Top Gun: Maverick

• Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment Inc. (Nasdaq: CSSE), a leading provider of entertainment to cost-conscious consumers, today announced its Redbox kiosks saw a record week of rentals with the recent addition of the animated film The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
• The film set several new records, including becoming the top movie rental for 2023, the most rented movie in its first week since Top Gun: Maverick, and the most first-week rentals for a family film since The Croods: A New Age.
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie also recently broke week one Transactional Video-on-Demand (TVOD) revenue records on the company’s Redbox streaming service.
• The Premium Video-on-Demand (PVOD) and Premium Electronic Sell-Through (PEST) debut surpassed the previous record PEST launch of Avatar: The Way of Water.

• Coverage over the past winter months, for example, has focused on how Ukrainians are fighting in WWI-like muddy trenches in Bakhmut, while Russia suffers almost WWI levels of casualties.
• Many of the WWI comparisons stress the unmodern nature of what is happening on Ukraine’s battlefields.
• And, most importantly, by making these kinds of historical comparisons, we detach ourselves from the war’s horrors and violence.

Unmodern and modern war

• In these comparisons, WWI does not serve as the benchmark of modern war, but as the haunted image of primitive industrial warfare from more than a century ago.
• What’s so characteristic of WWI, and seems so unmodern, is its lack of progress.
• And while we have seen drones and other hi-tech tools of war on the news, we haven´t seen much progress on pushing back the frontline.

Underestimating Russia’s objectives

• The unmodern is, of course, closely associated not just with the war in general, but especially with Russia’s conduct.
• But by tying Russia’s conduct to a stereotypical image of WWI fighting, we might stop analysing the full context.
• One might also lose sight of the toll the current fight might be taking on the “more modern” Ukraine’s forces.
• Is it a war against Ukraine, or a war against the west that happens to be fought in and over Ukraine?

Disengaging from reality

• But that is a dangerous and misleading thought, as it isolates what is happening in Ukraine from our own times.
• What we see in Ukraine is not a historical horror show, it is the ugly face of full-scale modern war.
• Over the past decades, western society has become strangely unaware of what happens in a modern war.

• The 36th Huading Awards Will Be Held This Friday, March 31, 2023, at the Avalon Theater in Hollywood
  LOS ANGELES, March 31, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The Huading Awards Group is excited to announce the guests walking the red carpet at the 36th Huading Awards on March 31, 2023.
• The red carpet begins at 3:30 p.m. followed by the awards ceremony from 5 – 8 p.m.
• Many esteemed guests and nominees will grace the red carpet such as Nicholas Meyer, director of Star Trek II, Robert Minkoff, director of "The Lion King", and Claudio Miranda, cinematographer of "Top Gun: Maverick", among many others.
• The following includes the list of honorable guests:

• "Top Gun" Captain Charlie Plumb to Keynote Welcome Home Ceremony;
  COLUMBUS, Ohio, March 15, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In observance of National Vietnam War Veterans Day, the National Veterans Memorial and Museum (NVMM) invites the public to join in honoring and welcoming home our Vietnam Veterans with a special in-person and live-stream ceremony on March 29 at 10 a.m. in the Great Hall.
• Museum admission is free to all guests on March 29, thanks to the support of NVMM sponsors.
• National Vietnam War Veterans Day was established as a national observance in 2017, the 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War, to recognize the 9 million Americans who served during the Vietnam War.
• March 29, 1973, was the day U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, was disestablished and the last U.S. combat troops departed Vietnam.