Sammie Vance will release her new children’s nonfiction book, INSPIRE THE WORLD: A Kid’s Journey to Making a Difference, on September 29.
Vance began the Buddy Bench Project when she was eight years old after wanting a buddy bench at her school so children would not have to sit alone. The project has since placed more than 750 benches around the world and recycled more than 13 million bottle caps.
Now seventeen, Vance works as a kindness ambassador, speaker and podcast host.
Published by Ardea Herodias Books, an imprint of Panhandle Creek Press, INSPIRE THE WORLD is written for ages 6 to 12 and includes doodles by Talitha Shipman. Across 48 pages, the book addresses recycling, community, giving, determination, bravery, individuality and the role children can play in creating change.
The Buddy Bench Project works with POLYWOOD, which turns collected bottle caps into benches. Participating schools receive a signed copy of the book, and free teacher resources are available.
The release will be followed by several upcoming appearances. Vance is scheduled to appear on 21 Alive’s Kids Who Care in Fort Wayne on September 30. She will also hold a book signing at Sunbound Books on October 10 at 2 p.m.
Her work has previously appeared on Nick News, Disney, Today, People, Time for Kids and NBC Nightly News.
By the time production wrapped, it was around 7:30 in the morning.
That was the working rhythm behind REWIND, Alvin Cowan’s new short film shot inside The Last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon. The production took place over two consecutive all-night shoots in June 2026 with a volunteer cast and crew and borrowed equipment.
The store itself was still functioning around them.
Getting cameras inside required a process that began well before the first overnight shoot. Cowan had considered the location for years. A local community theater connection helped open the door, and the production then spent months working through the licensing process. The Blockbuster brand and logo appear in the film under an agreement with Dish Network negotiated for the project.
The result is a film set in 1996 that was shot inside the last surviving location of the chain it depicts.
REWIND follows Nolan and Maya, two employees working a night shift. Nolan has recently been rejected by film school. Maya has feelings for him that remain mostly unspoken. Their shift changes after they discover a VHS tape without a title or barcode.
The tape contains two representatives from the digital future.
Bob and Jenna arrive with the certainty of people who already know what will happen to the shelves behind Nolan and Maya. They explain a coming world built around digital access while the two employees are still standing inside a business model that, in 1996, looks completely normal.
Cowan uses the store as part of the story’s logic. Rows of tapes, the returns cart and the VCR are not retro decoration. They are the machinery of a way of watching movies that the characters still take for granted.
The film is now preparing for a festival run, with an online release planned afterward.
Cowan is also using the project as part of a broader audience-building strategy around his work across film, television and audio. His background includes acting credits in American Sniper, Westworld, Better Call Saul, Paradise and Monster, along with producing and writing work across scripted and documentary projects.
Press screeners for REWIND are available by request.
The stranger image, though, may be the simplest one: a film crew working through dawn inside a Blockbuster that somehow outlived the rest of the chain.
Chris is nothing if not stubborn. The woman he loves is trapped in Hell, and he’s determined to free her even though everyone who finds out about his quest thinks he has no hope of success. They could be right. He doesn’t have any idea how to rescue someone from Hell. Even worse, his lack of faith robs him of the best methods to combat demons. Can love really conquer all? To find out, Chris will have to risk his life–and maybe his own soul.
Late September in “The Aggregate” sounds miserable before anything supernatural even happens.
Dust on the horizon. Dust in the fields. A sky burned almost white. Cicadas all over the trees and rooftops.
Lucy Ashwood finishes another unremarkable day in that heat.
By morning, two MontVida Corporation representatives and a sheriff’s deputy are dead.
They had come to serve notice of genetic patent violations and evict the Ashwood family. The family pushes back, and the confrontation turns into an accidental bloodbath.
That is only the beginning of G. Owen Wears’ “The Aggregate.”
The Ashwoods seek help from a criminal collective willing to assist them for a price. Lucy goes on the run, carrying guilt and waking nightmares with her.
Her visions become increasingly vivid as a presence begins emerging from beneath the soil.
It speaks through Wilbur, Lucy’s pig.
It speaks through the cicadas.
It speaks through the hot wind.
The Colorado setting is a huge part of the atmosphere here, and the existing review specifically calls out how well Wears evokes that “dry, hot Colorado setting.”
By the time the thing beneath the earth starts pushing toward the veil between worlds, those cicadas sound a lot less harmless.
A prince discovers that his father plans to steal the resource keeping another civilization alive.
That could be the foundation for a solemn fantasy drama. In MoonFu, the prince happens to be an owl who knows karate, flies with a jetpack, and dances to disco.
Creator David Santo has filled the G-rated animated adventure with combinations that should not fit together neatly, then placed them inside a story with real consequences. The result is a fantasy world that can move quickly, make children laugh, and still ask its young hero to confront a difficult decision.
MoonFu lives in Featherfell, where his father, King Talon, intends to take a life-giving diamond from a hidden society of owls. Following the king would place an entire civilization in danger. Defying him means challenging both his parent and the ruler of his kingdom.
The series does not separate that conflict from its more playful personality. MoonFu remains an energetic young hero rather than becoming a miniature adult delivering lessons to the audience. Sensei Hoot guides him, Flicker accompanies him, and the adventure continues moving through action, comedy, and fantasy.
Santo describes the concept as “along the lines of Kung Fu Panda but with talking owls.”
That simple description explains the accessibility of the idea, though MoonFu adds its own collection of royal politics, disco, aviation, hidden civilizations, and phone-first presentation.
The animated project was designed for vertical viewing, giving families a series made for the screen children already hold rather than a traditional production compressed into a smaller format. The pilot can be viewed through the MoonFu YouTube channel, where the growing project has now passed 1 million views.
Its Kickstarter pilot goal was reached in two minutes.
MoonFu has also moved through several other forms. The book reached No. 1 on Amazon Kindle, and the screenplay received first-place honors at 10 film festivals. KidsFirst.org has endorsed the project and its focus on enriching, age-appropriate entertainment that supports emotional resilience.
“There’s a huge need for shows that promote positive behavior,” Santo said. “MoonFu delivers life lessons wrapped in action and fun.”
That last part is central to the project’s personality. MoonFu is not asking children to pause the adventure so they can receive a lesson about courage, kindness, or conflict resolution. Those ideas are placed inside the choices the characters make while the jetpack remains lit and the story keeps moving.
The larger MoonFu storyverse is planned across animation, books, film, television, music, and merchandise. Featherfell has been designed with enough space for new stories, but the first impression remains wonderfully strange.
Moonee is six years old and living with her mother at the Magic Castle, a purple budget motel near Walt Disney World. To her, the motel is enormous. There are staircases to race down, abandoned buildings to explore and tourists who can be convinced to buy ice cream.
The adults see unpaid rent, complaints and another week they might not be able to afford.
Brooklynn Prince plays Moonee with such complete confidence that her behavior rarely appears performed. She spits on a car, starts trouble with her friends and talks to strangers with no fear whatsoever. Children adapt quickly to whatever surrounds them. Moonee has no reason to view the motel as temporary because nearly everything in her life has been temporary.
Her mother, Halley, sells perfume outside hotels and finds other increasingly risky ways to survive. Bria Vinaite gives her a confrontational energy that can be funny until it turns dangerous. Halley loves Moonee fiercely, but love does not make her stable. She treats every attempt at intervention as an attack and teaches her daughter to do the same.
Willem Dafoe plays Bobby, the motel manager, with exhausted patience. He repairs appliances, removes unwanted guests and tries to protect the children without pretending he can solve their lives. In one scene, he notices a suspicious older man speaking to the kids near the parking lot. Bobby gets him away from them quickly, with no speech and no request for gratitude.
Director Sean Baker photographs the area in bright colors. The Magic Castle, gift shops and oversized roadside attractions belong to the same tourist economy as Disney, only the families staying there will probably never enter the park. Helicopters pass overhead. Fireworks can be seen from a distance. Moonee grows up beside a fantasy kingdom built for other children.
The final section becomes painful once outside agencies arrive. Moonee has spent the movie treating every disaster as another adventure. When she understands that she may be taken from her mother, language finally fails her.
The closing dash toward Disney was filmed differently from the rest of the movie, and yes, it strains credibility. I don’t care much. Moonee runs toward the only happy ending she knows.
A fantasy movie can survive a lot if it remembers to have a pulse.
“Stardust” has one. It is romantic, strange, silly, occasionally uneven, and full of characters who act like the magical world has been running on bad decisions for generations. That is part of its charm. The movie does not present fantasy as a pristine museum of chosen ones and sacred objects. It gives us witches chasing youth, princes murdering each other over inheritance, pirates with better emotional range than expected, and a young man who begins the story with terrible romantic judgment.
Tristan starts out chasing the wrong woman, which is honestly useful. He is not introduced as a hero with ancient wisdom hiding under his village-boy haircut. He is young, eager, and foolish enough to think bringing Victoria a fallen star will earn him love. That kind of grand gesture is embarrassing in real life and extremely convenient in a fantasy plot.
Then he finds Yvaine.
Claire Danes gives Yvaine a nice sharpness. She is a star, yes, but she is also annoyed, injured, sarcastic, and fully aware that being treated like a prize is humiliating. Her chemistry with Tristan grows out of irritation first, which I prefer. They do not meet and instantly become a glowing romance poster. They bicker, misread each other, get dragged through danger, and slowly become better company than either of them planned.
Michelle Pfeiffer is having a fantastic time as Lamia. The movie gives her beauty, vanity, cruelty, desperation, and enough theatrical wickedness to keep the whole thing from becoming too soft. Her pursuit of youth has fairy-tale logic, but Pfeiffer plays it with real hunger. She is glamorous and disgusting in the same breath, which is the correct energy for a witch who would absolutely ruin your life to fix a wrinkle.
The princes are another pleasure. Their family dynamic is murder with paperwork. Every brother seems to understand the succession process as an invitation to remove relatives by any available method. It is dark, but played with enough dry humor that the brutality turns almost bureaucratic. These men are not noble rivals. They are inheritance goblins in good coats.
Robert De Niro’s Captain Shakespeare is the part people tend to remember, and for good reason. The performance is broad, but it is broad with purpose. He turns what could have been a throwaway pirate gag into one of the movie’s warmer detours. His ship gives Tristan and Yvaine space to change, and it gives the film a chance to become unexpectedly tender without losing its absurdity.
The movie is not elegant in the way some fantasy films are elegant. It has patches where the tone wobbles. Some jokes land better than others. Some effects carry that very specific mid-2000s sheen. The whole thing can look expensive in one scene and oddly cramped in another. I do not mind that much. “Stardust” has enough personality to survive its uneven surfaces.
What I appreciate is the way the film treats romance as a correction of appetite. Tristan begins by wanting love as proof of status. He wants Victoria because she represents an upgraded version of himself. His journey with Yvaine forces him to become less interested in being admired and more capable of seeing another person clearly. That is a better romantic arc than a hundred polished declarations under moonlight.
The ending is sweeter than I usually tolerate, but the film earns most of it. By then, the world has given us murder, vanity, greed, transformation, flying ships, family rot, and a star who just wanted to stop being hunted by everyone with an agenda. A little storybook closure does not feel like a betrayal. It feels like the movie admitting it was sincere all along, even while wearing a crooked grin.
“Stardust” is not flawless fantasy. It is better than that in some ways. It is lively, odd, romantic, funny, and just rough enough around the edges to feel handmade rather than embalmed. I miss this type of fantasy movie, the kind that lets adventure, comedy, danger, and romance share the same road without sanding every strange corner down.
The phone is not going anywhere, and family entertainment needs to deal with that reality instead of pretending kids are not watching stories vertically already.
That is where “MoonFu” has a clean and timely angle. The animated family adventure from creator David Santo is built for phone-first viewing, with a G-rated, mom-approved world designed to feel fun, safe, and emotionally useful for young audiences.
The newly shared “MoonFu” Short gives a fast look at that mission:
In the video description, the project is described as “an animated family adventure made for your phone,” with a direct nod to vertical video viewers. That positioning matters because “MoonFu” is not treating the phone like an enemy. It is treating the phone like the place where families already are, then asking what kind of story deserves to be there.
The series follows MoonFu, a karate-loving, jetpack-wearing, disco-dancing owl prince living in the fantastical realm of Featherfell. When he discovers that his father, King Talon, plans to steal a life-giving diamond from a hidden owl civilization, MoonFu is forced into a choice between serving his kingdom and saving an entire society.
That setup gives the show a bigger emotional frame than the character description alone suggests. The owl prince may be funny, colorful, and easy to market, but the story underneath is about courage, kindness, connection, and doing the right thing when pressure is coming from close to home.
The official MoonFu site expands on the series’ family-safe universe and prosocial focus: https://moonfustudio.com/
“MoonFu” is designed for kids ages 6 to 11 while also reaching mobile-native viewers through vertical pacing, humor, action, and emotional depth. The series is also endorsed by KidsFirst.org, adding another layer to its positioning as age-appropriate entertainment for families.
Santo has described the project as “Kung Fu Panda, but with talking owls,” which works because it gives the viewer an instant sense of the energy. Martial arts, comedy, animal adventure, heart, and a young hero learning who he is all live inside that comparison.
Episodes drop June 10 on Loopremium, giving “MoonFu” a vertical streaming home that matches the way the project is being presented. Loopremium can be found at https://loopremium.com/
The strongest thing about “MoonFu” may be that it does not sound afraid to be sincere. It is strange, bright, and owl-powered, but its promise is simple: families deserve stories that lift kids up instead of adding more stress to the screen.
A desperate woman fights to escape captivity in this gripping thriller from the New York Times–bestselling author of All the Ugly and Wonderful Things.
Beatrice is about to lose everything when a kind stranger offers her a cup of coffee and a job. It seems like a promise of a better life . . . until she wakes up under lock and key in an isolated mansion in the woods.
On orders from a shadowy criminal organization, armed jailers make the rules for their captives, enforcing them with unflinching violence. Beatrice has always been a “nice girl,” but that won’t save her now. Nobody helped her when she lost her job, her car, and her home, and nobody’s coming to give back her freedom. The only person she can rely on is herself. And now, several child hostages are relying on her too.
When the situation gets more dire—deadly even—Beatrice has to become the hero she and her fellow prisoners need. To escape she’ll have to outsmart her captors and do terrible things that would horrify her former self. If she succeeds, there’s no telling who she’ll be when the ordeal comes to an end.
A thousand years after a global nuclear war, ice sheets reclaim the land as they did over ten thousand years ago. Armies hundreds of thousands strong mobilize once more, nations of millions reigniting long-held rivalries.
In what was once the western half of the great American nation, several new nations rise from the ruins, forging a future with ancient technology. Echoing the Roman Republic’s rise, they seek to expand their influence and territory, their petty rivalries and squabbles escalating. A dispute between two old rivals over the continent’s most fertile region sparks a continent-wide war.
Eight figures will shape and direct the war to its conclusion. Nithya Muirjawa-Sasfoz, princess of Cascadia, Ernesto Saranta, senator of California, and his daughter Yaniya Saranta, Etzli Cuauhtli, ambassador of Aztlan, Adhika Mahalia-Cruize, princess of Honolulu, Hengist Nilsulsa, warrior of Mydakona, brothers George and Liam Andsen, deer-herders of Sedaserii. Each will alter the war’s trajectory, impacting the others and their own people. In the end, only one survives.
In the first book, these figures are fully introduced, their stories beginning. The decisions each makes in the conflict’s first year are revealed, with consequences unfolding before their eyes, more yet to come in other books.
