_{This feature was previously published ahead of Thelma’s theatrical release. It has been updated for the film’s streaming release.}

Action movies used to be the domain of younger stars: All those gunfights, car chases, death-defying stunts, and nefarious-crime-thwartings take a lot of energy and flexibility, not to mention the ability to heal up afterward. But American action stars are simultaneously aging up and staying in the picture: Harrison Ford, now 82, made an Indiana Jones movie about his age. Tom Cruise is 62 and has a new Mission: Impossible movie on the way. Keanu Reeves keeps putting out John Wick movies. Even Bob Odenkirk got in on the action for his 60th birthday. But 2024’s hilarious action-comedy Thelma, now on Hulu, pushes the trend to what must be its limit. Here, 94-year-old Oscar-nominated actress June Squibb picks up the action mantle. 

Thelma is the first feature film from director Josh Margolin. It’s about a 92-year-old woman named Thelma who loses $10,000 to a scammer pretending to be her grandson. But instead of taking the scam lying down, she jumps on her scooter, recruits a friend, and sets off on a quest to take back her money.

In an interview with Polygon, Margolin explained that the story is based on a real incident that happened to his own grandma — though thankfully, in real life, she didn’t actually send the money to her would-be scammers. That premise may sound familiar to action fans for other reasons, though: Margolin was very aware of the happy accident of his movie hitting theaters in close proximity to Jason Statham’s The Beekeeper, which was also about a phone scammer getting a very different kind of comeuppance. 

“It was so funny to see that trailer,” Margolin says with a laugh. “I was like, Oh my God, we’re a little bit like The Beekeeper. I definitely watched it, because I was like, I have to see this. And it was wild and crazy and fun. […] I’m glad we can continue the grand tradition that The Beekeeper started.”

But while Thelma is significantly less violent than The Beekeeper, it’s even funnier and no less thrilling. For Margolin, one of the most important parts of the movie was translating the language of action filmmaking to his less-than-traditional cast, which also includes the late Richard Roundtree (Shaft) in a fantastic, fun performance. That means high-speed chases on scooters, fistfights at more manageable speeds, and high-tension heists with hearing aids. 

“I’m a big fan of action movies. I always have been,” says Margolin. “The idea [was] trying to tell the story of my grandma, and this ode to her and celebrate her grit and tenacity, [using] those tropes and ideas and shrinking them down to an everyday scope and scale, but treating them with real stakes.” 

Margolin says he wanted to find a way to dramatize what he calls the everyday heroism of “moving through the world as you get older and things get harder, and smaller things present more danger.”

Of course, slowed-down action scenes with older people in chases and fights could easily come off as parody — or worse, poking fun at its terrific cast of older actors. But Margolin brilliantly walks the line of laughing with our characters rather than laughing at them. They’re the stars of a true action movie here, not the butt of a joke.

“It’s so easy for anything sending up those tropes or referencing them to feel like parody, and especially stuff with older characters,” Margolin says. “Something that me and my producers were very cognizant of protecting was the tone, and trying to make sure that all of the action, all of the tension, all of the fun was always born out of a sincere and earnest care for what was happening. 

“We never wanted it to feel like it was punching down or poking fun. We wanted it to be funny in a way that felt like we’re along for the ride.”

Part of that earnestness also comes from Margolin’s own favorite action movies. He says he prefers an actioner that “treats its stakes sincerely, isn’t just winky and referential, but action that’s fun and surprising and tense and just treats things with a certain sincerity. Obviously, the Mission: Impossible movies are a big influence on [the movie]. Watching Tom Cruise hurl himself at various moving objects for our entertainment is a source of inspiration for [our] ethos.” 

Thelma watches a Mission: Impossible film during the movie, and her Tom Cruise inspiration is not just there in spirit, but in the text itself. After she gets scammed, seeing Cruise’s face on a magazine inspires Thelma to take justice into her own hands. But that kind of sincerity wouldn’t work without Thelma’s terrific and committed performances, particularly from Squibb and Roundtree. Both actors are terrifically funny, and Roundtree’s charm gives the movie a tremendous amount of heart. For her part, Margolin says Squibb was adamant about owning the Tom Cruise mantle and doing as many stunts as she could herself. 

“She did!” Margolin laughs. “And increasingly so as we went on, because we were pretty nervous and careful and conservative about all those things. With the help of our really awesome stunt team, as the shoot progressed and she got more comfortable with the scooter and things like getting onto the bed and rolling, we sort of developed a shorthand for what she was or wasn’t game for. It was really cool. She used to be a dancer; she was doing Pilates pretty rigorously in the lead-up to the movie. There’s a lot of physical prowess to her as a performer, and it was really cool to see her tap into that, even at this moment in her life, and use that in the movie.” 

It’s rare that a summer action movie also happens to be one of the funniest and sweetest movies of the year, but Thelma manages to pull it off. So if you’re impatient for Tom Cruise’s next movie, just remember that Thelma and June Squibb are here to carry the torch in his honor.

Thelma is now streaming on Hulu and is available for rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital platforms.

What is the most badass car logo in the world? Is it the Ferrari Horse? The Lamborghini Bull? Maybe it’s the Abarth scorpion? I think, of them all, the coolest logo is Koenigsegg’s, not just because it adorns some of the most badass cars ever, but because of its history. And now there’s a statue of this incredible logo for sale, and my god is it huge.

Below you’ll see the video of Christian von Koenigsegg describing the history of the ghost symbol on his company’s vehicles.

“We took over an old military fighter jet base in 2003,” von Koenigsegg says. “And the Swedish government decided to shut it down.” While the base was being shut down, apparently pilots and other military personnel were present, and they told Koenigsegg: “It would be an honor for us if you could continue to carry this symbol on your vehicles … and let the legacy continue.”

The ghost, Koenigsegg explains, is a symbol for the squadron, which was known for being heard but not seen — flying high above the clouds.

Anyway, the ghost symbol has become a big deal for Koenigsegg and for car culture in general, taking the mantle as the badass-est of car logos. It’s for this reason that this six-foot-tall, five-foot-wide, two-foot-deep hand-crafted aluminum Koenigsegg Ghost has my heart:

Looking at the listing at a glance, the artwork appears to be fairly small:

But then you see photos of the artist, British artist and former coachbuilder Toby Southan, forming this magnificent shape, and you begin to realize how large it is:

Then you see this photo:

My god is that thing enormous!

The Bring a Trailer Listing describes what we’re looking at:

The 16-gauge 1050A aluminum sculpture was formed using a mix of hand tools and an English wheel. Several pieces of metal were welded together to construct the ghost form, and separate pieces were grafted onto the head to form recessed eyes. The sculpture weighs around 50 pounds. A black stand with a circular base allows for freestanding display, and the stand weighs around 30 pounds.

Bidding is up to $15,000 as of this writing. If I’m a wealthy car person looking for perhaps the coolest possible art piece for my home/garage, this might not be a bad deal.

The post Someone Hand-Built A Humongous Aluminum Koenigsegg Statue And It’s For Sale appeared first on The Autopian.

A call to action for our Patreon subscribers:

If you signed up for either of our Patreons using the Patreon app on an iPhone or iPad, then please remove that subscription and rejoin through our Patreon web pages!

Here’s the website version of Amy’s Patreon and here’s David’s.

What’s going on?

Patreon has a mobile app, for no good reason at all, and they take payments through their app. So Apple is now demanding a 30% cut of all payments via the Patreon app on an Apple device — both when you sign up and every month thereafter. [Patreon]

This means that, from November 2024 on, if you sign up or change your payment level using the Patreon app on an iPhone or iPad, you will be charged 43% more (to make up the 30% cut) every month going forward — and that will go directly to Apple, not to us or Patreon.

So for example, a $10/month subscription will cost you $14.29 (we think), with $4.29 gouged by Apple. ($14.29 minus 30% is $10.)

You can avoid this additional charge by signing up directly on the Patreon website on your phone or tablet — so whenever you sign up for someone’s Patreon, use their Patreon web page.

The blame lies with Apple for gouging and with Patreon for having a pointless app that does nothing useful — but which they insist on trying to push on users who are just trying to give people money.

Android users are not affected — as yet — though that Patreon app sucks too and you shouldn’t use it.

Thank you, and we love you all!

Notepad is the Windows operating system RichEdit widget as an application. The whole point is to be the simplest possible text editor.

But what if Notepad had some AI?

Wait no longer. Microsoft has added LLM-based text rewriting in Notepad!

This exciting new feature was first sighted in January — much to the consternation of anyone with a sense of proportion. [Register]

Notepad users on the Windows Insider preview channels can now shorten, lengthen, or rephrase text. This will cost you AI credits, which you can get with the mandatory price rise on your Office 365 subscription, or buy separately. [Microsoft]

If Notepad puts harmful, offensive, or otherwise “undesirable outputs” into your document, just hit “report”! Microsoft assures us that this hardly ever happens.

Notepad is for reading text files, editing configurations, and making quick notes. Almost anyone who can use the new LLM feature is already paying for Office 365.

As the most basic possible editor, Notepad has launched instantly since Windows 1 in 1985. Today’s computers are a thousand times faster, but Microsoft has somehow managed to slow down Notepad so much that they brag about speeding up launch “by more than 35%”!

Paint has also had AI bolted on the side, doing automatic fill and erase. Content-aware fill was introduced with Adobe Photoshop CS5 in 2010 — but this time it burns trees with Microsoft’s Cocreator diffusion model. [Windows blog]

CNN wrote up the press release and said “the results are astonishing!” We’re astonished too! Though not by the results. [CNN]

Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are continuing their fight against fines for selling user location data, with two of the big three carriers submitting new court briefs arguing that the Federal Communications Commission can't punish them.

A Verizon brief filed on November 4 and an AT&T brief on November 1 contest the legal basis for the FCC fines issued in April 2024. T-Mobile also sued the FCC, but briefs haven't been filed yet in that case.

"Verizon's petition for review stems from the multiple and significant errors that the FCC, in purporting to enforce statutory consumer data privacy provisions, made in overstepping its authority," Verizon wrote. "The FCC's Forfeiture Order violated both the Communications Act and the Constitution, while failing to benefit the consumers it purported to protect."

Verizon and AT&T both said the fines violate their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial, and that the location data doesn't fall under the law cited by the FCC. Verizon appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, while AT&T appealed in the 5th Circuit and T-Mobile appealed in the DC Circuit.

The fines are $80.1 million for T-Mobile, $57.3 million for AT&T, $46.9 million for Verizon, and $12.2 million for T-Mobile subsidiary Sprint. The penalties relate to the 2018 revelation of real-time location data being shared. The FCC proposed the fines in 2020, when the commission had a Republican majority, and the fines were finalized under the current Democratic majority.

Trump’s likely FCC chair opposed fines

Even though the penalties were first proposed by Republican Ajit Pai in his last year as FCC chair, the FCC's two current Republicans opposed the final fine orders in 2024. Brendan Carr, who is likely to become chair after President-elect Donald Trump takes office, said in his dissent that the FCC has only "limited and circumscribed authority over privacy" and that the matter should be handled by the Federal Trade Commission instead.

The FCC said in April that "each carrier sold access to its customers' location information to 'aggregators,' who then resold access to such information to third-party location-based service providers. In doing so, each carrier attempted to offload its obligations to obtain customer consent onto downstream recipients of location information, which in many instances meant that no valid customer consent was obtained."

The problem came to light with reports of customer location data "being disclosed by the largest American wireless carriers without customer consent or other legal authorization to a Missouri Sheriff through a 'location-finding service' operated by Securus, a provider of communications services to correctional facilities, to track the location of numerous individuals," the FCC said. Even "after becoming aware that their safeguards were ineffective, the carriers continued to sell access to location information without taking reasonable measures to protect it from unauthorized access," the FCC said.

Verizon's court brief defended the company's LBS (location-based service) program, saying it "completed hundreds of millions of successful, express requests from consumers to provide location information to service providers." The program ran for about a decade before being shut down amid the data scandal.

Verizon claimed the FCC over-reached in its fine, since the Securus incident happened outside the statute of limitations:

The FCC, however, did not punish Verizon for Securus's or the sheriff's actions—which were the only unauthorized requests for or misuse of customer device information by any service provider participating in Verizon's LBS program. The FCC acknowledged that those actions occurred outside the statute of limitations, so they could not support a forfeiture penalty. And, by the time of the NAL [Notice of Apparent Liability], Verizon had shut down its LBS program nearly one year earlier, eliminating any potential current or going-forward liability. The FCC, therefore, adopted a novel approach to generate an eye-popping penalty amount. The FCC punished Verizon for not terminating every other service provider from the LBS program on a faster timeline.

AT&T's brief similarly chided the FCC for "mak[ing] Securus the centerpiece of its argument" despite the statute of limitations on potential Securus violations having expired.

Supreme Court ruling could hurt FCC case

Both AT&T and Verizon cite the Supreme Court's June 2024 ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which held that "when the SEC seeks civil penalties against a defendant for securities fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitles the defendant to a jury trial."

The Supreme Court ruling, which affirmed a 5th Circuit order, had not been issued yet when the FCC finalized its fines. The FCC disputed the 5th Circuit ruling, saying among other things that Supreme Court precedent made clear that "Congress can assign matters involving public rights to adjudication by an administrative agency 'even if the Seventh Amendment would have required a jury where the adjudication of those rights is assigned to a federal court of law instead.'"

Of course, the FCC will have a tougher time disputing the Jarkesy ruling now that the Supreme Court affirmed the 5th Circuit. Verizon pointed out that in the high court's Jarkesy decision, "Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, recognized that Jarkesy was not limited to the SEC, identifying many agencies, including the FCC, whose practice of 'impos[ing] civil penalties in administrative proceedings' would be 'upend[ed].'"

Verizon further argued: "As in Jarkesy, the fact that the FCC seeks 'civil penalties... designed to punish' is 'all but dispositive' of Verizon's entitlement to an Article III court and a jury, rather than an agency prosecutor and adjudicator."

Carriers: We didn’t get fair notice

Both carriers said the FCC did not provide "fair notice" that its section 222 authority over customer proprietary network information (CPNI) would apply to the data in question.

When it issued the fines, the FCC said carriers had fair notice. "CPNI is defined by statute, in relevant part, to include 'information that relates to... the location... of a telecommunications service,'" the FCC said.

The FCC also pointed to a previous statement that "implicit in section 222 is a rebuttable presumption that information that fits the definition of CPNI contained in section 222([h])(1) is in fact CPNI." While the FCC did not comprehensively identify types of CPNI, "including in the case of location information, the Commission emphasized that 'location information in particular can be very sensitive customer information,'" the FCC said.

The carriers argue the location data is not CPNI. AT&T claims that "section 222 of the Communications Act does not cover the location information in question because the information was not obtained 'solely by virtue of' AT&T's provision of voice services." AT&T collected the location information to provide both voice and data service, not voice only, the company said.

The relevant law says that CPNI is data related to telecommunications service "that is made available to the carrier by the customer solely by virtue of the carrier-customer relationship." The FCC said it is "not persuaded that AT&T's inclusion of multiple services in a bundle—which includes one or more telecommunications services—takes the resulting relationship outside the scope of the 'carrier-customer' relationship for the specific purposes of the CPNI definition."

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While in Las Vegas at the Specialty Equipment Market Association show, SEMA, I spotted the “Lamborghini Miata” that has taken the internet by storm over the past couple of days, and the truth is: This ain’t what you think it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s totally wack, either. Check it out.

If you’ve been following the car-internet the past couple of days, you might have seen articles like “Drop Everything and Look at This V-10 Miata With Turbos for Headlights” claiming the Miata “might be the craziest [build] of the year.” Or “Shocking Mazda MX-5 Miata Transformation Is Amazing And Insane,” which  called the Lambo engine the “Wildest Mazda MX-5 Miata Engine Swap Ever.”

Or you might have seen Instagram reels like this one:

 

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And then there’s this one, which features an interview with the builder, who does not deny the Lamborghini engine:

 

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But the truth is, that’s not a Lambo engine under the hood. It’s very clearly a Chevy engine, as someone pointed out while I was peeking under the hood. Here’s my look at the Miata:

 

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I had a chat with Brazilian vehicle builder Jefferson Marcal from Hot Parts out of Orlando, Florida, and he actually told me the engine with the Lamborghini Gallardo intake bolted to it came out of a junked 2022 C8 Corvette.

That would make it a 6.2-liter LT2 V8 (Marcal told me LT4 on the phone, though that doesn’t make sense for a C8), though as eagle-eyed friend of the site Bozi Tatarevic points out, what can be seen through the hole in the hood really looks like like a truck motor:

This is a Gen V LS/LT engine based on the timing cover bolt location and the water pump outlet leads me to believe that this is something like the 5.3-liter L84 or the 6.6-liter L8T engine. pic.twitter.com/qqWydxXCeg

— Bozi Tatarevic (@BoziTatarevic) November 7, 2024

Specifically, Bozi points to the accessory drive, which I took a photo of here:

The photo is cut off a bit, but you can still see the water pump outlet with the little 90-degree tube at the 12 o’clock position. Plus there are similar castings. Much of what you see matches an L84, as Bozi points out:

Now look at the two side by side and see how the breather and the casting marks match between the Miata video and this photo of the Chevy L84 engine. pic.twitter.com/m5oZkFbAAu

— Bozi Tatarevic (@BoziTatarevic) November 7, 2024

I called up the builder to see what’s up. “[I] needed to change the accessory drive,” he told me me when I asked about a front end that looks quite different than what you’d seen on the LT2 that was allegedly used in the build. “The accessory is from 2022 from Silverado. I needed to change because I have no space to put AC compressor,” he said.

Marcal told me it’s a Gen 5 Chevy engine with forged pistons, new rods, a VVT delete, a custom cam, and lots of other mods. Attached to it is a Tremec T56 and in the rear is a Getrag rear diff from a Cadillac CTS-V. I asked Bozi if a Silverado accessory drive would fit a C8 Corvette motor, just to confirm. “It would fit and match the photo,” he told me. He then sent me a link to the L8T accessory drive kit:

“Could bolt something like this kit to an LT2 and end up with whats visible in the photos and videos,” Bozi told me, though he notes also that the Miata motor “Could also be an L87 which is basically the truck version of the LT2 and externally the block and heads look the same.”

“Lots of options when it comes to block and head combinations there but the one thing that I can say for certain is that it’s a Gen V Chevy small block V8 and not a Lamborghini V10,” he concludes.

So the builder, Marcal, and Bozi are in agreement: It’s a Gen V Chevy small block. Whether it actually came from a 2022 Corvette and had its accessory drive swapped out, we can’t know for sure, but it seems possible, and I’m inclined to believe the builder until I know otherwise, even if it seems he didn’t exactly correct folks when they claimed this was a Lambo motor.

So yes, this famous SEMA Miata a bit of a fraud, but hey, it IS still an LS-swapped Miata, which is cool — if it actually functions, that is.

The post The ‘Lamborghini Engine’ Mazda Miata At SEMA Is A Big Lie appeared first on The Autopian.