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Review: Tarnation
The highlight of the film may be an 11-year-old Jonathan Caouette's remarkable performance in front of the camera as a pregnant and abused junkie.3.5
One of the hottest tickets at Sundance '04, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation made headlines when it was announced that it was produced for $218.32 and edited entirely on Apple's free iMovie editing software. Soon, filmmakers Gus Van Sant and James Cameron Mitchell came calling. Using photographs, old home movies, short films, and pop-cultural artifacts from the '80s and '90s, Caouette splices together the images of his life using split-screen and recoloring effects, creating a kaleidoscopic found-art project that looks to redefine the nature of documentary filmmaking. Caouette plumbs the depths of his mother Renee's life, revealing a young girl who was forever scarred at an early age when doctors unnecessarily subjected her to electroshock treatment. Years later, when it's revealed that a drug dealer friend of Renee's once gave a young Jonathan two joints laced with PCP, you get a sense that the boy never recovered from the intense trip. Like many gay boys, Jonathan is hellbent on survival, and he uses his relationship to his camera to exorcize his demons. He naturally responds to camp—from Wonder Woman and The Stepford Wives to Liquid Sky and the films of David Lynch and Paul Morrissey (not surprisingly, his crazed mother suggests a grown-up Andrea Feldman)—as a means of displacing, understanding, and finally subverting human pain. The highlight of the film may be an 11-year-old Caouette's remarkable performance in front of the camera as a pregnant and abused junkie (this is a kid who's watched too much television, but one who's also seen real-life suffering). A drama queen to the core, Caouette evokes the horrible tragedy of his mother's life with printed text on the screen that suggests lines from a children's storybook. As for the soundtrack of hushed, sometimes distorted whispers, movie one-liners, and answering machine messages, it too points to the man's self-diagnosed "depersonalization disorder." The copious digital effects used throughout this brilliant video installation are self-conscious, for sure, but Caouette's psychedelic montage doesn't exist to pander to short attention spans. Instead, his images evoke the texture of the human mind—how it processes thoughts and sorts through memories, some more painful than others, constantly threatening to erode or, conversely, duplicate themselves until the body can't take the pressure. Like a person who divulges too much information on the first date, Caouette is not only self-pitying but also uncomfortably frank. But when you realize that Tarnation exists first and foremost for the director's benefit, you then realize that we should all be so lucky to so bravely confront and sort through the pieces of our lives.
Cast: Jonathan Caouette, Renee LeBlanc, Rosemary Davis, Adolph Davis Director: Jonathan Caouette Screenwriter: Jonathan Caouette Distributor: Wellspring Running Time: 88 min Rating: NR Year: 2003 Buy: Video
Review: Saudi Runaway Is a Raw and Immediate Chronicle of an Escape
Camera, character, and cameraperson are one throughout, and the effect is exquisitely suffocating.3.5
Susanne Regina Meures's invitation into the filmic world of her exquisite Saudi Runaway is by way of a camera that moves as if attached to a body. It's a mobility completely devoid of the vulgar familiarity of a GoPro, or the numb slickness of a dolly shot that only simulates the point of view of a character. We don't yet know where the body is headed but we can feel its fear. Camera, character, and cameraperson are one here, and the effect is suffocating. We see people's heads bare and covered. Our vision is fuzzy. Soon, though, the wind lifts what turns out to be a piece of a garment—the camera's sartorial filter. We're moving inside an abaya. That's where we remain for most of the film: between the body of a young woman, Muna, plotting her escape from Saudia Arabia and the dark fabric of her garb.
The film's handheld camera suggests a baby being held. Not just because of how tethered it often is to the cameraperson, but because our mostly hazy gaze suggests eyes just getting used to a terrifying world. By the time Muna tells us that she will try to record "everything" and that "it will be dangerous," she's stating the obvious. Though it pulsates with raw intimacy, Saudi Runaway does have its share of obvious elements, from the sound of music when we least need it, to one too many shots of a trapped bird, to Muna telling us, midway through the film, that "the majority of society is conservative." But its conceptual device is so uncanny, so un-mediated by how Meures structures Muna's original footage, that we can't help but excuse the director's attempts to turn the original fragments into a coherent narrative.
The camera in Saudi Runaway is so prosthetic, and its images all but birthed by Muna, that, at first, it's difficult to accept that someone other than she is credited with directing the film. Must Westerners save brown women so that they can speak? However, Muna's occasional prefacing of her murmured voiceover account with "Dear Sue" gives us a hint of a transnational sisterly collaboration. The epistolary layer of Saudi Runaway isn't fully explained, a technique often used in the essay film genre that helps give a video-diary aesthetic a sense of depth while maintaining its mystery. Is Sue the director or an imaginary friend? Is Sue a rhetorical device like one of Chris Marker addressees in Sans Soleil? Is Sue actually listening?
The fact that this writer sat immediately in front of both Muna and Meures at the film's Kino International screening at this year's Berlinale made the experience of watching it all the more eerie. Our real-life escapee was clearly now safe and sound in Germany, reacting in real time—with self-conscious sighs and sad moans—to the presentation of her ordeal.
On screen, we learn that Muna isn't allowed to leave her family home without being escorted by a male relative. That she will only be allowed to drive if her future husband allows her to. That her father keeps possession of her passport, which she can only renew with his approval. "Be obedient and everything will be fine" is the advice that Muna's grandmother gives her.
All of the film's faces, apart from Muna's, are perpetually pixilated, reminding us that these are images captured without her family members' consent. That betrayal and guilt might be prerequisites for deliverance. The pixilating effect also means Muna "covers" everyone else's faces while liberating her own, her flight necessitating an exhilarating mix of precision, and risk, and anxiety. But, also, the anger of those she must dupe in order to leave them behind. "Do you really think you can go to paradise and leave me here in hell?" is Muna's mother's reaction to her daughter's courage. Although with the benefit of hindsight, she eventually anoints Muna's newfound independence with a WhatsApp voice message praising her. As if freedom were contagious, experienceable by proxy, or the sheer power of imagination.
Director: Susanne Regina Meures Screenwriter: Susanne Regina Meures Distributor: National Geographic Documentary Films Running Time: 88 min Rating: NR Year: 2020
Review: Swallow Is a Provocative Me Too Parable in Body-Horror Guise
Fortunately for the film, Carlo Mirabella-Davis continually springs scenes that either transcend or justify his preaching.3
Writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis's Swallow pivots on a queasy premise: the uncontrollable urge of a young trophy wife, Hunter (Haley Bennett), to swallow inedible objects. Hunter first ingests a marble, after touching it as if it's a talisman, cherishing its assuring tactility. Later, Hunter carefully removes the marble from the toilet after passing it, cleaning it off and placing it on a tray as a trophy. The marble will soon be joined by a stickpin, a lock, and a variety of other increasingly disturbing things. But there's another wrinkle of perversity to Hunter's new hobby: She's pregnant, and the possibility of these objects puncturing her developing child, no matter how irrational, haunts the film.
For a significant portion of Swallow's running time, Mirabella-Davis maintains an aura of ambiguity, keeping the audience in a state of discomfort as to what Hunter's ailment precisely means. There are plenty of hints even early on, as Hunter is married to a svelte GQ-ready hunk, Richie (Austin Stowell), who's more interested in his phone and his job with his prosperous father, Michael (David Rasche), than his wife. Yet Mirabella-Davis initially resists doubling down on the sort of denouncements of the wealthy that come so easy to filmmakers. In his way, Richie seems to care about Hunter, and his mother, Katherine (Elizabeth Marvel), occasionally comforts her. The filmmaker's initial refusal to totally render these people rich monsters only intensifies the scenario's mystery and tension.
Mirabella-Davis is also willing to take Hunter to task for her own alienation, as people often tune her out because she has so efficiently rendered herself a dully accommodating and complacent Stepford wife. Her psychological disorder, known as pica, partially appears to be a response to her knowledge of this fact, serving as a contemptuous act of self-punishment, with perhaps an element of sexual gratification. The narrative contains multitudes of subtexts, and Bennett superbly modulates between learned impassivity and outright despair, capturing the pain of a kind of actress who has come to feel trapped in her role. This entrapment is formally complemented by an aesthetic that's been very fashionable in art-house horror films lately: pristine, symmetrical compositions of stylish, remote residences that express the inhumanity of essentially living in a one-percent fashion catalogue.
Swallow is initially marked by a driving tension, as we're led to wonder just how awful and crazy Hunter's habit will become. The film is never as gross as one might fear, as Mirabella-Davis is less interested in shock-jock flourishes than in sincerely rendering Hunter's physical pain and mental anguish; like Mike Flanagan, Mirabella-Davis is the rare humanist horror filmmaker. As such, Hunter's choking—the most disturbing detail in the film—becomes a piercing affirmation of her struggle to feel something and be seen.
There's a strange irony to the film's second half. As Mirabella-Davis sets about explaining the meaning of Hunter's predicament, Swallow grows simultaneously more poignant and pat. Dished out in pieces throughout the film, Hunter's backstory has been self-consciously overstuffed with topical elements of women's struggles against patriarchal atrocity, from casual objectification and condescension to rape to the struggle to be pro-choice in the United States. (Hunter's mother is even said to be a right-wing religious fundamentalist.) This psychology eventually waters the evocative premise down with literal-mindedness, so that Swallow becomes less a body horror film than a Me Too parable.
Fortunately, Mirabella-Davis continually springs scenes that either transcend or justify his preaching. Later in the film, a nurse, Luay (Laith Nakli), is hired to keep watch over Hunter. As a refugee of the Syrian civil war, Luay is partially offered up as a device to score points on Hunter's privilege (he memorably remarks that one doesn't have time for mind problems when dodging bullets), though he also shows her profound compassion, most acutely when he climbs under the bed with Hunter in a moment of crisis, patting her back with an affection that we've never seen extended to her by anyone else.
Near the end of the film, Hunter holes up in a cheap motel, shoveling dirt into her mouth while watching soap operas that peddle the dream of marrying rich and hot—a sequence of profound and wrenching loneliness. And the film's climax, in which Hunter tracks down a man from her past, Erwin (Denis O'Hare), is equally heartbreaking, exposing Hunter's swallowing for what it truly is: an attempt at annihilation as atonement, as well as a self-defiling as paradoxical affirmation of control. Hunter resists her status as an accessory by swallowing others.
Cast: Haley Bennett, Austin Stowell, Denis O'Hare, Elizabeth Marvel, David Rasche, Luna Lauren Velez, Laith Nakli, Babak Tafti Director: Carlo Mirabella-Davis Screenwriter: Carlo Mirabella-Davis Distributor: IFC Films Running Time: 94 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Interview: Corneliu Porumboiu on The Whistlers and Playing with Genre
Porumboiu discusses the links between his latest and Police, Adjective, the so-called "Romanian New Wave," and more.
Anyone inured to the downward-facing schadenfreude of Corneliu Porumboiu's prior features might be taken aback by The Whistlers, the Romanian auteur's first foray into slick, international genre filmmaking. The title refers to a crime ring in the Canary Islands that uses a bird-whistling language to evade surveillance. A crooked cop named Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) successfully infiltrates the group, but his undercover status is increasingly compromised by his fixation on Gilda (Catrinel Menghia), the sultry girlfriend of the ringleader, as well as by the tight leash his commanding officer back in Bucharest has him on.
Lest anyone think Porumboiu is making a play for more commercial appeal, The Whistlers is choc-a-block with teasing allusions, including repurposed music like Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" and Jacques Offenbach's "Baccharole" from The Tales of Hoffman, as well as cinephilic references: One expository dump happens during a screening of The Searchers, while a climactic set piece takes place at an abandoned movie set. I had the pleasure of picking Porumboiu's brain after the film's U.S. premiere last fall at the New York Film Festival about his toying with genre, the so-called "Romanian New Wave," and more.
All your films are playful in my opinion, but with this one, you're playing with genre.
If you had asked me four years ago if one of my films would have flashbacks, I would have said, "No, no way." [laughs] With The Whistlers, the way it's structured, I was interested in the process of learning the language. That determined the core of the film. After that, I knew I needed flashbacks so I can have different types of plot movements happening—so that the main character, Cristi, can look differently at things as they happen, because of language. Double-movement. A parallel structure. After that came the other characters in the film, who play specific roles for—in front of—the camera. Catrinel Menghia plays Gilda, which is an assumed name. We don't know much about this character.
The femme fatale.
Right. She's assuming that position. At the end of the day, this is a world of people chasing money. They're using dialogue to have a fight, you know? So, I knew it was time to look back at the classical noirs. I watched some films and began pulling from them.
The film's plotlines get increasingly convoluted as Cristi learns more about the world he's stepped into, the threat of a double-cross always looming over him.
Well, at the end I think you get it all back. My focus was to arrive in the middle, to arrive at a type of cinema linked exclusively to his character, his personality. So, I was thinking in classical noir but not dominated by it.
This is your second time working with Vlad Ivanov, the first since Police, Adjective, nearly a decade ago. Was this role written for him?
Yes. Because in a way I was revisiting the character from Police, Adjective, starting from that. To me he's an almost theological character. So, at the end of the day, I asked myself if this guy, who's almost like a military officer, who has a very strict background, can his philosophy last? To find this guy 10 years after, what does he still believe in? Who is he now?
Tell me more the difference between then and now.
Well, in the last film he was someone who trusted a certain system, was a part of it. He had his own philosophy, he knew very well where his power was. A decade later he's completely lost. He doesn't know what he believes in anymore. I wanted the difference to be subtle but indisputable. He's become obsessed with money, his motivations are more harsh.
Is there something about Romania's economic situation that you're linking this to?
In 12:08 East of Bucharest, my characters defined themselves in relation to the revolution of 1989, and they believed in communication. In Police, Adjective, you have a boss imposing his own ideology from the top down. In Metabolism, it's like a game: The director can't assume his position at the top. Here, my characters don't believe in anything, they just think in terms of fighting and winning. This is how we perceive the world now, I think.
The transition from value systems to anarchy, or at least a certain realpolitik—even working cooperatively, everyone is looking out for themselves.
I think after the economic crisis, the world changed drastically. I don't know, the classical noir has a certain vision about the world that's quite dark, yet was proper for that time. Maybe we can find some similarities today.
Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between this film and Infinite Football?
Infinite Football is about utopia—one man's political, ideological utopia. He wants to change the game, and what his new game implies is a reflection of the history of Romania. His personal history. But I was doing it in a different way, so I did it like a work in progress.
And you figure into the film as well. You have personal history with these people. They talk to you, talk to the camera, pull you into the frame.
Well, it's a personal project. Laurentiu, the subject, my friend, he may not have faith in the system, but he has faith in the game, or that his rules will prove themselves. This is the Don Quixote thing of it all.
Spanish and Romanian are not that far from one another, and in order to whistle, the main character has to break his messages down into units of Spanish syllables.
I saw a documentary on TV about La Gomera, the island in Spain. From that I learned about the language of whistling and became very curious. That was 10 years ago. I started to read about the language, and I went to the island where they were teaching it. It was then that I knew I wanted to do a film about the character from Police, Adjective. Being a film about language and codes, I thought I could play with genres; cinema at the end of the day is coding reality, after all. When I write, it's like going back to the first act, and trying to be there, be present with the characters. Eventually it is them who move me into the story. I have a very particular way of writing. Police, Adjective had eight or nine drafts. I wanted the dialogue to be functional, transactional. And not to go too deep. Each of the characters has a double nature that can't be opened too much. At the end of the day I'm making these movies for myself. You have to believe in what you're doing, at least at the beginning of the shoot. [laughs]
I think the first 15 minutes of this film have more edits than all of Police, Adjective. Surely this switch-up is getting you questions from people.
The story called for this approach though. It pushed me to do that.
Critics love packaging things. The "Romanian New Wave," epitomized by the slowness and realism of your earlier films, is a perfect example. Do you find these categories or tropes at all oppressive?
Well, the truth is it wasn't a "movement" in the sense of something written down or programmatic. Young filmmakers started working in 2000 and, of course, critics outside Romania don't know much about Romanian cinema before "us," so it's expected that they will put a stamp on new films coming out. For me, each of the directors has their own voice, their own way, developed on its own terms, and for me the movies are especially different now. I'm not offended, but it means I have to speak about my own cinema—none of these generalizations. These critics probably have not seen The Reenactment, or Reconstruction, by Lucian Pintillie, my mentor—the so-called "Old Wave." This was a hugely important, inspiring film for all of us in my generation. He died before I finished shooting The Whistlers. Regarding Police, Adjective, he told me: "If you cut five or 10 minutes from this film, you'll have a really good audience." And I told him, "No." [laughs]
The generalizations tend to break down, or that's just the nature of an artist discussing their own work. And the idea of a "movement" implies a finitude or a strategy.
The Treasure was a fable, no? You could find the structure less threatening if you had seen my previous films. Maybe other films from Romania around the same time. But I began to try a nonlinear structure in my documentaries, then applied it to The Whistlers.
Do you prefer the original title, La Gomera, to The Whistlers?
I do think The Whistlers is better. But translated into Romanian, it doesn't have the same power as La Gomera! Also, I wanted to avoid confusion with Gomorrah.
Review: Autumn de Wilde's Emma Takes a Classic for a Stylish, Ironic Spin
This lively adaptation plays up the novel's more farcical elements, granting it a snappy, rhythmic pace.3
Jane Austen's Emma concerns the mishaps of a self-assured young country aristocrat who prides herself on her savoir faire but who remains, in the terms a certain modern adaptation, totally clueless. A light comedy neither broad enough to be farce nor pointed enough to be satire, the novel lends itself to interpretation as both, given the narrative's manifold romantic misunderstandings and host of kooky, idle gentry. Without departing far from the text, director Autumn de Wilde's lively new film adaptation emphasizes the more farcical elements of Austen's second-longest novel, granting it a snappy, rhythmic pace.
The eponymous gentlewoman, the story's only three-dimensional character, is played with impressive depth by Anya Taylor-Joy here. On screen, Emma can seem frivolous right up until the climactic moment that forces her into a self-confrontation, but Taylor-Joy's open, expressive face, so often in close-up, captures Emma's creeping uncertainty regarding her powers of judgment, as well as her own feelings, even as she continues to act the social butterfly. She's aided by a screenplay by Eleanor Catton that doesn't quite resolve the story's main fault—its concluding romance counts as perhaps the least convincing of any of Austen's works—but which preserves much of the complexity of its "handsome, clever, and rich" heroine, who must learn to abide by her judgment rather than her vanity.
Emma begins the film at the height of self-regard, the reigning socialite of the small countryside community of Highbury. The 20-year-old has recently made a match for her governess, Miss Taylor (Gemma Whelan), arranging her marriage—well above her station—to the neighboring widower gentleman Mr. Weston (Rupert Graves). She elects Harriet Smith (Mia Goth), a recently arrived schoolgirl of uncertain origins and inelegant manners, to be her next project. She teaches the naïve girl, enraptured by Emma's ostentatious wealth and delicate bearing, to present herself as worthy of a genteel suitor, manipulating her into rejecting the proposal of hardy local farmer Mr. Martin (Connor Swindells), and encouraging her to pursue the affections of the young vicar-about-town Mr. Elton (Josh O'Connor) instead.
O'Connor plays Mr. Elton with palpable smarm, wearing a perpetual shit-eating grin above the ridiculous splayed-out collar of an early-19th-century Anglican vicar. Here, as elsewhere, de Wilde communicates much of what remains implicit in the novel (like Mr. Elton's odiousness) via a tidy mise-en-scène redolent of Wes Anderson. The sterile pastels of the elegant clothing and the precise movements of both the aristocracy and their servants (who hover about in the background like strange automatons) give the film's sudden eruptions of human neuroses a droll, punchy tone—as when Mr. Elton casually mentions that it may snow, and a dinner party suddenly erupts into chaos, the nervous guests rushing to the carriages to get back home.
It's in one of those carriages that, in a scene played perhaps a bit too broadly, a slightly drunk Mr. Elton confronts Emma with the revelation that he's been aiming to court her. Naturally, the news of Mr. Elton's true affections devastates Harriet, whom Emma very belatedly realizes may have been well suited to Mr. Martin, though at this point Harriet has learned to think of the farmer as beneath her. Outraged at Emma's tutoring of Harriet in the ways of class presumption is Martin's landlord, Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn), a wealthy Highbury bachelor who, as brother to her brother-in-law, counts as family to Emma and her worry-wart father, Mr. Woodhouse (Bill Nighy). In the lavishly decorated living rooms and salons of their immense estates, Emma and Mr. Knightley bicker in the way that unwitting lovers in Austen tend to, arguing verbosely about the propriety of introducing Harriet to high society.
Emma and Knightley later have occasion to debate the relative virtues of Frank Churchill (Callum Turner) and Jane Fairfax (Amber Anderson), who arrive separately in town under much whispered ballyhoo. The young and handsome Frank seems destined to ask for Emma's hand; Jane, the orphaned niece of local gossip Miss Bates (Miranda Hart), is rumored to be heartbroken after forming an inappropriate attachment to her adopted sister's husband. Emma is as flattered by Frank's attentions as she is jealous of Jane's level of gentlewomanly accomplishment. Catton and de Wilde extrapolate from the novel's succession of social scenarios to make Emma's doubt about the shifting social field more comically apparent: One of the funniest scenes has the ostensibly modest Jane follow up Emma's dilettantish performance on the pianoforte with a beautiful, complex sonata, in front of the whole town.
Emma's discomfort in her new situation will come to a head when she, with Frank's encouragement, grossly abuses her privilege as a gentlewoman with a practiced wit, embarrassing herself and wounding an old friend. Emma is interested in such textures of early-19th-century society, if not in the latter's pace. The film fits so much of Austen's narrative in by judiciously condensing scenes to suit its more ironic tone, occasionally using transitional smash cuts to get right to the point. The result is a stylish, eminently watchable farce that, despite its old-England trappings, is every bit an update as it is an adaptation.
Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Bill Nighy, Mia Goth, Miranda Hart, Josh O'Connor, Callum Turner, Rupert Graves, Amber Anderson Director: Autumn de Wilde Screenwriter: Eleanor Catton Distributor: Focus Features Running Time: 125 min Rating: PG Year: 2020 Buy: Soundtrack, Book
Review: The Trouble with Being Born Is a Chilly Rumination on Memory
In the end, the film suffers from the same issue as its moody androids: enervation borne out of repetition.2
The near future looks a lot like the present in Sandra Wollner's The Trouble with Being Born, only bleaker and lonelier. That sense of isolation is conveyed right from the start. In the fantastically dreamy introduction, we float through a forest on a summery drift of whispering voiceover and buzzing insects before coming upon a father and young daughter next to a backyard pool. What looks like a relaxing day quickly reads as forced, even icy. While the girl (Lena Watson), Elli, stays by the pool, the father (Dominik Warta) goes inside, only to dash back out again when he sees Elli floating lifeless in the water. "Fuck," he says. "Not again." In the next scene, he's using his phone to reboot the not-quite-drowned Elli.
An android whose deep black eyes and waxily smooth skin—evoking the eerie expressionlessness of Christiane's face mask in Eyes Without a Face—are the very definition of the Uncanny Valley, Elli was built to replicate the father's daughter, who disappeared 10 years before. Her reactions are slow and mannered, as though she were puzzling over a bug in her programming instead of playing like a human 10-year-old. Even though her actions are mostly set on a loop built out from scraps of what the father remembers of his daughter, Elli seems to take a mix-and-match approach to those implanted memories, obsessing like an amnesiac trying to make sense of a muddled past. At times, it's unclear whether the lines in the voiceover ("Mum…doesn't need to know everything") are repeated from the human Elli or invented by the android Elli as a way of mimicking her biological predecessor.
The first half of The Trouble with Being Born is narratively thin but heavy with the promise of something more. Inklings of something disturbing in this isolated idyll, that too-close stare of the father and his dressing her just so, are eventually made explicit and disturbing. In one of the more effectively queasy body-horror moments ever put on film, the father removes Elli's tongue and vagina for cleaning, leaving her naked on the counter. It's a strikingly disgusting moment, pointing not just to the abuse he subjected his human daughter to, but the casual disdain with which he regards her replacement. But despite the power of this scene and a few others—particularly the wordless shot of Elli watching her father from a distance with the same restless curiosity of the cat flopped next to her, visualizing the unbridgeable gulf between "father" and "daughter"—Wollner continues to fill her film with too little story.
That problem becomes more acute once Elli runs away and the story shifts to another android-human relationship. After Elli is picked up by a passing motorist (Simon Hatzl) who then gifts her like a new toy to his elderly mother (Ingrid Burkhard), still mourning the little brother she lost 60 years before. The ease with which Elli is made into a boy—in the world of the film, reprogramming androids is about as complicated as restarting a smartphone—stands in stark contrast to the violent trauma of abuse that still lingers like a ghost in her flickeringly sentient CPU. But while the setting and the primary human character changes in the second half of the film, Wollner's narrow view of her story means just more of the same glassy expressions and long maundering silences, like Tarkovsky without the existential pain. At some point, the mirroring begins to feel more like straight repetition without any significant revelation.
In the end, The Trouble with Being Born suffers from the same issue as its moody androids: enervation borne out of repetition. There are some attempts here and there to comment on the replacement of human connection with silicone facsimiles. We almost never see people together. The only time the mother, who spends much of her time walking her dog and wistfully pondering the past, is with another person is when her son drops off Elli. Shopping malls, car-choked roads, and distant skyscrapers dominate the landscape. But rather than truly exploring the ramifications of its futuristic conceit, whether from a broader societal or individualistic and relational perspective, the film just keeps looping back to the same luminously filmed but ultimately blank silences.
Cast: Lena Watson, Dominik Warta, Ingrid Burkhard, Jana McKinnon, Simon Hatzl Director: Sandra Wollner Screenwriter: Sandra Wollner, Roderick Warich Running Time: 94 min Rating: NR Year: 2020
Review: Cristi Puiu's Malmkrog Wages a War Between Language and Cinema
It all has the makings of a game of Clue, but the mysteries here are linguistic.3
Cristi Puiu's Malmkrog is based on 19th-century Russian philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovyov's prophetic Three Conversations, which, through a series of dialectical maneuvers, addresses such topics as economic materialism, nationalism, and abstract moralism. The film takes place on a snow-covered hillside, where a large pastel-pink mansion sits and Puiu turns the philosophical into drama. Sheltered in the mansion's walls are a small group of aristocrats that includes a politician, a general and his wife, and a young countess. It all has the makings of a game of Clue, but the mysteries here are linguistic. A Christmas gathering stretches on in what seems to be real time, as the party's high-minded philosophical and political chatter takes on an increasingly strained air.
That tension is heightened by the obstacles that Puiu uses to discombobulate his audience. Malmkrog is the Transylvanian village where the film takes place, yet the characters, who speak primarily in French, talk of being in Russia. And as they discuss imminent war and the potential outcomes of violence, it's as if the film appears to exist outside of time and place. Doorways and mirrors obfuscate who's involved in a conversation, and the characters move through the mansion as though compelled by spirits of the past, with cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru often lighting all those drawing rooms using only natural light sources. Malmkrog exudes a painterly expressiveness that's a far cry from the cold, handheld aesthetic that typically defines the look of Puiu's work and the Romanian New Wave as a whole.
The film's first scene lasts nearly an hour and is a magnificent example of staging. The camera glides left and right, with each movement matched by a change in composition that the actors match as though dancing to the music behind their endless words. This balletic circularity, slow but constantly surprising, recalls Max Ophüls's fixation on the oneiric, circular properties of time. In a surprising moment of violence, a number of characters die on a staircase, only for them to come back to life a scene later, and without comment from anyone. When Nikolai (Frédéric Schulz-Richard), the mansion's wealthy owner and Malmkrog's central figure, looks up the staircase, it's as if he recalls what previously occurred there. The moment echoes one from Letter from an Unknown Woman where Joan Fontaine's Lisa stares up the very staircase up which Louis Jourdan's Stefan and another woman ascended years earlier.
Whenever Nikolai, who makes the domineering Stefan from Ophüls's 1948 masterpiece seem meek by comparison, utters lines like "prayer is a soap for the soul," he carries himself like the Sherlock Holmes of moral arbitration. But he's closer to a 19th-century Ben Shapiro: a pompous rat obsessed with facts and logic, who won't let a woman finish a point for fear that he won't be able to counteract it with a cogent counter-argument. It's not always clear to what extent Puiu is satirizing this type of behavior, given the spectacle of the man's endless pontificating, and that the other characters only rarely undercut his words with references to his verbosity. Puiu clearly believes in Nikolai enough to make him the mouthpiece for Solovyov's philosophizing, which makes it harder to buy to what extent these people are being sent up, and how much Puiu wants the viewer to eat up his words wholesale.
With our perspective held hostage in one place, memory and imagination blur into one. When Ingrida (Diana Sakalauskaité) reads from a book, the account of a vicious battle between Cossacks and bashi-bazouks, the effect is rapturous. In this claustrophobic endurance test, Puiu transports the viewer through language to a scene with the epic scope of the film's runtime. He focuses on listening faces, themselves teleported to a different space.
Like his characters, Puiu wages his own war of discourses, in his case between language and cinema. Whenever Malmkrog seems to have settled into a formal rhythm, the filmmaker flips it, using a different device to interrogate how people talk, and to what extent they listen. One heightened dialogue exchange culminates with the main characters staring out of the window in complete stillness. Then Nikolai starts to move, unstuck from this tableau, and seemingly from time. The boundaries of reality keep getting pushed at, to the point that one almost expects the mansion's walls to fall and reveal a film set. Later, he glides away from a tea reception to observe the servants, who silently rearrange the house and conceal their own power structure through glances and outbursts of violence that are hidden from the wealthy class. They are like spirits, pulling out chairs for aristocrats who don't acknowledge them, clearing out items like empty champagne glasses that hint at the echo of a past time.
The creeping dread of history repeatedly overwhelms character and viewer, particularly during General Edouard's (Ugo Broussot) screed on the world's necessary "Europeanness," which becomes a Buñuelian account of fascist tendencies and culminates in the film's most shocking moment. His wife, the imperious, frizzy-haired Madeline (Agathe Bosch), obsesses over the authority behind language: who may speak, and how. This is the sneaky vessel for a larger discussion on power and control. Living in a religious nation, Nikolai posits, one must first understand what Christianity is, and define national identity from that. The characters situate this in the context of war, and a globe that's shrinking in the face of technological progress.
But with each scene, Puiu strips away the layers of his ornate style, so that by hour three, all that's left is the close-up. With Nikolai's straight face berating Olga, evangelizing on resurrection, the sophistication of the dialogue rarely matches that of Puiu's aesthetic form. As Malmkrog becomes less ostentatious in style, the redundancy of its philosophizing becomes almost impossible to ignore, having made its conclusions about the inability of the intellectual class in combating fascism through language by the 100-minute mark. Puiu's assaultive mass of a film speaks to modern times in its depiction of aristocrats indulging in comfortable platitudes as the world edges toward the precipice of chaos, but the Romanian auteur doesn't entirely make the case for sticking around to listen.
Cast: Agathe Bosch, Frédéric Schulz-Richard, Diana Sakalauskaité, Ugo Broussot, Marina Palii, István Téglás Director: Cristi Puiu Screenwriter: Cristi Puiu Running Time: 200 min Rating: NR Year: 2020
Review: For Leigh Whannell's The Invisible Man, the Cruelty Is the Point
The thrill of the film's craftsmanship is inseparable from its main character's abuse.1.5
Elisabeth Moss brings unexpected shades to the flimsiest of roles, and she makes it look so easy. Even if you go into writer-director Leigh Whannell's The Invisible Man blind, you will know what Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) did to his wife, Cecilia Kass (Moss), simply from the way she moves one of his hands from her belly. Across a taut and nerve-wracking opening sequence, Cecilia orchestrates what becomes increasingly clear is an elaborate escape. If it's easy to overlook the hoariness with which the camera lingers at various points on some object that portends things to come, that's because Moss never stops conveying the agony of the years-long abuse that Cecilia has endured, through the surreptitiousness of her gait and the way paralyzing bolts of fear shoot through her body.
That kind of talent only helps a film like The Invisible Man that doesn't really care about abuse beyond its function as a plot device. After escaping Adrian's clutches, Cecilia goes to live with a childhood friend (Aldis Hodge) and his daughter (Storm Reid). Or, rather, struggles to live, as leaving the house is too hard for Cecilia to bear. Cecilia never really stops talking about the control that Adrian exercised over her, even after she learns that he committed suicide, thus freeing her to finally put her life back together. But there's a frustrating friction to such scenes, between an actress sincerely committed to expressing her character's pain and a filmmaker interested in trauma only as far it whets our appetite for how a psychopathic tech magnate who specialized in optics could possibly torment his wife from beyond the grave.
With his directorial debut, Insidious 3, Whannell effectively goosed an otherwise insipid haunted-house attraction with clever twists on a franchise's trite dependence on the jump scare. But it was Upgrade, which saw him freed of franchise responsibilities, as well as longtime collaborator James Wan, that felt closer to a coming-out party for the filmmaker. And it practically announced him as a master, if not of horror, then of evasion, for the way his acute sense of movement is so thrilling in the moment that it can make one overlook his rickety storytelling. Upgrade is a film that's less suspicious of the not-so-brave new world of tomorrow that anti-authoritarian tech bros are rapidly ushering in than it is in awe of what their toys can do. Its meditation on vengeance is closer to justification: that it's okay that a bro turned half-machine is going on a violent rampage because of what was done to his wife.
The Invisible Man, another distinctly male fantasy set in a more recognizable present-day San Francisco, has even less to say than that, though it seeks to also entertain us with all that a techie can do with one of his toys. And that it does, as in an impressive early scene inside James's house where Cecilia walks out of the kitchen while making breakfast and a long shot unobtrusively captures a knife falling off the counter and the flame on one of the gas burners being turned to high. The frisson of unease to this and several other scenes, of a man hiding in not-so-plain sight as he mounts a spectacular show of gaslighting, is close to unbearable. And when the titular menace is finally glimpsed, if only intermittently, the straight shot of action-infused momentum that marks the sequence as he lays waste to a small army of police officers inside the hallway of a mental institution feels like a release, for Cecilia and the audience.
But to what end does Whannell really fashion all this style? In one scene, and only one scene, the film tells us that Cecilia is an architect, not to illuminate all that she's capable of as a creative, but to allow for the moment where she shows up to an interview at an architecture firm and discovers that the samples of her work were removed from her portfolio. That scene, some 30 minutes into The Invisible Man, is the moment where the film starts to provoke a certain queasiness, where it becomes clear that Cecilia only exists, for Adrian and for Whannell, to be terrorized, to be held up in the air, to be flung across a room, to be punched, to not be believed, to be thought of as insane. And to be raped. That this violation happens off screen proves that Whannell has foresight, that he's aware of the controversy that surrounded Hollow Man upon its release in 2000. But that we must be told that it also took place at an indeterminate time, almost as a matter of course, feels like an icky attempt at not having to actually grapple with the implications of the crime by casting doubt on it.
Out of sight, out of mind. That feels like Whannell's mantra. Indeed, by the time it gets around to the business of Cecilia being believed, the film starts to collapse under the weight of an increasingly absurd series of plot reveals for the way she turns the tables on the invisible man to feel like anything but an afterthought. Even then, when her tormentor is right there out in the open, it's still clear that Whannell only thinks of violence in terms of how it can be paid back. Which is to say, he's consistent. Through to the end, you can't get off on the thrill of this film's craftsmanship without also getting off on the spectacle of more than just Cecilia brought to the brink of destruction. Like its style, The Invisible Man's cruelty is the point.
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer, Michael Dorman, Benedict Hardie Director: Leigh Whannell Screenwriter: Leigh Whannell Distributor: Universal Pictures Running Time: 125 min Rating: R Year: 2020
Review: Guns Akimbo Squanders a Nifty Setup with Excruciating Humor
Writer-director Jason Lei Howden's humor might have been tolerable if his film was at least reasonably imaginative.1.5
For much of Jason Lei Howden's Guns Akimbo, Miles (Daniel Radcliffe) is in his jammies, because getting dressed is difficult when your hands are nailed to pistols. Eating and using the bathroom are no easy feat either. With this, the film hits on an amusing setup for physical comedy, as Miles can do little but stumble about as he strives to drive a car or use his phone with his nose. He also must avoid being shot by Nix (Samara Weaving), his designated opponent in a kill-or-be-killed online competition called Skizm. But the film ultimately fails to capitalize on its concept and gets smothered by its smug, abrasive tone.
Miles is a coder for a video game titled Nuts Bust 2, one of too-many examples of the film's groan-inducing comedy. He's also a bizarrely self-aware depiction of an internet troll, as Miles admits via narration that, in order to feel worthwhile, he seeks out arguments in comment sections and reports "offensive content." When he goes to Skizm's chatroom to tell the viewers off, he runs afoul of the organization's facial-tattooed leader, Riktor (Ned Dennehy), who at one point says, "I'm going to do a poo-poo in my pantaloons," because why not? Those guns for hands and his forced participation in Skizm are Miles's punishment.
Most of Guns Akimbo's dialogue squanders an intriguing concept through truly excruciating attempts at humor, oscillating between snide comments, gay panic jokes, and capital-A attitude-laden one-liners. In one scene, Miles remarks that the world looks "so HD" because, with gun-hands, he can't go outside with his face in his phone.
The humor might have been tolerable if the film was at least reasonably imaginative. Radcliffe really digs into Miles's sniveling bafflement and the expressive Weaving clearly has a lot of hammy fun as the unhinged Nix. But too much of Guns Akimbo consists of unremarkable car chases and gun fights that hardly feel transformed at all by Miles's unique predicament. We watch a lot of people fire a lot of guns against a lot of concrete backdrops, except Howden deploys a hyperactive camera style that's always zooming around the characters in slow motion or fast forward. He appears to be going for the Neveldine/Taylor style of films like Crank and Gamer, except he's not nearly as inventive and most of his flourishes outright distract from the action choreography, sometimes obscuring it altogether.
Worse, Guns Akimbo strains to be self-aware, with Miles assuring audiences via narration that this isn't one of those stories where he wins back his ex-girlfriend, Nova (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), in the end. And it's weirdly self-congratulatory for a film that visibly revels in torturing Weaving's character and eventually has Nova kidnapped for the big climax anyway. The film has even less to say about the sort of obsessive spectatorship that makes up the story's backdrop, as though simply depicting reality-TV audiences and internet users as assholes is some profound statement. Luckily, unlike Miles, viewers have a say in the matter. They aren't bolted to the couch and the remote isn't nailed into their hands; they're free to quit watching at any time, or simply opt not to watch this obnoxious film at all.
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Samara Weaving, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Ned Dennehy, Rhys Darby, Grant Bowler, Edwin Wright Director: Jason Lei Howden Screenwriter: Jason Lei Howden Distributor: Saban Films Running Time: 97 min Rating: R Year: 2020
Review: The Assistant Is a Chilling Portrait of Workplace Harassment
The film is designed so that we feel as starved for rudimentary human emotion as its main character.3
With The Assistant, writer-director Kitty Green offers a top-to-bottom portrait of incremental dehumanization, and, on its terms, the film is aesthetically, tonally immaculate. The narrative is set in the Tribeca offices of a film mogul, but it could take place in a branch of any major corporation throughout the world without losing much of its resonance. Offices encourage professional functionality as a way of divorcing people from themselves, leading them to make actions without a sense of complicity. What starts small—throwing co-workers under the bus, neglecting friends due to punishing work hours—can blossom over time into people enabling atrocity under the guise of "doing what they're told."
With this psychology in mind, Green fashions The Assistant as a pseudo-thriller composed entirely of purposefully demoralizing minutiae. The film opens with a young woman, Jane (Julia Garner), being picked up from her apartment for work so punishingly early that it's almost impossible to tell if it's morning or night. By 8 a.m., she's been making copies, printing documents, reading emails, and tending to office errands for hours. Other employees gradually drift in, talking obligatorily of their weekends off—a privilege that Jane isn't accorded.
In these early scenes, Green conjures a peculiar, very palpable dread, her precise, anal-retentive compositions suggesting what might happen if David Fincher were to adapt Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." This dread springs from two places, as the visual palette is silvery and moody, evoking a potential corporate thriller, though the film refuses to move beyond the expository stage and gratify this expectation, and so we fear that we may be trapped with Jane in her tedium. We are, and this is by Green's moral schematic.
The Assistant is designed so that we feel as starved for rudimentary human emotion as Jane. No names are uttered throughout (the name Jane, which brings to mind the anonymity of a Jane Doe, is only stated in the credits), while the film mogul is only evoked via male pronouns (he's never seen but often referenced and occasionally heard over the phone, usually in a torrent of rage against Jane for her inability to talk down his wife, who knows of his infidelity). Jane brings another assistant the wrong sandwich, and he treats her cruelly; it never occurs to him, or anyone else, to thank Jane for the tasks she performs for everyone in the office. At best, Jane's co-workers regard her with a kind of pitying befuddlement, as if she's not quite real. When Jane eats, it's quickly and without pleasure, and she's always alert to being watched. No one speaks of their personal lives. Green springs one perceptive, poignant detail after another, especially when the mogul compliments Jane via email just as she thinks he's reached his limit with her. This is, of course, a major tool of the master manipulator: praise when least expected, and only enough to keep the person in your sphere of influence and at your mercy.
Increasingly unsettling details seep into this deadening atmosphere. Jane finds an earring in the mogul's office, which is repeatedly seen from a distance through its open door and becomes a chilling symbol for the mogul himself, suggesting his unshakable presence even in absence. There are jokes made about his couch, which Jane cleans. Young, beautiful women are brought into the office at late hours, and are referenced by both male and female employees with contempt. Growing fearful for one of the women, Jane tries to complain to an unsympathetic H.R. officer who sets about gaslighting her. It becomes evident that we're watching—from the perspective of a powerless yet ultimately complicit person—a parable about rich, insulated predators like Harvey Weinstein, and Green's grasp of Jane's indoctrination into this perverse world is impeccably believable.
Yet The Assistant also feels too narrow, too comfortable with its thesis. The rendering of the mogul as an unseen specter is effective but also dime-store lurid in the tradition of mediocre horror movies, and this device also conveniently absolves Green of having to wrestle with how a Weinstein type might live with himself. George Huang's similarly themed 1994 film Swimming with Sharks, which is mostly inferior to The Assistant, benefited from such a friction, as its own Weinstein surrogate (played by Kevin Spacey) had a magnetism that complicated and enriched the script's anger. There's also something insidious about Green's evasion, as the mogul's absence elevates him, mythologizes him, which reflects how people low on the power ladder see powerful exploiters. But Green physicalizes this idea without standing outside of it, challenging it, or contextualizing it; she traps us in a monotonous hell and leaves us there. Her fury with Weinstein and his ilk contains an element of awe.
Cast: Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen, Makenzie Leigh, Kristine Froseth, Jon Orsini, Noah Robbins, Stéphanye Dussud, Juliana Canfield, Alexander Chaplin, Dagmara Dominczyk, Bregje Heinen Director: Kitty Green Screenwriter: Kitty Green Distributor: Bleecker Street Media Running Time: 87 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Benh Zeitlin's Wendy Is a Half-Hearted Spin on Peter Pan
Wendy veers awkwardly and aimlessly between tragedy and jubilance, never accruing any lasting emotional impact.2
Like Beasts of the Southern Wild before it, Wendy unfolds through the eyes of a child. Benh Zeitlin's sophomore feature puts a new spin on Peter Pan, and not only because it takes on the perspective of a 10-year-old Wendy Darling (Devin France). The film's modern-rustic settings and costumes and relative lack of fantastical elements—notwithstanding the presence of a majestic, glowing sea creature, referred to as "mother," who may hold the secret to reversing time—also play a large part in re-envisioning J.M. Barrie's classic. But Zeitlin's brand of magical realism strains in its conflicting desires to both demystify Neverland (never mentioned by name in the film), chiefly by grounding it in a rather prosaic reality, and imbue the story with all the enchanting qualities we've come to expect from fantasies of everlasting childhood. Like its version of Peter (Yashua Mack), Wendy wants to fly, yet, because of its self-imposed restrictions, it never quite gets off the ground.
Across this tale of a child lurching toward adulthood, there's a sense of wonder and awe to the sea creature's brief appearances, and to Wendy's initial encounters with the free-spirited Peter, who playfully eggs her on from atop the train that regularly roars across the barren, rural locale that houses her family's rundown diner. But Wendy's whimsical flourishes, from Dan Romer's incessantly rousing score to Wendy's breathy and all-too-mannered voiceover, brush awkwardly against the film's dour conception of a Neverland drained of all its magic and grandeur. Despite this, Zeitlin strives to capture an unbridled sense of childlike exuberance as kids cavort around the rugged cliffside vistas of the remote volcanic island that Peter calls home. But lacking any of the mystical features typically associated with them, Peter and his cohorts' behaviors appear overly precocious to the point of ludicrousness; it's almost as if they're performing a twee, optimistic rendition of Lord of the Flies.
Unlike Quvenzhané Wallis, whose magnetic presence imbued Beasts of the Southern Wild with a pervasive warmth and soulfulness, Mack is an unfortunately listless presence as Peter. Several years younger than Wendy and her twin brothers, Douglas (Gage Naquin) and James (Gavin Naquin), Peter appears, more often than not, like a six-year-old playing dress-up. His utter lack of charisma and gusto renders him an ill-fitting avatar for boisterous youthfulness, while his occasionally domineering, yet still unimposing, demeanor hardly makes him out to be the inspirational figure that the film ultimately wants him to be. Not only does he allow one boy to drown at one point, he chops off the hand of another to prevent him from aging.
Such events position Wendy as a twisted take on Peter Pan, but these moments are never given room to breathe. Rather, they're uniformly undermined by the film cutting back to the idyllic adventures of children, in lockstep with Zeitlin's relentless pursuit of galvanizing his audience through a gleefully idealized vision of the world. This jarring intrusion of darker elements into the story makes for bizarre clashes in tone, leaving Wendy to veer awkwardly and aimlessly between tragedy and jubilance, never to accrue any lasting emotional impact. When Peter buoyantly declares that "to grow up is a great adventure," one is left to wonder not only why the boy who never grows up would, out of nowhere, embrace this worldview, but why Wendy, or any of the other children, would want to follow such a troubling figure on that journey.
As Wendy stumbles into its final act, where adult pirates attempt to use Wendy as bait to catch the giant sea creature, it becomes even more convoluted, contradictory, and murky in what it's trying to say about growing up. Wendy eventually begins to stand up to and question Peter, both for his mistreatment of her brother and his harshness toward the adults Peter has excommunicated to an impoverished community on the outskirts of the island. But no sooner does she chide Peter than she's back on his side, cheering him on as he fights off an admittedly cleverly devised Captain Hook. It's as if she, much like the film, can't seem to settle on whether Peter's a hero or a borderline psychopath, or if childhood is a magical time to live in permanently or a necessary step on the way to adulthood. Rather than meaningfully subverting audience expectations, Wendy instead plays like a half-hearted twist on the familiar tale that ultimately doesn't change the moral at the core of countless other Peter Pan adaptations: childhood is magical, and growing up is scary but inevitable.
Cast: Tommie Lynn Milazzo, Shay Walker, Devin France, Stephanie Lynn Wilson, Ahmad Cage, Gage Naquin, Krzysztof Meyn, Gavin Naquin, Romyri Ross Director: Benh Zeitlin Screenwriter: Benh Zeitlin, Eliza Zeitlin Distributor: Searchlight Pictures Running Time: 112 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2020
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This is the moment fans of author Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale" have been awaiting/dreading for years.
Akiva Goldsman, the producer behind movies like "Jonah Hex," "Fair Game" and "The Losers," is making his feature-film directorial debut with his own adaptation of "Winter's Tale," reported Deadline.
The novel is a sweeping epic, an adult fairy tale set in New York City around the turn of the 20th Century. Here's the description from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:
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New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake--orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.
Though he thinks hte house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.
Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
This synopsis is notable for a couple of reasons, like the misspellings of "the" in the second paragraph and "besieged" in the third, and for the lack of any mention of the flying horse that appears throughout the story.
This seems like an awfully ambitious project for a man who's previously only directed a handful of TV episodes, mostly "Fringe." We dearly loved this novel, but shudder to think what Hollywood would do to it with a $75 million budget.
Do yourself a favor and read the book before this thing hits theaters--figure you've got at least two years.


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Gluten Free Menu Swap!
If you want to know more about the weekly gluten free menu swap blogging event, or would like to volunteer to host one week, please visit Natalie, the Gluten Free Mommy's Headquarters!
Volunteers are ALWAYS welcome!
The special ingredient this week is chocolate! This was actually Natalie's pick for the week, and I can't agree more. I am a chocolate addict. When I was a little girl, I believed Hershey's milk chocolate was the bomb... now I really like fancy dark 70% cocoa Belgium chocolates... don't ask me what happened.
My wonderful Valentine Michael is still a "milk-chocolate-Hershey's" kinda guy. And I like that about him. He likes anything with chocolate, and if I ask him what he wants for dessert, I can almost guarantee that "chocolate" will be in the title. He especially loves my chocolate chip cookies!
Cocoa seeds were discovered over 2000 years ago. The first people known to make chocolate were from the ancient cultures of Mexico and Central America. The first chocolate creation was probably a hot spicy drink made from crushed cocoa seeds and various spices.
Chocolate can be sweet or spicy, savory or subtle. One of the best qualities of chocolate is that it can be made in so many different ways and is shared in so many different cultures!
To learn more about the history, culture, and making of chocolate, please visit this fantastic website from The Field Museum of Chicago.
(If you would like your menu listed, please email me at gingerlemon_girl(at)yahoo(dot)com)
Ginger of Fresh Ginger will be having a lovely international week! She will be serving up wild boar burgers and crab curry and on Valentine's Day she'll be serving up some mouth watering fare in an ode to Aphrodite! Check out her fun menu today!!
Karen, of Gluten Free Sox will be making roast pork with an apple cranberry glaze (that sounds SO delicious Karen!!) and on Valentine's Day she will be making a special "Smoked Trout Pizza" with a flourless chocolate cake for dessert! I hope you will post that pizza recipe Karen!!
Cris, of Red Dirt Girl will be joining us for the first time today! It's her first weekly gluten free menu plan ever! Way to Go Cris! Welcome to the swap!! Cris has a great commentary on why she's decided to begin menu planning and she will be making an Indian inspired meal with Delhi Korma Simmer Sauce with Chicken and basmati rice. She will also be serving a chocolate pudding in honor of Valentine's Day this week! Check out her excellent menu this week which also includes some recipe links! Thank you for participating Cris!
Mary Frances, of Gluten Free Cooking School is having an budget-conscious, frugal menu this week! (We are doing this too Mary Frances!) and has a great commentary on her budgeting and weekly shopping skills! She will be making an Eggplant and Tomato Stew with Garbanzo beans, Sweet Potato Peanut Stew, and Falafel with cilantro Sauce! (I really must try your recipe for the Falafel Mary Frances!) And for Valentine's Day she will trying out a Chocolate Creme Brulee! Yum!!
Sea's menu this week at Book of Yum looks absolutely Delish, as always!! She will be making Vegetarian Eggplant Moussaka, Summer Rolls with a peanut sauce, and a Chocolate fruit fondue (that's making my mouth water Sea!!) She will be going of town this week, but has great plans for what she will make "on the go" while she's gone!
Sally at Aprovechar, has a lovely Valentine's menu this week! Included in her menu this week is a Healthy 7 Grain Broccoli Soup and she will have a Baked Potato Night. Sally will also be making a romantic Valentine's Dinner for her sweetie with a 3 course meal including a fruit and cheese plate, Red Lentil Soup, and for dessert: Brownies topped with sliced bananas, dairy free caramel, and whipped coconut cream! Also check our her menu this week for some fabulous gluten free breakfast, lunch, and snack ideas!
Kara, at Gluten Free in the Greens, has an excellent menu plan this week! She will be serving Paella with Turkey and Shrimp, Coconut lemon grass soup, and asian noodle bowls! She also has some great information on her favorite new cookbook (which I can't wait to buy)! Kara also shares her recipe for dark chocolate meringues in honor of Valentine's Day!
Natalie, our beloved Gluten Free Mommy, also has her menu up for the week! Natalie shares excellent information about gluten free chocolates you can buy this week for your sweetie! (I love See's candy too Nat!) She will also be making braised chicken with peppers, potato soup, and she will possibly be sharing a recipe for baked italian flavored fish!
Our Menu:
Spicy Peanut Pasta with Baked Tofu
Green Leaf Salad
Millet with Black-Eyed Peas and Soy Sausage
Green Beans with Almonds
Granny Smith Apple Slices
Nan's Skillet Dinner
Gluten Free French Rolls
Romaine Salad
Thursday - Valentine's Day
Classic Beef Stroganoff with GF noodles
Steamed Broccoli and Cheese Sauce
Honey Sweetened Carrots
Michael's Favorite Chocolate Cupcakes
Going out of town on a surprise trip with my Valentine!
Baked Goods and Breakfasts
Michael's Favorite Chocolate Cupcakes
Super Quick and Yummy Banana Nut Muffins -- version 2.0 (recipe coming soon!)
Elizabeth Barbone's Easy Sandwich Bread
Check back later this week to enter the Winter Mystery Photo Contest (there is a prize!!) and for another recipe using that incredible new Gluten Free Master Baking Mix!


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This is a cute tutorial on how to draw an anime cartoon baby panda bear step by step. This drawing only took me an hour to do with an additional hour to color and shade. The reason why this baby panda bear doesn't have those big anime glossy eyes is because panda bears have black circles around the eyes and if I were to make the eyes black, it would have looked ridiculous. Nevertheless, this baby panda is an anime animal that you will learn how to draw with ease. I love drawing new anime animals especially when they are babies. This baby panda was requested by a DragoArt member like a day or two ago and since it was so simple to draw, I figured I would fill this request asap. At first when I was done with the drawing, the limbs looked chibi-ish. But then I said "well…it's supposed to be a baby panda." All in all I think that this little guy came out super sweet and he does indeed look good enough to eat. I love teaching members how to draw animals step by step even if they do look like they should be in the cartoon animal section. Well I am going to go now so that I can keep submitting free online lessons for you all so keep your eyes and hands tuned in, in the mean time try out this tutorial on how to draw an anime cartoon baby panda step by step. Remember have fun and stay creative. Peace out people!
DragoArt members upload artwork and drawing tutorials! They are also allowed to leave comments on tutorials, profiles, etc. Many more features, as well; it's way better than just being a boring guest! Register Now!


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G4 Repair Summary
The LG G4 was released in 2015 featuring a 5.5" IPS screen, 3GB RAM and a 3000mAh battery.
The G4 commonly comes in for screen repairs, battery replacements and software issues.
We offer a fast track repair service for LG G4 in our Southend repair centre (top floor of the victoria shopping centre) where most repairs will be completed in 2 hours (typically 30 mins), so we are ideally located for customers in the Westcliff, Leigh, Chalkwell, Hadleigh and Rayleigh areas. We also offer a postal service for customers not in the Essex Area.
G4 Part Codes
Walkin Repairs
1Book device in online or come straight to Buzz Box and we'll book it in for you.
2Our technicians will repair the fault. If any other problems are found we will re-quote you before carrying out any additional work.
3The device will be then fully tested for quality assurance.
4We'll then inform your device is ready, for collection/dispatch and request payment if applicable.
Postal Repairs
1Book device in online.
2You should package device well and send to us (using a insured & tracked service such as Royal Mail Special Delivery).
3We'll drop you an email as soon as it arrives.
4Our technicians will repair the fault. If any other problems are found, we will re-quote you before carring out any additional work.
5The device will be then fully tested for quality assurance.
6We'll then inform you your device is being posted back to you (we use an insured and tracked service such as royal mail special delivery) and take payment if applicable.


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You are about to enter a website that may contain content of an adult nature.
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A Custom cymbals deliver a sophisticated expression of classic Zildjian A Series sounds. They feature thinner weights and radically innovative hammering.
A Custom Series Features
Zildjian Hi Hats - The heart of your set-up.
The Hi Hat is a timekeeping necessity for all drummers. Because the Hi Hat and the Ride both play a part in keeping time, the relationship between them is very important. They should be selected together, and they should complement each other.
What makes a great Hi Hat?
The bottom cymbal should be relatively heavier than the top cymbal. This will ensure a good, clean "chick" sound. It is important that the volume of your Hi Hats balance with your snare and bass drums.
Played by
What started as a simple string and pedal sales catalog has grown exponentially over the past thirty years. The early days were a time where catalogs didn't have much of a presence in the industry, but what began as a college dorm room operation grew rapidly. In 1986 we moved to a full product offering and 64-page catalog, which over the years has grown to 162 pages. Join the AMS family and get your free catalog now!
Copyright © 1996-2020 American Musical Supply, Inc. All rights reserved. American Musical Supply reserves the right to correct pricing and/or product specifications in the event of typographical errors found in our print catalog or on our website. If a product is listed at an incorrect price due to such errors or because of inaccurate information received from a supplier, American Musical Supply shall have the right to refuse or cancel any orders placed, whether or not the order has been confirmed and your credit card charged. If your credit card has already been charged for the purchase and your order is canceled, American Musical Supply will issue a credit to your credit card account in the amount of the charge.


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A bit about swimming
Swimming is a great way to stay physically active and we've got an activity for you, whatever place you're into. You can maintain and develop your fitness with our lane swimming sessions, learn to swim whatever your age with our development sessions or just enjoy a splash around to stay healthy. And it could save your life.
Is the pool the place for you?
Swimming is a really great way to improve your health and fitness as propelling yourself through the water works your body far more than exercising on dry land.
And to inspire you even more, here are 8 great reasons why you should try swimming according to the Amateur Swimming Association.
- Full body workout
- Great for general wellbeing
- De-stresses and relaxes
- Burns calories
- Lowers risk of diseases
- Supports the body
- Increases energy levels
- Exercise without the sweat
Let's get you started
You can enjoy swimming at a variety of sessions and fit them in to your weekly schedule either before or after work, during your lunch break, at weekends with the family or during the day. See our timetable below for session times and prices.
Check out our swim shop in reception for costumes, towels, goggles and lots of other brilliant swim accessories to help improve the enjoyment of your swim.
If you find your place in the pool then you may benefit from a membership which could save you money.
Swim with Places Locker
Places Locker is our app for all things active. It's perfect for tracking your activity and it even links with SWIMTAG. You earn MOVES for all the activity that you complete each week, build training programmes and review progress. Did you know a one hour swim could earn you 1,000 MOVES.
Swimming Lessons
Learn a life skillFind out more
Are you ready to Rule the Pool?Find out more
Aquatic classes
Social fitness in the pool. See timetable below for class times.
Family fun
Baby and Toddlers through to weekend Family Fun sessions. Check out our timetable below for details.
This Girl Can Swim
Designed for girls, by girlsFind out more
Take your swimming to the next levelFind out more
Pool information
Know your poolFind out more


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Deep Learning based analysis and prediction model for Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. (GMCR) stock is a 1st Generation Non-linear Autoregresive with exogenous variable(s) (NARX) model based on the Recurrent Neural Network architecture.
Model is in the production pipeline since Oct. 22, 2015.
Market data for GMCR model training are being downloaded from the Quandl premium datasets on a daily basis.
Model is being retrained on a daily basis.


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Carrie Underwood and husband Mike Fisher have kept their love for each other burning strong and there is no indication this fire will go out anytime soon, even when they are apart.
In an interview with US Weekly, the star shared how the two lovebirds keep their relationship afloat.
"Because we are so busy, we make our time together count," said Underwood. "We go on dates and make sure to make that extra effort."
Even though they married just two years ago in Georgia, the singer and NHL player act like they just started dating. When one of them is on the road or away, Underwood says, "We will text and tweet 'I love you' every day."
Happy anniversary
@carrieunderwood ! Life is so much better with u in my life!Looking forward to many more! — Mike Fisher (@mikefisher1212) July 10, 2012
They may not be newlyweds anymore, but the honeymoon hasn't ended and Underwood couldn't be happier with her husband.
"I never thought guys like Mike actually existed!" said Underwood. "He loves me and all of my craziness!"
Just like the success of her new album, Carrie Underwood is still "Blown Away" by her husband.
It's a good thing these two have figured out how to make their love last. Next month Underwood starts her 54 week tour, leaving behind her hubby in Music City to play for the Nashville Predators. To see where the star is headed first, click here.
-Ashley Quadros, KNCI/105.1


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How do people call an additive functor from a triangulated category $C$ to an abelian one that converts distinguished triangles into long exact sequences. Does one usually call a covariant functor of this sort 'homology' and denote it by $H_i$, whereas a contravariant functor is called cohomology and is denoted by $H^i$? For example, if we consider the $i$-th homology (?) of $C$ with respect to a $t$-structure $t$ for it, is it fine to denote it by $H_i^t$?
Upd. Besides, consider a cohomological complex $\dots\to C^0\to C^1\to C^2\to \dots$. Does it have homology ($H_i(C)$) or cohomology ($H^i(C)$)?


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View From Your Table
Our reader writes:
The Blue Point in Duck, North Carolina. A quick jaunt to the Outer Banks was capped off by an incredible meal at this lovely restaurant overlooking the Currituck Bay.
Pictured here is one of the best salads of my life. Plums served on bed of arugula with goat cheese, toasted pistachios, and a vanilla black pepper vinaigrette. Incredible.
I really, really hope to make it to the Outer Banks next summer. Never been. Really curious about that place. Now I know for sure I can eat well there.


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API Support
Embed videos from youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. We support most of the famous video sharing websites.
Live Streaming
Live stream videos of your events, seminars, etc using RTMP live video streaming server with HDW Player.
Ads Solutions
Monetize your video contents by posting video ads using VAST, VPAID, Google IMA and other ads network servers.


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Hi there… It is that time of the year again. With each release Autodesk always gives us a way to facilitate our life. In Civil 3D 2013 we have a lots of new functionality regarding Assemblies and Subassemblies.
I am sure that you inserted a subassembly in the wrong side probably in more than one occasion. Well, now we have Auto-Detect!
The Auto-Detect Side command setting enables AutoCAD Civil 3D to apply the side parameter of the subassembly to which a new subassembly is attached. You can access this option under CreateSubAssemblyTool command (Setting tab -> Subassembly -> Commands -> right click on CreateSubassemblyTool -> Subassembly Options). When this option is set to ON, the existing subassembly side overrides the side that is specified for the Current Side option.
Stay tuned for more good things to come!!!


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What is a mold remediation?
Mold remediation is the process of identifying and removing unhealthy levels of mold that have colonized in a home, office, school or other building. Over time, if untreated, mold can destroy a home by breaking down cellulose-based materials (like wood or ceiling tiles) and causing a slow and messy decay. In the shorter term, a mold infestation can cause severe health problems. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), mold can trigger respiratory problems, nasal and sinus congestion, eye irritation, nose or throat irritation, skin irritations, problems with your nervous system, and aches and pains. Mold inspection and mold remediation are often requested in tandem, although they are two separate services. Nationally, mold inspection costs range from $250 to $300. If mold has been positively identified in your house, either by visual examination or through mold testing, remediation can safely remove it. Properly trained and equipped professionals use specialized equipment (like vacuums and air scrubbers with HEPA filters) to keep mold spores contained while they remove contaminated materials and treat infested areas with antimicrobial spray. A key component to a successful mold remediation after eliminating the mold is ensuring that the water source that caused the mold infestation is also resolved.
How is a mold test done?
Mold testing can help identify a mold infestation in your home or business. Mold inspection costs can vary based on the type of test you want done and the number of samples you request. The national average mold inspection cost is $250-$300. The EPA explains that if you have a visible mold problem, in most cases sampling and testing is unnecessary. However, if you have unexplained and potential mold-related illness or can smell mold in your house, mold inspection costs may be a good investment. To avoid unscrupulous testers, the EPA recommends working with a testing agency that adheres to the analytical methods laid out by professional organizations such as the American Industrial Hygiene Association or the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists. Mold inspection costs can vary based on the type of testing done. Prices can also vary, depending on the size of the home, the number of surface areas to be tested, and the extent of the mold infestation. Here are some examples of mold inspection average costs:
- Swab testing: $200-$300
- A professional collects a surface swab from a potentially infested area for testing in a lab. Some professionals have concerns about this being the sole test done because it only gathers a small amount of data from a certain area of the house. That's why it's frequently done in conjunction with air cell testing.
- Air cell testing: $250-$350
- A professional collects an air sample in the home to measure the amount of mold spores in the air. This test is frequently done in conjunction with swab testing to ensure more complete data. Costs are higher for this test because the equipment required of the contractor is more expensive.
- Both air cell and swab tests provided by the same company: $400-$600.
How does mold remediation work?
Mold remediation can eliminate mold colonies from your home or business. Mold is a normal part of daily life, but in wet or humid settings mold can quickly colonize and spread by making spores. Whether visible or hidden, untreated mold can cause real health problems and cause extensive (and expensive) damage to your property. Mold remediation involves killing the mold, removing the dead mold and preventing future mold growth. Here is an example of the steps involved in professional mold remediation:
- Contain work area and apply negative air pressure HEPA air purifiers to prevent cross-contamination. If spores spread, the colonies can easily regrow elsewhere in your home.
- Mist an EPA-registered antimicrobial to suspend and kill mold spores.
- Remove affected building surfaces.
- Bag and dispose of contaminated materials properly.
- Treat cavities/underlayment and dehumidify.
- Abrasively remove dead loose mold.
- Apply EPA-registered protective sealer.
- Perform clearance testing.
Remove containment materials.
Is mold damage covered by insurance?
Mold damage may or may not be covered by your homeowner's insurance. Mold damage is caused by standing water and excess moisture. Mold damage can be covered by insurance when an item already covered under your homeowners insurance breaks accidentally — for example, if your plumbing suddenly ruptures and water floods your house, the homeowners insurance will cover part or all of the costs for the plumbing repair and any mold remediation costs necessary as a direct result of the water damage.
But you may not be able to get insurance to pay for your mold remediation costs if the damage is a result of your neglect — for example, if you've had a slow leak under your bathroom sink for years and have ignored the issue. If the insurer can determine that the mold damage is a result of your negligence, they likely won't cover mold remediation costs. Also, most homeowners insurance will usually not cover mold remediation costs after a flood unless you have a special insurance rider covering your home in case of a flood. To help prevent mold damage, always keep humidity levels in your house between 30 percent and 60 percent, clean up water spills and damp areas right away, and ensure you have exhaust fans in your kitchen and bathroom.
How much does it cost to clean up mold?
The cost to clean up mold in your home or business will vary based on the pervasiveness of the mold infestation, regional labor rates, and the accessibility of the mold sources for remediation. Mold remediation costs will increase anytime demolition is necessary or the crew must access interior areas like HVAC ducts. For example, these two homes have approximately the same size floor plan but a different number of square feet of mold to be treated. The two homes also have varying levels of accessibility to the sites of mold the mold infestation.
- House 1:
- Mold treatment of 15 square feet in an accessible area with a less aggressive type of mold: $3,400 (average).
- Price includes mold inspection costs.
- House 2:
- Mold treatment of 27 square feet inside an HVAC system requiring a higher level of chemicals and processes: $9,500 (average).
- Price includes mold inspection costs.


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Okay, so I bought a trailer and CVT Mt.Shasta Its not finished but the frame, box and lid are there.
What are some suggestions for items to add or include in an offroad trailer. Give me your top 5
These guys will sell you one at many different levels of completion. Rockboxoffroad.com. They also will sell you a top for your m416 and just joined up with Cascadia Vehicle Tents.


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View Previous Contest Winners
Purpose of rules—These rules set forth, and will govern, the annual Alabama Migratory Waterfowl Stamp contest through which a design is chosen for the Migratory Waterfowl Stamp.
Contest deadlines—The contest to select the design for the annual Alabama Migratory Waterfowl Stamp will officially open in January of each year. All persons intending to submit an entry in the contest shall notify the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and request a copy of the contest rules and Reproduction Rights Agreement. Requests for the contest rules and Reproduction Rights Agreement should be sent to the Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, 64 North Union Street, Montgomery, Alabama 36130. Entries may be received any time after January 18, but must be received or postmarked no later than midnight of March 1.
Contest eligibility—Alabama residents only shall be eligible to participate in the contest. However, any person who has won the contest during the preceding three years shall be ineligible to submit an entry in the current year's contest. Employees of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, members of the contest judging panel and their relatives are ineligible to submit an entry.
Criteria for judging—Entries will be judged based on the following five categories:
- Suitability for Reproduction
- Originality
- Artistic Composition
- Anatomical Accuracy
- General Rendering
Eligible Species
The following species will not qualify for the 2018 Alabama Migratory Waterfowl Stamp contest because they have been used within the past three years.
- Canada Goose - 2017-2018
- Green-winged Teal - 2018-2019
- Wood Duck - 2019-2020
Technical requirements for design or entry—The design must be a horizontal drawing or painting not to exceed 9 x 12 inches. No scrollwork, lettering, or signature can appear on the design itself. Each entry may be drawn in any medium desired by the contestant. Contestants may not submit more than one entry per contest.
Restrictions on subject matter of entry—A living species of North American migratory ducks or geese must be the dominant feature of any design. No such species shall be portrayed which has been selected for the Migratory Waterfowl Stamp during the preceding three years (Canada Goose, Green-winged, and Wood Duck). The design must be the contestant's own original creation and may not be copied or duplicated from previously published art, including photographs. An entry submitted in a prior Alabama contest which was not selected for the stamp design may not be resubmitted in the present contest.
Suitability of entry for printing—All entries should be rendered with fullest possible attention to tone and detail. These are important prerequisites in printing, as they determine texture and directions of lining. The wing and feather construction must be particularly well defined, as a printer is reliant on the art of the naturalist for detail.
Submission procedures for entry—The lower, detachable portion of the contestant's Reproduction Rights Agreement must be attached to the back of the entry. The name of the species depicted shall also be printed on the back of the entry. Each entry shall be mounted with a three inch mat (total size including mat will not exceed 15 x 18 inches). Each entry shall be protected by a covering of acetate or cellophane (suggestion: heavy acetate attached only at the top of the mat will allow judges the opportunity to view the painting without a reflective cover over it). Entries will not be accepted that are in wooden frames or under glass. Each entry shall be protectively wrapped and mailed first class registered mail, or shipped United Parcel to: Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, 64 North Union Street, Suite 584, Montgomery, AL 36130 or 36104 for UPS delivery. Entries will be promptly processed when received. Each contestant must also sign and submit the top portion of the Reproduction Rights Agreement.
Property insurance for entries—All contestants are hereby notified of the advisability of obtaining adequate property insurance coverage for their respective entry. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources will not so insure the entries it receives. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources is not responsible for damage in the mails or loss by fire or theft.
Failure to comply with contest rules—Any entry which fails to comply with any of the requirements of these rules shall be disqualified from the contest and will not be considered by the judging panel.
Selection and qualification of contest judges—Three judges will be selected annually by the Commissioner. The judges will be recognized experts in the fields of ornithology, conservation, and/or art. The judges selected will serve without compensation. The identification of the members of the judging panel will be announced on the date that the judging takes place.
Date and location of contest—The selection of the winning entry will take place as soon as possible after the closing date of the contest but in no event will it be later than April 1 of each year. The exact date, time, and location of the contest will be announced at a reasonable period of time prior to April 1.
Display of entries for contest selection--All qualifying entries will be displayed chronologically based on the date of receipt of the entry. The only visible identification mark on each entry will be the designation assigned to the entry by the contest coordinator.
Scoring criteria for contest—Entries will be judged on the previously set forth criteria and will receive a score of between one and ten.
Scoring procedures for contest—Prior to the judging of the entries, the entire panel of judges will be briefed by the contest coordinator on the requisite characteristics which make a design suitable for printing. The entire display of qualifying entries will be closely scrutinized by the panel of judges. Each judge will then be allowed to nominate 10 entries for preliminary consideration by the entire panel of judges. When the judges have completed this nomination process, the entries so nominated for consideration will be voted on by written ballot by the panel of judges. The entry receiving the highest score will win.
The contest coordinator will tabulate the final votes and announce the winning entry which received the highest total of points and the second and third runner-ups. In case of a tie vote for first place in the final round of consideration, the entire panel of judges will vote again on the deadlocked entries, with each judge voting for only that entry believed to be most qualified to win. If, after three rounds of judging, any two or more entries receive identical scores, selecting the winning artwork will reside with the Commissioner of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. The selection of the winning entry by the judges will be final. NOTE: ANY ARTIST, OR THIRD PARTY, WHO ATTEMPTS TO INFLUENCE THE SELECTION OF THE JUDGES WILL BE PERMANENTLY DISQUALIFIED FROM PRESENT AND FUTURE ALABAMA WATERFOWL STAMP CONTESTS.
A high-resolution image of the winning artwork must be supplied by the artist.
Public attendance at contest—All phases of the nomination and voting process will be open for viewing by the general public.
Return of entries after contest—All entries will be returned by United Parcel Service to the participating artists within 60 days of completion of the contest. NOTE: UPS WILL NOT DELIVER TO A POST OFFICE BOX. Artists should provide street address, or directions for United Parcel Service.