Amelia

“Sex, violent death, and mystery. If your life has one of these things people might be interested. If it has two, now you’re tabloid fodder. If it has three, you’re Amelia Earhart.” So begins Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s enticing “The Aviator and the Showman,” a vibrant account of the courtship and union of the famous pilot and her publisher husband whose intrusive management of his wife’s career may have cost her life. Shapiro dexterously untangles the Gordian knot of their entwined passions, shared ambitions and business bottom lines.

The affianced Earhart and the married George Palmer Putnam met in his Manhattan office in the spring of 1928. She was 30, he a decade older. While she’d grown up in the Midwest and spent time in California, she was currently living in Boston, employed as a social worker and indulging an enthusiasm for flying in her spare time. Although she was still honing her skills, her tall, lean beauty, capped with a tousled jazz-age bob, caught Putnam’s attention. The previous year the publishing exec had rushed out Charles Lindbergh’s bestselling “We,” which detailed Lindy’s solo flight across the Atlantic; he was hoping to achieve a similar success for Earhart. Would she be willing to hitch a ride with a crew that summer?

Shapiro then circles back to their biographies. Earhart was born into a solidly middle-class family in Kansas, close to her younger sister, Muriel, but her father’s job failures and alcoholism uprooted the Earharts, undermining the girls’ educations. Earhart was full of mischief and adventure, a natural leader with a modesty instilled by her mother, who was prone to invoking her Quaker background when it suited her. Despite financial insecurity, both parents encouraged their daughters to pursue their dreams, however unconventional — their feminist, progressive spirit guided Earhart like a compass.

A stint in Toronto kindled her desire to fly. After another move to Los Angeles, she took lessons from a female instructor, learning basics, but it was a hobby compared to her chosen vocation. She was also juggling men, among them the boyish Sam Chapman, whose proposal she’d tentatively accepted, to a wealthy 64-year-old who showered her with pricey presents, such as an automobile. (Earhart was susceptible to luxury items, which Putnam later exploited). Shapiro’s tone is conversational, luring us into a rich story about American media.

Her portrait of Putnam is equally magnetic. A large, expansive man and junior partner in a dynastic firm, “Gyp” had a knack for packaging authors as mass-market products, adept at negotiating deals from London to New York to Hollywood. His troubled marriage to Dorothy Binney Putnam, an heiress, did not restrain him from skimming her fortune to defray his expenses. He recruited Earhart to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, though she spent the duration squeezed between gasoline tanks, “feeling like a faker due to George’s excessive promotion of her as a pilot.” Her return to the U.S. was a Putnam-orchestrated extravaganza that eclipsed the flight: “Wherever Amelia went, she ignited a frenzy of excitement that not only enraptured audiences but also allowed George to revel in her reflected glory,” Shapiro notes. “He was invigorated by her carefree and glamorous aura. Amelia was the ‘it girl’… urbane, relaxed, and effortlessly charming.” Their affair triggered Putnam’s divorce, and the pair married in 1931, residing at his estate in Rye, N.Y.

“The Aviator and the Showman” is a lavish, layered narrative, a primer on early aviation and the transition of publishing from genteel carriage trade to an industry increasingly reliant on blockbusters. Putnam mastered the moment; to this day, corporations demand photogenic authors, high-stakes publicity, spreadsheet tweaks and magical thinking. From Big Five houses to small presses, from Amazon to Barnes & Noble to pocket independent stores: We are all descendants of George Putnam.

Earhart never lost her eye for attractive men, though, tipping Shapiro into the occasional cliché or purple flourish. “Captain Manning’s handsome good looks and gentlemanliness greatly appealed to Amelia,” she writes. “Sam Chapman who? Could a budding romantic connection from these intoxicating nights at sea grow after they docked?” Putnam was jealous of his wife’s flirtations, and tinkered with her schedule accordingly.

Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro

(Franco Vogt)

Shapiro chronicles the couple’s reach, as Putnam stamped Amelia’s imprimatur onto (white) American womanhood, a prototype still among us: role model for younger women, professional and practical, efficient by day, elegant by night. He spun her myth into fashion and merchandise, even a brief editorial gig at Cosmopolitan. (Earhart loved poetry but was no gifted writer herself.) They bought expensive cars, a stylish house in Toluca Lake and Amelia’s signature Lockheed Electra. Dollar signs in his eyes, Putnam helped Earhart assemble a team for her 1937 global trek, including her trusted technical advisor Paul Mantz, and Fred Noonan, a seasoned navigator with a taste for liquor. The author’s recreation of Earhart’s final odyssey, manipulated by Putnam’s controlling personality, will seem familiar, yet Shapiro teases out two factors: the Electra’s faulty transmissions and Earhart’s limitations (she never bothered to learn Morse code).

“The Aviator and the Showman” leaves no doubt about Earhart’s disappearance: She misjudged her gasoline reserves, panicked and crashed near tiny Howland atoll. The wreck of the Electra sits on the Pacific’s floor, Shapiro asserts, at a level deeper than the ruins of the Titanic. One reporter’s “most scathing critique was directed toward George Palmer Putnam, whom he saw as motivated more by profit than by his wife’s safety, a sentiment fueled by seeing cabled messages pressuring Amelia to hasten her journey for a lucrative radio deal.”

Putnam’s post-Earhart life was a roller coaster of cash woes and notoriety; the following year he staged his own kidnapping, alienating his stodgy publishing community. His appetite for publicity was insatiable. “The Aviator and the Showman” reveals the magnitude of our celebrity worship, the wonder of what we don’t understand. Shapiro captures the thrill of a leap into the unknown, recalling the works of Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger.

Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

“M3GAN 2.0” is another shiny display case for its violent antiheroine, an artificially intelligent doll with little regard for human life. In the new movie, there are two of them: Meet AMELIA, a lithesome blond who opens the film decimating a bunker somewhere near the border of Turkey and Iran. The robot babe’s name stands for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android, and one can imagine the real White House asking if we can actually build her.

This fledgling franchise has rewired itself from horror to action-comedy. Bigger and goofier than the 2022 hit, “M3GAN 2.0” is content to be this summer’s fidget spinner: an amusement soon forgotten. You can easily accuse returning director Gerard Johnstone (who’s taken over screenwriting duties too) of assembling it from other movies’ nuts and bolts. He’s not hiding his influences, including “The Terminator,” “Metropolis” and the head-spinning theatrics of “The Exorcist.” It’s a magpie movie that’s happy to give audiences the tinselly things they want — i.e., two robots clobbering the Wi-Fi out of each other. But Johnstone creates openings for his own shaggy sense of humor. I’m excited to keep tabs on the promising New Zealander.

The snippy robot begins the film with her body destroyed but her ego as big as ever. M3GAN, voiced by Jenna Davis and embodied by both an animatronic puppet and the young dancer Amie Donald, will be reconstructed and built back better — and taller, as the physically gifted Donald has herself aged from 12 to 15. As an interim step, M3GAN gets temporarily placed in a tiny teal bot with flipper hands named Moxie, who seems adorable unless you know that Moxie was a real AI emotional support doll launched in 2020 that was abruptly bricked last year, teaching kids a sad lesson in startup funding and, in essence, death. (You can find videos online of people saying goodbye to their comatose friend.)

Meanwhile, M3GAN’S creator Gemma (a droll Allison Williams) is out of prison and rebranding herself as an anti-technology crusader. “You wouldn’t give your child cocaine — why would you give them a smartphone?” she hectors, while her bland do-gooder boyfriend Christian (Aristotle Athari) enlists the United Nations to fight back against the creeping omnipotence of AI. Cady (Violet McGraw), Gemma’s 12-year-old orphaned niece, wants a career in computer science. Gemma prefers that she concentrate on soccer.

Smartly, these films don’t create a phony dichotomy between tender humans and cold machinery. Gemma’s interpersonal skills could use an update. She can’t connect to her young charge. Hilariously and hypocritically, she orders Cady around with zero respect for the child’s free will. When Cady insists that she’s not sleepy enough to go to bed, Gemma snaps, “Take a melatonin.”

What interests Johnstone here is how biological and synthetic beings blend together. Gemma and her colleagues Cole and Tess (Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epp) are designing a mechanized exoskeleton that would allow a human worker to toss around concrete blocks as breezily as a penny (although when it glitches, Cole can’t get out of the suit to use the bathroom). Their billionaire potential investor, Alton (Jemaine Clement, whose oily lecherousness may remind you of a recent government employee), has a neural chip in his temple that’s layered an invisible computer screen over his retinas. Blinking his eyes to take photographs, this repellent tech bro appears so ridiculous that you half-wonder if his innovation is fake, — the emperor’s new code. But when AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) uses his eyeballs against him, we enjoy Alton realizing how pitiful he looks.

The plot here is the same one we’re going to keep repeating until today’s technofeudalist geeks quit inventing things that the majority of people don’t want. (So, probably forever.) AMELIA wants access to the computer cloud that controls every facet of our existence, from the power grid to the financial markets. There’s a cool, if truncated, car chase in which AMELIA treats humans like roadblocks, flinging us into traffic by freezing scooters and releasing cash from sidewalk ATMs.

On a more intimate scale, Gemma and Cady’s new Bay Area rental is a smart house where everything is a potential poltergeist, from the ice dispenser to the vacuum. They thought M3GAN was dead; turns out, she’s the ghost in their machines. The movie isn’t scary in the slightest. But afterward, it’s terrifying to count how many things you own that aren’t truly under your control — and, scarier, how hard it’s getting to stop this home invasion. Does anyone really need their refrigerator authorized to order more eggs?

“M3GAN 2.0” is at heart a B-movie about a technological arms race fought by femmebots with literal swinging arms. It’s dopey by design. At least Johnstone punches up the premise. There’s not just one secret lair — there are three! — and each has its own playful reveal. Later, he finagles a physical comedy beat in which Gemma is delighted to realize she’s more like M3GAN than she thinks. I was never that moved by M3GAN’s girl-power-y argument that she has a soul (“I’m nobody’s plaything,” she growls.) And the scene in which she and Gemma bond starts off like a groaner but gets us howling when the doll goes too far and begins to sing another cringey pop song, a great gag recycled from the last movie.

Most of the other obvious yuks are flashy and hollow: Of course M3GAN will dance. Of course M3GAN will zip into a flying squirrel suit and go soaring over the trees. Of course a souped-up smart sports car will blare the theme music from “Knight Rider.” That gets a reflexive chuckle, but it mostly reminds us that today’s so-called genius inventors just wish their childhood toys were real.

But what intrigues me about Johnstone are the jokes that barely involve M3GAN at all. The most surprising laugh in the first movie came when a detective giggled as he described a little boy’s murder. Killer dolls, we get. Yet, this was the stock cop character seen in every genre flick acting fundamentally against his programming. Here, that humor has gone viral — it’s now in every scene — insisting that humanity itself is fundamentally strange and unpredictable.

The robot is the draw, but I’d watch “M3GAN 2.0” for the people. And stay for the end credits disclaimer: “This work may not be used to train AI.” Good luck with that.

Emmerdale’s April Windsor actress Amelia Flanagan told The Mirror at the British Soap Awards all about a return to the ITV soap, which had been announced by bosses a while back

One Emmerdale favourite’s return to the show could be imminent, with Amelia Flanagan who plays April Windsor spilling all.

Speaking exclusively to The Mirror, the actress, who won the award for Best Young Performer at this year’s event, finally spoke out about the big news that a comeback was on the cards. The return had been announced by boss Laura Shaw months ago, but no details were given and no date was revealed either.

April star Amelia has spoken for the first time about the looming return of Dylan Penders, played by actor Fred Kettle. The character debuted earlier this year as part of the teen’s huge storyline that saw her living on the streets after running away from home.

Dylan ended up following April to the village but after an overdose, he went to rehab and appeared to leave the show. The character proved a hit with fans though, and bosses decided to bring him back.

It’s now thought he will cause trouble for April and will feature in a big storyline in the village. He appeared to be filming already too which means he could be back onscreen within weeks.

READ MORE: British Soap Awards moments you didn’t see: Jane McDonald warning and scenes re-filmed

Speaking to us about the return for the first some, Amelia shared she was thrilled and was excited to explore Dylan and April further. She also teased there was some “big” stuff ahead, while revealing all on growing up on the soap after more than 11 years in the role.

Amelia told us: “April has had an incredibly tough year with what she has been through, with the pregnancy and the homelessness storyline. April and Dylan didn’t leave things on the best terms, but I think what is important now is that he’s back.

“Who knows what will happen. It will be great to explore that relationship further, I think fans want to see that which is great.” Viewers have seen April having a tough time recently, struggling to adjust to life back in the village after the heartbreaking stillbirth if her daughter.

Her and her dad Marlon Dingle have been at each other’s throats for months, with Marlon struggling to get through to her and April trying to find her way. But there’s positive scenes ahead, with “big” storylines teased too.

Amelia told us: “I think hopefully the future is looking bright for all of them. They have been through so much with recent events. She’s been dealt a hard hand in life in the last year or so, and we’re gonna see more of April’s journey.

“She has been in the village for a long time now. She’s been growing as a person and it’s an incredible thing to explore with the show. I am excited for the bigger storylines to stick my teeth into.”

On her time on the show, she added: “I’ve been on the show for 11 and a half years now. It’s been a long time. With April’s journey, so much has happened, it’s important to remember what has led her to be the way she is now, as far back as Donna’s death. I think it’s brilliant exploring new things.”

Amelia also praised her co-star Mike Parr, who plays Ross Barton, for his support towards her. She said: “Ross is like a big brother to April and it’s very true to real life. I always say Mike is like a big brother. I love him to pieces, he’s incredible and we have the best time together. Hopefully we see more of them onscreen.”

Emmerdale airs weeknights at 7:30pm on ITV1 and ITVX, with an hour-long episode on Thursdays. * Follow Mirror Celebs and TV on TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .