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HARTFORD — Former pro football player and ex-ESPN analyst Hugh Douglas pleaded no contest and avoided jail on Monday in a Connecticut case alleging he assaulted his now-former girlfriend, who said she wasn't happy with the plea bargain.
The former defensive end for the New York Jets, Philadelphia Eagles and Jacksonville Jaguars pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor breach of peace charge, after having been arrested on felony assault and strangulation allegations.
Prosecutor Mirella Giambalvo said the case would have been difficult to prove at trial because it was the woman's word against Douglas' word, and it was better to get a breach of peace conviction than risk going to trial.
Judge Laura Baldini sentenced Douglas, 42, of Bryn Mawr, Pa., to a six-month suspended jail sentence and two years of conditional discharge, a probation-like program. She also issued a protective order barring Douglas from having contact with the woman for the rest of his life. If Douglas violates the order, he would face a felony charge carrying up to five years in prison upon conviction.
Douglas' ex-girlfriend, Hope Davila, 33, said in court Monday that Douglas assaulted her at the Hartford Marriott Downtown hotel in September. She said she was trying to leave him because she believed he was sending text messages to another woman, but she alleged Douglas picked her up by her throat and slammed her into the walls in a hallway while carrying her back to their room.
Douglas, who played in the NFL from 1995 to 2004, denies the allegations and said he took a plea deal to put the matter behind him. Douglas told officers on the night of the alleged assault that injuries on Davila's neck were from "rough sex," according to a police report.
Davila said she and Douglas dated for about eight months. She said she suffered neck injuries and a hematoma the size of a baseball on the back of her head and lost consciousness.
Davila expressed frustration in court that Douglas was pleading to breach of peace instead of assault.
"I just want accountability," Davila said. "That man assaulted me and sent me to the hospital. ... That wasn't a breach of peace. I was assaulted that night."
Douglas' lawyer, Corey Brinson, said that the prosecution's case was weak because Davila gave conflicting statements about what she alleged happened and that TV personalities can become targets for false charges by people seeking money. He said Davila was upset with Douglas because he refused to pay for breast enhancements for her, and said she has hired a lawyer for a potential civil case against Douglas.
Davila acknowledged that she had talked with Douglas about breast implants, but she said the case wasn't about that.
Douglas said after the court hearing that he looked forward to seeking employment.
He was a football analyst with ESPN from 2011 to last year. He declined to say why he left the sports network, but media reports say he left after allegedly having an argument with a co-host.
"As a man, you never want allegations like this hanging over your head," Douglas said. "Right now, we look forward to putting the word out ... that this was a breach of peace, so I can move on with my life."


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Saturday was a long, sweaty, buggy racing session at the Mutually Assured Destruction Of Omaha LeMons, with engines nuking head gaskets all day long.
In first place, with a not-so-secure four-lap lead, we've got the Team Short Bus Volkswagen Golf. This VW sat in first or second place all day, occasionally expanding its cushion to a semi-comfortable 9 laps (this on a track configuration with lap times in the 1:30 area). Will the Short Bus drivers continue their run of error-and-breakdown-free quick laps? Who can say?
In second place is the Arse-Freeze-a-Palooza veteran Supra of JBR DOGMA Racing. We've seen this car in sight of the lead at a couple of Houston races, but never this close. Supras have taken the overall win at LeMons events in the past, so this car must be looming pretty large in the Golf's rear-view right about now.
The Free Candy Racing Civic sits just six laps back of the Short Bus, and its quickest lap time is nearly a full second quicker than the leader. The slightest stumble by the top two cars and the Pedobear will pounce on the lead!
Just a single lap behind the Civic and seven behind the leader, the Ecurie Lowcosse GTI gives Volkswagen two shots at the checkered flag on Sunday.
After that, the extremely rusty Team Polska Kielbasa 300ZX hopes to repeat the improbable feat of the first-ever Nissan Z LeMons victor. With 21 laps to make up, such a victory seems unlikely, but you never know what might happen at the race track.

subset: commoncrawl


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Brad Rencher, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Omniture Business Unit, Adobe Systems Incorporated.
As senior vice president and general manager of Adobe's Omniture Business Unit, Brad Rencher is passionate about helping businesses achieve their goals by harnessing the power of data. Under Rencher's leadership, the Omniture business processes more than 1.5 trillion transactions for its customers every quarter – providing customer insights that power smarter decisions for many of the world's top brands. To advance Adobe's Online Marketing Suite, Rencher drives product innovation and strategic direction of the company's online marketing, advertising and data analytics initiatives including an increasing focus on exploding areas such as mobile and social media.
Rencher joined Omniture Inc. in January 2008, and held various positions with the company before its acquisition by Adobe in 2009. He managed daily operations and the integration of the Omniture business into the Adobe organization before being promoted to run the business unit in July 2010. Rencher also played a key leadership role in the evolution of the Online Marketing Suite through the acquisitions of Demdex, Mercado, Offermatica and Visual Sciences.
Prior to joining the company, Rencher worked at Morgan Stanley as part of the technology investment banking team. In addition to the Omniture initial public offering and equity financings, he executed mergers and acquisitions and capital market financings for leading technology clients including Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Polycom and Successfactors.
Rencher holds a bachelor's degree in finance from Brigham Young University and master's degree in business administration from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
Join Rencher on the social web via Twitter, @bradrencher or blog.
Reach business leaders and technology influencers at the Web 2.0 Summit. Call Kristen Nicasio at (415) 947-6283 or email email@example.com
View a complete list of Web 2.0 Summit contacts.


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13, Terrain Césarin


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Heart is the thirteenth episode of Glee's third season and the fifty-seventh episode overall. It premiered on February 14, 2012 and is the Valentine's Day episode.
Will declares to the Glee Club that they need money to pay for costumes and hairspray for Regionals to which Sugar offers to pay. She tells them that she rented Breadstix out for Valentine's Day and is making a party for the Glee Club and other people from the school. Artie and Rory vow for Sugar's love and to take her as a date to the night. Hiram and LeRoy Berry, Rachel's dads, find out about Finn and Rachel's engagement, to which they have mixed feelings about. The truth about Mercedes and Sam's love affair is exposed while The God Squad, consisting of Mercedes, Sam, Quinn, and new religious character, Joe, is asked to sings song to other people's Valentines, but when Santana asks them to serenade Brittany, it becomes questionable.
The episode was directed by Brad Falchuk and written by Allison Adler.
In the Choir room, Will declares that they still need money for Regionals to pay for costumes and hairspray. He suggests that they go and sing love songs to couples to raise money, which some members of New Directions are against due to a bad experience of singing in front of classes. Sugar quickly hands him money to pay for it. He declines but New Directions, particularly Kurt, force him take it, refusing to deliver the singing valentines. She then tells them that she rented Breadstix out for Valentine's Day and everyone is invited but they must have a date as single people make her sad. Mercedes points out that Sugar herself is single which she replies with, "Not for long," to which Artie and Rory are visibly excited about.
In the auditorium, Finn and Rachel receive the same note telling them to meet someone. They hear voices, to discover that it is Rachel's dads, Hiram and LeRoy singing Chapel of Love. They tell the couple that Burt and Carole told them about the engagement and that they support it. They decide to throw a Valentine's Day dinner with the Hudson-Hummels.
Mercedes calls The God Squad to order and reintroduces Quinn to the group, along with a new student, Joe Hart. Joe shows the group his tattoos of bible verses and tells them about how each one of his dreadlocks are named after a book from the Bible. They discuss community service ideas, with Sam pitching the idea of 'singing telegrams', costing only 10 dollars.
In the cafeteria, most of New Directions sit together discussing who they are taking to Sugar's party. Puck tells them he is taking an entire sorority house. Kurt shows them he just received a card from a 'secret admirer', who Kurt believes is actually Blaine. A Valentine Gorilla appears and gives him a telegram, also from his secret admirer. Kurt asks Rory who he is taking, who says he is taking Sugar. Artie and Rory have a heated discussion over who gets to take her.
In the choir room, Tina and Mike begin to perform L-O-V-E while we cut to see Rory and Artie trying to win over Sugar's affection by giving her presents.At Santana's locker, Brittany shows her the Valentine's playlist she made, telling her that these are the songs she hears when they are together or thinking about her. They are about to share a kiss, until Principal Figgins appears and takes the two to his office. He tells them he has had complaints over them sharing PDA in the hallways. He tells them he personally doesn't mind, but doesn't want to upset anyone for religious reasons. Rachel and Finn announce that they are engaged in the Choir room, to mixed views. Quinn and Kurt publicly announce their distaste. Tina tells the couple that she supports the marriage, along with Mike, saying she'd love to be a bridesmaid. Artie wishes them the best. He performs Let Me Love You, to Sugar, with the rest of the New Directions boys, excluding Rory. After the performance, Sugar says she will go with Artie to the party. In the courtyard, Santana tells Rachel she also supports her engagement. They are interrupted by The God Squad who have a singing telegram from Finn. They sing Stereo Hearts, with Mercedes' choir backing up. Santana, discovering that they are the religious group, asks them to perform a song to Brittany, making it clear to Joe that Britt is her girlfriend, leaving Joe confused.
Back in the choir room, Kurt finds another card and Rory announces that he is having to go back to Ireland at the end of the year as his student Visa was turned down. He tells them that they have become his second family and sings Home. Afterwards, Sugar tells him that she feels worse for him and asks him to the dance, he tells her that he would be honored.
In The God Squad, they discuss whether they feel comfortable singing to gay couples. Mercedes, Sam, and Quinn are fine with it but Joe is not sure as he has never really met a gay person before. He tells them he needs to think about it.
At Mercedes' locker, Sam gives her a small statue of one of the Three Wise Men, he painted to look like St. Valentine. She tells him that she told Shane about them, Sam thinking this means they can now properly be together. Mercedes tells him that she knows what she did to Shane was wrong, and it makes her feels awful, telling him that she loved him but they can't be together. Sam walks away heart-broken. She starts to sing at her locker, I Will Always Love You, and then in the Choir room, to an emotional Glee Club and to Sam himself in the auditorium. After the performance, Sam walks out of the room, crying.At the Berry's, Rachel, Hiram, and LeRoy are giving a performance of You're the Top. They continue on to dinner. Afterwards, the parents tell Finn he is allowed to stay over so he and Rachel can get used to sleeping together.
In her room, they get ready for bed, and she tells him about her pre-bedtime ritual. Finn goes to use the bathroom, to which she freaks out and they discuss what it will be like in New York, Rachel not thinking about what Finn will be doing when she is at school. He leaves her room telling her she won't have to worry about them sharing a bed.At Breadstix, Kurt enters after being told to by his secret admirer. The Valentine Gorilla appears and gives him one last card that says "Happy Valentine's Day Kurt, I think I love you." Kurt is confused, still thinking it is Blaine. When the gorilla mask is removed, he discovers it is Karofsky. The two sit down and Dave tells Kurt he knew that he liked Kurt since Scandals, seeing how strong and proud he was. He admits he wanted to call him, telling him that he loves him. Kurt tells him that he's proud for Dave coming to where he is now so quickly but he is with Blaine. He gets up to leave, to find that a team mate from his new school had seen their whole exchange. He leaves quickly, leaving Kurt calling after him.
Back in Rachel's room, Finn and Rachel have made up and are lying in bed together, they notice the time and get up to leave for Sugar's party. Her parents, who where happy to discover the two fighting earlier, are shocked to see them happy, more so when she tells them they are getting married in May.
Sugar, starts off the night, handing out gift cards to everyone. She announces the 'God Squad' and they sing Cherish/Cherish, dedicated to Brittany as Santana's gift, after Joe says that anyone can love whoever they want too as everyone else proceeds to dance with their partner. Sugar and Rory dance, she tells him he is going to miss him. He is taken aback until he realizes what she is talking about and says not to worry about it (possibly implying that he lied about moving just to win her affection). Santana and Brittany finally share a kiss in public when the performance is over.
Sugar then brings out another surprise, which is Blaine and he leads into the performance of Love Shack.
|Song Title
|Original Artist
|Nat King Cole
|Mike Chang and Tina Cohen-Chang
|Let Me Love You
|Artie Abrams with New Directions Boys
|Stereo Hearts
|Gym Class Heroes feat. Adam Levine
|The God Squad with Church Choir
|Michael Bublé
|Rory Flanagan
|I Will Always Love You
|Dolly Parton
(Whitney Houston version)
|Mercedes Jones
|You're the Top
|Cast of Anything Goes
|Hiram Berry and LeRoy Berry
|Madonna/The Association
|The God Squad
|Love Shack
|The B-52's
|New Directions
Unreleased Songs
- Chapel of Love by The Dixie Cups. Sung by Hiram Berry and LeRoy Berry
Guest Cast
Special Guest Stars
Guest Stars
- Mike O'Malley as Burt Hummel
- Iqbal Theba as Principal Figgins
- Chord Overstreet as Sam Evans
- Romy Rosemont as Carole Hudson-Hummel
- Max Adler as Dave Karofsky
- Vanessa Lengies as Sugar Motta
- Damian McGinty as Rory Flanagan
- Samuel Larsen as Joe Hart
- LaMarcus Tinker as Shane Tinsley
- Aaron Hill as Nick
- Jeanine Anderson as Waitress
Absent Cast Members
- The letters in the title-card are pink instead of white.
- This episode is dedicated to the memory of Whitney Houston, who died four days before the episode aired.
- This is the second Valentine's Day episode, the first being Silly Love Songs in season two.
- Samuel Larsen makes his debut as Joe Hart, whose last name implies a reference to the episode title.
- L-O-V-E by Nat King Cole, a song Mike sings in this episode, is the song Harry Shum Jr. sang for his audition.
- The "Brittana Kiss" was cut out in the 4pm episode in the Philippines and was later shown in the primetime telecast at 9pm.
- Whitney Houston's dedication card is removed in Australia and the United Kingdom.
- Prior to the airing of The First Time, Ryan Murphy revealed to EW that he and the writing team were planning an episode where Dave expresses his feelings to Kurt in "the right way," It is believed this is the episode. Source
- The songs in Brittany's playlist for Santana are: "Purple People Eater", "Disco Duck", "Monster Mash", "On Top of Spaghetti", "Pac-Man Fever", "Osama Yo' Mama", and the "Diff'rent Strokes Theme Song".
- The picture Rachel has on her bedside table is the same picture Finn has in his room, which can be seen in The Quarterback. It is a picture from the two of them in The Purple Piano Project.
- When Brittany and Santana are about to kiss by their lockers, you see Santana tilt her head, but when they zoom in it's not tilted.
- In the Pilot episode, Rachel introduces her dads by showing a picture of the two of them, and her dads in this episode are different. However, this can be explained by the casting change.
- Sugar says that only those are allowed to come her party who have a date. However, Artie attends the party without having a date. The God Squad members and Kurt prior to Blaine's return were present without a date, too.
- Puck says he found his chocolate 10 minutes ago. However, before the 'Glee Title Card' his face is clean and no chocolates are in sight.
- During Hiram and LeRoy's talk about the wedding, in a shot, one of Hiram's hands is in the table and the other on the air. Then the camera turns to LeRoy and when it backs to Hiram his arms are crossed. The camera turns back to LeRoy and in the next shot, Hiram is again with one hand on the table and the other in his hip.
- When Will suggests serenading people from classroom to classroom and everyone argues against it, Tina states two years before this episode, the Glee Club went caroling in the classrooms, but it was actually one year before.
Sugar: No single people allowed. Single people are sad.
—Sugar and Mercedes to the New Directions
Rory: Girls dig accents.
Rory: This is a four leaf clover, kid. 'Cause you're gonna need all the luck you can get.
Brittany: Happy Valentine's Day!
Hiram: Time for the teenage love-making!
—Hiram at the Hudson-Hummel/Berry celebration dinner
Yeah, they say that 1 out of every 10 people are gay. And if that's true, that means 1 of the 12 apostles might've been gay. And my guess is Simon, because that name's the gayest.
Honesty. Respect. Dance. Those are the foundations of the Berry family.


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George Shaw: My Back to Nature
This event has now finished!
A former Turner Prize-nominee, George Shaw has been the National Gallery artist in residence since 2014. The George Shaw: My Back to Nature exhibition is the culmination of the past two years work.
Almost 50 new paintings and drawings inspired by the National Gallery's collection will be on display. George Shaw has unlimited access to the collection and his subjects include woodland landscapes, religion and the clash of cultures. He also draws on the behaviour portrayed in classical stories linking it with the equivalent in the modern world.
Shaw is renowned for his highly detailed approach to suburban subject matter, and for his unusual choice of medium – Humbrol enamel paint, which is typically used to colour model trains and aeroplanes.
Free Entry


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Review: Bronson
Clockwork Orange fictionalized with copious Kubrick-isms, Bronson is a fast, ferocious, wickedly funny portrait of one man's acceptance of his bone-deep animalism. As a kid in the '60s, Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy) enjoyed beating up fellow schoolmates for no good reason, and as a married father, he decided to saw off a shotgun (with wife and baby in the other room) and rob a jewelry store, a heist that netted him little cash but seven years in prison. Inside, he was home, fashioning his penitentiary confines as a "hotel" where he could finally be himself—which is to say, finally let loose with maniac violent tendencies epitomized by his new nickname Charles Bronson. Those brutal inclinations generally took the form of misbehaving so he could slug it out with guards who, knowing what to expect, arrived at fights decked out in riot gear.
Bronson was an unbridled beast, as evident from director Nicolas Winding Refn's blistering opening salvo, a character-defining blood-red depiction of Peterson pacing side to side, naked and covered in filth, inside a cage, his fury rising as he psyches himself up for forthcoming fisticuffs, which in Bronson typically arrive in slow-motion and staged to crashing classical music and opera or '80s synth-pop like the Pet Shop Boys' devilishly appropriate "It's a Sin." Bronson wastes no time immersing itself in its subject's manic rage, alternating between vicious set pieces in which Bronson goes toe-to-toe with others, and to-the-camera narration in which he's set against a black backdrop while on stage in front of an audience, sequences that complement his stated desire to be a star. He was, albeit of a decidedly infamous variety, since despite being released from jail for his original crime (and never committing a single murder), Peterson would spend 30 of his next 34 years not only behind bars but in solitary confinement.
During a brief stint on the outside, Peterson, on the suggestion of a foppish former inmate, took up the name Charles Bronson in homage to the actor's hostile Death Wish persona. The psycho to whom director Refn more than subtly likens his protagonist, however, is Clockwork Orange's droog Alex, another antisocial misfit immune to the mainstream's socializing mechanisms. No rehabilitating Ludovico technique here: Bronson's bestiality was incomprehensible and immutable, and consequently, solely treatable through severe containment. Alienation was thus his destiny, and amid his numerous violent clashes, director Refn shrewdly pinpoints—through images of a free Bronson getting trapped in his parents' locked car, proving unable to open a locked gate, and facing closing doors—how psychosis of this extreme sort could only lead to literal and figurative captivity.
Whereas Bronson was a preternaturally nasty bloke, he was also a self-described "comedian," and Bronson's coup de grace isn't simply its fitting Kubrick-indebted aesthetics—ominously patient, teasing camerawork, gorgeously symmetrical and low-level compositions, incongruous blending of sound and image, as well as its direct allusions to the Korova Milk Bar (in a strip club) and Alex's iconic style—but its protagonist's jet-black humor. As the famed inmate, whose bald head, upturned mustache, and imposing physique (usually nude or in white long-sleeved T-shirts) resembled that of a cartoon carnival strongman, Hardy is a whirlwind force of nature, stomping around a cell like a one-track pain train, leaping into battle with rabid-dog intensity (in one sequence, he actually takes on a Doberman), and in his first-person monologues, flashing unnervingly funny menace. Bronson so immediately and definitively establishes its template and character that each scene soon plays like a disturbed Loony Tunes cartoon replete with concluding punch(line). And when Bronson appears on stage with face covered in white makeup (and, in a magnificently deranged, schizo sequence, with half his face au natural and the other half done up like a mad Nurse Ratchet), Refn strikingly nails his subject as a monstrous clown, a lunatic who took great, sadistically comical pleasure from putting fists to flesh.
Cast: Tom Hardy, Matt King, James Lance, Kelly Adams, Amanda Burton Director: Nicolas Winding Refn Screenwriter: Nicolas Winding Refn, Brock Norman Brock Distributor: Magnet Releasing Running Time: 92 min Rating: R Year: 2008 Buy: Video
Review: The Old Guard Is a Would-Be Franchise Starter with No New Moves
Smartly prioritizing the bond of relationships over action, the film is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts.2
Gina Prince-Bythewood's The Old Guard is a modestly successful attempt to build a new fountain of franchise content out of a comic series with nearly limitless potential for spin-offs. The story kicks into motion with a team of four mercenaries with unique powers and an ancient bond setting off to rescue some kidnapped girls in South Sudan. Charlize Theron brings her customarily steely intensity to the role of the group's cynical, burnt-out leader, Andy, who isn't crazy about the idea since she doesn't trust Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the ex-C.I.A. agent who hired them. Given how long it turns out that Andy has been doing this sort of thing, you would imagine that her comrades would listen.
The mission turns out to be a set-up, and the would-be rescuers are wiped out in a barrage of bullets. Except not, because Andy and her team are pretty much unkillable. So as their enemies are slapping each other on the back and conveniently looking the other way, the mercenaries haul themselves to their feet, bodies healing almost instantaneously, bullets popping out of closing wounds. Payback is swift but interesting, because for reasons likely having to do with their being many centuries old—the youngest, Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), fought for Napoleon—the four quasi-immortals like to use swords in addition to automatic weaponry.
Written with glints of pulpy panache by Greg Rucka, the comic's originator, The Old Guard sets up a high-potential premise and proceeds to do not very much with it. Rucka's conceit is that this tiny group are among the very few people on Earth to have been born essentially immortal. This can be a good thing, but it can also prove problematic, as it means that they watch everybody they know age and die—a trope that was already somewhat worn by the time Anne Rice used it throughout her novels about ever-suffering vampires.
The plot of the film does relatively little after the showdown in South Sudan besides introduce a new member of the mercenary team, Nile (KiKi Layne), establish that Andy is tiring of the wandering warrior life, and show the group plotting revenge on Copley only to have that turn into a rescue mission that conveniently brings them all back together again. As part of the run-up to that mission, new recruit Nile, a Marine who goes AWOL from Afghanistan with Andy after her fellow soldiers see her seemingly fatal knife wound magically heal and treat her as some kind of witch, is introduced to life as a nearly invincible eternal warrior.
That rescue plot is simple to the point of being rote. Billionaire Big Pharma bro Merrick (Harry Melling), seemingly made up of equal parts Lex Luthor and Martin Shkreli, kidnaps two of Andy's team in the hope of harvesting their DNA for blockbuster anti-aging drugs. Unfortunately for the film, that takes two of its most personable characters temporarily out of action. Nicky (Luca Marinelli) and Joe (Marwan Kenzari) had their meet-cute while fighting on opposite sides of the Crusades and have been wildly in love ever since. After the two are captured and mocked by Merrick's homophobic gunsels, Joe delivers a pocket soliloquy on his poetic yearning: "His kiss still thrills me after a millennium." The moment's romantic burn is more poignant by being clipped to its bare-minimal length and presented with the casual confidence one would expect from a man old enough to remember Pope Urban II.
In other ways, however, The Old Guard fails to explore the effects of living such lengthy lives. Asked by Nile whether they are "good guys or bad guys," Booker answers that "it depends on the century." While Rucka's hard-boiled lines like that can help energize the narrative, it can also suggest a certain flippancy. When the film does deal with crushing weight of historical memory, it focuses primarily on Andy, who's been around so long that her name is shortened from Andromache the Scythian (suggesting she was once the Amazon warrior queen who fought in the battle of Troy). Except for a brief flashback illustrating the centuries-long escapades of Andy and Quynh (Veronica Ngo) fighting for vaguely defined positive principles (one involved rescuing women accused of witchcraft), we don't see much of their past. Similarly, except for Andy's increasing cynicism about the positive impact of their roaming the Earth like do-gooder ronin, they seem to exist largely in the present.
That present is largely taken up with combat, particularly as Booker, Andy, and Nile gear up to rescue Nicky and Joe. Prince-Bythewood handles these scenes with a degree of John Wick-esque flair: Why just shoot a Big Pharma hired gun once when you can shoot him, flip him over, and then stab and shoot him again for good measure? However tight, though, the action scenes' staging is unremarkable, with the exception of one climactic moment that's so well-choreographed from an emotional standpoint that the impossibility of a multiplex crowd hooting and clapping in response makes the film feel stifled by being limited to streaming.
Smartly prioritizing the bond of relationships over action in the way of the modern franchise series—doing so more organically than the Fast and the Furious series but missing the self-aware comedic patter of the Avengers films—The Old Guard is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts. That will likely not stop further iterations from finding ways to plug these characters and their like into any historical moment that has room in it for high-minded mercenaries with marketable skills and a few centuries to kill.
Cast: Charlize Theron, Matthias Schoenaerts, KiKi Layne, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Harry Melling, Veronica Ngo Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood Screenwriter: Greg Rucka Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 118 min Rating: R Year: 2020
Review: We Are Little Zombies Is a Fun, Wildly Stylized Portrait of Grief
The film is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world where emotions are accessed and revealed primarily through digital intermediaries.3
Makoto Nagahisa's We Are Little Zombies follows the exploits of a group of tweens who meet at the funeral home where their deceased parents are being cremated. But, surprisingly, Hitari (Keita Ninomiya), Takemura (Mondo Okumura), Ishi (Satoshi Mizuno), and Ikiko (Satoshi Mizuno) are united less by sorrow and more by cool indifference, as they see their parents' deaths as yet another tragedy in what they collectively agree is pretty much a "shit life." As the socially awkward Hitari claims matter-of-factly in voiceover, "Babies cry to signal they need help. Since no one can help me, there's no point in crying."
Through a series of extended flashbacks, Nagahisa relates the kids' troubled lives, never stooping to pitying or sentimentalizing them or their utter dismay with the adult world. The new friends' deeply internalized grief and hopelessness are filtered wildly through a hyperreal aesthetic lens that's indebted to all things pop, from psychedelia to role-playing games. It's Nagashisa's vibrant means of expressing the disconnect between the kids' troubled lives and their emotionless reactions to the various tragedies that have befallen them.
With its chiptunes-laden soundtrack and chapter-like form, which mimics the levels of a video game, We Are Little Zombies will draw understandable comparisons to Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. But it's Nagisa Oshima's Three Resurrected Drunkards that offers a more precise analogue to this film's provocative rhyming of stylistic zaniness and extreme youthful alienation. Oshima's anarchically playful farce stars the real-life members of the Folk Crusaders as a disaffected group of rebellious musicians, and when the kids of We Are Little Zombies decide to form a band to express themselves, they even perform a bossa nova version of the Folk Crusaders's theme song for the 1968 film. This and the many other cultural touchstones in We Are Little Zombies are seamlessly weaved by Nagahisa into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world where emotions are accessed and revealed primarily through digital intermediaries, be they social media or a dizzying glut of pop-cultural creations.
Nagahisa's aesthetic mirrors his main characters' disconnect from reality, incorporating everything from stop-motion animation to pixelated scenes and overhead shots that replicate the stylings of 8-bit RPGs. At one point in We Are Little Zombies, an unsettling talk show appearance brings to mind what it would be like to have a bad acid trip on the set of an old MTV news program. Nagahisa accepts that the kids' over-engagement with screen-based technology is inextricably embedded in their experience of reality and ultimately celebrates the sense of camaraderie and belonging that the foursome finds in pop artifacts and detritus. This is particularly evident once their band, the Little Zombies of the film's title, starts to explore their antipathy toward and frustrations with a seemingly indifferent world.
The Little Zombies wield the same charming punk spirit as the film, and once instant fame reveals its viciously sharp teeth, Nagahisa doesn't hold back from peering into the nihilistic abyss that stands before the kids. As in Three Resurrected Drunkards, We Are Little Zombies's most despairing notes are couched in the distinctive language of pop culture. Hitari's attempts to grab essential items before running away from the home of a relative (Eriko Hatsune) are staged as a video game mission. The band's hit song—titled, of course, "We Are Little Zombies"—is an infectious, delightfully melodic banger all about their dispassionate existence. There's even a fake death scene of the kids that, as in Three Resurrected Drunkards, effectively restarts the film's narrative, allowing the characters to once again test their fate.
For all of this film's reliance on the stylistic ticks of video games, its narrative arc isn't limited to the typically linear journey embarked upon by many a gaming protagonist, and the foursome's path leads neither to enlightenment nor even happiness per se. What they've discovered in the months since their parents' deaths is a solidarity with one another, and rather than have them conquer their fears and anxieties, Nagahisa wisely acknowledges that their social disconnection will remain an ongoing struggle. He understands that by tapping into the unifying, rather than alienating, powers of pop culture, they're better equipped to deal with whatever additional hard knocks that the modern world will inevitably throw their way.
Cast: Keita Ninomiya, Satoshi Mizuno, Mondo Okumura, Sena Nakajima, Kuranosukie Sasaki, Youki Kudoh, Sosuke Ikematsu, Eriko Hatsune, Jun Murakami, Naomi Nishida Director: Makoto Nagahisa Screenwriter: Makoto Nagahisa Distributor: Oscilloscope Running Time: 120 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Palm Springs Puts a Fresh Spin on the Time-Loop Rom-Com
The film smuggles some surprisingly bleak existential questioning inside a brightly comedic vehicle.3
The pitch for Palm Springs likely went: "Edge of Tomorrow meets Groundhog Day but with a cool Coachella rom-com vibe." All of those components are present and accounted for in Max Barbakow's film, about two people forced to endure the same day of a Palm Springs wedding over and over again after getting stuck in a time loop. But even though the concept might feel secondhand, the execution is confident, funny, and thoughtful.
Palm Springs starts without much of a hook, sidling into its story with the same lassitude as its protagonist, Nyles (Andy Samberg). First seen having desultory sex with his shallow and always peeved girlfriend, Misty (Meredith Hagner), Nyles spends the rest of the film's opening stretch wandering around the resort where guests are gathered for the wedding of Misty's friend, Tala (Camila Mendes), lazing around the pool and drinking a seemingly endless number of beers. "Oh yeah, Misty's boyfriend" is how most refer to him with casual annoyance, and then he gives a winning wedding speech that one doesn't expect from a plus-one.
The reason for why everything at the wedding seems so familiar to Nyles, and why that speech is so perfectly delivered, becomes clear after he entices the bride's sister and maid of honor, Sarah (Cristin Milioti), to follow him out to the desert for a make-out session. In quick succession, Nyles is shot with an arrow by a mysterious figure (J.K. Simmons), Sarah is accidentally sucked into the same glowing vortex that trapped Nyles in his time loop, and she wakes up on the morning of the not-so-great day that she just lived through.
Although Palm Springs eventually digs into the knottier philosophical quandaries of this highly elaborate meet-cute, it takes an appealingly blasé approach to providing answers to the scenario's curiosities. What initially led Nyles to the mysterious glowing cave in the desert? How has he maintained any semblance of sanity over what appears to be many years of this nightmare existence? How come certain people say "thank you" in Arabic?
This attitude of floating along the sea of life's mysteries without worry parallels Nyles's shrugging attitude about the abyss facing them. In response to Sarah's panicked queries about why they are living the same day on repeat, Nyles throws out a random collection of theories: "one of those infinite time loop situations….purgatory….a glitch in the simulation we're all in." His ideas seem half-baked at first. But as time passes, it becomes clear that Nyles has been trapped at the wedding so long that not only has he lost all concept of time or even who he was before it began, his lackadaisical approach to eternity seems more like wisdom.
Darkly cantankerous, Sarah takes a while to come around to that way of thinking. Her version of the Kübler-Ross model starts in anger and shifts to denial (testing the limits of their time-loop trap, she drives home to Texas, only to snap back to morning in Palm Springs when she finally dozes off) before pivoting to acceptance. This segment, where Nyles introduces Sarah to all the people and things he's found in the nooks and crannies of the world he's been able to explore in one waking day, plays like a quantum physics rom-com with a video-game-y sense of immortality. After learning the ropes from Nyles (death is no escape, so try to avoid the slow, agonizing deaths), Sarah happily takes part in his Sisyphean games of the drunk and unkillable, ranging from breaking into houses to stealing and crashing a plane.
As places to be trapped for all eternity, this idyll doesn't seem half bad at first. Barbakow's fast-paced take on the pleasingly daffy material helps, as does the balancing of Milioti's angry agita with Samberg's who-cares recklessness. Eventually the story moves out of endlessly looping stasis into the problem-solution phase, with Sarah deciding she can't waste away in Palm Springs for eternity. But while the question of whether or not they can escape via Sarah's device for bridging the multiverse takes over the narrative to some degree, Palm Springs is far more interesting when it ruminates lightly on which puzzle they're better off solving: pinning their hopes on escape or cracking another beer and figuring out how to be happy in purgatory. Palm Springs isn't daring by any stretch, but it smuggles some surprisingly bleak existential questioning inside a brightly comedic vehicle that's similar to Groundhog Day but without that film's reassuring belief that a day can be lived perfectly rather than simply endured.
Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Millioti, J.K. Simmons, Peter Gallagher, Meredith Hagner, Camila Mendez, Tyler Hoechlin, Chris Pang Director: Max Barbakow Screenwriter: Andy Siara Distributor: Neon, Hulu Running Time: 90 min Rating: NR Year: 2020
Review: Hamilton Comes Home, Still Holding Conflicting Truths at Once
The show offers testimony to the power of communal storytelling, just as mighty on screen as on stage.3.5
The actual physical production of Hamilton has never been at the heart of the show's fandom. Its lyrics have been memorized en masse, Hamilton-inspired history courses have been created across grade levels, and its references have invaded the vernacular, but, for most, Hamilton's liveness has been inaccessible, whether due to geography or unaffordability. Hamilton the film, recorded over two Broadway performances in 2016 with most of the original Broadway cast, winningly celebrates the still-surprisingly rich density of Lin-Manuel Miranda's score and the show's much-heralded actors. But this new iteration is most stunning in its devotion to translating Hamilton's swirling, churning storytelling—the work of director Thomas Kail and choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler—to the screen.
Most films of live theater feel partial and remote. There's usually a sense that with every move of the camera we're missing out on something happening elsewhere on stage. The autonomy of attending theater in person—the ability to choose what to focus on—is stripped away. But instead of delimiting what we see of Hamilton, this film opens up our options. Even when the camera (one of many installed around, behind, and above the stage) homes in on a lone singer, the shots tend to frame the soloists in a larger context: We can watch Aaron Burr (Leslie Odom Jr.), but we can also track the characters behind him or on the walkways above him. Every shot is rife with detail and movement: the rowers escorting Alexander Hamilton's (Miranda) body to shore, Maria Reynolds (Jasmine Cephas Jones) hovering beneath a stairway as Hamilton confesses his infidelities to Burr, ensemble members dancing in the shadows of David Korins's imposing set. There's no space to wonder what might be happening beyond the camera's gaze.
Off-setting the cast album's appropriate spotlight on the show's stars, the film, also directed by Kail, constantly centers the ensemble, even when they're not singing, as they enact battles and balls or symbolically fly letters back and forth between Hamilton and Burr. Audiences who mainly know the show's music may be surprised by how often the entire cast is on stage, and even those who've seen Hamilton live on stage will be delighted by the highlighted, quirky individuality of each ensemble member's often-silent storytelling.
Kail shows impressive restraint, withholding aerial views and shots from aboard the spinning turntables at the center of the stage until they can be most potent. The film also convincingly offers Hamilton's design as a stunning work of visual art, showcasing Howell Binkley's lighting—the sharp yellows as the Schuyler Sisters take the town and the slowly warming blues as Hamilton seeks his wife's forgiveness—just as thoughtfully as it does the performances.
And when the cameras do go in for a close-up, they shade lyrics we may know by heart with new meaning. In "Wait for It," Burr's paean to practicing patience rather than impulsiveness, Odom (who won a Tony for the role) clenches his eyes shut as he sings, "I am inimitable, I am an original," tensing as if battling to convince himself that his passivity is a sign of strength and not cowardice. When Eliza Hamilton (Philippa Soo) glances upward and away from her ever-ascendant husband as she asks him, "If I could grant you peace of mind, would that be enough?," it's suddenly crystal clear that she's wondering whether taking care of Alexander would be enough for herself, not for him, her searching eyes foreshadowing her eventual self-reliance. And there's an icky intimacy unachievable in person when Jonathan Groff's mad King George literally foams at the mouth in response to the ingratitude of his colonies.
The production's less understated performances, like Daveed Diggs's show-stealing turn (also Tony-winning) in the dual roles of the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson and Renée Elise Goldsberry's fiery embodiment (yes, also Tony-winning) of the shrewd, self-sacrificing Angelica Schuyler Church, benefit, too, from the way that the film's pacing latches onto Miranda's propulsive writing. In Jefferson's return home, "What'd I Miss," the camera angles change swiftly as if to keep up with Diggs's buoyancy.
Despite Christopher Jackson's warm and gorgeous-voiced performance, George Washington remains Hamilton's central sticking point. While Jefferson receives a dressing down from Hamilton for practicing slavery, Washington, who once enslaved over 200 people at one time at Mount Vernon, shows up in Hamilton as a spotless hero who might as well be king if he wasn't so noble as to step down. There's a tricky tension at Hamilton's core: Casting performers of color as white founding "heroes" allows the master narrative to be reclaimed, but it's still a master narrative. For audiences familiar with the facts, the casting of black actors as slave owners (not just Jefferson) is an unstated, powerful act of artistic resistance against the truths of the nation's founding. But for those learning their history from Hamilton, especially young audiences, they will still believe in Washington's moral purity, even if they walk away picturing the first president as Christopher Jackson.
But Hamilton is complex and monumental enough of a work to hold conflicting truths at once. In attempting to recraft our understanding of America's founding, it may fall short. In forcibly transforming the expectations for who can tell what stories on which stages, Hamilton has been a game-changer. And as a feat of musical theater high-wire acts, Miranda's dexterity in navigating decades of historical detail while weaving his characters' personal and political paths tightly together is matched only by his own ingenuity as a composer and lyricist of songs that showcase his characters' brilliance without distractingly drawing attention to his own.
Dynamized by its narrative-reclaiming, race-conscious casting and hip-hop score, and built around timeline-bending reminders that America may be perpetually in the "battle for our nation's very soul," Hamilton, of course, also lends itself particularly easily to 2020 connections. But the greater gift is that Hamilton will swivel from untouchability as Broadway's most elusive, priciest ticket to mass accessibility at a moment of keen awareness that, to paraphrase George Washington, history has its eyes on us. The show offers testimony to the power of communal storytelling, just as mighty on screen as on stage. That we are sharing Hamilton here and now offers as much hope as Hamilton itself.
Cast: Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jonathan Groff, Christopher Jackson, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, Phillipa Soo Director: Thomas Kail Screenwriter: Ron Chernow, Lin-Manuel Miranda Distributor: Disney+ Running Time: 160 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2020
Review: In Family Romance, LLC, Reality and Fantasy Affectingly Collide
Throughout, it's as though Werner Herzog were more witness than author, simply registering Japan being Japan.3
Werner Herzog's Family Romance, LLC presents Japan as a place where the technological follies of modernity that many see as embryonic in the West are allowed to blossom unabashedly. The Orientalism inherent to this myth, that of Japan as a high-tech dystopia where human alienation reaches its pathetic zenith, is somewhat masked here by the film's style, which inhabits that strangely pleasurable cusp between fact and fiction. We are never quite sure of the extent to which situations and dialogues have been scripted and, as such, it's as though Herzog were more witness than author, more passerby than gawker, simply registering Japan being Japan.
The film is centered around Ishii Yuichi, playing a version of himself, who owns a business that rents out human beings to act like paparazzi, family members, lovers, or bearers of good (albeit fake) news. One of his clients, for example, is a woman who wants to relive the moment when she won the lottery. We follow Ishii as he travels to his business calls, which may consist of going to a funeral home that offers coffin rentals by the hour for people to test out, or to a hotel where the clerks behind the helpdesk and the fish in the aquarium are robots.
The camera, otherwise, follows Ishii's encounters with his 12-year-old "daughter," Mahiro (Mahiro). The girl's mother, Miki (Miki Fujimaki), has enlisted Ishii to play Mahiro's missing father, who abandoned her when she was two, and make it seem as if he's suddenly resurfaced. The film's most interesting moments don't arise from its largely obvious critiques of simulation, but from the human relationship between Ishii and Mahiro. In the end, the film's smartest trick is getting the audience to genuinely feel for this young girl on screen, acting for us, all while scoffing at Ishii's clients for scripting their own emotional experiences.
We know the relationship between Mahiro and Ishii to be false on multiple levels. They may not be professional actors, but they are very much acting, and their interactions nonetheless tap into something quite authentic and emotional. Although their kinship is an act of make-believe, it's driven by similar malaises that plague "real" father-daughter relationships. Mahiro, who doesn't meet Ishii until she's a pre-teen and is presumably unaware that it's all just an act, struggles to articulate feelings that overwhelm her. Asking for a hug from Ishii is a Herculean task for her. But granting her the hug is also a Herculean task for Ishii, who ultimately confesses to wondering whether his real family, too, has been paid by someone else to raise him. Must a father's hug be so clinical even when he's getting paid to do it?
Such moments as that awkward father-daughter hug, a scene where Mahiro gives Ishii an origami animal that she made for him ("It's delicate, so be careful," she says), and another where she confesses that she likes a boy all point to the ways in which feeling slips out of even the most perfectly scripted protocols. That's a relief for the kind of society that Family Romance, LLC aims to critique, one where tidy transactions are meant to neuter the messy unpredictability of human interactions but fail. Emotion slips out despite diligent attempts to master it, forcing even those who stand to gain the most from hyper-controlled environments to eventually face the shakiness of their own ground. Ishii, for instance, is forced to reconsider his business model when Mahiro's demand for love starts to affect him. Ishii's fear that he may also have been swindled by actors posing as parents tells us that authors are subjects, too, and that the equation between reality and fantasy is never quite settled.
Cast: Ishii Yuichi, Mahiro, Miki Fujimaki, Umetani Hideyasu, Shun Ishigaki Director: Werner Herzog Screenwriter: Werner Herzog Distributor: MUBI Running Time: 89 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Force of Nature, Much Like Mel Gibson, Is an Absolute Disaster
The film presents its scattershot cop-movie tropes in earnest, as if, like hurricanes, they were natural, unavoidable phenomena..5
If cancel culture truly had the power its detractors ascribed to it, then Michael Polish's Force of Nature would have probably never starred Mel Gibson. The film stars the one-time Hollywood idol as a trigger-happy retired cop who hurls insults like "cocksucker" at men who inconvenience him. By itself, casting Gibson as the kind of manic, violence-prone cop for which he was once known for playing speaks to the film's defiantly conservative politics, its will to return to a cinematic era when violent white cops were viewed as good cops. But also having Gibson's Ray toss out homophobic slurs almost turns this insipid action flick into a statement about Gibson himself, as if the actor's own record of making such remarks should be viewed as the charmingly impolitic outbursts of an old-fashioned geezer.
Because Ray joins a multiethnic crew of good guys to save the day, we're presumably meant to view his personality flaws as minor, the attributes of a classical cop masculinity that's entered its dotage but ready to be awakened for one last shoot-out with big-city scum. The big city in this case is San Juan, Puerto Rico, which, as the film begins, is under siege by a hurricane. Set almost entirely in a cramped apartment building, Force of Nature is part Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, part The Raid: Redemption (or one of its many clones), attempting but failing to imitate both the former's eccentric take on the clash of extreme personalities and extreme weather and the intensity of the latter's kinetic, close-quarters action.
Despite being the biggest star on the bill, Gibson isn't quite at the center of the narrative, even if the meaningless flash forward that opens Force of Nature, of Ray shooting at two figures in the rain, initially suggests otherwise. Ray plays second fiddle to Emile Hirsch's point-of-view character, Cordillo, the San Juan police officer who refuses to learn a word of Spanish and might as well be wearing a MAGA hat. ("Where is el victim-o?" he asks regarding an incident at a supermarket early in the film.) Cordillo and his new partner, Peña (Stephanie Cayo), are assigned to help move San Juan's residents to shelters, encountering Ray and his daughter, Troy (Kate Bosworth), at the apartment complex where Griffin (Will Catlett), Ray and Troy's newly arrested neighbor, needs to feed his very hungry pet.
For those who've seen Netflix's Tiger King, it will be clear from the 100 pounds of meat that Griffin intends to feed his pet that the man illegally owns some kind of wild cat. And if this offbeat scenario doesn't elicit the laughs it may be aiming for, that's at least in part due to composer Kubilay Uner's score, which applies Wagnerian bombast to nearly every narrative event, as if it could will the paper-thin plot into some kind of significance. The tonal inconsistencies, however, aren't confined to this clash between image and soundtrack. On a visual level, it's difficult to know what to make of the scene in which Griffin's pet, kept entirely off screen, drags Griffin into its pitch-black den and mauls him in front of a not-quite-horrified Cordillo, while a gang that Ray identifies as high-end burglars begins a raid of the complex. Neither funny nor suspenseful, it's a bewildering mash of visual codes.
Led by a ruthless figure known as John the Baptist (David Zayas), the burglars first make an appearance in the second of the film's two prologues, in which John kidnaps an elderly woman to get into her safety deposit box, before executing her as well as his accomplice in plain sight—a scene that somewhat belies Ray's later in-the-know description of the gang as clever plotters. The nature of their interest in Ray, Troy, and Griffin's apartment building is left vague until a late reveal, a nonsensically belated introduction of the story's MacGuffin that contributes to the feeling of arbitrariness that pervades the film.
While Peña and Ray confront John and his crew, Cordillo and Troy go off to find medical supplies, along the way developing a thoroughly underwritten and ill-conceived romance; Troy is abruptly drawn to Cordillo after he shares his history of accidental violence against a former girlfriend (Jasper Polish). Meanwhile, the wounded Griffin is left under the watch of Paul (Jorge Luis Ramos), a German about whom multiple characters ask, in all sincerity, if he's a Nazi, and based solely on his white hair and nationality—certainly not on any arithmetic, as the seventysomething man appears far too young to have been a Nazi Party member.
It would all be material for a parody of cheap-action-flick sensibilities: the preoccupation with Nazism, the hollow romance, the valorization of white male rage barely masked behind a rudimentary psychologism. Unfortunately, Cory M. Miller's screenplay presents all these scattershot cop-movie tropes in earnest, as if, like hurricanes, they were natural, unavoidable phenomena. The truth, of course, is that Force of Nature, much like the consequences of the hurricane that clearly inspired it, is a man-made disaster.
Cast: Emile Hirsch, Mel Gibson, Kate Bosworth, David Zayas, Stephanie Cayo, Will Catlett, Jasper Polish, Jorge Luis Ramos Director: Michael Polish Screenwriter: Cory M. Miller Distributor: Lionsgate Running Time: 91 min Rating: R Year: 2020
Review: John Lewis: Good Trouble Places a Hero in Dialogue with the Past
The film is well-outfitted with telling, thematically rich shards of historical information.3
John Lewis isn't easily rattled. As a nonviolent foot soldier for desegregation and voting rights in the 1960s, he was severely beaten on several occasions. As a U.S. representative since 1987, he's contended with a Republican Party that has tacked steadily rightward. John Lewis: Good Trouble presents another, if much less demanding, test for the congressman: Watching his life unspool around him on three large screens in a darkened D.C. theater.
Dawn Porter's authoritative documentary mixes contemporary and archival material, and the latter includes many rare images, including some that the 80-year-old civil rights pioneer himself had never seen. Porter and her crew decided to show their findings to the Georgia Democrat while simultaneously filming his reactions, and the emotions prompted by this experience are palpable but carefully modulated on his part. Like most successful politicians, Lewis knows how to stay on message, and it's clear from the moments captured here that he long ago decided which of his private feelings would be elements of his public persona.
One example of this is Lewis's story about his early desire to become a preacher. As a boy, he says, he would address the chickens on his sharecropper family's Alabama farm but could never get them to say "amen." Porter places this anecdote early in Good Trouble, amid comments from family members, so it plays like a revelatory glimpse at Lewis's formative years. But the congressman, of course, began constructing his biography long before this particular documentary crew arrived. And Porter acknowledges this fact with a scene, toward the film's end, where Lewis tells the story again during a get-together of former congressional staffers and it becomes clear that everybody in the room already knows it.
Good Trouble, which takes its title from Lewis's advice to young activists to get into "what I call good trouble," is partly a testimonial. It includes snippets of praise from Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as congressional new wavers Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who says she wouldn't be where she is today without Lewis's example. Yet the film also recalls moments when Lewis wasn't in perfect sync with his allies, notably the bitter primary for the seat he now holds in Georgia's 5th District. Lewis defeated Julian Bond by winning support of the district's white voters, and by hinting that Bond had a drug problem. Earlier, Lewis had recoiled from the militancy of "Black Power" and lost his position in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
Lewis doesn't say much about these chapters in his life, just as he doesn't reveal a lot when he gives tours of his homes in Atlanta and D.C. A widower, he seems to live alone, though a cat is glimpsed inside the Georgia house at one point. One of the documentary's most personal stories, about his tearful reaction to the news that his great-great-grandfather registered to vote in 1867, is told not by the congressman but by cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., who unveiled the voter card on the show he hosts, Finding Your Roots. Good Trouble is well-outfitted with such telling shards of historical information, and Porter skillfully fits them together, assembling her subject's biography thematically rather than chronologically.
Thus, a section on the young Lewis's battle for African-American suffrage naturally begins in the 1960s before leading to 2014, when a Supreme Court ruling undermined the Voting Rights Act, and ultimately to the 2016 and 2018 elections swayed by voter suppression. The effect is illuminating, if not especially visceral. When the filmmakers arranged this kind of "This Is Your Life" for Lewis, they may not have elicited as much emotion as they'd hoped from the congressman. But they did fashion a microcosm of what the entire Good Trouble shows: the present in dialogue with the past, and a hero in the context of a larger movement.
Director: Dawn Porter Distributor: Magnolia Pictures Running Time: 97 min Rating: PG Year: 2020
Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020: Mon Amour, Film About a Father Who, & The Kiosk
There's colossal might to a cinematic image achieved through the scrappiest of means.
In the opening narration to his documentary Mon Amour, David Teboul recalls a message that his former lover, Frédéric, sent him in the middle of the night before taking his life: "It's crazy how many things we must invent to keep us from just eating, shitting, and sleeping." The great organizer of these "many things" we invent to convince ourselves to be something more than mere organisms is the belief in love. That, anyway, is the idea that organizes Mon Amour as Teboul travels from his native France to Siberia in order to interview locals about their experiences with love, as a way to mourn the end of his own love story.
What Teboul finds in Siberia is quite disheartening: that love, when it materializes in the figure of the lover, burns fast, and what seemed like a panacea to make our miserable world a livable place turns into the poison we call domesticity. Lovers become enemies we can't get rid of. But the little bit of love that's saved in the ashes of the deflated mirage that once promised to save us is once in a while rekindled through Teboul's prodding as he interviews elderly couples who seem to articulate their feelings for the first time in ages.
The very dispositions of these individuals mimic the abyss between what was once a prospect of a pleasurable life and the crude reality of vodka and violence that replaced it. In the rare moments when someone sings the praises of togetherness, they do so by looking down or away, as if addressing their own partners when speaking about love would mean losing the little bit of honor they have left after putting up with so much betrayal.
Although Teboul interviews young people, too, the strongest portraits are those of the elderly, who, on some level, take advantage of their cinematic moment to air their grievances and, once in a while, admit gratitude. A very old-looking woman in her mid-60s who lost her sight from reading too much Pushkin late at night tells us that any other man would surely have left her long ago, but not her husband, who senses when she's awake in the middle of the night, makes her tea, and tells her that if she dies he will follow her to the grave. Teboul's questions can be refreshingly unexpected. As when he asks the woman what her husband's favorite body part is. When she whispers the answer into his cute little mushroom ears, you sense that it's the closest thing to an "I love you" that he will ever hear. We don't know if his eyes water as she praises his ears, for he looks down and away, before then heart-breakingly saying, "The main thing is not to suffer, and not to make others suffer."
Teboul juxtaposes these portraits with digressions about his simultaneously wonderful and dismal times with Frédéric. These reflections borrow from Hiroshima Mon Amour, which Teboul watched as a child and has haunted him ever since. Frédéric, like Emmanuelle Riva's character in that film, was also from Nevers. In these poetic detours, we see barely lit naked bodies meant to represent Teboul and his ghostly lover, recalling the opening of Alain Resnais's film. It often feels like these autobiographical avowals, plagued by unnecessary classical music, belong to a different film. But they're symbolically important, if not indispensable, as if Teboul was offering a self-implicating gift in exchange for awakening the long dormant intimacies of strangers.
The absence of love, and our insistence on spending our entire lives looking for it anyway, is also at the core of Lynne Sachs's Film About a Father Who. Sheffield Doc/Fest is screening several of Sachs's documentaries on its streaming platform. For Film About a Father Who, Sachs spent over three decades amassing footage (from Super 8 to digital) of her father, an eccentric salesman from Utah who lived a Hugh Hefner kind of life, neglecting his children and hosting a different girlfriend almost every night at his official family home. Lots and lots of them got pregnant, which resulted in Sachs having what feels like hundreds of siblings, whose testimonials she collects here. Some didn't know who their father was until they were adults. Others, in order to protect themselves from so much hurt, still think of him as a kind of godfather.
The title of the film is an obvious play on Film About a Woman Who…, Yvonne Rainer's experimental masterpiece about heteronormativity and monogamy. Rainer's approach is acerbic, perhaps even folkloric, in the sense that her film portrays one specific woman wallowing in the sinking boat of heterosexual coupledom at the same time that it tells the archetypal tale of heterosexual domesticity writ large. Sachs's approach feels a lot less multi-layered. Film About a Father Who is so fast-paced and Sachs's narration so detached, or literal, that it can seem more like an underdeveloped absurdist comedy as random siblings keep turning up out of nowhere to give a brief account of their contradicting feelings toward their father. One of Sachs's many sisters recounts how their father was arrested for possession of weed when they were kids and how she didn't know whether to weep or jump with joy at the time. But the family constellation in Sachs's film is so vast we never spend enough time with any one single relative to see them as something other than an element.
There's a sort of North American pragmatic froideur in the film, also present in self-ethnographic films like Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell, that Rainer queers through stylistic experimentation, and that Teboul completely avoids by surrendering to melancholia with gusto. There isn't much of a point in self-ethnographies where filmmakers protect their vulnerability through intellectualization, or prod their family wounds with a 10-foot pole. At one point in her narration, Sachs tells her audience that Film About a Father Who isn't a portrait but, rather, her attempt to understand "the asymmetry of my conundrum." The film is also shot in such a matter-of-fact manner that you may forget that the father is actually the filmmaker's. It doesn't help that the father himself pleads the fifth on every question and Sachs often directs her camera elsewhere, toward her siblings, instead of letting it linger on the silent and sad remnants of an aging womanizer.
Alexandra Pianelli also captures aging bodies in The Kiosk, but in a very different fashion. Her film was entirely shot on her phone, which was mostly stuck to her head, and without her ever leaving the tiny area behind the cash register of her family's press kiosk in a posh area of Paris. We never see the world outside of Pianelli's field of vision from her counter, and yet it feels like she shows us the entire mechanics of the contemporary world.
The film's subjects are mostly the elderly regulars who seem to show up at the kiosk everyday, for magazines and for Pianelli's company. Pianelli crafts a tale of hopeful pessimism about humans' relationship to otherness by explaining the ecosystem of her trade—namely, the slow decline of the printing industry in France and how the physical circulation of ideas can be the only connection to the world for an aging population that doesn't master digital technology and for whom kiosks play the role of cafés, pubs, or even the analyst's couch.
When filmmaker Pedro Costa said, at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, that all one needs to make a great film is "three flowers and a glass of water," not "money, cars, and chicks," this is what he means: the colossal might of the cinematic image achieved through the scrappiest of means. The Kiosk is a master class in filmmaking resourcefulness. Pianelli paints a portrait of our times through simple drawings that she makes of her clients, makeshift props and miniature sets made out of cardboard, and the anachronic gadgets around her workstation: a cassette tape player, an early-19th-century clock, coin holders that bear her great-grandparents' fingerprints, and the very publications that she sells. Pianelli's no-nonsense voiceover glues these elements together with the stunning honesty of the unflappable young Parisian for whom difference is an existential aphrodisiac. There's no affectedness here. It's as if a refined cinematic object accidently emerged on the road to her making an artisanal project for the sheer pleasure of making something out of dead time.
Pianelli humanizes the figure of the press kiosk clerk who, in turn, humanizes the strangers she comes across, from seniors who spend more time with her than with their own children to the Bangladeshi asylum seeker who goes to her for legal help. In one sequence, Pianelli witnesses a homeless man insistently offering his metro-ticket money to a bourgeois lady upset that the machine won't take her credit card. We also learn that the demographics of the clientele per day of the week is contingent on what kinds of publications come out on which day, as well as which niche newspapers are the most anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, or pro-monarchy.
Pianelli lets the serious emerge but doesn't dwell on it. Seriousness often comes wrapped up in quirkiness and play, as when she plays a guessing game with the audience, telling us what a random customer will buy before they open their months, solely based on what they wear, and always she gets it right. Men in suits and ties go for either the newspaper Le Figaro or Les Echos, while the well-coiffed ladies who don fur coats gravitate toward Voici, unless Kate Moss's ass is on the cover of a nearby fashion magazine.
At one point, Pianelli says that she considers herself a seller of dreams. By this she means that each magazine at the kiosk stokes a different fantasy, from a supermodel body to a nation without Arabs. But The Kiosk makes Pianelli a saleswoman of a very different sort. Instead of working as the intermediary between vulnerable denizens and the idealized images that tease and haunt them, she cobbles a much more original fantasy through the bodies they actually have. The kiosk becomes the prototype for the most utopian vision of the public library, or any old space inhabited by a curious mind—an ebullient infinity of poetry and care.
Sheffield Doc/Fest's online platform will be available to all public audiences from June 10—July 10.
Review: My Spy Is a Clumsy Mix of Comedy, Action, and Romance
Peter Segal's film is pulled in so many different directions that it comes to feel slack.1.5
From Arnold Schwarzenneger in Kindergarten Cop to Dwayne Johnson in The Game Plan, pairing an oversized, hyper-masculine actor with a cute and precocious youngster has long been a staple of Hollywood family-friendly entertainment, as well as something of a rite of passage for action stars since the 1990s. And now, with My Spy, it's Dave Bautista's turn to ward off an array of villains with the help of a spunky, three-foot tall sidekick.
To its credit, Peter Segal's film at least has the decency to cop to its derivativeness throughout, with several shots that cheekily poke fun at characters slow-walking away from explosions and one character calling out how a scene feels eerily similar to the famous fight scene near a propeller plane in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But these occasional self-referential nods prove to be only fleeting distractions from how antiquated and unimaginative My Spy is much of the time, and how clumsily it tends to its mixture of comedy, action, and romance.
The film's mismatched duo consists of nine-year-old Sophie (Chloe Colman) and JJ (Bautista), a C.I.A. operative who's spying on the girl and her mother, Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), with the help of his tech officer, Bobbi (Kristen Schaal). It's all for a good reason, as Sophie's Uncle Marquez (Greg Bryk) not only recently murdered her father, but is now caught up in some shady Russian dealings that have put Sophie and her mother in danger. But these more nefarious threats fade to the background as soon as the film starts to fixate on Sophie's concerns about being the new girl at school, as well as her blackmailing of JJ, which results in the beefcake being uncomfortably forced into the role of surrogate father.
Given that JJ is still reeling from his prior overseas combat experience and Kate is coping with the fresh challenges of single motherhood and a time-consuming job, My Spy too readily foreshadows their later romantic entanglement. And while Bautista and Fitz-Henley share a charming, easy repartee, and Coleman has impressive comic timing for a child actor, the film is pulled in so many different directions that it comes to feel slack. JJ's efforts alone are split three ways, as he's not only dealing with becoming a long-term father figure to Sophie and partner to Kate, both of whom force him to confront his trauma, but he's also stuck with Bobbi, who hero-worships him and wants to learn all his tricks of the trade.
And that is to say nothing of the half-baked subplot involving the Russian crooks (Vieslav Krystyan and Jean-Michel Nadeau), or the gay couple (Devere Rogers and Noah Dalton Danby) that appears to have stumbled in from the set of a '90s sitcom. Schaal's unrestrained zaniness ensures that a few jokes land here and there, but My Spy is ultimately sunk by a reliance on clichéd character types—the emotionally distant vet, the overworked single mom, the isolated new kid at school—that leaves it feeling like several mildly amusing after-school specials were stitched together with a handful of action scenes tossed in for good measure.
Cast: Dave Bautista, Chloe Coleman, Parisa Fitz-Henley, Kristen Schaal, Greg Bryk, Ken Jeong, Nicola Correia-Damude, Devere Rogers, Noah Dalton Danby Director: Peter Segal Screenwriter: Erich Hoeber, Jon Hoeber Distributor: Amazon Studios Running Time: 101 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2020
Review: The Audition Grapples with the Consequences of Oppressive Discipline
With great clarity, the film conveys how discipline can be directed both inward and outward.3
A film about the oppressive discipline of classical musicianship, Ina Weisse's The Audition recalls The Piano Teacher, only with the erotic grotesqueries dialed all the way down. Nina Hoss, like Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke's film, plays a middle-aged music teacher whose fragile sense of self becomes entwined with a new student. Here, though, the student isn't a peer but a young high school violinist, Alexander (Ilja Monti), and her projections onto him, mercifully, are more about her own perceived failures than any shameful sexual hang-ups. Even if it takes us to some rather dark places, Weisse's spin on the tortured psyche of a professional female musician is more humanistic than Haneke's.
Weisse, a violinist herself, clearly knows the pressures of high-caliber musicianship. The film aptly opens with an audition in which we see the impassive administrators of a Berlin youth conservatory, including Anna (Hoss), evaluating young teens taking turns playing orchestral instruments on stage. Although each of them has prepared multiple pieces to play, the judges consistently cut them off moments through their first piece—an unforgiving intimidation tactic that introduces us to the film's portrait of music education as a regime of oppression.
Anna's cold exterior is momentarily broken by Alexander's audition, which, however much his performance of a difficult piece by Édouard Lalo moves her, fails to fully impress her colleagues. Gradually we learn that Alexander's visible nervousness is part of what draws her to him, as Anna suffers from a nervous condition that led her to retire from an orchestra and become an instructor, and continues to manifest itself in a daily inability to make decisions, as in an early scene in which she repeatedly changes orders and then tables when out to dinner with her husband, Philippe (Simon Abkarian). "Whenever I play, I'm thinking of how I'll fail," she later confesses to Christian (Jens Albinus), a colleague with whom she's having an affair.
Anna takes Alexander on as her student, to prepare him for their school's intermediate exam—also referred to in the dialogue as an audition. The film's German title, Das Vorspiel, has two meanings—"audition" and "prologue"—and most of Weisse and Daphne Carizani's screenplay, in fact, could be seen as a kind of prologue, centered around the series of rehearsals preceding Alexander's big performance for the conservatory, tracking their gradual devolution into punishing routines. Anna begins directing her own self-punishing thoughts onto the vulnerable young boy, at one point forcibly clipping his fingernails.
The filmmakers let us into Anna's life through compact scenes that often open in media res, or end abruptly in the midst of a character's movement. It's a subtle way of communicating the anxiety encroaching on the order of Anna's world. Glimpses of Philippe, a luthier who runs a shop below their apartment, handling her with kids' gloves, and of her son Jonas's (Serafin Mishiev) neutral responses to her presence, come to be emplaced within the atmosphere of alienation that Anna's unraveling sense of discipline has produced. Anna, of course, knows that her insecurities themselves actually lie at the root of the problems in her life—a neurotic feedback loop of inner despair that Hoss captures wordlessly in her performance as a woman who puts on an increasingly fractured stone face for the outside world.
Discipline can be directed both inward and outward, as personal rigor or as interpersonal punitiveness. Anna has been raised in a culture of self-discipline, as a line from her father (Thomas Thieme) intimates. "Your mother always saw her illness as a lack of discipline," he reminds Anna, a recollection that neatly sums up the cultural and possible genetic roots of her issues. The Audition is about the relation between those inward and outward senses of discipline, as the strict self-control that Anna has internalized cracks, turns outward in imperious, borderline violent behavior, and eventually shatters.
It all builds toward a tragic conclusion that may have better served the narrative by letting the consequences of Anna's unglamorous breakdown remain as understated as Hoss's captivating performance. Nevertheless, The Audition captures with clarity an irony at the base of accomplished musical expression: the conflict between interiority and imposed technique, which can be fraught with repressed frustration and resentment.
Cast: Nina Hoss, Simon Abkarian, Jens Albinus, Ilja Monti, Serafin Mischiev, Thomas Thieme Director: Ina Weisse Screenwriter: Ina Weisse, Daphne Carizani Distributor: Strand Releasing Running Time: 90 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
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You know I can't help but like Star Wars. Even with the new stuff, I watch it. Recently, I was watching the Clone Wars cartoon and noticed something odd about the way R2-D2 flies. I know what you are saying...."the odd thing is that he flies at all. Why didn't he fly in episodes 4-6?" Who knows. Here is the best image I could get of R2-D2 flying (from wookieepedia).
What is wrong? Well, maybe you can't tell from the image I posted. Here is a diagram of flying R2-D2.
If R2 (I can call him that because we are good friends) was flying like that, why would that be a problem? That would be a problem if he was going at a constant speed. I re watched the end of Clone Wars (the movie) and it seems like R2 is flying at a constant speed. Why is that problem? Let me draw a free body diagram.
If I assume that R2 is flying horizontally at a constant velocity, and the the "thrust" is at an angle theta from the vertical then:
I guess I should say I am using g as the local gravitational field for whatever planet he (R2) is on. Is R2 even a he? Maybe R2 is a she. I don't know. The point is that the vertical component of the thrust must equal the vertical component of the gravitational force. So what you say? Well, that leaves the horizontal component of the thrust so that the net force in the horizontal direction is:
Obviously I have missed the air resistance force on R2 while he is flying. That is what makes the net horizontal force zero, right? Well, let us calculate this. First, some assumptions (or maybe starting declarations):
- I would assume the world is like Earth because they seem to jump like a person on Earth. Needless, I will call the local gravitational field g.
- Also, I will assume other things are like the Earth. Most importantly, the density of air (I will call rho) - if it is even air.
- I am not sure what the air drag coefficient for R2 is, but I will call this C. I assume this value will be somewhere between a brick and a sphere.
- Let me call R2's linear speed v. This will need to be estimated later.
- I will need to estimate three things about R2, its mass ( m ) volume ( V ) and cross section area in the direction of motion ( A ).
- Finally, I need to know R2's thruster angle. I will call this angle theta from the vertical.
If R2 is moving at a constant velocity, then the forces in the x (horizontal) and y (vertical) directions will be zero. I will assume there is air resistance in the horizontal direction, and I will use the following model for the magnitude of air resistance:
So, the x- and y-direction equations for force are:
I will solve the y-equation for Fthrust and put that into the x-equation. Doing this, I get:
Let me tell you where I am going. If R2 is firing is thrusters a little forward and moving at a constant speed then I suspect R2 has a very low density and the thrusters are not pushing very hard. So, from the above stuff, I will solve for the mass.
Here are my estimations (you are welcome to come up with your own):
- rho = 1.2 kg/m3
- Area: Wookieepedia says that R2 is 0.96 meters tall. Using tracker video on an image of R2, I am going to approximate it as a rectangle that is 0.42 meters by 0.62 meters for an area of 0.26 m2
- Wikipedia lists the drag coefficient for a smooth sphere as 0.1. It has a smooth brick with a coefficient of 2.1. A skier has a coefficient of 1.0. Wikipedia does not list the drag coefficient for R2, but a value of around 1.0 seems reasonable.
- For the velocity, I took it a little far. I was just going to ballpark guess at his speed, but I didn't. I used Tracker to look at R2's motion in Clone Wars where he flies to rescue Padme. From this, I get a speed of 2.3 m/s.
- I already said I would assume Earth-like gravity. So, g will be 9.8 N/kg
- Theta is about 35 degrees (although it could be as high as 45 degrees).
Using these values, the mass of R2 is 0.1 kg. Yes, 100 grams. How do I know I am correct? I know because Wookieepedia doesn't list R2's mass or weight. They know it is silly, so they left it off.
If this mass is so low, I think R2 doesn't even need thrusters. He would just float (which would actually change my calculations above - I left off the buoyancy force). By my estimations, R2 is about .42 meters in diameter. This would put its volume at about 0.1 m3 and R2's density would be:
I was originally thinking that maybe R2 was made of styrofoam - but that has a density of about 40 kg/m3. So there.
Pre-emptive comment
I know someone is going to say "hey, chill man! It is just a movie. Don't ruin it by bringing in all your physics stuff." My reply, someone has already ruined the Star Wars movies, his name is George. Just kidding, I still like Star Wars.
There were two questions in the comments that I addressed in a second post. The first question: Was R2 flying at a constant speed - I included the data. Second: what was the angle of the thrusters.


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The main thing about Cobh is its history. It was here that the RMS Titanic and hundreds of other liners and famine ships made their last stop before America
As you sail into Cobh, you'll pass by Spike Island to your left in what is the second largest natural harbour in the world. As a former prison, monastery and British fort, the island languishes under a curious and turbulent history.
Up on a hilly rise, the peaks and points of Cobh's Gothic Cathedral stand guard over the town. A line of rainbow houses shines along the seafront, a signal to anyone arriving that this is a colourful place.
History is all over the promenade, from the battered White Star Line pier to the statue of Annie Moore – the first immigrant to be processed through Ellis Island in New York. In charge of her two younger brothers, Annie was only 14 at the time.
The sailing
Cork locals are rarely stuck for words. With that in mind, local sailing enthusiast and yacht master instructor of SailCork, Eddie English, explains what makes sailing in Cobh worthwhile.
"Sailing has carried on in this corner of Cork harbour for 350 years, and it's one of the world's finest natural harbours with 250km of coastline. No matter where the wind blows from, we can find a sheltered area to sail in. This makes it safe and comfortable for beginners.
"The more experienced sailors who want thrills and spills can venture out a little further and find plenty of breeze!"
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Craic and quiet
According to Eddie, the atmosphere in this part of the world is unique: "The craic (fun) is MIGHTY! There are regattas or festivals in some corner of the harbour almost every weekend from May to September.
"There are at least a dozen landing points that have a 'watering hole' on the spot, and several excellent restaurants that can be accessed by water. Sailing races take place from April to December and racing is always great fun. SailCork takes part in several races."
But what attracts Eddie most to sailing at Cobh? "My favourite detail is that I can sail from one little place to another within the harbour and that there are places where you can find peace and solitude.
"Each different place is a different world. Sailing from our base at East Ferry in Cobh to Aghada just over a mile away is like going to a different planet. The people have different accents, the culture is different – it's a great transformation."
Don't forget to drop your anchor with us in Ballycastle, Dun Laoghaire and Strangford Lough, too.
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There's a bit of the multitasker about Ballycastle, and the pretty harbour appeals to sailing enthusiasts and holidaymakers...
You can tell Dún Laoghaire is a sailing hotspot even with your eyes closed. How? By listening to that soft flapping...
As harbour gems go, Strangford twinkles brightly. The harbour may be on the modest side, but that's exactly what works...
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A new study conducted by enterprise IT management company CA and the National Cyber Security Alliance as part of National Cyber Security Awareness Month raises some questions about how careful users of social networking sites are. According to the study, 83 percent of adults on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace admit to downloading unknown files from user profiles, despite not being sure about their contents.
Social networking site members are also putting themselves at risk of identity theft, according to the CA/NCSA study. 74 percent have willingly given out personal information on the Internet, which seems high until you consider that the study's definition of personal information includes e-mail addresses. Still, the fact that people willingly provide their Social Security Numbers and other information they really shouldn't be sharing is alarming.
Contrary to the expectations of CA and the NCSA, they found that almost half of the respondents using social networking sites were adults between the ages of 18 and 34. That finding may hold some implications for corporate IT departments, as 46 percent of those surveyed said they visit such sites from the office, which could leave corporate PCs and networks vulnerable to malware found there.
Malware authors have recently discovered that social networking sites are fertile fields for their malicious payloads. In July, a banner ad exploiting a known .wmf image file vulnerability appeared on MySpace and a handful of other sites. Although the ads were quickly removed once they were discovered by MySpace adminsand MySpace is generally very quick to respond to reports of malicious codethe potential for future malware attacks is strong.
"As social networking use continues to increase in popularity it is imperative that people take steps to safeguard their information at home and at work," said David Luft, Senior Vice President of Product Development for CA. "Not only is it important to install and frequently update firewalls, antispyware and antivirus software, users must be aware of the specific unsafe behaviors which make them vulnerable to online predators, hackers and thieves."
We call that "skeptical computing" here at Ars. When faced with strange-looking links, instant messages from folks one has never heard of before, and unexpected requests for personal information, users need to think twice before they respond. Sometimes, a little bit of common sense goes a long way.


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Steven Tisdale in Forsyth County jail
Tisdale accused of killing partner in Pfafftown
A man accused in the slaying death of his partner is in jail in Forsyth County and has made his first court appearance.
Steven Tisdale was booked early Friday morning, according to the Forsyth County Jail. He was arrested in Las Vegas last month.
He is accused of killing his partner, Robert Tisdale, inside their home in Pfafftown in February. Tisdale is also charged with embezzlement in an unrelated case. He's being held in jail on a $500,000 bond on the embezzlement charge.
Tisdale has been charged with first-degree murder, according to Forsyth County Chief Deputy Brad Stanley. He's being held without bond on the murder charge. Tisdale was in court Friday on the embezzlement charge and will be in court in early April on the murder charge.
He was brought back to North Carolina Thursday night on a plane that landed in Lexington, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.


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Some parents angry they were not notified of the crypto outbreak
Some parents are angry they were not notified immediately of the crypto outbreak.
Cumberland Elementary School has several confirmed cases of crypto. Parents at the school were notified by the North Shore Health Department.
However, other parents with children in Whitefish Bay schools had no idea about the outbreak. They said that was unacceptable.
Amy Westrup said she learned about the crypto outbreak from friends instead of an official alert from the Village of Whitefish Bay late Friday evening.
"I'm sure that they don't want to alarm people, I get that," she said. "But then don't only send the letter to only one school or just the public schools. We did not get any notification."
Westrup's children attend Holy Family, a private Catholic school located near Cumberland Elementary.
Tree of Life Daycare in Whitefish Bay is the only other location that was notified. They have three cases.
Westrup said children from all Whitefish Bay Schools interact with each other in some way through extracurricular activities.
"All of the kids in the public schools, we all hang out together. We all live in the same neighborhoods," Westrup said. "I cannot imagine why they wouldn't have notified everyone."
Other parents said they are concerned about how contagious crypto is and are wondering about the source of the outbreak.
Mike Sherlock knows all too well how sick someone can get from crypto. He had it the last time the area experienced an outbreak.
"It lasted a little while and it's not something you want to wish on anybody," Sherlock said.
Parents said they were going to make sure their children wash their hands more frequently and use bottled water temporarily, even though the Health Department said water is not the outbreak's source. Parents said they would rather be extra careful.


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