phone call

It’s clear from the existence and execution of “Black Phone 2” that Universal and Blumhouse never expected 2021’s “The Black Phone” to be a hit. If there was ever an inkling that the first film might have been more than a quick and dirty ’70s-style riff on a boogeyman tale, there’s no way those in charge would have let their big baddie, the Grabber, be killed off at the end of the movie.

But a hit it was and so, for a sequel, supernatural elements must be spun out and ’80s slasher classics consulted, especially since it’s now four years later, in 1982. Masked serial killer the Grabber, played by Ethan Hawke (we never really see his face, though we do hear his voice), continues to haunt, torment and maim children, despite the inconvenience of death.

Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill co-wrote both films, with Derrickson behind the camera as director. The first was based on a short story by Joe Hill (the son of Stephen King) and is set in 1978 Denver, where plucky Finney Blake (Mason Thames) had to escape the clutches of kidnapper the Grabber while fielding phone calls from the ghosts of his previous victims, offering tips and tricks. What distinguished “The Black Phone” was its shocking approach to violence with its young characters, who all sported entertainingly profane potty mouths. While it was daring in its hard-R riskiness and played on our basest fears, it didn’t reinvent the wheel, or even try to. However, the film’s phone conceit played well enough and young star Thames was outstanding.

In “Black Phone 2,” Finney’s now a high school student, drowning his trauma in weed and schoolyard fights, sometimes the bully himself. He’s protective of his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who has the gift of psychic sight, but mostly he just wants to check out from his own brain. The sequel is primarily Gwen’s movie. She starts lucid dreaming and sleepwalking, receiving phone calls from beyond — like from their dead mother when she was a teenager beyond.

The messages bring Gwen, Finney and her crush, Ernesto (Miguel Mora), to a winter retreat for Christian youth, Camp Alpine, now run by Mando (Demián Bichir) and his niece, Mustang (Arianna Rivas). As it turns out, this camp is rife with the ghosts of young dead boys — the phone keeps ringing and it won’t stop until Finney picks it up.

If “The Black Phone” dabbles in crimes that are taboo and is even unforgivable in its depiction of brutality against innocent children, “Black Phone 2” commits its own unforgivable crime of being dreadfully boring. This movie is a snooze, not just because all of the action takes place entirely during Gwen’s dreams.

The film can’t shake its lingering scent of “Stranger Things,” but the filmmakers have also turned for inspiration to another iconic ’80s-set property: The whole movie is a “Nightmare on Elm Street” ripoff, with a disfigured killer stalking his prey through their subconscious. Those sequences are fine, action-packed if not entirely scary, but at least it’s something more rousing than the awake scenes, where the characters stand in one place and make speeches to each other about their trauma and backstories. The entire affair is monotonously one-note and dour, with only a few pops of unintentional humor.

You realize almost immediately what the deal is with these ghost boys, but the film takes its sweet time explaining it all. It’s a fairly simple story, so you do understand why Derrickson gussies it up with grainy dream sequences and shaky 8mm flashbacks, and a pretty terrific electronic score composed by his son, Atticus Derrickson.

It’s also a bit surprising that “Black Phone 2” turns out to be so pious and deeply Christian, which is a bit of an odd mix. For a film about Jesus and the power of prayer, it also features a scene in which a kid’s face gets sliced in half by a windowpane. Then again, horror’s trend toward the faith-based isn’t a surprise when you take a look at the success of the Bible-thumping “Conjuring” franchise.

However, it seems like this might be the Grabber’s last hurrah. You’ll root for the characters to vanquish him only because then the drudgery might finally end. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a hit and they’ll figure out another way to reanimate this utterly uninspiring horror villain. Personally, I’ve had my fill of the Grabber’s grabbing.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Fox News host Jesse Watters acknowledged Thursday that his program made a mistake in reporting on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s phone conversation with President Trump during last month’s immigration raids in Los Angeles.

Newsom filed a $787-million defamation lawsuit against Watters and Fox News on June 27 after the host reported on comments Trump made about a phone call with the governor as tensions heated up over the raids and the president’s decision to deploy the National Guard.

Newsom’s lawsuit said Watters lied on his prime-time program about the timeline of his conversations with the president.

After the lawsuit was filed in a Delaware court, Newsom’s lawyers said they were prepared to drop the suit if the governor got a retraction and a formal on-air apology. The suit claims Fox News willfully distorted the facts about the Trump call to harm the governor politically.

Asked for a reaction to Watters’ remarks about the matter, Newsom showed no signs of backing down. “Discovery will be fun,” he said in a statement. “See you in court buddy.”

Watters’ on-air persona is snarky and tongue-in-cheek and he did not deviate from it when he addressed the Newsom matter. He acknowledged he misunderstood Newsom’s social media post on Trump’s remarks and used the words “I’m sorry.” But it was far from a fulsome apology.

“Fox News invited [Newsom] on the show to talk it out man to man, but he said no,” Watters said.

The dust-up began after Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on June 10 that he spoke to Newsom “a day ago — called him up tell him you’ve got to do a better job, you’re doing a bad job.” Trump’s comment gave the impression that the two spoke on the same day 700 Marines were deployed in Los Angeles.

Newsom refuted the claim in a post on X. The governor had already said publicly he spoke to Trump after midnight Eastern time on June 7 and the National Guard was not discussed. They never spoke after that.

“There was no call,” Newsom posted on X. “Not even a voicemail. Americans should be alarmed that a President deploying Marines onto our streets doesn’t even know who he’s talking to.”

Newsom’s lawyers allege in the complaint that by making the call seem more recent, Trump could suggest they discussed the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, which they had not.

Trump sent Fox News anchor John Roberts a screen shot showing the June 7 date stamp of the phone call, which Watters showed on his program to assert that Newsom was lying when he said they did not speak.

When Watters showed a clip of Trump’s June 10 comments about the call on his program, it omitted the portion where the president said he spoke to Newsom the previous day. A banner at the bottom of the screen read: “Gavin lied about Trump’s call.”

Watters told viewers Thursday he believed Newsom’s X post asserted that the two had not spoken at all.

“‘Not even a voicemail’ — we took that to mean there was no call ever,” Watters said.

“We thought the dispute was about whether there was a phone call at all when he said without qualification that there was no call,” the host continued. “Now Newsom’s telling us what was in his head when he wrote the tweet. He didn’t deceive anybody on purpose, so I’m sorry, he wasn’t lying. He was just confusing and unclear. Next time, governor, why don’t you say what you mean.”

The $787-million figure in the lawsuit is the amount Fox News paid to Dominion Voting Systems to settle another defamation case in 2023. Fox agreed to pay the company, which said the network aired false claims that its voting equipment was manipulated to help President Biden win the 2020 election.

Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The State Department is warning U.S. diplomats of attempts to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and possibly other officials using technology driven by artificial intelligence, according to two senior officials and a cable sent last week to all embassies and consulates.

The warning came after the department discovered that an impostor posing as Rubio had attempted to reach out to at least three foreign ministers, a U.S. senator and a governor, according to the July 3 cable, which was first reported by the Washington Post.

The recipients of the scam messages, which were sent by text, Signal and voicemail, were not identified in the cable, a copy of which was shared with the Associated Press.

“The State Department is aware of this incident and is currently investigating the matter,” it said. “The department takes seriously its responsibility to safeguard its information and continuously takes steps to improve the department’s cybersecurity posture to prevent future incidents.”

It declined to comment further due to “security reasons” and the ongoing investigation.

It’s the latest instance of a high-level Trump administration figure targeted by an impersonator, with a similar incident revealed in May involving President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The misuse of AI to deceive people is likely to grow as the technology improves and becomes more widely available, and the FBI warned in the spring about “malicious actors” impersonating senior U.S. government officials in a text and voice messaging campaign.

The hoaxes involving Rubio had been unsuccessful and “not very sophisticated,” one of the officials said. Nonetheless, the second official said the department deemed it “prudent” to advise all employees and foreign governments, particularly as efforts by foreign actors to compromise information security increase.

The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“There is no direct cyber threat to the department from this campaign, but information shared with a third party could be exposed if targeted individuals are compromised,” the cable said.

The FBI has warned in a public service announcement about a “malicious” campaign relying on text messages and AI-generated voice messages that purport to come from a senior U.S. official and that aim to dupe other government officials as well as the victim’s associates and contacts.

This is not the first time that Rubio has been impersonated in a deepfake. This spring, someone created a bogus video of him saying he wanted to cut off Ukraine’s access to Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service. Ukraine’s government later rebutted the false claim.

Several potential solutions have been put forward in recent years to the growing misuse of AI for deception, including criminal penalties and improved media literacy. Concerns about deepfakes have also led to a flood of new apps and AI systems designed to spot phonies that could easily fool a human.

The tech companies working on these systems are now in competition against those who would use AI to deceive, according to Siwei Lyu, a professor and computer scientist at the University at Buffalo. He said he’s seen an increase in the number of deepfakes portraying celebrities, politicians and business leaders as the technology improves.

Just a few years ago, fakes contained easy-to-spot flaws — inhuman voices or mistakes such as extra fingers — but now the AI is so good, it’s much harder for a human to spot, giving deepfake makers an advantage.

“The level of realism and quality is increasing,” Lyu said. “It’s an arms race, and right now the generators are getting the upper hand.”

The Rubio hoax comes after text messages and phone calls went to elected officials, business executives and other prominent figures from someone who seemed to have gained access to the contacts in Wiles’ personal cellphone, the Wall Street Journal reported in May.

Some of those who received calls heard a voice that sounded like Wiles’, which may have been generated by AI, according to the newspaper. The messages and calls were not coming from Wiles’ number, the report said. The government was investigating.

Lee writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Eric Tucker and David Klepper contributed to this report.

MOSCOW — President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed Iran, Ukraine and other issues by phone on Thursday, the Kremlin said, in their sixth publicly disclosed chat since Trump returned to the White House.

While discussing the situation around Iran, Putin emphasized the need to resolve all issues by political and diplomatic means, said Yuri Ushakov, his foreign affairs advisor.

The United States struck three sites in Iran on June 22, inserting itself into Israel’s war aimed at destroying Tehran’s nuclear program.

On the conflict in Ukraine, Ushakov said Trump emphasized his push for a quick halt to the fighting, and Putin voiced Moscow’s readiness to pursue talks with Kyiv.

At the same time, the Russian leader emphasized that Moscow will seek to achieve its goals in Ukraine and remove the “root causes” of the conflict, Ushakov said.

Putin has argued he sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022 to fend off a threat to Russia posed by Ukraine’s push to join NATO and protect Russian speakers in Ukraine — arguments rejected by Kyiv and its allies. He insisted that any prospective peace deal must see Ukraine abandon its NATO bid and recognize Russia’s territorial gains.

Thursday’s call follows the Pentagon’s confirmation that it’s pausing shipment of some weapons to Ukraine as it reviews U.S. military stockpiles. The weapons being held up for Ukraine include air defense missiles, precision-guided artillery and other equipment.

The details on the weapons in some of the paused deliveries were confirmed by a U.S. official and former national security official familiar with the matter. They both requested anonymity to discuss what is being held up as the Pentagon has yet to provide details.

Ushakov said a suspension of some U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine wasn’t discussed in the Trump-Putin call.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in Denmark after meeting with major European Union backers that he may talk to Trump in the coming days about the suspension of U.S. weapons deliveries.

“I hope that maybe tomorrow, or close days, these days, I will speak about it with President Trump,” he said.

Asked about his expectations from the Trump-Putin call, he said that “I’m not sure that they have a lot of common ideas, common topics to talk [about], because they are very different people.”

The previous publicly known call between Trump and Putin came June 14, a day after Israel attacked Iran.

The resumed contacts between Trump and Putin appeared to reflect both leaders’ interest in mending U.S.-Russian ties that have plummeted to their lowest point since the Cold War amid the conflict in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron held their first direct telephone call in almost three years.

Isachenkov writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Aamer Madhani in Washington and Lorne Cook in Aarhus, Denmark, contributed to this report.

Critics of President Trump may have cheered the defamation lawsuit filed by Gov. Gavin Newsom against Fox News for giving the White House a spoonful of its own litigious medicine.

Newsom is suing the conservative-leaning network alleging it intentionally distorted the facts in its reports on the timeline of the governor’s conversations with Trump amid the deployment of the National Grard in Los Angeles during immigration raids in the city.

But legal experts are concerned that it may just be the bipartisan escalation of an ongoing trend: use of defamation suits as a political weapon. The tactic, largely used by Trump and his allies until Newsom’s salvo, has put the media business and its legal defenders on high alert.

“There has been an outbreak of defamation lawsuits over the last 10 years since President Trump came on the scene and threatened to open up the liable laws,” said Ted Boutros, an attorney with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles. “It has been remarkable and has a chilling effect on speech.”

Trump has aggressively used the courts to punish media outlets he believes have crossed him.

Trump extracted $15 million from ABC News after George Stephanopolous said the president was convicted of rape rather than sexual abuse in the civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll. He’s pushing for a massive payment from CBS over a “60 Minutes” interview he claims was edited to make former Vice President Kamala Harris more coherent.

Although CBS denies Trump’s claims and 1st Amendment experts say the case is frivolous, the parties are reportedly headed for a settlement.

Trump is also continuing his lawsuit against the Des Moines Register over a poll that showed him losing Iowa in the 2024 election, moving it to state court Monday after the case appeared to be faltering at the federal level.

Trump hasn’t stopped there.

Last week, he threatened CNN and the New York Times with legal action over their coverage on an early intelligence report that said the military attack on Iran’s nuclear program had only set it back a few months. On Monday, Tom Homan, Trump’s chief adviser on border policy, called for the Department of Justice to investigate CNN for reporting on the existence of an app that alerts users to ICE activities.

“We have crossed over into a new world,” said Lee Levine, a retired 1st Amendment attorney whose clients included CBS News. “Everybody has taken note and tried to position themselves the best that they can to weather the assault.”

Newsom, a contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, took his shot last week with a suit alleging Fox News intentionally manipulated its coverage of a late-night June 6 phone call he made to Trump. Trump later falsely stated on June 10 that the two were in contact “a day ago,” while Newsom asserted they never spoke after June 6.

Newsom’s lawyers allege in the complaint that by making the call seem more recent, Trump could suggest they discussed the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, which they had not.

The governor’s legal team alleged the conservative network’s coverage covered up Trump’s false statement that the two had spoken on June 9 while a banner on the bottom of the screen said “Gavin Lied About Trump’s Call.”

The suit asks for $787 million — the amount Fox paid Dominion Voting Systems to settle its defamation case over false statements — if Newsom doesn’t get a retraction and on-air apology from host Jesse Watters who presented the segment on the calls. (Fox News has called the suit a publicity stunt and said it will fight it in court.)

Andrew Geronimo, director of the Dr. Frank Stanton First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, believes Newsom’s actions are tailored to get the public‘s attention rather than that of the court itself. Newsom has been aggressive in his efforts to combat misinformation disseminated by right wing media outlets, and the lawsuit clearly turned it up a notch.

Experts say high-profile politicians have the ability to get their message out without going to court. “The idea that there is this dollar amount in the millions that they’ve been damaged by the reporting rather than coming out there and account the facts straightforwardly I think is sort of laughable,” Geronimo said.

The calls for possible legal actions against journalists reporting on information leaked by government officials, as is the case in the Iran intelligence stories, is considered a far more troubling development.

The long-term danger is that the suits can ultimately weaken laws that protect press freedoms, such as the ability to publish government information as long as it was obtained in a lawful matter.

“With everything the U.S. Supreme Court has been doing lately, all of these press protections could be on the table,” Geronimo said. “Journalists for years have relied on Supreme Court case law that, if someone leaks something to them, they can publish it as long as they did not participate in the illegal collection of it.”

The chilling effect could be particularly acute for large publicly owned media companies that have business before the government. It’s unlikely that CBS parent Paramount Global would settle over “60 Minutes” if it did not have an $8 billion merger deal pending that requires approval of the Federal Communications Commission now led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr.

“The fusion of libel suits and government officials in office is a pernicious development,” said Boutros. “When you have the president of the United States… wielding defamation suits when they have some degree of power over those companies that they can assert, that puts the companies in a terrible position.”

It also puts more strain on the legal system. While Trump and Newsom are getting headlines, Boutros noted there are similar politically motivated defamation cases coming in with “useless claims that we have to litigate.”

“It’s costly for people who are just participating in a public debate,” he said. “We’d rather have less business and more freedom of the press.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is suing Fox News for defamation, alleging that the news outlet intentionally manipulated its coverage to give the appearance that the governor lied about a phone call with President Trump.

The governor’s demand for $787 million in punitive damages escalates his aggressive effort to challenge misinformation. The lawsuit, announced Friday, places Newsom at the forefront of the political proxy war between Democrats and Republicans over the press by calling out an outlet that many in his party despise.

“By disregarding basic journalistic ethics in favor of malicious propaganda, Fox continues to play a major role in the further erosion of the bedrock principles of informed representative government,” the suit states. “Setting the record straight and confronting Fox’s dishonest practices are critical to protecting democracy from being overrun by disinformation and lies.”

Newsom, a potential presidential candidate, said he decided to sue in part because Fox failed to change after admitting in a legal settlement two years ago to spreading falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.

In response to Newsom’s lawsuit, Fox criticized the California governor, accusing him of undercutting the 1st Amendment.

“Gov. Newsom’s transparent publicity stunt is frivolous and designed to chill free speech critical of him. We will defend this case vigorously and look forward to it being dismissed,” Fox News said in a statement Friday morning.

The case stems from comments Trump made about a phone call with Newsom as tensions heated up between the two leaders over immigration raids and the president’s decision to deploy the National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles.

Trump told reporters on June 10 that he spoke with Newsom “a day ago.”

“Called him up to tell him, got to do a better job, he’s doing a bad job,” Trump said. “Causing a lot of death and a lot of potential death.”

Newsom immediately rejected Trump’s timeline on social media.

The governor had already spoken publicly about talking to Trump on the phone late in the night on June 6 in California, which was early June 7 for Trump on the East Coast. Newsom said the National Guard was never discussed during that call. They didn’t talk again, he said.

“There was no call,” Newsom posted on X. “Not even a voicemail. Americans should be alarmed that a President deploying Marines onto our streets doesn’t even know who he’s talking to.”

Newsom’s lawyers allege in the complaint that by making the call seem more recent, Trump could suggest they discussed the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, which they had not.

Trump attempted to fire back at Newsom through Fox and shared a screenshot of his call log with anchor John Roberts. The log showed that a phone call occurred on June 7 and provided no evidence of a call on June 9 as Trump claimed.

“It is impossible to know for certain whether President Trump’s distortion was intentionally deceptive or merely a result of his poor cognitive state, but Fox’s decision to cover up for the President’s false statement cannot be so easily dismissed,” the complaint states.

Newsom’s legal team said Roberts initially misrepresented the situation to viewers “to obscure President Trump’s false statement of fact.”

Then during an evening broadcast on June 10, Fox News host Jesse Watters showed a video of Trump’s comments about the phone call but omitted the president saying that it happened “a day ago.” The edit made it appear that Newsom alleged the two never spoke at all.

“Why would Newsom lie and claim Trump never called him? Why would he do that?” Watters then asked.

A banner at the bottom of the screen during the segment claimed “Gavin lied about Trump’s call.”

Newsom’s lawyers said Fox “willfully distorted the facts” and defamed Newsom to tens of millions of people.

“Fox advanced this lie about Governor Newsom out of a desire to harm him politically,” the complaint states.

Newsom is particularly attuned to his critics on Fox, a conservative-leaning television network that he describes as the epicenter of a right-wing media ecosystem that misleads the public to benefit Trump and his allies. Similar to reports of Trump watching CNN, the governor regularly follows Fox political coverage. He pays close attention to the outlet’s assessment of his leadership.

Fox commentators and opinion hosts, such as Watters, are given a wide berth to express their views, even when they contradict the reporting of its nonpartisan correspondents. They aggressively defend Trump and his policies, while often casting California as a failed state with incompetent leadership.

But Newsom has also benefited from Fox and used his appearances on the network to brandish his image as a brawler for Democrats and his standing as a potential future presidential candidate.

Fox hosted a much talked about debate between Newsom and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023. The California governor also participated in a sit-down interview with Sean Hannity, which drew praise from within and outside of his party.

During a talk on the social media website Substack on Friday, Newsom said he started going on Fox to disrupt propaganda and the network’s narrative about Democrats.

“I have a high threshold for the bulls— on Fox, is the point,” Newsom said. “I wouldn’t do this unless I felt they really did cross the line.”

The amount of the governor’s request for damages was a subtle dig at the outlet.

Fox agreed two years ago to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to drop a lawsuit related to the network’s false claims that voting machines were manipulated to help President Biden win the 2020 election. The news organization settled the case rather than put its executives and on-air talent on the witness stand in a high-profile trial.

Fox faces a similar lawsuit from Smartmatic, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based voting machine company that claims its business had been hurt because of the network’s reporting.

The news outlet has maintained that reporting on Trump’s fraud claims was newsworthy and protected by the 1st Amendment. Barring a settlement, the case could go to trial next year.

In a letter to Fox, Newsom’s lawyers said they will voluntarily dismiss the governor’s suit if the outlet retracts its claims that he lied about speaking to Trump.

“We expect that you will give the same airtime in retracting these falsehoods as you spent presenting and amplifying them,” his lawyers stated. “Further, Mr. Watters and Fox News must issue a formal on-air apology for the lie you have spread about Governor Newsom.”

The governor said any damages he might receive from the lawsuit, punitive or otherwise, would go to charity.

Times staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.