Apress – The News Herald

Sister of Alex Pretti says he was kind, generous and lit up every room

Apress — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:39:44 +0000

The younger sister of Alex Pretti issued a statement memorializing her big brother’s kindness and criticizing “disgusting lies” told in the wake of his death.

Micayla Pretti called her brother a hero and thanked everyone who had reached out to the family with messages or posts she described as sharing the overwhelming positivity that reflected his character, work ethic and passions.

“All Alex ever wanted was to help someone — anyone,” she said. “Even in his very last moments on this earth, he was simply trying to do just that.”

Alex Pretti was an intensive care nurse, and through his work at the Veterans Administration, “he touched more lives than he probably ever realized,” his sister said.

She lamented how some have portrayed her brother.

“When does this end? How many more innocent lives must be lost before we say enough?” Micayla Pretti asked. “Hearing disgusting lies spread about my brother is absolutely gut-wrenching.”

Minneapolis driver is at least the 5th killed in immigration crackdown

Apress — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:43:58 +0000

A motorist fatally shot by an immigration officer in Minneapolis is at least the fifth person to die since the Trump administration launched its aggressive immigration crackdown last year.

The Department of Homeland Security said the woman killed Wednesday was trying to run over officers with a vehicle. But Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said video of the incident showed it was reckless and unnecessary.

Last September, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in suburban Chicago shot and killed a Mexican man during a traffic stop.

Two men have died after being struck by vehicles while fleeing immigration authorities — one in California and another in Virginia. In July, a California farmworker fell from a greenhouse roof and broke his neck during an ICE raid.

Rob Reiner remembered as one of the preeminent filmmakers of his generation

Apress — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 13:43:27 +0000

Rob Reiner, the son of a comedy giant who went on to become one, himself, as one of the preeminent filmmakers of his generation with movies such as “The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally …” and “This Is Spinal Tap,” has died. He was 78.

Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer, were found dead Sunday at their home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. A law enforcement official briefed on the investigation confirmed that Reiner and Singer were the victims. The official could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers speak onstage at the 75th Emmy Awards on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. (Photo by Phil McCarten/Invision for the Television Academy/AP Images)

Authorities were investigating an “apparent homicide,” said Capt. Mike Bland with the Los Angeles Police Department. The Los Angeles Fire Department said it responded to a medical aid request shortly after 3:30 p.m.

Reiner grew up thinking his father, Carl Reiner, didn’t understand him or find him funny. But the younger Reiner would in many ways follow in his father’s footsteps, working both in front and behind the camera, in comedies that stretched from broad sketch work to accomplished dramedies.

“My father thought, ‘Oh, my God, this poor kid is worried about being in the shadow of a famous father,’” Reiner said, recalling the temptation to change his name to “60 Minutes” in October. “And he says, ‘What do you want to change your name to?’ And I said, ‘Carl.’ I just wanted to be like him.”

After starting out as a writer for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” Reiner’s breakthrough came when he was, at age 23, cast in Norman Lear’s “All in the Family” as Archie Bunker’s liberal son-in-law, Michael “Meathead” Stivic. But by the 1980s, Reiner began as a feature film director, churning out some of the most beloved films of that, or any, era. His first film, the largely improvised 1984 cult classic “This Is Spinal Tap,” remains the urtext mockumentary.

After the 1985 John Cusack summer comedy, “The Sure Thing,” Reiner made “Stand By Me” (1986), “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “When Harry Met Sally …” (1989), a four-year stretch that resulted in a trio of American classics, all of them among the most often quoted movies of the 20th century.

A legacy on and off screen

For the next four decades, Reiner, a warm and gregarious presence on screen and an outspoken liberal advocate off it, remained a constant fixture in Hollywood. The production company he co-founded, Castle Rock Entertainment, launched an enviable string of hits, including “Seinfeld” and “The Shawshank Redemption.” By the turn of the century, its success rate had fallen considerably, but Reiner revived it earlier this decade. This fall, Reiner and Castle Rock released the long-in-coming sequel “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.”

All the while, Reiner was one of the film industry’s most passionate Democrat activists, regularly hosting fundraisers and campaigning for liberal issues. He was co-founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which challenged in court California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8. He also chaired the campaign for Prop 10, a California initiative to fund early childhood development services with a tax on tobacco products. Reiner was also a critic of President Donald Trump.

That ran in the family, too. Reiner’s father opposed the Communist hunt of McCarthyism in the 1950s and his mother, Estelle Reiner, a singer and actor, protested the Vietnam War.

“If you’re a nepo baby, doors will open,” Reiner told the Guardian in 2024. “But you have to deliver. If you don’t deliver, the door will close just as fast as it opened.”

‘All in the Family’ to ‘Stand By Me’

Robert Reiner was born in the Bronx on March 6, 1947. As a young man, he quickly set out to follow his father into entertainment. He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles film school and, in the 1960s, began appearing in small parts in various television shows.

But when Lear saw Reiner as a key cast member in “All in the Family,” it came as a surprise to the elder Reiner.

“Norman says to my dad, ‘You know, this kid is really funny.’ And I think my dad said, ‘What? That kid? That kid? He’s sullen. He sits quiet. He doesn’t, you know, he’s not funny.’ He didn’t think I was anyway,” Reiner told “60 Minutes.”

On “All in the Family,” Reiner served as a pivotal foil to Carroll O’Connor’s bigoted, conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner was five times nominated for an Emmy for his performance on the show, winning in 1974 and 1978. In Lear, Reiner also found a mentor. He called him “a second father.”

“It wasn’t just that he hired me for ‘All in the Family,’” Reiner told “American Masters” in 2005. “It was that I saw, in how he conducted his life, that there was room to be an activist as well. That you could use your celebrity, your good fortune, to help make some change.”

Lear also helped launch Reiner as a filmmaker. He put $7.5 million of his own money to help finance “Stand By Me,” Reiner’s adaptation of the Stephen King novella “The Body.” The movie, about four boys who go looking for the dead body of a missing boy, became a coming-of-age classic, made breakthroughs of its young cast (particularly River Phoenix) and even earned the praise of King.

With his stock rising, Reiner devoted himself to adapting William Goldman’s 1973’s “The Princess Bride,” a book Reiner had loved since his father gave him a copy as a gift. Everyone from François Truffaut to Robert Redford had considered adapting Goldman’s book, but it ultimately fell to Reiner (from Goldman’s own script) to capture the unique comic tone of “The Princess Bride.” But only once he had Goldman’s blessing.

“At the door he greeted me and he said, ‘This is my baby. I want this on my tombstone. This is my favorite thing I’ve ever written in my life. What are you going to do with it?’” Reiner recalled in a Television Academy interview. “And we sat down with him and started going through what I thought should be done with the film.”

Though only a modest success in theaters, the movie — starring Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, André the Giant and Robin Wright — would grow in stature over the years, leading to countless impressions of Inigo Montoya’s vow of revenge and the risky nature of land wars in Asia.

‘When Harry Met Sally …”

Reiner was married to Penny Marshall, the actor and filmmaker, for 10 years beginning in 1971. Like Reiner, Marshall experienced sitcom fame, with “Laverne & Shirley,” but found a more lasting legacy behind the camera.

After their divorce, Reiner, at a lunch with Nora Ephron, suggested a comedy about dating. In writing what became “When Harry Met Sally …” Ephron and Reiner charted a relationship between a man and a woman (played in the film by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan) over the course of 12 years.

Along the way, the movie’s ending changed, as did some of the film’s indelible moments. The famous line, “I’ll have what she’s having,” said after witnessing Ryan’s fake orgasm at Katz’s Delicatessen, was a suggestion by Crystal — delivered by none other than Reiner’s mother, Estelle.

The movie’s happy ending also had some real-life basis. Reiner met Singer, a photographer, on the set of “When Harry Met Sally …” In 1989, they were wed. They had three children together: Nick, Jake and Romy.

Reiner’s subsequent films included another King adaptation, “Misery” (1990) and a pair of Aaron Sorkin-penned dramas: the military courtroom tale “A Few Good Men” (1992) and 1995’s “The American President.”

By the late ’90s, Reiner’s films (1996’s “Ghosts of Mississippi,” 2007’s “The Bucket List”) no longer had the same success rate. But he remained a frequent actor, often memorably enlivening films like “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993) and “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013). In 2023, he directed the documentary “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life.”

In an interview earlier this year with Seth Rogen, Reiner suggested everything in his career boiled down to one thing.

“All I’ve ever done is say, ‘Is this something that is an extension of me?’ For ‘Stand by Me,’ I didn’t know if it was going to be successful or not. All I thought was, ‘I like this because I know what it feels like.’”

Watch celebrities from Doja Cat to John Travolta to Adam Driver in their Super Bowl ads

Apress — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 21:28:06 +0000

By MAE ANDERSON

NEW YORK — The Super Bowl is advertising’s biggest, glitziest stage.

Big name advertisers from Netflix to Google are paying as much as $7 million for a 30-second spot during the big game on Sunday, seeking to capture the attention of the roughly 100 million viewers who tune in each year.

To get the most out of those millions, most advertisers release their ads in the days ahead of the big game to maximize publicity for their spots. In the ads released so far, John Travolta and “Scrubs” stars Donald Faison and Zach Braff sing a T-Mobile themed version of “Summer Nights” from “Grease,” Adam Driver creates multiple versions of himself for Squarespace, and Alicia Silverstone reprises her “Clueless” character for online shopping site Rakuten.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w57YsiNmt90

Anna Faris stars as Eve, who eats an avocado in the garden of Eden. Flash forward to the present day, when no one is ashamed of nudity and everyone is naked, including the Statue of Liberty.

Actress Melissa McCarthy stars in a musical number for the travel site about her desire to go on a trip “somewhere, anywhere.”

Actor Miles Teller (“Top Gun: Maverick”) and his wife Keleigh Sperry Teller dance to customer service hold music while drinking a Bud Light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dChVB7iKSg8

In a regional ad, a diverse group of people share a six-pack of Budweiser — a voiceover by Kevin Bacon showcases the “six degrees of Bud.” Although he’s not shown, the ad is a nod to the “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” meme — the idea that anyone in the entertainment business can be linked to Kevin Bacon in six connections.

A mountain man talk talks about surviving the outdoors in an ad that stars singer Sarah McLachlan spoofing her well-known and oft mocked animal-advocacy ad that uses her song “Angel.”

Singer Nick Jonas returns for the second year in an ad that highlight’s Dexcom’s glucose monitoring system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HepTQeP9ye0

Celebrity chef Matty Matheson, Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon The Chef and Nickelodeon’s stop-motion-animated Tiny Chef help a DoorDash shopper find the best products.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD6d5THLlUA

Music stars Jack Harlow, Missy Elliott and Elton John team up in an ad for Doritos Sweet & Tangy BBQ that shows Harlow abandoning his rap career to focus on the triangle — a Doritos-shaped musical instrument.

Super Bowl regular Procter & Gamble promotes its Downy Unstopables brand in an ad showing actor Danny McBride — who wants to go by “Downy McBride.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7ngWuMGmN0

The online betting site shows stars including skateboard mogul Tony Hawk and singer Ludacris discussing DraftKings free bet offer at a party at actor Kevin Hart’s house.

The E(asterisk)Trade babies are back. This time they’re at a wedding to demonstrate E(asterisk)Trade makes you ready for anything, including marriage, kids and college.

The subscription dog food service goes for the heartstrings with an ad showing a woman going through life’s milestones with her dog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jymEz9xkPQ

Actor and comedian Will Ferrell drives different GM electric vehicles through different Netflix shows, including “Bridgerton” and “Stranger Things,” to announce that Netflix will feature electric vehicles in its original shows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkHdpA-drz0&t=5s

Google promotes its Pixel photo editing tools “Magic Eraser” and “Photo Unblur” with a 90 second spot featuring Amy Schumer, Doja Cat and NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_xfLBvk-AA

The mayo brand shows actors Jon Hamm and Brie Larson in a fridge with a jar of Hellmann’s mayo — to drive home the point that Hellmann’s would go well with a “ham and brie” sandwich.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3SHwtLa2bE

Kia’s ad for its 2023 Telluride X-Pro SUV shows a dad making an epic trek to recover a child’s left behind “binky.”

Michelob Ultra’s two ads are set at Bushwood Country Club, the fictional country club in “Caddyshack,” and star a bevy of stars and athletes: tennis great Serena Williams, actor Brian Cox, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, soccer player Alex Morgan and boxer Canelo Alvarez.

Sylvester Stallone and his daughters Sophia, Scarlet and Sistine set up camp on Paramount Mountain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTnavAlWnJg

In an unusual move, Peacock’s ad for its “Poker Face” show starring Natasha Lyonne makes a nod to other commercials in the broadcast including ads for M&Ms and Google Pixel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok38Xuc5UTE

Pepsi is running two ads starring Ben Stiller and Steve Martin that ask “Great acting or great taste?” and ask viewers to taste Pepsi Zero Sugar for themselves.

Jeff Ross, Natasha Leggero and other comedians hold a “roast” for the Planters spokescharacter Mr. Peanut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMlemd6U24Y

The Frito-Lay brand recreates “Breaking Bad” with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul — but this time the duo are cooking up the PopCorners snack in their RV instead of anything illicit.

Anyone can get their hand stuck in a Pringles can, according to Pringles’ latest Super Bowl ad effort, including singer Meghan Trainor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_yGq_4xCKQ

The online shopping site tapped “Clueless” stars Alicia Silverstone and Elisa Donovan to recreate a scene from the 1995 hit and convey that Rakuten gives shoppers cash back on purchases. Designer Christian Siriano also appears as a student.

Snoop Dogg wears different Skechers throughout the day with cameos from Martha Stewart and others.

Adam Driver contemplates the fact that “Squarespace is a website that makes websites” and splits into multiple versions of himself.

To promote its 5G home internet, John Travolta sings a version of “Summer Nights” with “Scrubs” stars Donald Faison and Zach Braff touting its benefits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0nfcxSQrBw

A man dances in front of a fountain to showcase the free time people will have if they let TurboTax professionals do their taxes for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnySyKAoLpI

Uber’s ad for its membership program Uber One shows hip hop mogul P. Diddy working to create a hit song for Uber One. The ad features singers of famous hits, including Montell Jordan (“This is How We Do It”), Kelis (“Milkshake”), Donna Lewis (“I Love You Always Forever”), Haddaway (“What is Love”) and Ylvis (“What Does the Fox Say”).

The auto accessories maker showcases the fact that its factories and workers are American.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ID-1mzRAew&t=1s

In the first Super Bowl ad from the enterprise software company, actual rock stars Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Idol, Joan Jett and others complain that office workers shouldn’t call each other “rock stars.”