowhard who had no coding skills, but just was a fairly good salesman who smoked marijuana a lot,” Miller told TechCrunch in 2014. “And that’s kind of where I got my character.”

binuMiller’s impression of Girija was based primarily on one chance meeting and an awkward pitch, Girija tells Business Insider.

Binu

Girija, in fact, does have a coding background, and studied computer science in university in India before working at Oracle and then founding a string of four startups. Two of them completely failed and two had mildly successful exits, he says.

Unfortunately, Girija says he put the money from his successes into one of his failures and ended up losing it.

“Whatever money I made, I lost it here,” he says.

But in 2013, Girija founded Way.com, which is what brought him into Miller’s orbit. Way, which raised a $1 million seed round half a year ago, is a "online marketplace for services." Think about Amazon listing what you can buy from third-party sellers, and then apply that to things that aren’t just retail goods.

Girija explains it in terms of three things: time, location, and personalization.

“Let’s assume you are ordering lunch,” he says. “You have a time [you want to eat]. Then you pick a restaurant: location. And then you pick the cuisine, that’s personalization.” Anything that has those three elements, a vendor can list on Way, and Way will help connect them to the buyer. Way doesn't produce anything in-house.

In explaining his ambitions for Way, Girija invokes grand marketplace comparisons, like Amazon and eBay, which might have contributed to Miller’s blowhard salesman impression of him.

The meeting

Girija says he met Miller at a random event, and followed him. “Hey TJ, would you have five minutes to talk ideas,” he asked.

“Who are you?” Miller replied. That’s when Girija immediately began pitching him Way. Miller began to walk away and Girija inserted the Amazon comparison.

“You've got three minutes,” Miller said.

erlichBut as Girija kept talking, it was clear that Miller wasn’t getting the idea, Girija says. So Girija pulled out his phone to try and show him, but the site was spotty and the screen was just loading and loading. Girija says he got nervous and kept talking fast, and his accent is, admittedly, a bit hard to understand at times.

“He might have thought I was high,” Girija laughs.

Girija is pretty good-natured about Miller's comments. He did get free exposure out of it, after all. But he takes issue with one particular bit of Miller’s commentary. “I’m not arrogant,” he says. And indeed, he does seems much more self-deprecating than Bachman is in the show.

However, like Bachman, Girija is a bit prone to the sweeping statement.

One of Girija’s cofounders left the company as soon as the company secured the initial investment. This is what Girija says as a explanation: “There are some people who are born entrepreneurs. But some people purely look for an opportunity to get the money and run. Those I'll call ‘the runners.’ [My cofounder] was a runner.”

That’s a mini speech I could definitely hear coming out of Erlich Bachman’s mouth.

Check out Way for yourself here.

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