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Congratulations to Karen Lozano!!!
Help us congratulate Karen Lozano for winning our Monthly contest for August 2011: Disneyland Getaway Package! She will be getting two tickets to Disneyland for the whole day, two free night stay at Irvine Suites, and two free shirts! Please check out our monthly giveaway contest at www.HeritageHotelGroup.com/giveaway/
Karen likes running! She just ran a 100 Mile Endurance Run and she recently won first place in her age group. She's also a first grade teacher and said that she's very excited to win the tickets to Disneyland!


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iluvk9 wrote:TheRedQueen wrote:And Joyce...Rip has been getting awful sugary crap treats to take his thyroid meds in the morning...first thing that's worked reliably. I figure if he's gotten to 13 with only minor issues, this isn't gonna kill him!
My Vet laughs when I tell him I have to sneak the crappy dog food to the check out line. And he said the same thing..."some people feed Mighty Dog and their dogs live to 15."
The only way Birdie will cooperate with a nail trimming is if I give her milkway candy bars. It is the only way that she will sit, give me a paw and let me clip a nail without a struggle, needing to restrain her or paying someone else to do it. Seriously.
I divide the small bite sized square ones into 4 pieces, she gets one piece per nail. I've tried just about everything, bacon, bologna, cheese, hot dogs, roast beast, steak and even ice cream. She'll only cooperate for a bite of milkway candy bar.
Nuts, I tell you, nuts.

subset: commoncrawl


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Members of the Houma Lions Club are selling raffle tickets for $1.
Members of the Houma Lions Club are selling raffle tickets for $1. There are more than 49 prizes to win, including ruby and diamond earrings, a cypress ring and a Harley-Davidson ring. If you would like to buy tickets, call Becky at 855-3741.
Officials with First Presbyterian Church of Houma, 414 Barrow St., are collecting new shoes for its annual Shoes for Orphan Souls drive. Shoes for Orphan Souls, a ministry of Buckner International, distributes shoes to orphans around the world. Shoes can be delivered to the church from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays or Fridays. For information, call the church at 873-8136 or visit www.shoesfororphanssouls.org.
The Terrebonne Parish Consolidated Government's Head Start program is accepting applications for children from low-income families for the 2012-13 school year. Children must be 3 by Sept. 30 in order to be age eligible for the program. For information, call 580-7273.
Library news: The Gibson library, 6363 S. Bayou Black Drive, is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. The library is closed on Saturdays and Sundays. For information, call 575-2639.
Gym news: Zumba classes are scheduled for Monday and Wednesday nights at the Bayou Black Recreation Center, 3688 Southdown Mandalay Road. Classes cost $24 per month. For information, call 876-4270.
The Bayou Black Recreation Center has a fitness studio that consists of an elliptical trainer, treadmills, a bicycle and a weight station. The cost is $40 per year.
A garage sale is scheduled from 7 a.m. till Saturday at the Bayou Black Recreation Center. If you are interested in renting a booth, call Melissa at 876-4270.
Computers and printers are available for school projects from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays at the Bayou Black Recreation Center. Children under 16 must be accompanied by a parent.
Homework help is available for first- through 12th-graders from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays at the gym. Tutoring runs according to the school calendar.
The 50s Plus luncheon is held once a month at the gym. Anyone 50 or older can attend. For information, call 876-4270.
Church news: St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church's Ladies Altar Society is collecting dues for 2013. Anyone wishing to join the organization is welcome. Active and inactive memberships are available. The group meets once a month at 10 a.m. the second Wednesday of the month in the church's community center. The duties of the Altar Society are cleaning linens and candle holders and purchasing host and other needed items. The society's money comes from dues, sanctuary lamps, donations, and if additional money is needed, the group holds bake sales or dinners. The group spends an hour from 1 to 2 p.m. Thursdays in the adoration chapel praying a Rosary and praying for the sick of the parish, for the dying and for the problems of the community. You may purchase a sanctuary lamp in memory of deceased love ones for a week. The cost is $3.
If you want to receive a copy of the 2012 contributions, call the church at 872-0922 with your name and address.
Mass is scheduled for 6:30 a.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church during Lent. Way of the Cross is scheduled for 6 p.m. Fridays during Lent.
A pizza and movie social for all 10- to 17-year-old boys sponsored by St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church Squires is scheduled from 4 to 8 p.m. March 19 in the church's community center, 3897 Bayou Black Drive.
St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church is in need of kindergarten, sixth- and seventh-grade CCD teachers for the 2012-13 school year. If you are interested, call the church office at 872-0922.
St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church needs two Eucharistic ministries to serve the needs of the homebound once a week on a rotation basis and three groups of parishioners to cook for the families of the deceased. They could use your help. If you want to volunteer, call 872-0922.
Altar flowers can be ordered in memory of your loved ones by calling the office at 872-0922. Church officials order flowers for you according to the liturgical season for a donation of $100.
Officials with St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church are looking for volunteers to bring Communion to the homebound from the church to the north toward Gibson. If you feel you can help or if you need information, call the church office at 872-0922.
Get well wishes are extended to Juanita Trahan, Sister Miriam Mire, Marie Gros, the Rev. Gerard Hayes, Leona Breaux and Clyde Bergeron.
If anyone notices that someone has passed away who is in the birthday list or a couple has divorced that is in the anniversary list, call 872-1053.
Registration for Vandebilt Catholic High School's 2013-14 school year continues through today. For information, call the school at 876-2551. You can pick up applications from the school office, 209 S. Hollywood Road, Houma.
A six-session course on liturgy taught by the Rev. Josh Rodrigue is scheduled from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. March 6, 13, 20, April 10, 17 and 24 at the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux's Pastoral Center, 2779 La. 311, Schriever. To register, call the diocese's Office of Religious Education at 850-3144 at least two weeks before classes begin. The cost is $20 plus books.
Birthdays: Ruby LeBouef, Bryan Lejaunie, Daniel Foster, March 6; Ronnie Neal, Brandon Giroir, Octaiva Williams, March 7; Winnie Theriot, Donnie Bourg, Randy LaJaunie, Austin Price, Andrew Boudreaux, Madison Boudreaux, March 8; R.J. Giroir, James Dudek, March 9; Patti Bergeron, Bobby Thibodeaux, March 10; Roy Breaux, L.J. Blanchard, Ralph Guidry, Kerry Banes, Betty Louviere and Henry Stein, March 11.
Anniversaries: Burnell and Mary Beth Clement, March 7; and Mr. and Mrs. Steve Arceneaux, March 10.


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AJ Promotions are currently running a model search, in search of their Face of AJ Promotions. The Top 6 finalists have been chosen and now it's up to the public to vote for their favorite model. The judges will have the final call, based on public votes, and the winner will take home prizes to the value of R15 000. ...Read More »
Home » Tag Archives: JSM Lingerie


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Camping.se uses cookies for statistics, marketing purposes and to give you the best experience when using our website. Here you can read more about how we handle cookies
Sysslebäcks Fiskecamping is located in a calm and scenic environment beside the river Klarälven.A wilderness area with a wide variety of fish. Here you can fish for grayling and salmon trout in the river as well as pike, perch and salmon trout in our lakes. We can meet all your needs when it comes to fishing.At the campsite are cottages, reception with kiosk and basic foodstuffs, group accommodation, grill cottage, indoor swimming pool with sauna and solarium. You can hire a canoe, play tennis, mini golf, football, hike along the first-rate trails, visit Värmland's highest mountain Granbergstoppen 700.5 m above sea level and see the breathtaking panorama from the observation tower. Or visit a mountain pasture or a Finnish farm). You can go into the woods and pick cloudberries or lingonberries.In the Sysslebäck area you can get a guided fishing tour, go on moose or beaver safari, visit the Hunting and Fishing Museum, local arts and crafts centre or ride/build a raft, go white water rafting on the river and much, much more.
Adapted for disabled people
Credit cards accepted
Baby changing room
Dogs welcome
Beach and bathing
Conference facilities
Supervised children's activities
Convenience store
Wi-Fi/Wireless Internet
Open full service
Youth hostel
Number of pitches 115
Number of cottages 19
Seasonal pitches 20
Sysslebäcks Fiskecamping is located in a quiet and scenic location next to River Klarälven. The campsite is located in a wilderness area and is open all the year round.
The youth hostel consists of 2 x 2-bed and 4 x 4-bed rooms (bunk beds). Communal TV, separate women and men's showers, WC and kitchen/dining room in the corridor.
Sysslebäcks Fiskecamping & Stugby offers cottages for rent all the year round. There are both fully equipped cottages with shower and WC, as well as more basic cabins with WC but without shower.All cottages have a patio or veranda. The service building is adjacent to the cottages and has showers, disabled WC, etc.
Alpine ski facilities
Ball games
Boat hire
Indoor pool
Canoe hire
Children's pool
Cross-country skiing
Drying facilities
Quick stop
Microwave oven
Washing machine
Waste disposal site for fixed tanks
Sysslebäcks Fiskecamping & Stugby
Badhusvägen 2, 680 60 Sysslebäck
Telephone: 0564-105 14
Fax: 0564-101 96
Site no.: S36
Area: Värmland
Campsite's website
Send email
© Camping.se. Made in Sweden.


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GREENBURGH, N.Y., May 2 (UPI) -- New York Knicks forward Amare Stoudemire said Wednesday he didn't intentionally punch the glass case of a fire extinguisher in anger as reported.
Stoudemire said at the Knicks' practice facility media accounts he intentionally smashed his fist through glass in frustration following a loss in Monday's Game 2 of the Eastern Conference first-round series against the Heat were erroneous.
The incident at American Airlines Arena in Miami resulted in lacerations to Stoudemire's left hand, which will force him to miss Thursday's Game 3, in which New York will try to rally from an 0-2 series deficit.
"The fire extinguisher door was 85 percent metal and 2 percent glass, or whatever," he told The New York Times. "I swung my arm backward. It wasn't like I had a closed fist and punched the glass. I was frustrated that we were down 0-2 and I was trying to make some noise, not injure myself.
"When I saw that my hand was cut, I was like, What? I was very upset and upset with myself. But never in a million years did I think I would cut my hand."


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California Department of Transportation
Date: July 5, 2012
District: 1 - Eureka
Contact: Scott Burger
Phone: (707) 441-3998
Caltrans Awards $48.5 Million for Safe Routes to School
to Increase Safety and Health
EURAKA - Caltrans today awarded $48.5 million of state Safe Routes to School Program funds for 139 projects to increase safety and help reduce injuries and fatalities among children in grades K-12 who walk and bicycle to school.
"Safety is Caltrans' number one priority," said Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty. "We are committed to providing the highest safety possible for our children as they travel to and from school in California."
Among the state-funded projects are new sidewalks, bicycle lanes, and other safety improvements. Caltrans chose each project based upon need, effectiveness, and how quickly it could be delivered. By improving safety, more kids are encouraged to walk and bicycle to school, resulting in healthier children while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle congestion.
More than $7 million of the funds were awarded to critical safety projects in rural counties. In addition, 82 projects totaling $28 million will create jobs and benefit at least one low-income school within each project.
Some of the notable local projects that received funding include:
- Humboldt County - $300,000 to construct a raised crosswalk, raised medians, sidewalks and curbs near Grant Elementary School and McKinleyville High School.
- Humboldt County - $152,000 to construct sidewalks, and install crosswalks, in-pavement crosswalk lighting, LED signs, and pavement markings near Eagle Prairie Elementary School and Monument Middle School.
- Lake County - $188,300 to construct sidewalks and curbs, and upgrade crosswalks near Burns Valley Elementary School and Pomo Elementary School.
- Lake County - $346,900 to construct sidewalks and curb ramps, and install crosswalks near Kelseyville Elementary School and Mountain Vista Middle School.
- Mendocino County - $394,500 to construct sidewalks and curbs, and install bike lanes near Calpella Elementary School and The Waldorf School of Mendocino County.
To date, the state and federal Safe Routes to School programs have awarded $472 million for safety projects around California's schools.
To view the entire list of SRTS projects that received funding, click here.
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Gun Cleaning Kit In Plastic Box
Plastic carrying case containing three-piece wooden rod, split jag, wool mop, phosphor-bronze brush, gun oil, barrel cleaner, CCL stock conditioning oil and cloth. UK thread size.
- Delivery Information
We use DPD/Interlink Express Couriers or Royal Mail for all our parcels.
FREE STANDARD DELIVERY - on all orders £50 and over
£2.95 - Orders under £50 2-3 day standard delivery for the UK & Channel Islands (Guernsey & Jersey)
£4.95 - Next working day delivery - for the UK & Channel Islands (Guernsey & Jersey) - Order must be placed by 1pm (Orders placed after 1pm on Thursday and before 1pm on Friday will be delivered on Monday)
£7.95 - Saturday Delivery - for the UK & Channel Islands (Guernsey & Jersey) - Order must be placed by 1pm on Friday
£20 - Rest of the European Union - Standard Delivery
£30 - North America (United States & Canada) - Standard Delivery
£25 - Rest Of The World - Standard Delivery
* Rest Of The World refers to Australia, China, Iceland, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Africa and Switzerland.
If your country does not appear on the above list please contact us at email@example.com or on +44(0)1488 682885 before placing your order.
We will endeavour to arrange delivery of your goods as economically as possible, for example if your goods exceed 2kg, we will split products into separate packages where it is possible to do so.
Weekends and bank holidays are not classed as working days. Some items may require a higher shipping charge. In this instance we will notify you either by email or telephone and wait for your confirmation to proceed. All orders require a signature upon receipt. Any duty or taxes incurred in the country of destination are the sole responsibility of the customer.


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A freeze on a Transportation Security Administration program to privatize airport screening services will preserve job opportunities for federal workers and keep passengers safe, according to union leaders.
TSA Administrator John Pistole said on Friday the agency would not accept new applications from private companies to participate in its Screening Partnership Program, which allows airports to opt out of using TSA employees. Currently, 16 airports across the country use private screeners.
According to National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley, Pistole's decision keeps the work in the hands of federal employees rather than outsourcing it to private contractors.
"NTEU has always argued that there is core work in every agency that is inherently governmental," Kelley said. "That has always been our argument about airport security workers."
Kelley has actively opposed the privatization program, saying it does not save money, and could cause a loss of expertise and professionalism and open up an airport to potential liability issues. After Charlotte-Douglas International Airport Aviation Director Jerry Orr in North Carolina talked about privatization, Kelley in a December 2010 letter criticized negative comments made about federal employees and urged Orr to commend TSA screeners for their work.
"The nation is secure in the sense that the safety of our skies will not be left in the hands of the lowest-bidder contractor, as it was before 9/11" said American Federation of Government Employees National President John Gage. "We applaud Administrator Pistole for recognizing the value in a cohesive federalized screening system and workforce."
Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, however, criticized Pistole's decision to end the privatization program. Mica has been vocal about the need to reform TSA's workforce and procedures.
"It's unimaginable that TSA would suspend the most successfully performing passenger screening program we've had over the last decade," he said. "The agency should concentrate on cutting some of the more than 3,700 administrative personnel in Washington who concocted this decision, and reduce the army of TSA employees that has ballooned to more than 62,000."
According to Kelley, TSA was created to provide the best possible transportation security system for the traveling public, and privatization would only hinder that mission.


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Why companies need a new approach to acquiring non-traditional, digitally oriented targets
Companies across industries are rethinking their M&A strategy to ramp up their competitive agility. But while large companies know they need to acquire digital capabilities, they struggle to get it right. They are still playing by traditional M&A rules for pursuing big targets, the "mammoths." In doing so, they risk losing the fight for innovative digital companies, the "rabbits." The fact is, acquiring and unlocking value from these new targets is a different ballgame. Large companies must develop a new M&A strategy—across target screening, transaction and integration management—that's more in tune with how these targets do business if they want to flex their competitive agility.READ THE REPORT [PDF]


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The Fix: March 13, 2011 - March 19, 2011
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Summer of '87: The Monster Squad: Wolfman's Got Nards!
Universal Pictures turns 100 this year. Back when they were 75, their famous monsters returned to the screen courtesy of Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad. Dekker and co-screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) resurrect Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Wolf Man, The Mummy and The Creature from the Black Lagoon for 1980's audiences. Thankfully, they don't give them standard '80s operating protocol (machine guns, one-liners). Outside of some serious no-no language from Dracula, and an added feature to the Wolf Man, Black and Dekker keep the proceedings retro. The monsters retain their old-school appearance, subtly updated by makeup guru, Stan Winston.
The filmmakers love their source material. One can imagine the human aspects of The Monster Squad as some form of semi-autobiographical recollection. A group of young boys have a club devoted to old Monster movies. Though it's 1987, these kids are mostly focused on the pre-slasher days. Jason and Freddy are nowhere to be found, though at some point, there's mention of Groundhog Day 12. One can only hope the axe murderer slashing his way through this series turns out to be Bill Murray.
While our band of brothers has the usual suspects (adventurous leader, requisite fat kid, annoying runt who wants to join the group), The Monster Squad can't help but add a little fantasy to its motley crew. The coolest teenage rebel in the neighborhood expresses interest in joining this Geek Squad. The leader, Sean (Andre Gower), asks Rudy (Ryan Lambert) questions pertaining to the monsters he'll encounter later. Rudy aces the test, though there is some question about the ways to kill a werewolf. Rudy's reward for being in the treehouse of a bunch of pre-pubescent kids is an unobstructed view of the exhibitionist sister of one of the Squad members.
Squad borrows a page from 1948's Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. In that film, Bela Lugosi's Dracula plans to resurrect Frankenstein's Monster and take over the world. Lon Chaney's Wolf Man enlists Bud and Lou to help him stop Drac's evil plan. The Monster Squad follows a similar plotline, complete with Wolfie issuing his dire warnings, but the true ally here is the Monster. In a minor bit of inspired casting, Frankenstein's monster is played by writer-director Tom Noonan. Noonan fills the role of yet another standard '80s preteen movie staple, the gentle mutant. Frankie's creation is just Sloth from The Goonies with more personality. There's a sweetness to his interactions with 6-year old actress Ashley Bank.
The Monster Squad begins with an opening scroll, which talks about "a time when Dr. Abraham Van Helsing and a small band of freedom fighters conspired to rid the world of vampires and monsters…and to save mankind from the forces of evil…" The scroll pauses a bit, then informs us that "they blew it." Blame the magical amulet, created by Richard Edlund and his visual effects team. Activated by a virgin's spoken words, the amulet opens a portal that will pull anyone and anything evil in its path into Limbo. Van Helsing's discovers in his research that the amulet, though technically indestructible, can be shattered once every 100 years. If destroyed, the forces of evil will take over. Unaware of how powerful it is, Van Helsing and a slew of the undead are accidentally sucked into the amulet's black hole.
Fast-forward a hundred years to 1987. With Van Helsing doing the Limbo Rock, Drac is free to obtain the amulet and destroy it. He rallies the aforementioned troops and literally descends upon the same town that houses both The Monster Squad and the amulet. While being transferred via plane, Drac and his packages fall through the cargo bay and into a lake. Also present in the lake is the Creature from the Black La—I mean, whatever this body of water is called.
Meanwhile, strange things are happening in town. At the museum, the priceless mummy exhibit mysteriously walks off without notifying museum security. A crazed man (Jon Gries) barges into the police station proclaiming to be a werewolf. He's temporarily shot dead, resurrected by the moon and Drac's call to arms. All interested parties meet at 666 Shadowview Lane, where the amulet is hidden, though they have no idea how to use it. All our Universal monsters report to a revamped vampire who looks, so help me God, like Mitt Romney.
Our human heroes have their own problems. Horace (Brent Chalem), aka "Fat Kid," has to deal with The Wonder Years' Jason Hervey bullying him. Sean's 5-year old sister, Phoebe (Ashley Bank) keeps trying to join the all male Squad. Eugene (David Faustino's brother Michael) has a monster in his closet (he wisely contacts the Army about this via a note written on Kindergarten-style paper. They show up.). And Sean's priceless copy of Van Helsing's diary is written in German, rendering it unreadable by anyone but the Scary German Guy (Leonardo Cimino) who freaks out the neighborhood kids. Count Mittens wants that book—it's the instruction manual for the amulet—and he'll do anything to get it.
On the Night of the Creeps DVD, Dekker says he and Black collaborated on the screenplay while at UCLA. This explains why our heroes have a frat-boy attitude despite their average age of 13. These kids jockey for position and goof off even in the face of danger. They constantly refer to people with less than polite nicknames. They taunt each other by saying "faggot" a lot, which is either piss-poor screenwriting or a wink toward just how homoerotic their Squad really is. Girls aren't allowed, and while Rudy is staring at the topless Emily from the gang's treehouse, at least one of those boys is staring at the leather clad Rudy. You can wring a lot from some un-PC language and close male camaraderie!
The filmmakers wring even more out of '80s film clichés, including Edlund's effects and the soundtrack. Michael Sembello, formerly of both Stevie Wonder's band and the Flashdance soundtrack, sings to us about "rocking til you drop" and "dancing 'til your feet fall off." It's so goofy, so 1987 that I had to repeatedly watch the (standard '80s issue) weapons-making montage to hear it. Sean's homemaker Mom and cop dad's marital problems are touched upon, and the lone Black face in the film is, in true horror movie fashion, sent to his death. When Count Mittens blows up Black actor Stan Shaw's police car with a stick of dynamite, I immediately thought "well that's one way he can win a Presidential debate…"
I liked The Monster Squad better when I first saw it. Unlike Dekker's masterpiece, Night of the Creeps (which I covered here last year) its allure must have worn off as I aged. Still, I was engaged during this viewing, and there are nostalgic touches I still enjoyed: Frankenstein's first encounter with Phoebe pays homage to the tragic little girl scene from the 1931 classic. A candle designed to "ward off monsters" conveniently goes out just before the climactic attack. A drinking game can be made from the blatant product placement of Burger King and Pepsi. The closing credits rap song is even worse than the one in Dragnet. And Fat Kid does what no one else ever considered in a werewolf movie: He kicks the monster in the nuts. As the monster stoops in pain, the late Chalem utters the film's most quoted line:
"Wolfman's got nards!"
So does The Monster Squad, though they're not as big as I remembered.
The Odienator's got nards too. Sometimes he uses 'em at Roger Ebert's Demanders Blog, Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness.
Review: The Perfection Walks Impersonally Though a Labyrinth of Gimmicks
The crazier Richard Shepard's film gets, the more routine and mechanical it comes to feel.2.5
Richard Shepard's The Perfection is, for better and worse, an ingenious toy. The plot is clever, but the film is all plot. Shepard and co-writers Eric C. Charmelo and Nicole Snyder repeatedly paint themselves into corners, only to free themselves with twists that bring about increasingly diminishing returns. The first switchback is legitimately startling, but the fourth is exhausting and belabored even by the standards of self-consciously cheeky exploitation shockers. As The Perfection mutates from gothic-tinged lesbian romance to body-horror thriller to revenge film, its lack of atmosphere becomes apparent, and the characters begin to seem as if they exist only to move through a labyrinth of gimmicks.
The film opens, promisingly, in Black Swan mode, introducing us to women with potentially rickety senses of self who may come to eat one another alive for our delectation. Charlotte (Allison Williams) travels to Shanghai to reconnect with her mentor, Anton (Steven Weber), who nurtured her to become one of the world's great cello players, before she retired to care for her ailing mother. (We also pointedly learn, via shock cuts, that Charlotte was institutionalized after her mother's death.) Charlotte meets Anton's new pet prodigy, Lizzie (Logan Browning), at a swanky party, and Shepard springs the first and subtlest of the narrative's many surprises. Conditioned by films such as All About Eve, we expect Charlotte and Lizzie to resent one another and fall into a catty rivalry. However, Lizzie worships Charlotte, and Charlotte doesn't seem to want to return to the industry, and so the women, free of envy, connect after a night of collaboration, drinking, dancing, and sex.
Shepard's handling of Charlotte and Lizzie's lovely, companionable night together is telling of his direction of the film at large. He rushes through it with a montage, collapsing Charlotte and Lizzie's cello duet, their clubbing, and their coupling all together, reducing their union to a math equation: Meet Cute + Flirtation + Sex = Inciting Incident. For, say, Peter Strickland, this sequence might've taken up half the film, allowing him to celebrate and fetishize these gorgeous women while stylishly exploring their loneliness and alienation. And for Dario Argento in his prime, this scene might've been an opening aria of erotic terror.
For Shepard, though, it's just business, and his disappointing haste squanders the heat that's been worked up in one of The Perfection's best scenes, when Lizzie observes an infidelity at a concert and whispers to Charlotte that it makes her wet. Even more egregiously, Shepard glosses over a significant bit of information, as Charlotte claims to have lost her virginity to Lizzie. What would it feel like to be sexually arrested and then to so suddenly fall into bed with someone as attractive, worldly, and confident as Lizzie? Shepard doesn't care to know—and this confession is eventually revealed to be fodder for one of the film's many twists.
Shepard's mercenary pace at times serves the film well. When Charlotte and Lizzie awaken the morning after, the filmmaker sustains, for about 15 minutes, an expert tone of slow-dawning dread. Both women are hungover, but Lizzie is dramatically ill, and Shepard plunges us into her panic and helplessness, capping the scene with the perverse spectacle of Lizzie vomiting yellow maggots against a bus's windows, clutching her head in pain. Several tensions merge at this point in The Perfection: the fear of being sick in another country, of having to grapple with a new lover's biological eccentricities, and a basic tension wrought by the violation of narrative expectation, as we're meant to wonder how we moved from a film in the vein of Black Swan to something in the key of a zombie-outbreak movie. Shepard merges these tonal disparities with a lurid reveal, at which point his film goes completely bonkers.
Funny thing, though: The crazier The Perfection gets, the more mechanical it becomes. Shepard appears to be so proud of the film's first twist—which pivots on a spectacular gaslighting—that he can't leave well enough alone. It's then that the film's narrative "rules" start changing every few minutes, with Charlotte, Lizzie, and Anton trading the batons of "hero," "villain," "victim," and "avenger" back and forth between them. A film as impersonal and plot-centric as The Perfection needs at least some kind of warped logic to sustain a sense of there being stakes at play. In this case, if anything goes then nothing matters.
Cast: Allison Williams, Logan Browning, Steven Weber, Alaina Huffman, Milah Thompson, Molly Grace, Winnie Hung Director: Richard Shepard Screenwriter: Eric C. Charmelo, Richard Shepard, Nicole Snyder Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 90 min Rating: TV-MA Year: 2019
Review: Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood Is an Elegy to an Era's Sunset
The film is Quentin Tarantino's magnum opus, a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture.4
Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is presented, right down to the ellipses in its title, as a diptych. But instead of just being a way to structure a piece of entertainment for commercial reasons—like the Grindhouse double feature, the two-part Kill Bill, and the "roadshow" version of The Hateful Eight, which was broken up by an intermission—this demarcation separates two distinct periods: the beginning of the end (February 1969) and the end itself (the summer of '69). And it's a juxtaposition that shows old Hollywood in a time of transition, from dog days to death throes.
While Tarantino's films tend to provide audiences with much evidence of where the auteur's love of Hollywood's lurid lore finds root (in blaxploitation, World War II dramas, kung-fu movies, or spaghetti westerns), Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood gets the closest of any to giving us the complete picture. In this sense, the film is nothing less than Tarantino's magnum opus—a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture and an almost expressionistic rendering of the counterculture forming at its margins, gradually growing in influence. It's an uncharacteristically thoughtful and sobering film for Tarantino, while somehow also being his funniest, and most casually entertaining.
In the film's first section, old Hollywood comes to life through montages of flashing neon signs, majestic old movie theater marquees on the Sunset Strip, and long-haired hippies hanging out on street corners, trying to bum rides from people who pass them by in their hot cars. Tarantino's late-'60s Hollywood is an immersive playground of opulence and iconicity, and thanks to the many exhilarating driving sequences that dot the film, the Los Angeles neighborhood conjures the adrenalized sensation of velocity and acceleration.
Navigating through this fast-paced Hollywood is Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a fading star of TV westerns trying to break into the movies, and his best friend and longtime stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Both characters are complete fabrications, as are most of the titles they're associated with, like Kill Me Now Ringo, Said the Gringo and Three in an Attic. And as Tarantino detours his narrative through depictions of these fictional projects, subjecting us to many scenes of Dalton playing different characters, this at first just seems like an excuse to make spoofy versions of disposable Hollywood product, like the fake trailers that appear between Planet Terror and Death Proof in Grindhouse. But these scenes actually serve to sketch the shifting dynamics on film sets of the late-'60s, like the emergence of Method acting, and they also position Dalton as a kind of Tarantino surrogate.
In one of the film's most clever sequences, Dalton regales his eight-year-old co-star (Julia Butters), in between takes on the set of some low-budget western, with the story of the novel that he's been reading. The character in the story is an aging cowboy who used to be the best but now is a shadow of his former self. As Dalton tells the story of the man's misfortune, and all his aches and pains, he starts to well up, obviously recognizing how much this all applies to him. But the way the sequence plays out, with the young girl with the forceful feminist outlook putting Dalton in his place when he tries to call her by a cute nickname, effectively puts Tarantino in the hot seat, and for that matter DiCaprio, another artist whose aging career comes with the danger of obsolescence and of falling out of step with the times.
Progressing on a parallel track to Dalton and Booth's narratives is another storyline, and the one that Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood has already become infamous for. The real-life Sharon Tate (Margo Robbie) comes to feel like the flipside of Dalton and Booth, her next-door neighbors in the film. The "It" girl flits through parties with her celebrated Polish filmmaker husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), and good friend, Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch). If the changing times threaten to discard and ignore Dalton and Booth, they're bringing Tate too much attention: At various points in Tarantino's film, she's watched and coveted from afar, as in a scene in which Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) gossips while ogling her at a party.
In the film's finest scene, Tate even watches herself: at a matinee screening of Phil Karlson's 1968 Dean Martin vehicle The Wrecking Crew. The sequence is resonant in no small part for its layers, with Robbie, as Tate, watching the real Tate (Tarantino uses actual footage from The Wrecking Crew for the scene). The whole thing suggests a kind of eerie feedback loop of celebrity and its cycles of consumption, but it's also a profoundly moving scene: Effortlessly nailing the moment, and without any dialogue, Robbie responds, in character, to the film on a diegetic level, watching her own performance, but at the same time, there's also the added metatextual layer of Robbie watching the very actress whom she's playing.
It's the film's commitment to fortifying its themes with such layers of self-reflexivity, while still anchoring its concepts to fully realized, emotionally invested characters, that makes it one of Tarantino's great films—a dense but focused effort that validates the divisive artist's status as one of American cinema's preeminent pop-cultural figures. It's also that self-reflexive lens through which to read Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood that makes its finale harder to write off as the misstep that it would otherwise seem to be. Tarantino does, perhaps unsurprisingly, revert to some of his more vexing shock-jock tendencies, and even squanders some of his film's emotional gravitas. But it's difficult to deny how effectively he sets up what's to come, when, in the midst of a tense debate between members of the Manson Family, one young woman (Mikey Madison) delivers an incendiary edict: "If you grew up watching TV, you grew up watching murder—my idea is to kill the people who taught us to kill!"
This chilling sentiment becomes the nexus of the film's significantly darker second half, which jumps six months ahead to take the temperature of Hollywood on the eve of the Charles Manson murders. As the landscape and the sociocultural identity of Hollywood continue to change, inching toward a post-Flower Generation comedown, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood takes on an elegiac quality. The shift facilitates one of Tarantino's more brilliant needle drops to date: of the Rolling Stones's wistful, wounded, and ominous "Out of Time" playing over a montage of Dalton and Booth returning to L.A. from a sojourn to Europe and a pregnant Tate preparing her home for the arrival of her baby boy.
The flash and fun of the film's first half gives way to a haunting decline into the valley of alcoholism, and to increasing signs that a new generation is about to push the old one out. And, then, inevitably, those tensions come to a head one August night on Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills. It's this sequence, and the Tarantino-branded ultraviolence that it ushers in, that puts the greatest strain on a film that had been setting itself up for tragedy but ends far afield from that. Still, this subversion points a path to our understanding of the broader intent of Tarantino's commentary in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, which is less about addressing the violence that people commit against each other than it is about lamenting the existential violence that sustains some and leaves others out of time.
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino, Nicholas Hammond, Samantha Robinson, Lorenza Izzo, Costa Ronin, Perla Haney-Jardine, Damon Herriman, Lena Dunham, Kurt Russell, Scoot McNairy, Michael Madsen, Rumer Willis, Rafal Zawierucha Director: Quentin Tarantino Screenwriter: Quentin Tarantino Distributor: Columbia Pictures Running Time: 159 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Jeonju IFF 2019: Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, L. Cohen, & Introduzione all'oscuro
These are three enigmatic, challenging, and weird works of art by filmmakers pushing at the boundaries of the cinematic form.
Shortly after arriving in Jeonju, the mid-sized Korean city about 200 kilometers south of Seoul that serves as the site of the Jeonju International Film Festival, I pulled my bedraggled, jet-lagged body over to the guest center to pick up my press credentials. As I made my way through the carnivalesque open-air city block known as Jeonju Cinema Town, I found myself, to my surprise, in the midst of a rather peculiar, almost surreal scenario as a bunch of white- and black-suited stormtroopers marched in lockstep toward me, weapons at the ready, flanking none other than the Grand Imperial Poobah himself, Darth Vader.
The group maneuvered around me without incident, eager to pose for selfies with the crowd of locals assembled in the area, but after over 20 hours of travel, the encounter took on a vaguely sinister air, as if the forces of Hollywood monoculture had been dispatched to this relatively remote cinephile retreat to ensure that no one here got the wrong idea: Have fun with your cute little art films, but remember who really wields the power in the world of cinema.
I suppose these are the sorts of strange inclinations that strike you when your body's circadian rhythms have been shaken up like a snow globe, but, despite the presence of the Walt Disney Company as one of the festival's premier sponsors, the films I saw—personal, challenging, at times exhilarating work from all across the world—couldn't have seemed further away from the market-tested franchises that clog American cineplexes. Having said that, it's with some irony that one of the first films I took in at Jeonju IFF was in fact a sequel—albeit one whose eccentric sense of humor and repetitive, unresolved narrative mean it's never going to be mistaken for the latest from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The sequel in question is Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, Bruno Dumont's follow-up to Li'l Quinquin. One of the great left turns in the history of auteurism, Dumont's 2014 miniseries signaled his transition from austere Bressonian miserablism to a singular brand of deadpan grotesquerie that gleefully explodes the thin line between the clever and the stupid. Dumont doesn't vary his style too much for the sequel, as it's another bizarre sunlit mystery set in the windswept countryside of Dumont's native Nord-Pas-de-Calais. And Dumont has reassembled the same cast of non-professional local oddballs led by Bernard Pruvost as Commandant Van der Weyden, a twitchy, hapless police detective investigating matters way beyond his depths.
Dumont, though, still finds ways to mess with his audience's expectations, starting with the baffling and completely inexplicable change of the title character's name. If the earlier film felt like Dumont's riff on popular international crime dramas like Broadchurch and The Killing, Coincoin turns out to be his spin on The X-Files, a sci-fi pod-people procedural featuring a mysterious black goo from outer space that inhabits its victims and forces them to give birth to their own uncanny clones. Like many stories about body-snatching, the series is a satire—here on provincial racism, the poor treatment of African migrants, and the rise of the French far right—but Dumont isn't simply interested in topical point-scoring against Marine Le Pen, the anti-immigrant politician who represents Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
Rather, with its ambling, directionless narrative and lackadaisical long shots that perversely undercut the screenplay's gags, Coincoin evokes a deep-rooted spirit of reactionary malaise, of people whose lives are hopelessly circumscribed by their own fears and prejudices. Dumont rigorously resists developing his plot or deepening his characters: They're all trapped in an absurd loop, doomed to endlessly say the same things and reenact the same jokes.
Van der Weyden sums up that mentality in a single line: "Progress isn't inevitable." There's a group of black men who periodically appear throughout the film only to be consistently and summarily dismissed in a fit of racist panic. Each time, we expect the film to create some meaningful interaction between the white townsfolk and these migrants, and each time we're rebuffed—that is, until a final musical explosion of kumbaya-like camaraderie that's somehow goofy, moving, tedious, and invigorating all at the same time.
Dumont is one of the few artists in cinema willing to risk exhausting his audience to induce a particular effect, but he's not the only one, as demonstrated by James Benning's L. Cohen, a 45-minute static shot of a seemingly unremarkable field with a mountain visible in the distance. It's an elegantly composed frame, reminiscent of an American Regionalist painting and whose centrally located peak perhaps coyly refers to the Paramount logo.
After 20 minutes, even the most hardened cinephiles are bound to be squirming in their seat, at which point Benning reveals his remarkable trump card: As the sky quickly darkens and blackness falls over the Earth, we realize that we've been watching the leadup to a total solar eclipse. It's a moment of quiet astonishment and confusion for anyone who doesn't know it's coming, bringing us close to the feeling a caveman might've had when the same event occurred. With typical mathematical precision, Benning has placed the eclipse at the exact center of the film, allowing us to explore the subtle shadows that precede and follow it.
The film, however, isn't just some academic structuralist exercise, as it's also a meditation on death, a fact highlighted by the next startling moment: the inclusion of Leonard Cohen's "Love Itself" on the soundtrack, a stark divergence from the ominous drone (identified by Benning during his festival Q&A as the hum of airplanes flying overhead) that fills the rest of the film. This song and the dedication of the film to the recently deceased Cohen add a deeper layer of meaning to Benning's precisely calibrated study of light and time.
L. Cohen is in essence a meditation on temporality. All things are fleeting, even grand interplanetary ballets. Considering the brief alignment of these celestial bodies puts one in a cosmic mood and calls to mind a cryptic, haunting line from a different Cohen song, "Stories of the Street": "We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky."
One could also find the specter of death looming over Introduzione all'oscuro, an expressionistic tribute to director Gastón Solnicki's good friend, Hans Hurch, the recently departed director of the Viennale, the Vienna International Film Festival. Described by the director not as a film about Hurch, but a film for him, Introduzione all'oscuro dispenses with biography entirely, instead evoking its subject's buoyant, ragtag spirit in an almost subliminal fashion: through music, film, and the city of Vienna. Hurch "appears" in the film primarily through his letters and through his voice, recorded by Solnicki when he provided notes on one of the director's previous films. Solnicki does appear on screen: a comically lonely figure visiting some of Hurch's favorite Viennese haunts—such as the Café Engländer, from which he would periodically steal cups—on a journey that drolly recalls Holly Martins's investigation into the apparent death of his pal Harry Lime in The Third Man.
Like Solnicki's Kékszakállú before it, Introduzione all'oscuro is what might be called "slideshow cinema"—a procession of taut, piquant compositions whose relationship to one another isn't precisely clear but which, when taken together, create an indelible impression of a highly specific milieu. Structured more like a piece of avant-garde music than a narrative work or traditional documentary, the film has a hypnotic yet often dissonant allure. It pulls us into a strange liminal zone where Hurch seems to be simultaneously present and absent, haunting the film like a benevolent spirit. Solnicki simply has one of the best eyes in cinema today, and it's the pungency of his images which makes the film such an endlessly compelling experience, even when the reasons behind Solnicki's individual choices remain obscure.
Abstruseness, though, is no crime. In fact, the greatest pleasures of Jeonju IFF were to be found in grappling with "difficult" films such as Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, L. Cohen, and Introduzione all'oscuro: enigmatic, challenging, and even downright weird works of art made by filmmakers pushing at the boundaries of the cinematic form.
The Jeonju International Film Festival ran from May 2—11.
Review: As Teen Comedy, Booksmart Is Sweet and Nasty in Fine Balance
It's an R-rated teen comedy that proves that you can center girls' experiences without sacrificing grossness.3
An uncharitable way of describing Olivia Wilde's feature directorial debut, Booksmart, is as a gender-flipped version of Superbad. Like Greg Mottola's 2007 film, it concerns a pair of best friends who've spent their high school years as outsiders but, at the end of their senior year, decide to attend the biggest, coolest graduation party imaginable. As in Superbad, getting to the party devolves into an almost picaresque gauntlet through suburban nightlife, consisting of comical encounters with outlandish characters (both films even feature a "creepy car guy"). Booksmart and Superbad also share a ribald, R-rated sense of humor and a sex scene interrupted by vomit—even the same casting director (the venerable Allison Jones).
For all that, Wilde's film is less a derivative of Mottola's teen comedy than a corrective to it. Its exaggerated universe is less mean-spirited than the one depicted in Superbad, where so much of the humor depended on Jonah Hill loudly proclaiming his character's misogyny. Booksmart isn't above getting laughs from sex jokes that land somewhere between honest and outrageous—there's a recurring bit about Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) masturbating with her stuffed panda doll—but it does show that teenage conversations about sex can be funny without being demeaning. And its belief in its main characters as more than just stand-ins for the most distorted beliefs that virginal high schoolers have about sex gives the film a fuller, more satisfying arc.
Amy and her best friend, Molly (Beanie Feldstein), are their elite Valley High School's A-type-personality do-gooders, well-meaning in their ambition and their wokeness, but with streaks of haughtiness and self-righteousness. Beanie is class president, the kind of kid who pushes the school principal (Jason Sudeikis) to arrange a budget meeting with the juniors on the last day of class. In contrast to the brashly assertive Molly, Amy is meek, barely able to eke out syllables when talking to her crush, Ryan (Victoria Ruesga), but she's also intensely woke, adorning her denim jacket with feminist-slogan patches and her car with "Elizabeth Warren 2020" bumper stickers. The pair are so close that they're often mistaken for being a couple (Amy has been out since the 10th grade), and they definitely don't party.
As school is letting out, Molly discovers that her and Amy's monk-like approach to high school life has been for naught. Although the two pride themselves on respectively getting into Yale and Columbia, it seems that virtually all of their classmates have a similarly propitious future lined up. Even the horny goofball Theo (Eduardo Franco), who repeated seventh grade three times, was recruited for a six-figure job with Google. Molly adopts partying as her new project, dragging the reluctant Amy, all the more anxious because Ryan will be at the party, along with her. The problem is that, not being a part of their school's social scene, they have no idea where the party actually is, and limited means of figuring it out.
The obliviously indefatigable Molly is a star-making role for Feldstein, who keeps let her highly dynamic character—Molly can be both very rigid and very foolhardy—from feeling inconsistent, or leading to broad caricature. As the quieter Amy, Devers's role is mostly reactive, but, in the tumultuous climax, she supplies the film's most poignant and relatable moments. As the omnipresent Gigi, a troubled party girl who inexplicably appears at each of the girls' wayward stops on their journey to the party, Billie Lourd channels a chaotic energy, becoming the film's strung-out jester. Lourd is just part of an altogether impressive ensemble that also includes Jessica Williams as the teacher who loves Amy and Molly perhaps a bit too much, and Will Forte and Lisa Kudrow as Amy's super-Christian, super-supportive parents.
For the most part sharply written, and tighter and more consistently funny than the fragmented improv-style Superbad, Booksmart nevertheless has a couple of stretches that don't quite land. There's a claymated ayahuasca-tripping sequence that neither suits the rest of the film nor is followed up on in any way by the narrative. And the film's conclusion is more than a little formally messy, with Wilde relying on a too-rapid succession of non-diegetic pop songs as emotional accents and to fast-forward the plot—at one crucial moment even drowning out the dialogue. But despite these small missteps, Booksmart feels like an innovation, an R-rated teen comedy that proves that you can center girls' experiences without sacrificing grossness, and that you can be gross without being too mean.
Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein, Jessica Williams, Jason Sudeikis, Billie Lourd, Diana Silvers, Mason Gooding, Skyler Gisondo, Noah Galvin, Eduardo Franco, Lisa Kudrow, Will Forte, Mike O'Brien Director: Olivia Wilde Screenwriter: Olivia Wilde Katie Silberman, Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins Distributor: Annapurna Pictures Running Time: 102 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Terminator: Dark Fate Official Trailer: Going Back to the Well with Sarah Connor
Linda Hamilton at least makes a killer impression as Sarah visits fiery justice upon Gabriel Luna's terminator.
Today, Paramount dropped the trailer for the sixth entry in the Terminator series, Terminator: Dark Fate, which promises to deliver…more of the same? With this film, Deadpool director Tim Miller aims to give the series a reboot: by pretending that none of the films that came after Terminator 2: Judgement Day ever existed (sorry, Rise of the Machines fans), maybe even Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. "Welcome to the day after judgment day," reads the poster, promising the badass return of Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor. And on that front, the film looks to deliver, as Hamilton certainly makes a killer impression as Sarah visits fiery justice upon Gabriel Luna's terminator.
But based on everything else that's on display throughout the trailer, we're worried that there's not anything new that a film in this series stands to bring to the table besides running and gunning, with the occasional wink thrown in for good measure. Cast in point: Mackenzie Davis stars as Grace, an "enhanced human" who looks to fill the hanger-on role to Connor that Edward Furlong's John Connor did to Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800, now apparently living in woodsy retirement, and at the ready to give sage advice. In short, we're not impressed, and that also holds true of that cover of Björk's "Hunter" by some zombie man singer.
Watch the official trailer below:
Paramount Pictures will release Terminator Dark Fate on November 1.
Review: Woodstock Offers a New Look at the Three Days that Defined a Generation
Throughout, the era-defining yet problem-plagued music festival astounds in large part for all the disasters that didn't occur.3
According to Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation, the 1969 Woodstock festival seemed fated to fail. But a rare convergence of good luck, good intentions, and good vibes somehow snapped into place and crystallized over a few days in August the aspirations of a counterculture about to hit its peak. The festival's planners, mostly promoters and music-industry pros, talk off-camera throughout this gloriously gleeful documentary about their somewhat spur-of-the-moment concept in a purposefully overlapping mosaic that makes it difficult to determine who's saying what. Their original idea was simply a big concert that would celebrate the opening of a recording studio in the bucolic artist community of Woodstock, NY and take advantage of the musicians living nearby.
That conceit ballooned into a sprawling three-day cultural amoeba of feel-good psychedelia billed as "An Aquarian Exposition" to be held in a bucolic setting. It would ideally seem, according to one organizer, "like visiting another world." Creating that gateway to paradise, however, hit one snag after another. Conservative fears about an invasion of hippies led to much anger among locals and triggered permitting issues. Original desired stars like Bob Dylan, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones all passed on the vent. Months' worth of construction at the original site in Wallkill, NY had to be scrapped at the last minute.
But Woodstock shows also how both lucky circumstances and in-depth planning saved the day. The lineup swelled with a killer roster of acts whom David Crosby defines simply as "everybody we thought was cool": Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Creedence Clearwater, Janis Joplin, and so on. According to writer Bob Spitz, interest grew as the organizers put the word out through the underground press, and though their top estimates of attendance topped out at 150,000, the eventual total was closer to a potentially unmanageable 400,000. Seemingly foolhardy ideas like hiring Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm commune to handle what they termed "security" and what Wavy defined as trying to "spread grooviness," helped the increasingly massive enterprise maintain an appealingly mellow tone. Then, a Republican dairy farmer named Max Yasgur, who just happened to have a visually gorgeous sweep of land shaped like a natural amphitheater, agreed to host the festival.
Just about everyone interviewed in Barak Goodman and Jamilia Ephron's documentary still marvels a half-century on at the scope and tranquility of what happened, though the potential for disaster provides some dramatic grit to the narrative. Much of the festival's harmoniousnes was a result of on-the-spot empathetic resourcefulness, from Hog Farm's thrown-together Sunday-morning "breakfast in bed" and "freak-out" tents for people on bad acid trips to the previously resentful locals who spontaneously emptied their pantries to feed the long-haired kids who had been tromping through their front yards. The crowds were soothed by the reassuring voice of the festival announcer, whose "we"-focused addresses over the PA system strengthened the communal spirit, which is then echoed in the film's starry-eyed reminiscences of interviewees who all sound as though they wish they could go back.
Woodstock cannot hope to supplant Michael Wadleigh's more symphonic and experiential 1970 documentary. But conversely, its tighter, narrower focus on narrative and context ultimately tells a bigger story at roughly half the length. Co-director Goodman has shown in some of his darker work for PBS's American Experience, like his episode about the Oklahoma City bombing, a knack for building suspense. He deploys that skill here marvelously when showing the sea of humanity converging on Yasgur's farm, balancing a fear of impending disaster (short supplies, last-minute glitches, a crowd many times larger than the highest estimates) with the dawning realization that things might just work out.
That tightrope-walking drama is maintained through the actual concert portion of the movie. The musical highs, Hendrix's squalling "Star-Spangled Banner" and Richie Haven's raucous two-hour jam (filling the gap while helicopters ferried musicians in over the blocked roads), play out while the vast crowd contends with food shortages and an unexpected rainstorm. But even though the attendees rushed past the mostly unbuilt fencing and by default created what organizer John Roberts here terms "the world's greatest three-day freebie," he and his partners appear now happier about the instant community that metamorphosed in the mud than the fact that as a business venture the concert was "in deep shit."
Woodstock hits many of the expected notes about the concert's place in the nation's cultural history. But it's refreshingly less self-satisfied than awestruck at the simple beauty of what happened at the Woodstock festival and the utopian example it provided to the world. Though unmentioned here, the disastrous music festival that occurred four months later at Altamont Speedway, in the hills of Northern California's East Bay, where the organizers' callous indifference to advance planning led to chaos and multiple deaths, shows just how rare the event that occurred in Bethel across three days back in August '69 remains to this day.
Director: Barak Goodman, Jamila Ephron Distributor: PBS Distribution Running Time: 90 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir Is a Knotty Trip Down Memory Lane
Its stylistic fluctuations are a sign of a filmmaker really wrestling with how she became the woman and artist she is today.3.5
True to the mission of its protagonist, a well-meaning student filmmaker working on a thesis feature about a community foreign to her, writer-director Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir is engaged in a running dialogue with itself around the notion of how—and how not—to make a personal narrative. Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is a London-based, upper-middle-class young woman coming of age in Margaret Thatcher's England who feels a moral imperative to transpose her own experiences onto a fictional story set in working-class Sunderland, and she's given ongoing opportunities in her film workshops to try to articulate why that is. Hogg, who based the character on her own early experiences as an artist, views Julie's trajectory tenderly but through the lens of a greater maturity, dotting the young woman's path with interlocutors who challenge and redirect her inclinations. Gradually, Julie's certitude seems to fall out from under her, transforming Hogg's film in the process.
Pivotal among these forces is Anthony (Tom Burke), a spectacularly smug older man with ambiguous professional and personal affiliations who becomes inexorably drawn to Julie, and she to him. When he first appears on screen across a table from Julie at a café, Hogg frames the scene in the kind of spacious, sophisticated master shot that defined her 2013 film Exhibition, snapping The Souvenir out of the close-up-heavy, fly-on-the-wall aesthetic with which it opens. The shift in style registers the exhilarating impact Anthony has on Julie, who is up to that point seen as a wallflower at college parties, taking photos and rolling a Bolex in the corner while bouncing in and out of conversations. Sizing up Julie's film project with suave dismissiveness, Anthony suggests that she might heed the influence of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who were able to express personal emotions free of the constraints of realism, and later proposes that "it's not enough to be sincere or authentic."
Julie takes such counseling in stride even when it comes from her casually condescending professors (also men), giving her a headstrong resilience that Swinton-Byrne beautifully underplays. But Julie's toughness doesn't equate to stubborn pride, and soon The Souvenir turns away from its portrait of early filmmaking ambition and toward the knotty dynamics of Anthony and Julie's strengthening relationship—itself modeled off a fling in Hogg's past. The director orchestrates this formal shapeshift with sly subtlety, first introducing the couple's scenes together as elliptical diversions from the central storyline, then gradually lengthening them until the sequences set in and around Julie's film school take a backseat entirely. Now sharing an apartment, Anthony and Julie go through the growing pains of coexistence—the former posits a "Wall of Jericho" made of pillows in a reference to It Happened One Night to solve his discomfort in bed—but nonetheless find a strange harmony in their dissonant personalities, with his brutal honesty charming her and her placidity disarming him.
In Anthony's case, however, this apparent personality yardstick proves misleading, as it turns out that he's frank about everything but his own life. Talk of a vague government job creates an impression of a posh background belied by Anthony and Julie's trip to visit his parents, and later, an offhand remark made by one of Anthony's friends when he's in the bathroom yields the startling revelation—cued by spatially disorienting mirror shots and the gentle use of Dutch angles—that Julie's boyfriend is a heroin addict. Hogg omits the scene where Julie confronts Anthony about this revelation, but the mark it leaves on their relationship is implicitly, delicately apparent in every part of The Souvenir moving forward. The neatly organized, white-walled apartment where much of the action takes place becomes charged with tension, not only from the threat of dissident bombing that percolates outside its windows (a reality contemporaneous to the film's early-'80s setting), but also from Anthony's frequent, unexplained comings and goings, which starkly contrast Julie's more fixed physicality as she spends her time hunched over a typewriter.
The Souvenir flirts with a few conventional movie premises—the doomed romance, the spiral into the hell of drug addiction, the pursuit of self-actualization—without ever fully engaging one, which doesn't indicate an uncertainty on Hogg's part so much as a supreme confidence in the intricacies of her own material. Likely to some viewers' dismay, Julie's story isn't one that ever comes to hinge on an a-ha moment, a sudden realization that she's strayed from her artistic passion in her entanglement with a toxic partner. Rather, Hogg evokes both the seductive appeal of an irrational romance and the less sexy but nonetheless potent comfort of falling into the role of nurturer, a discipline shown in a few touching scenes to be inherited by Julie from her mother (Tilda Swinton). What's more, it can't be said that Anthony's influence is purely deleterious, as his bouts of real vulnerability, carried off with a persuasive display of wounded pride by Burke, repeatedly push Julie toward greater sensitivity and awareness.
Perhaps ambivalent herself to Anthony's recommendation that Julie seek inspiration from Powell and Pressburger's work, Hogg shoots in a grainy, underlit 16mm palette that has less to do with period fetishism than with draining the sparkle from Julie's privileged upbringing. The Souvenir is shot from a measured distance, often with the camera in rooms adjacent to the actors so that walls and other objects populate the foreground, and the resulting sense is of being simultaneously immersed in the spaces of Hogg's early adulthood and at an intellectual remove from them, a fusion seemingly reflective of the director's own mixed emotions in revisiting this story. In this case, however, that quality of fluctuation isn't a deficiency but a virtue, a sign of a filmmaker really wrestling with how she became the woman and artist she is today, and the mark of a film that's beholden to no recipe but its own.
Cast: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton, Jack McMullen, Frankie Wilson, Richard Ayoade, Jaygann Ayeh Director: Joanna Hogg Screenwriter: Joanna Hogg Distributor: A24 Running Time: 119 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Aladdin Is a Magic Corporate Ride to Nowhere Special
Guy Ritchie's live-action remake is content to trace the original's narrative beats with perfunctory indifference.1
Compared to a few other recent live-action remakes of Disney's animated films, which at least attempted to bring striking story wrinkles or an auteurist perspective to bear on their interpretations, Guy Ritchie's Aladdin is a remake in the most literal sense. Much of the film's first act traces the narrative beats of the 1992 animated feature, and in shot-for-shot fashion: Thieving street rat Aladdin (Mena Massoud) meets and charms the princess of his native Agrabah, Jasmine (Naomi Scott), and ultimately runs afoul of scheming grand vizier Jafar (Marwan Kenzari), before obtaining a magic lamp containing a genie (Will Smith) who has the power to transform the young pauper into a prince worthy of Jasmine's station.
The steadfastness with which every aspect of the original is replicated by this new Aladdin makes Ritchie's film a grueling example of the streaming-era notion of art as content. Because there's no chemistry between Massoud and Scott, the legitimacy of Aladdin and Jasmine's flirtations is largely sold on the basis of the viewer's preexisting knowledge that these two will become a couple. Elsewhere, the relationship between Jafar and the Sultan (Navid Negahban) is an even paler imitation. In the original, Jafar's viciousness was at least partially driven by his hatred of the Sultan, who issued inane commands to his grand vizier in all sorts of parodically infantile and buffoonish of ways. Here, though, the Sultan is a negligible figure, neither callous nor especially influential, thus robbing his subordinate of a compelling motive. The Jafar of this film is evil simply because he's been designated as the story's big bad.
If the dogged faithfulness of Ritchie's film to the original proves consistently stultifying, it's the most noticeable deviations that ultimately damn the remake. In an attempt to give Jasmine something to do other than be the object of men's affections, Ritchie and co-writer John August blend the character's traditional frustrations at being trapped behind palace walls with a newfound resentment over how her capacity to rule as sultan is thwarted by traditional gender roles. Nonetheless, her desires to lead are bluntly articulated and reflective of a broader tendency among the film's characters to express their awareness of their own repression by tilting their heads back and staring off into the distance as they speak extemporaneously about their dreams. Poor Scott is also burdened with the film's big new song, "Speechless," an instantly dated empowerment anthem that suggests the sonic equivalent of that old woman's botched restoration of the Ecce Homo fresco in Borja, Spain.
The film does come somewhat to life during its musical numbers. Though these sequences are marked by simplistic and unengaging choreography, they don't quell the verve of Howard Ashman and Tim Rice's original songs. Less successful is Smith, who, unable to match the intensity of Robin Williams's performance as the Genie in the original film, leans into his signature drawling sarcasm to bring his spin on the character to life, effectively draining the Genie of everything that made him so memorably larger than life in the first place. Even when portraying some of the Genie's more antic behavior, Smith mostly takes the path of least resistance, injecting just enough energy into his performance to hint at Williams's memorable take on the character but without seeming as if he's actually working up a sweat.
Elsewhere, Massoud mostly goes through the motions in establishing Aladdin as a rakish pauper, but the actor comes alive in a comic scene that sees his street urchin, newly styled as a prince by the Genie, presenting himself to the Sultan's court. Having never been trained on any points of social graces, Aladdin can only stammer out pleasantries, using strange honorifics to refer to the Sultan as he curtsies instead of bows. Later, the Genie helps Aladdin perform an elaborate dance by controlling the young man's body in order to wow the Sultan's court. Impressively, Massoud manages to perform complicated steps while looking as if every movement is done against his will, giving Aladdin's flailing motions a slapstick quality.
Such flashes of personality, though, are few and far between in this remake. Certainly there was a lot of room to bring a contemporary perspective to this material—to counter the original's problematic representation of its Middle-Eastern milieu and deepen its characters. Instead, the film settles for telling you a joke you've already heard and botching the delivery.
Cast: Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Will Smith, Marwan Kenzari, Navid Negahban, Nasim Pedrad, Alan Tudyk, Frank Welker, Billy Magnussen Director: Guy Ritchie Screenwriter: John August, Guy Ritchie Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Running Time: 128 min Rating: PG Year: 2019 Buy: Soundtrack
Review: Brightburn Is a Soulless Mishmash of Disparate Genre Elements
The way the film shuttles through its 90 minutes, it's as if it's been stripped of its most crucial narrative parts.1
Like a lot of kids squirming through puberty, Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn) is an asshole. Unlike most, however, he's from outer space and possessed of formidable superpowers. Soon after learning of his abilities, he stalks a classmate, Caitlyn (Emmie Hunter), who consoled him in class after he was teased for his incredible smarts. Brandon makes a show of controlling Caitlyn's laptop before appearing outside her bedroom window, eerily floating in the air. By this point in director David Yarovesky's Brightburn, one is still optimistic that Brandon's creeper tendencies will be the most insidious of his problems. But when Caitlyn calls him a pervert, after letting him fall to the ground during a "trust fall" exercise in gym class, Brandon crushes the bones in her hand after she's forced to help him up. By the end of the film, Caitlyn will prove to be one of the lucky ones.
That Yarovesky and screenwriters Brian and Mark Gunn don't exactly push the link between Brandon's pubescence and his growing self-awareness isn't the first sign that something is amiss here. Right out of the gate, Brightburn reveals itself unwilling to animate its characters' emotional dramas, using visual shorthand to simply hint at them. In the opening scene, set more than 10 years in the past, the camera pans across a bookshelf full of fertility books, informing the audience that Brandon's parents, Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle (David Denman), really want to have a baby. Later, while helping his dad with chores, Brandon accidentally throws a lawnmower halfway across the family farm. This is when he recognizes that he has superpowers, but rather than prolong the kid's doubt across more than one scene, the film zips straight to the moment where he's about to shove his hand into the lawn mower's spinning blades to confirm his suspicions that he's nothing short of invincible.
More genre films—more films, period—could stand to have a lot less fat on their bones, but the way Brightburn shuttles through its 90 minutes, it's as if it's been stripped even of its most crucial narrative parts. Outside of one pulpy hallucination sequence, the film stubbornly refuses to give a concrete sense of the desperation that drove Tori and Kyle to adopt Brandon, just as it can't be bothered to give shape to the mythology of his creation—or rather, his arrival. For a spell, though, this suggests a purposeful show of evasion. Much is made of the red light that peeks out from the floorboards in the family barn and to which Brandon is drawn throughout the film. If you're a fan of Larry Cohen's canon, you may wonder if the kid will be revealed as a kindred spirit of the ever-glowing human-alien antagonist from God Told Me To, here to make sport of our biological urge to procreate in our increasingly decaying world.
No such luck, as Brightburn is a meaningless mishmash of disparate genre elements. The truth of what lurks beneath the floorboards turns out to be of no particular consequence—not exactly a red herring, just a bit of hogwash that confirms Brandon to be a gene splice of Damien and Superman. Maybe a sense of majesty, of mythic grandeur, might have made him feel as if he was less arbitrarily willed into being, though Yarovesky certainly conveys the weight of the kid's killing spree. Not its existential weight, only its repugnant force. At one point, one of his victims struggles to hold up the lower part of his grotesquely shattered jaw, as Brandon pulls off the mask that he wears because, presumably, he understands that that's what someone with superhuman powers should do. Brightburn never shows us how Brandon came to such a realization, but it does let us glimpse the stone-cold delight he takes in erasing human life—a spectacle of violence that exists for its own soulless sake.
Cast: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Jackson A. Dunn, Jennifer Holland, Matt Jones, Meredith Hagner, Becky Wahlstrom, Gregory Alan Williams, Steve Agee, Emmie Hunter Director: David Yarovesky Screenwriter: Brian Gunn, Mark Gunn Distributor: Screen Gems Running Time: 90 min Rating: R Year: 2019
The Nightingale Trailer: Aisling Franciosi and Sam Claflin Star in Jennifer Kent's Follow-Up to The Babadook
Today, IFC has released the first trailer for the film, which is set during the colonization of Australia in 1825.
Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale, the Aussie filmmaker's much-anticipated follow-up to The Babadook, premiered way back in September at the Venice Film Festival, and to mostly positive notices. Today, ahead of its U.S. theatrical release in August, IFC has released the first trailer for the film, which is set during the colonization of Australia in 1825 and follows a young Irish convict settler, Clare (played by Aisling Franciosi), who, after finishing her seven-year sentence, struggles to be free of her abusive master, Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin). According to the studio's official description of the film:
Clare's husband Aidan (Michael Sheasby) retaliates and she becomes the victim of a harrowing crime at the hands of the lieutenant and his cronies. When British authorities fail to deliver justice, Clare decides to pursue Hawkins, who leaves his post suddenly to secure a captaincy up north. Unable to find compatriots for her journey, she is forced to enlist the help of a young Aboriginal tracker Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) who grudgingly takes her through the rugged wilderness to track down Hawkins. The terrain and the prevailing hostilities are frightening, as fighting between the original inhabitants of the land and its colonizers plays out in what is now known as "The Black War." Clare and Billy are hostile towards each other from the outset, both suffering their own traumas and mutual distrust, but as their journey leads them deeper into the wilderness, they must learn to find empathy for one another, while weighing the true cost of revenge.
Watch the official trailer below:
IFC Films will release The Nightingale in NY and LA on August 2.
Game of Thrones Recap: Season 8, Episode 6, "The Iron Throne"
Review: Aladdin Is a Magic Corporate Ride to Nowhere Special
Review: A Hidden Life Lyrically Attests to a Man's Quest for Moral Purity
Review: Zombi Child Radically Grapples with Colonialism's Legacy
Review: In Pain and Glory, Life and Art Are Wistful Bedfellows
Review: The Perfection Walks Impersonally Though a Labyrinth of Gimmicks
Review: Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood Is an Elegy to an Era's Sunset
Jeonju IFF 2019: Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, L. Cohen, & Introduzione all'oscuro
Review: As Teen Comedy, Booksmart Is Sweet and Nasty in Fine Balance
Review: When They See Us Is a Harrowing but Heavy-Handed Act of Protest
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Game of Thrones Recap: Season 8, Episode 6, "The Iron Throne"
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text: Followed virtual users postfix ubuntu 12.10 guide. I can connect over ports 143 and 110, but 995 and 993 don't work. Seems to be a problem with certificates but i've spent hours on google with no luck. Telnet on 110 works fine, no errors show up in mail.log: Code: telnet localhost 110 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost.localdomain. Escape character is '^]'. +OK Hello there. Telnet on 995 or 993 doesn't connect: Code: telnet localhost 995 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost.localdomain. Escape character is '^]'. Hangs there and I get the following entry in mail.log when I try connecting over 995 in Thunderbird: Code: couriertls: read: error:14094412:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:sslv3 alert bad certificate I created the certificates using mkpop3dcert and mkimapdcert. Contents of pop3d.cnf: Code: RANDFILE = /usr/lib/courier/pop3d.rand [ req ] default_bits = 1024 encrypt_key = yes distinguished_name = req_dn x509_extensions = cert_type prompt = no default_md = sha1 [ req_dn ] C=US ST=TN L=Nashville O=Courier Mail Server OU=Automatically-generated POP3 SSL key CN=myhost.mydomain.com [email protected] [ cert_type ] nsCertType = server Any ideas? I'm pretty stuck at this point.


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Earcuff - Sølv med stjerne
Tax included. Shipping calculated at checkout.
Smukke earcuffs, sølv.
Vi sender fragtfrit ved køb for mere end kr. 400,00.
Du kan betale med kort og MobilePay.
Outstanding selection of beads of every kind, as well as jewelry and unusual finds. The staff can customize jewelry for you, is very helpful and very friendly. Stop in and get inspired to make something sparkling and beautiful!


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This week we debated:
On Tuesday, the House unanimously passed second reading of Bill 154, Cutting Unnecessary Red Tape Act, 2017. The bill has been referred to the Standing Committee on Justice Policy. Anyone interested in speaking to the bill should contact Clerk Christopher Tyrell by tel. 416-325-3883 or email: firstname.lastname@example.com.
On Wednesday, the House also unanimously passed second reading of Bill 142, Construction Lien Amendment Act, 2017. The bill has been referred to the Standing Committee on the Legislative Assembly. Anyone interested in speaking to the bill should contact Clerk William Short by tel. 416-325-3509 or email: email@example.com.
Also on Wednesday, the Attorney General introduced Bill 163, Protecting a Woman's Right to Access Abortion Services Act, 2017. The bill would, if passed, protect the safety, security, health, and privacy of women and health care providers by allowing for safe access zones to be established around clinics and facilities that offer abortion services, the homes of clinic staff, and the homes and offices of other regulated health professionals who provide these services.
The following day, the PC party moved a motion to bypass the legislative process for Bill 163. This motion was defeated because it's important that healthcare professionals, women's groups and other advocates have the opportunity to review the bill and provide input to strengthen it during the committee process. The government will advocate for swift passage of the bill and intends to pass it before the end of the fall sitting.
On Thursday, the Minister of Government and Consumer Services introduced Bill 166, Strengthening Protection for Ontario Consumers Act, 2017. This bill would, if passed, strengthen protections for consumers making significant purchases like buying event tickets or travel services, and purchasing or selling real estate, including newly built homes.
Bill 155, Life Leases Act, 2017, sponsored by Liberal MPP Ann Hoggarth passed second reading with unanimous support in the House. This bill would, if passed, establish the conditions for leases not less than 50 years.
Bill 100, Honouring our Veterans Act, 2017, sponsored by Trillium Party MPP Jack MacLaren passed in the House. This bill would, if passed, allow an individual to request to be identified as a veteran on his or her driver's licence or photo card.
Bill 161, Nick's Law (Opioid Abuse Awareness), 2017, sponsored by PC MPP Lisa MacLeod passed second reading in the House. This bill would, if passed, require the Government of Ontario to allocate at least 10 per cent of the Bulk Media Buy Program toward marketing campaigns on the risks of prescription opioid abuse and fentanyl abuse.
Committee Organization:
This website is provided for your convenience. If you'd prefer to call or email, my staff and I would be happy to hear from you.
No Cuts to Franco-Ontarian Services PetitionDecember 10, 2018
Save Ontario's Sexual Education Curriculum PetitionAugust 01, 2018
Be a Donor - Trillium Gift of LifeJuly 24, 2018
Delivering a Plan for Care and OpportunityMarch 28, 2018
Students Will Now See OSAP Amount and Net Tuition Fees Online
College Students to Receive Additional Support to Finish Studies


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Design Mixtape 4
Posted January 06, 2012 by Dennis Eusebio
Pretty weird to think that I've now been releasing these things for over a year now. It's been cool to look back and see the progression but know that there's so much more room to grow.
One Spark
Posted June 07, 2011 by Dennis Eusebio
It's simple. Whoever tells you that you have to move from Jacksonville in order to be successful lacks vision. We have always possesed the raw materials to make this city an amazing place to live, work and more importantly grow. Jacksonville just needs a spark to get things going.
Design Mixtape 3
Posted May 18, 2011 by Dennis Eusebio
The third mixtape in the series, I compiled a combination of tracks I heard at SXSW this year and some other random goodness. This was the first time I got to play around with the my new Traktor S4 so it might sound a bit different from the other mixes.
Design Mixtape 2
Posted April 04, 2011 by Dennis Eusebio
The second mixtape in the series, I chose to focus on more personal favorites this time around. The 90's continues to be my favorite era of hip-hop and I wanted to introduce some classic tracks to contrast against newer songs used. To help step things up a bit, I also added some personal mashups I've been using in sets for the last couple of months.


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Want to contribute to the Telford What's On? Add your event for free here: http://www.telford-live.com/add-your-flyers/
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SkaBurst Band – Wellington
April 16, 2017 @ 7:00 pm
Event Navigation
'Classic Ska & Ska'd up Classics'
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Please note that since this was added to the calendar stuff may have changed. It's not my fault, it just happens sometimes.


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Items, Weapons, and Armor
Finding weapons, armor, and other items is a random occurence in Oblivion. Outside of quest rewards, shop inventories, dungeon loot, and items found on NPCs are all random and change according to your level. We wish we could tell you where to look for these items, but we can't.
|Notes on Selling Goods
Selling goods is the primary way to make money in Oblivion. The only problem is that there aren't any secret shopkeepers in the game like there were in Morrowind. The most money you'll find on a merchant is 1200 gold. Merchants carrying this much money can be found all around the Market District of the Imperial City. Pick one store and always return to it. Each time you make a sale, the merchant's disposition will increase slightly allowing you to sell your goods at a closer to retail price. Merchants can make as many transactions per day as you want, provided the cost of each individual sale isn't greater than their maximum amount of gold. That means you'll have to sell that Daedric Cuirass for a measley 1200 gold. The only way to increase the amount of money a merchant holds is to increase your Mercantile skill to 75 and then 100.
Since you can only make 1200 per transaction, it is important to look at the weight to value ratio of each item you find in a dungeon. Just because a cuirass is worth 2000 gold, it doesn't mean it is a better deal than the 800 gold potion next to it. A rule of thumb to follow is to divide the cost of the item by the weight. Take the items with you that have the bigger result of that quick math. If you're not good at math, it is ok to round these off to rough estimates.
Items of Great Importance
|Use these to open locked doors and chests to gain access to areas and items otherwise unobtainable. These can be extremely difficult to find and break if you misuse them. For more on how to find and use them effectively, read our Stealth section. Also remember that some keys can be used in place of lockpicks while other doors require a key and can't be picked.
|Repair hammers can be purchased at most general stores and just about any weapons or armor store. Each weapon you use and piece of armor that absorbs a hit will take damage and become less effective in battle. To restore them to their natural glory, you'll have to either pay someone to repair your items (at equipment stores or the Fighters Guild) or do it yourself. Repair hammers have a base cost of 10 gold and can be used multiple times before they break making them a cost-effective way or maintaining your equipment. Buy them and keep at least 10 with you at all times.
|These extremely valuable stones can be found in Ayleid ruins. They will restore the charge on all of your enchanted items when you use them, though with a base price of 1000 gold you might want to sell them when you're lucky enough to come across a stash.
|These cheap counterparts to the Varla stones are also found in the Ayleid ruins. They are only worth 50 gold, but when you use one you'll have your Magicka fully restored instantly. These work better than any potion you'll find. Hang on to them.
|Ranging from Lesser Soul Gems to Grand Soul Gems, these can be used to house the souls of creatures after you kill them. To capture a soul, you'll need to use a Soul Trap spell and then kill the enemy before it wears off. You'll also have to have a Soul Gem large enough to carry that soul. Humans can only be trapped in Black Soul Gems which must be created or found on Necromancers. Make sure you complete the quest for Azura's Shrine to get Azura's Star, a reusable Grand Soul Gem.
Once you've trapped a soul, you can use the gem to recharge your enchanted items, or you can bring it to the Arcane University and use it to add an enchantment to an item. Grand Soul Gems are most easily found in the Mages Guilds or in dungeons at later levels. Remember, a soul will go into the smallest soul gem you have available. That means that if you only have Grand Soul Gems and you capture a Rat, the lesser soul will fill the Grand Soul Gem and you will be stuck with a wasted gem.
|When you remove one of these from an Oblivion gate to close it, you'll find that it has certain effects associated with it. These will either be a constant effect for armor or an on-strike effect for a weapon. The constant effect enchantments are much more useful. You can use Sigil Stones to enchant any piece of armor or weapon that doesn't currently have an enchantment without even having to go to the Arcane University. The effects of the Sigil Stone increase as you level up, but they are still random. If you save your
game right before pulling it out, you can reload the save and try again if you find you got a stone with a useless enchantment.
|Diamonds, topaz, emeralds; these, and other, stones can be found in various states of perfection all around Cyrodil. They can't be used for anything other than as an item to be sold for profit. Pick them up since they weigh little but can bring in a decent amount of gold at the shop.
Edible Goods
|Potions can be made from alchemy ingredients or bought in stores. You'll want to carry around a good supply of Restore Health and Restore Magicka potions at all times, just in case. Another potion that is always good to have
is a Restore Strength potion. You'll learn why when you face some undead Wraiths.
|You can find and harvest ingredients all over Cyrodill. They can be found in the wild, in people's houses, and even growing in towns. They can be eaten by themselves for a minor effect or combined with other ingredients using your Alchemy tools to create powerful potions. For a list of alchemical ingredients and instructions on how to use them, see our Alchemy page.
Alchemy Tools
|This tool gets its own mention because it is required to perform any alchemy. You can purchase one at any store that sells ingredients, though they are cheaper if you join the Mages Guild and just take one off of the shelf. Once you have this and several ingredients, use the Mortar and Pestle to begin making potions.
|Like the Mortar and Pestle, these tools range from Novice to Master ratings. To find any better than Novice rating, you'll have to buy them in stores or find them in dungeons. The only way to begin finding more advanced ones is to increase your character's level.
The Pen is Mightier
|Scrolls work just like a spell, but don't require any special skills. You can purchase them in stores or find them in dungeons. Many of them will have effects more powerful than spells your character actually has the ability to cast making them prized possessions. To use them, equip them through the journal screen. They will become equipped as the next spell you cast when you enter combat.
|There are hundreds of books in Cyrodiil. Many of the books are holdovers from Morrowind, though there are plenty of new texts to read. Aside from offering you bits of backstory, some of the books will give you an increase in one or more skills. For this reason, it is a great idea to read every book you can without getting caught stealing.
|There are tons of random scraps of paper and notes in Oblivion. Some will offer clues on how to make potions, find caves, or give you clues as to local affairs. Rarely, unless noted in a quest, will you need to have these in your possession. Outside of quests, read these and discard them immediately.
|Give us feedback!
|On to Weapons and Armor...
Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony Cheats
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George Will Wakes Up
In his column today, conservative Washington Post opinionator George Will's takes his side to task for the dishonest ways they have attacked the president's record on foreign policy. As Will explains, those who advance the notion that "America is being endangered by 'appeasement' and military parsimony have worked that pedal on their organ quite enough."
The deaf, dumb, and blind approach that the Republican presidential contenders have taken, in which they attack even the president's most popular and successful decisions, doesn't have much resonance with the electorate — especially given that the president has pursued a fairly conservative foreign policy while backing modest cuts to the massive military infrastructure. Will writes:
The U.S. defense budget is about 43 percent of the world's total military spending — more than the combined defense spending of the next 17 nations, many of which are U.S. allies. Are Republicans really going to warn voters that America will be imperiled if the defense budget is cut 8 percent from projections over the next decade? In 2017, defense spending would still be more than that of the next 10 countries combined.
Do Republicans think it is premature to withdraw as many as 7,000 troops from Europe two decades after the Soviet Union's death? About 73,000 will remain, most of them in prosperous, pacific, largely unarmed and utterly unthreatened Germany. Why do so many remain?
Since 2001, the United States has waged war in three nations, and some Republicans appear ready to bring the total to five, adding Iran and Syria. (The Weekly Standard, of neoconservative bent, regrets that Obama "is reluctant to intervene to oust Iran's closest ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.") GOP critics say that Obama's proposed defense cuts will limit America's ability to engage in troop-intensive nation-building. Most Americans probably say: Good.
Will, an early and enthusiastic supporter of the war in Iraq, points out that what many Republicans are complaining about — namely that we are less inclined to invade and occupy other countries almost at will — is exactly what most Americans want. In particular, Will goes after former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who has advanced the "appeasement" canard even more than his more hawkish opponents. Romney's policy on Afghanistan, for example, seems to be the opposite of what the president is initiating; even if that means continuing a war that many (including some of Romney's own advisors) realize is unwinnable in the conventional sense.
But Will's comments about military spending are even more important. In the past several months, we've heard from Republicans that sequestration would result in all sorts of terrible outcomes, including a possible military draft, the abandonment of our allies, and even ceding our "global superpower status." The Heritage Foundation, one of the breeding grounds for conservative thought, is not only opposed to modest cuts to military spending but has consistently called for defense spending to be increased, much like Romney.
But these arguments, as Will notes, are made without consideration of just how massive our military budget is, how small an impact sequestration will ultimately have, and the fact that not only do we spend more than the next 17 countries combined, but that many of those behind us are our NATO allies and hence are of no threat.