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Councillor Maureen Millbank has resigned from the Parish Council, we would like to thank her for all her efforts over many years. Following a councillors resignation, 10 parishioners can request an election be held, as per the terms in the
Reporting period: CIL Monies received by the Council in. 2018/19 a) CIL Receipts Total amount of CIL received in financial year (2018/19) £0 b) CIL Expenditure Total amount of CIL spent in financial year (2018/19)
There is a new Deregulation Act, shortly to come into effect, with which we will lose the right to use unregistered footpaths. That part of the footpath from Meadow Walk through the Amenity / Woodland to Meadow Park is unregistered.


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Written in an easy-to-read language. It aims at inspiring kids to be
moral, conscious and virtuous; developing respect and a spirit of
cooperation between kids, and teaching youngsters to be effective in
their communities.
This Series seeks to achieve the following objectives:
• Demonstrate the genuine character of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)
• Enhance the positive conduct, behavior & morals of the Muslin young.
• To build the young Muslim's character that imitates the Prophet's
Al Hidaayah, 436 Coventry Road, Small Heath, Birmingham
B10 0UG, United Kingdom. Tel: 0121 753 1889 Email: email@example.com

subset: commoncrawl


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As if out of a fairy tale, the Madison upholstered bed captures the tailored elegance of a bedroom fit for a princess. Diamond button tufting on the upholstered headboard and footboard recall classic glamor, while tapered bun feet exude charm. Nailhead trim highlights the romantic arched headboard, adding a regal element to the piece. A Natural White painted finish over poplar solids and birch veneers completes the look, creating the perfect blank canvas for your own personal touches with fun, colorful bedding. Classically elegant, this upholstered bed brings youthful glamor to any child or teen's bedroom.
The Madison Twin Upholstered Bed with Button Tufting by Legacy Classic Kids at Conlin's Furniture in the Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wyoming area. Product availability may vary. Contact us for the most current availability on this product.
Subtly feminine and designed for modern lifestyles, Madison Youth offers tailored simplicity that evolves with changing tastes to create a look that that never goes out of style. With raised and recessed paneling, turned posts and legs, torus mould details, sweeping arches and nickel finished hardware knobs, each piece in the Madison collection is crafted with care and finesse for a youth bedroom that your little girl can proudly call her own. Perfect for a young child or teen, the group can mix, match and layer with bedding, paint and accessories to create style after style. Poplar wood solid and birch veneer construction with a Natural White painted finish serves as a clean palette for dressing in the color and theme of her choice. Plus, Madison offers the functionality, durability and safety that every parent wants for his or her child with safety tested cases outfitted with features like double bolting bed rails, anti-tip hardware, solid wood drawer construction and automatic drawer stops. Select from a wide variety of bed types in twin and full sizes, and fill out the rest of the room with her choice of storage and accent pieces for the perfect youth decor.
The Madison collection is a great option if you are looking for Traditional furniture in the Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wyoming area.
These images are representative of this group as a whole and may differ from this item.
Browse other items in the Madison collection from Conlin's Furniture in the Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wyoming area.
This item has been tagged as: Bed, Bedroom Furniture, Twin Size Bed, Full Size Bed, Queen Size Bed, King Size Bed, California King Size Bed, Bookcase Bed, Book Case Bed, Canopy Bed, Bed with Canopy, Captain's Bed, Daybed, Headboard and Footboard Bed, Headboard, Footboard, Headboard & Footboard, Pier Bed, Poster Bed, Sleigh Bed, Upholstered Bed, Wall Unit Bed, Double Bed, Day Bed, Storage Bed, Home Furnishings, Furniture, Bed frame, Furnishing For Bedroom, Bedroom Furniture Set
Nothing on this page may be copied or reproduced without explicit permission.


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Robbins Pathologic Basis of Disease
Saunders, 1999 - Medical - 1425 pages
Presenting the latest edition of this popular, comprehensive and practical text of pathology. Written with great clarity for easy readability, this reference offers detailed discussions of genetic disorders, cellular injury and death, neoplasia, the skeletal system and soft tissue tumors, and much more. Completely revised and updated, this edition is even more user-friendly with the use of text boxes for key topics in each chapter and a new full-color design. Features 1200 excellent 4-color illustrations!
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Z S 6 S GENERAL PATHOLOGY Genetic Disorders 139
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abnormal acid activation acute adhesion amyloidosis angiogenesis antibodies antigens apoptosis associated bacteria binding blood cancer carcinoma caspase cause CD4+ cell cycle cell death cell injury cellular Chapter chemical chemokines chromosome chronic clinical collagen common complex couse cyclin cytokines cytoplasm damage defects deficiency develop disease disorders edema effects endothelial cells endothelium enzymes epithelial fibrin fibroblasts fibrosis Figure function gene genetic granules growth factors host immune increased induced infection inflammation inflammatory inhibit integrins intracellular involved kinase lesions leukocyte lipid liver lung lymphocytes lysosomal macrophages matrix mechanisms mediators membrane metabolism mitochondrial molecular molecules MORPHOLOGY muscle mutations necrosis neutrophils normal occur organs oxidative pathogenesis Pathology pathway patients permeability phagocytosis phospholipids plasma platelet produced proliferation proteases protein reactions receptors regulation release renal response result signals skin specific surface syndrome synthesis T-cell thrombi tion tissue toxic tumor tumor cells vascular vessels viral virus vitamin
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Advances in Cancer Research
George F. Vande Woude,George Klein
Limited preview - 1999
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Continental Sprinter Tire - Tubular
Select style & size:Select options
- Black-BW w/Black Chili, 700c x 22mmsale $60.16
Tech Specs
Train where you race.
Many racers train on clinchers and race on tubulars. It makes sense, unless you ride the Continental Sprinter Tubular tire. The Sprinter is light enough for race day, but it's also durable enough to use in training, so it truly is a great all- around tire. To achieve this, Continental uses four layers of polyamide casing to protect against punctures. Even so, the Sprinter provides the legendary ride and feel of a tubular tire. It's made with natural rubber and Continental's Activated Silica Compound, which enhances the tire's grip on both wet and dry roads.
- 4-layer polyamide casing
- Activated Silica Compound
- Recommended 115-170psi
Very difficult to mount on the rim
- Familiarity: I've used it several times
Very smooth tire. Appears to be able to stand up to ordinary road debris. Requires week to 10 days of stretching on the rim before gluing. Even then it requires the strength of King Kong to remount it. I recommend tape instead of glue because of the difficulty in mounting. Next time I will buy the Grand Prix, but at $59 the Sprinter is a value.
Decent tire if you get in on Sale
- Familiarity: I've put it through the wringer
Pre-Stretch for 1 week on a rim at 160psi and you will get the tire on easier, the butyl tube holds air quite well, it is a true 22mm tire but does not ride any worse than than other tires at 110psi. Durability is good and cut resistance as well, a 25mm version is out now but usually not on sale...:(
Crap tire
- Familiarity: I've used it several times
I making my patriotic duty as an American as they must have some small ass rims in Germany. These are a god dam nightmare to mount and I not joking you need to be Conan or some other muscle bound ass to mount these things. Not good when your a puny cyclist that has little to no upper body strength after long periods of caloric deficit. DO NOT BUY EVER spend the extra dough on a better tire that mounts properly.
Best value for the price
- Familiarity: I've put it through the wringer
Awesome as an everyday or training tubular tire. Handles excellently with Conti's Black Chili rubber, good ride quality considering the butyl rubber tubes, seems quite puncture and cut resistant as I have run the 22mm's on over 15 miles of gravel/dirt fire road with no issues. Wear is much better than a "race" tire like Vittoria CX's.
Pros: Inexpensive, durable, long-lasting, good grip, made in Germany
Cons: sizes (22mm is slightly skinny and 25 maybe a little too wide)
ride quality not as good as latex tubies, heavier than "race" tires
Really Great Tires
- Familiarity: I've put it through the wringer
I only ride on tubulars and these have proven to be an excellent all around tire. I run them with Stans and have had excellent luck. I have tried other brands but keep coming back to these. These are priced right, decent weight and ride well but the biggest factor is they hold up.
Great Alternative
- Familiarity: I've put it through the wringer
Made the upgrade to Tubular's this year and have been very happy, I ran GP4000's for the first half of the season and needed to replace the rear after wearing it out. Bought a pair of sprinters and couldn't be happier. I currently have more miles on the sprinter and the rear looks like its still ready for more.
Nice ride but ...
Easy to mount, not overly expensive, good control and acceleration, smooth ride. First 100 miles got a 3 mm horizontal cut on front tire. Holds pressure well. Solid construction overall. Comparatively this tire was flat free about as long as Tufo S3 Lite. I was expecting a little more puncture resistance with the Conti and was disappointed. Overall prefer it's handling characteristics over S3 Lite however the latter rode faster. Concerning flats I had better success with Tufo S33 Special and Tufo Hi-C although both tires ride slower for me over Conti and S3. I'll probably buy again depending on how successful the repair process goes. I may have to send this one to Tire Alert in Florida, I hope they're still in business - their web-site seems to be down.
Have been repairing tubulars since 1973 - takes time but they fix. Takes the right materials, good eyes and something or someone good to listen to. You got to stay after it, the good ones - higher dollar, higher pressure - are worth the time. I have to admit I am at max. 142 lb.s which makes a difference!
Part time USA Official and ardent and loyal sew up rider. Bob Huerta Oklahoma City.
This is a great tubular. I ran a set of these on my Zipp 303 for the entire summer, not just racing but training as well. Probably put 1400 miles on this wheelset last summer and these babies are still looking good. No cuts or major nicks and the no typical back tire wearout. Yet, during any rainy rides they were not scary to be on, good rubber. I am running 25's. These will not disappoint, and the price is right.


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The film's relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance.
Amy Poehler's feature directorial debut, Wine Country, has goodwill to burn. The film, about a reunion weekend shared by six longtime friends, actually stages a reunion of beloved female performers from one of SNL's strongest periods: Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell, and Tina Fey. Written by Liz Cackowsky and Emily Spivey, Wine Country appears to presume—and probably correctly—that no elaborate plot is necessary to motivate the collective hijinks of its legendary cast. But it tries to skirt by on too little, as its barebones story and reliance on stoking nostalgia fail to deliver the emotional payoff it ultimately wants—or to provide much beyond moments of fleeting humor.
Poehler plays Abby, a character who is, in her neurotic perfectionism and attachment to binders and schedules, perhaps a shade too reminiscent of Poehler's Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation. The film opens with Abby convincing five longtime friends—Naomi (Rudolph), Val (Pell), Catherine (Gasteyer), Jenny (Spivey), and Rebecca (Dratch)—to converge for the weekend at a rented house in Napa Valley to celebrate Rebecca's impending 50th birthday. Although they pride themselves on being a tight-knit group, each woman except Jenny is harboring some unspoken anxiety, resentment, or news of a major life transition from the others, all of which, in traditional vacation-comedy fashion, will eventually be brought out into the open by way of verbal confrontation, momentary distress, and tearful reconciliation.
In brief: Rebecca is in denial about her age, Catherine is overworked, Naomi is anxious about her health, Abby's fastidiousness masks a profound unhappiness, and Val is lonely. As one might expect from a comedy about friends vacationing amid the serene vistas of central California, there's a leisurely quality to Wine Country's plotting. Rather than being driven by the development of the characters' arcs, the film's scenes are often backdrops for the cast to exchange one-liners, to flamboyantly act out, or to encounter eccentric weirdos like Abby and company's Airbnb host, Tammy (Fey), or the cook, Devon (Jason Schwartzman), who they discover "comes with the house." Val's flirtation with Jade, a local waitress played by Pen15 creator and star Maya Erskine, ends up motivating a couple of major scenes, but the film is only loosely committed to this subplot of casual, ambivalent attraction.
The film's relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance. Throughout, Rudolph's expressive, malleable face and infallible line deliveries reveal comic dimensions in otherwise dry scenes. Poehler wisely allows her usually excessively composed character a pair of supremely comic facial reactions. And as a guest star who gets to pop up every once a while and make a throwaway allusion to her artisanal edible soaps, Fey steals some of the film's best comic moments.
But Wine Country's general aimlessness also works to its disadvantage, both when the humor of a scene doesn't click and when the film eventually tries to transform the women's simmering conflict into a moral lesson. Not unlike a misbegotten SNL sketch, Wine Country turns to music when unsure how to spice up a flat scene, as no less than four of them see the women listening, dancing, or singing along to classic '90s songs. And this onslaught of feel-good nostalgia is complemented by a confused scene set at an art gallery, where the crochety, aging Gen-Xers lecture Jade and her millennial friends, in the process ruining a perfectly good joke about an Andy Warhol-style exhibition of Fran Drescher portraits.
In the end, Wine Country spends all of the cultural capital earned with its casting, and then some, relying far too often on its stars to make its sketchy material entertaining. The filmmakers' surely intentional choice to construct a plot that doesn't over-emphasize conflict between women sometimes comes off as lazy writing (it's a film that features not one but two puns about pinot grigio). One effect is that, during the third act when the friends are all miserable about the vacation, it's hard to pinpoint exactly why everyone is feeling quite so sour with one another. Wine Country is so focused on avoiding the impression that it's another film about women who can't get along that when it concludes with a moral about facing and accepting change in yourself and others, it feels both ham-handed and unearned.
Cast: Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell, Jason Schwartzmann, Emily Spivey, Tina Fey, Maya Erskine, Cherry Jones Director: Amy Poehler Screenwriter: Liz Cackowsky, Emily Spivey Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 103 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Kippers for breakfast, Aunt Helga? Is it St. Swithin's Day already? No, it ain't, dear. 'Tis Downtown Abbey Day.
Kippers for breakfast, Aunt Helga? Is it St. Swithin's Day already? No, it ain't, dear. 'Tis Downton Abbey Day—that is, the release of the official trailer for the Downton Abbey movie. It's been some three years since we've gotten to sip tea with the Crawley clan and hang out downstairs with the servants making sure that the biscuits are placed just right on the proper fine bone china tea set. And from the looks of the two-and-a-half-minute trailer, it would appear that nothing has changed at Downton Abbey since the series's finale.
In the tradition of Mad Men's episode-ending "next week on AMC's Mad Men" teasers, it's just a series of snappy snippets that suggest we're in for more of the same, from Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess of Grantham snarking up a storm to Robert James-Collier's Thomas Barrow getting his gay on. And we are here for it. The cherry on top? The king and queen are coming to Downton! And as everything must be in tip-top shape for their arrival, the Crawley's must enlist the help of the one and only Charles Carson (Jim Carter), who is treated here with the reverence of a god, or a superhero from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Downton Abbey is directed by Michael Engler and written by Oscar- and Emmy-winning screenwriter Julian Fellowes. And in addition to the aforementioned actors, the film stars Hugh Bonneville, Laura Carmichael, Brendan Coyle, Michelle Dockery, Kevin Doyle, Joanne Froggatt, Matthew Goode, Harry Hadden-Paton, David Haig, Geraldine James, Simon Jones, Allen Leech, Phyllis Logan, Elizabeth McGovern, Sophie McShera, Tuppence Middleton, Stephen Campbell Moore, Lesley Nicol, Kate Phillips, Imelda Staunton, and Penelope Wilton.
Terrence Malick's film means to seek out souls caught in the tide of history, but which move against its current.
With A Hidden Life, the Christian God that Terrence Malick has ordained as omnipotent in so many of his films seems, for the first time, on the verge of defeat. To Malick, the hate and devastation of the Third Reich during World War II brought not only death to the mortal body, but threatened annihilating the moral soul. No less than this weighs on Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian farmer who risks imprisonment, and worse, by refusing to fight for Adolf Hitler in the early 1940s.
Malick makes Diehl's conscientious objector the human center of A Hidden Life, and the bearer of its two colossal forms of internal torment: a waning fealty to country and the loss of faith in God. Franz's path from forceful rejection of his nation's shifting values to his questioning of the church isn't only A Hidden Life's most compelling through line, but also one of the few substantive deviations from Malick's signature thematic fixations.
Franz's crisis of faith otherwise plays out in a formal register that's of a piece with Malick's prior work. This is evident right away in the film's first section, set mostly in Radegund, a small Austrian village surrounded by rolling hills and flowing streams, and throughout which the camera lingers on scythes gliding through cornfields, braying farm animals, afternoon strolls down rough-trod dirt pathways, and silken blankets of fog over acres of forest.
The imagery is predictably gorgeous, but these sequences don't offer the sense of progression that the overtures of Malick's films often do. The Tree of Life spirits us through the birth of a family, its children coming of age, and a world-altering tragedy, all in its first moments. In A Hidden Life, we see, via flashback, how Franz met his wife, Franzi (Valerie Pachner), with usual Malickian hushed and reverent narration accompanying the scene of the couple's first encounter and instant infatuation. Malick then launches into a string of scenes that show Franz and Franzi in the throes of domestic bliss, but the sweeping romance of these moments grows repetitive, and for maybe the first time, the director's form verges on the monotonous.
Malick's working method in recent years is quicker and less precise than it used to be, an approach that's yielded profound rewards, as most of the films are set in contemporary times and depict a fast-paced world lacking in human contact. However, A Hidden Life, being Malick's first historical epic in over a decade, could have greatly benefited from the longer gestation period that a film like The New World was allowed.
A Hidden Life eventually moves past its unhurried opening, as Franz is thrust from his home in the foothills of Radegund, first to a German military base after he's drafted, and later to Berlin, where he's imprisoned and condemned to death. In these later sections, the film sees Malick working with more plot than in almost any other film he's made, which is one change that does at least open A Hidden Life up to some unexpectedly impactful dramatic moments. Unfortunately, the need to attend to matters of plot distracts Malick from summoning the sort of grace notes that typically accumulate with such phenomenal ease across his films.
A Hidden Life is a deeply interiorized movie—a war film about the battle between one man's mind, heart, and soul—that also functions on a more macro level. At various points, Malick cuts from the personal narrative to black-and-white archival footage, which features Berlin during the war, steam-powered trains, and Hitler in a promo reel playing with a child. Franz himself also facilitates broader implications about the world around him, and its inability to comprehend the damage caused by unmitigated hate and intolerance, through the reverberating effects of his oppression: As society ostracizes him, the intensity of his moral conviction—the refusal to comply with the German's Oath of the Leader—is projected outward, imprinted on spaces he occupies, and on the people whom he influences.
Malick stresses this idea at various points in A Hidden Life, especially in a scene that's bound to cause controversy: Bruno Ganz, as a high-ranking Nazi officer, conducts a one-on-one meeting with the condemned Franz, trying to understand why he believes his cause is a just one. While there's nothing inherently wrong with humanizing an officer of the Third Reich—an earnest extension of Malick's boundless commitment to humanism—the scene contrives moments of such earnest reflection that it verges on maudlin.
The film's strongest section is its final stretch, which encompasses some of Malick's most ambitious, probing, philosophical ideas since The Tree of Life. It's also here where Malick adds another wrenching layer to Franz's struggle, as the man must weigh the moral imperative of refusing to play a part in Germany's conquest against the responsibilities that he will not be able to perform as a husband and father if he's put to death. Malick renders Franz's final months and days through the lens of the evocative, semi-surrealist Christian imagery that he employed in The Tree of Life, but that imagery—such as a door left ajar, revealing only darkness beyond—carries darker connotations here, as Franz faces his impending execution.
The first line that we hear in A Hidden Life is a telling one: "We thought we could make our nest high up in the trees." If Malick's art had ever offered one essential means through which to understand it, it's that with the loftiest of beliefs and ambitions comes the greatest risk. The filmmaker's work has often teetered on the brink of folly, and here it builds on a foundation that isn't as sturdy as it used to be. But Malick still dares to push his moral inquiry further than he ever has before. A Hidden Life means to seek out souls caught in the tide of history, but which move against its current. It's a quietly radical, if problematic, effort, as Malick's baseline faith in humanity becomes uncomfortable when it resonates on the faces of soldiers throughout a Nazi war camp. But Malick owns that hire-wire risk, and when his filmmaking matches that level of commitment, as it often does here, he reaps the reward.
Cast: August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Maria Simon, Tobias Moretti, Bruno Ganz, Matthias Schoenaerts, Karin Neuhäuser, Ulrich Matthes Director: Terrence Malick Screenwriter: Terrence Malick Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures Running Time: 174 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
As a musical, Dexter Fletcher's film is just fun enough to (mostly) distract us from its superficiality.
Dexter Fletcher's Rocketman is yet another biopic about the psycho-sensual highs and lows of being a rock star. The story of Elton John's life suggests a narrative arc that is, at this point, awfully familiar: a musically gifted boy from working-class England is inspired by the sonic freedom evoked by American rock music; his dissatisfaction with his own life propels him to great success but also makes him susceptible to the temptations of the decadent pop-star lifestyle; his drug habit ruins his personal relationships and even threatens his career; he eventually confronts his demons and stages a comeback—with his new, healthy attitude mirrored by renewed professional success. Roll titles telling us where Elton is now.
To its credit, Rocketman is at least partially aware that we're familiar with these types of Behind the Music-style biopics. It doesn't abandon the template, but it does toss us a colorful, energetic musical sequence whenever the protagonist's family life or struggles with stardom threaten to get too dark. Fantastical song-and-dance scenes, built around some of Elton's most well-known songs and enhanced by CG effects, serve to express the characters' submerged feelings ("I Want Love"), transition between Elton's childhood and adulthood ("Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting"), link the performative decadence of mid-'70s glam rock to that of mid-'70s sex ("Bennie and the Jets," somewhat oddly), and simply offer some visually pleasing spectacle ("Crocodile Rock"). Their main effect, though, is to give the film the quality of a karaoke stage musical: Even as Elton nearly overdoses on prescription meds, we're not here to contemplate mortality, but to enjoy some fondly remembered pop songs. As a musical, Rocketman is just fun enough to (mostly) distract us from its superficiality.
In between the musical sequences, Elton (Taron Egerton), born Reginald Dwight, is portrayed as the unhappy genius inside the sequined chicken costume. Loved insufficiently by his selfish mother (Bruce Dallas Howard) and not at all by his stiff-upper-lipped father (Steven Mackintosh), the young Reggie longs to be somewhere and someone else. It turns out that he's almost preternaturally gifted at the piano, able to reproduce complex pieces upon hearing them once, and this gift turns out to be his ticket out of working-class London. Starting as a back-up musician for Motown artists on tour in Britain, Reggie soon breaks out on his own, inventing his new stage name by stealing the first name of one of his bandmates, and taking the last name from John Lennon—improvising the latter when he sees a photo of the Beatles hanging in the office of Dick James (Stephen Graham), head of his first record label, DJM.
Rocketman makes clear that Reggie's adoption of a stage name is more than just marketing, as he'll insist, later in the film, that his family also call him Elton. The invention of a new persona allows him to escape his humble origins and demeanor. As one of the Motown performers advises him in one of those programmatic lines that these sorts of films specialize in, "Kill the person you are in order to become the person you want to be." The irony of John's public image—the mild manner and small stature offset by flamboyant, glittering stage performances—is expanded into a Reggie/Elton dialectic in Rocketman, in which the adult Elton must eventually learn to reconcile himself with his inner child. It's a reconciliation that will be presented in the most literal of images toward the end of the film.
At DJM, Elton is paired with lyricist Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell), and the two form an instant bond. Together, they write many popular songs, some seemingly inspired by their friendship. There's an ambiguous sexual tension between them, and the film implies that the duo's "Your Song" may have been an outgrowth of this tension—or, at the very least, that the lonely Elton mistook it as such. Elton's ultimately platonic friendship with Bernie is the emotional core of Rocketman, depicted as the most stable relationship of Elton's life. (The film concludes in the '80s, just before the singer would meet his eventual husband, David Furnish.)
Fletcher's film is less squeamish about Elton's love life—including sex—than a big-budget biopic about a gay star would have been years ago—or, rather, as recent as last year. Elton has an intense and predictably doomed romance with callous music manager John Reid (Richard Madden), but what drives him to booze and drugs is a loneliness and discomfort with himself that goes beyond his marginalized sexual identity. Which is to say, the Elton John of Rocketman doesn't fit into to the stereotype of the tragic, self-destructive gay man.
There isn't much to Bernie and Elton's creative process as depicted in the film. Repeatedly, Bernie shows up with lyrics, and Elton comes up with the music on the spot, as if the tunes came to him from on high. At one point, his mother claims accusatorily that everything has always been too easy for Elton, and as a viewer, one is tempted to agree. Here, Elton's music is less the outgrowth of hard work and more on the order of religious revelation: Witness, for example, the trippy musical number in which "Crocodile Rock" makes the audience at the famous Troubadour club in Los Angeles levitate. The visually engrossing title-song sequence plays, in overblown glam-rock fashion, with Christ-like images of death and ascension.
Egerton delivers a dynamic performance as the alternatingly sullen and exuberant star, one that fits in perfectly with the film's embrace of Elton's loud, diamond-encrusted aesthetic. But if the musical sequences feature spirited performances and colorful mise-en-scène that are pleasurably diverting, much of what surrounds them is bound to elicit groans, from the hackneyed way the film uses minor black characters as props to legitimize its aspiring white rock star, to the one-dimensionality of every character who isn't Elton or Bernie, to the final delivery of a complacent moral. As a vision Elton has of his beloved grandmother (Gemma Jones) tells him during his stint in rehab, "You write songs millions of people love, and that's what's important." Is it, though? This seems less like a reassurance for a character in the grips of addiction, and more like a reassurance to the audience that they matter.
Cast: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden, Gemma Jones, Bryce Dallas Howard, Steven Mackintosh Director: Dexter Fletcher Screenwriter: Lee Hall Distributor: Paramount Pictures Running Time: 121 min Rating: R Year: 2019 Buy: Video
Pedro Almodóvar's latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned intensity of his finest work.
A film about an aging artist struggling to recapture his yen for creation, Pain and Glory has the makings of a deeply personal, career-capping work for Pedro Almodóvar. His name may be Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), but the gay filmmaker, with his tussled hair, white beard, and red turtleneck, may as well call himself Pedro. One of the very few differences between them is that Salvador has stopped making films while Almodóvar continues to work at a relatively steady clip. Pain and Glory is a ballsy admission on the Spanish auteur's part that he hasn't made a film in more than a decade that can compare with his most outrageous and subversive output, which makes it all the more dispiriting that his latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned, melodramatic intensity that defined, say, Law of Desire, Matador, and Bad Education.
Pain and Glory is most surprising at the outset, as the stern narration that we've come to expect from an Almodóvar film is audaciously paired with CG graphics and abstract animations that illustrate Salvador's anatomical and psychosomatic conditions. The man suffers from tinnitus, chronic back pain, severe headaches, anxiety, depression, and various other ailments. It's a literally visceral way to begin a film that soon settles into the more familiar pattern of a two-track narrative: There's Salvador in the present, who works toward repairing a friendship with the heroin-addicted star, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), of his recently restored and most celebrated film, Subor, and there's Salvador as a young boy (Asier Flores), preternaturally intelligent and perpetually optimistic, living in poverty with his ever-harried mother, Jacinta (Penélope Cruz), until he's finally sent off to a seminary.
Perhaps all of this might have landed with a little more impact if Almodóvar hadn't already covered so much of the same territory in Bad Education, which also centers itself around a film director's relationship with an actor and tells the story of a young altar boy's life, much of it spent at a seminary, through a series of flashbacks. Another rehash of a nearly identical plot point from that 2004 film is Pain and Glory's intriguing meta conceit: Alberto convinces Salvador to let him perform a one-man stage adaptation of a monologue the former wrote long ago, an obvious nod to Almodóvar's longtime collaborator, Banderas, playing a version of the filmmaker here. Pain and Glory is, in fact, defined by its abundance of conspicuously placed Easter eggs. Even in the scenes between the present-day Salvador and his dying mother (Julietta Serrano), namely the moment she tells him not to make films about her, Almodóvar points to the personal turmoil that led to the making of All About My Mother.
Putting aside the boldness of the sequences that kick Pain and Glory into motion, Almodóvar's formal approach is generally subdued and disciplined throughout. His screenplay is also quite neat in its structure, relating its two plotlines in almost stubbornly linear fashion, reliably hitting standard narrative beats of interpersonal conflict and reconciliation. Almodóvar wouldn't be the first filmmaker in the history of cinema to mellow with age, and there's a sense that Pain and Glory's artistry is a reflection of that trajectory, but that only makes the too-fleeting snapshots of Salvador's hard-scrabble early years—which includes living inside a white cave with Jacinta and other migrants—feel as if they never transcend easy nostalgia.
Still, Almodóvar's singular use of color as a barometer of characters' interiorities and the emotional temperature of a scene remains on vibrant display throughout Pain and Glory. There's also some wonderful comic repartee between the disheveled Banderas, so exquisitely committed to imparting a sense of his character's almost ghostly status, and the perpetually bug-eyed Etxeandia. Alberto, upon reuniting with Salvador, almost immediately introduces him to heroin, and, improbably, the way in which they bond through their horrible addiction results in some of the funniest scenes in an Almodóvar film in some time.
It's another reunion, though, between Salvador and Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), an ex-lover he hasn't seen since the '80s, that finds Almodóvar delivering on the heightened promise of the film's title. The men are brought back together through an absurd coincidence, after Federico wanders into the performance of Salvador's play and recognizes that his life has been incorporated into the monologue, but the scene thrums with that distinctly magnetic force of love that's fundamental to Almodóvar's best work. Also, the actual moment of Salvador and Federico's reunion is a gracefully staged dance of advance and retreat, beginning with a late-night conversation at Salvador's apartment that never leaves the common area. Finally, after an intense kiss, Federico departs, and though he invites Salvador to come visit him and his family, both men seem to implicitly realize that they'll never see each other again.
Salvador and Federico's meeting unfolds almost in real time, and touches on their shared past, the lives they lived in the interim, and how much they've always meant to each other. The scene recalls other intense emotional meetings in prior Almodóvar films, but more than that, in its duration and focus, it seems drawn from more contemporary inspirations: Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, the final stretch of Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, even "Looking for the Future," the finest episode of Andrew Haigh's Looking. It also arguably packs even more of an expressive force than any of those works, and serves as a reminder that, however much Almodóvar's formalist bona fides may have cooled, his ability to craft emotionally acute, achingly felt scenes between men in the throes of love is as vigorous as ever.
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Penélope Cruz, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Nora Navas, Julieta Serrano, César Vicente, Asier Flores, Julieta Serrano Director: Pedro Almodóvar Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics Running Time: 113 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Bruno Dumont seems perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking.
Bruno Dumont's Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc may not have earned the French filmmaker many new fans, but it did serve to further his apparent embrace of a more mirthful directorial approach. As radical as any film that the New French Extremity-adjacent auteur has made, Jeanette is also unexpectedly accessible: a full-blown pop-rock musical in which a preteen Joan of Arc frets over her God-given mission to save France during the Hundred Years' War, all the while head-banging to heavy metal music.
Dumont's follow-up, Joan of Arc, now takes on the task of covering the "adult" years of the martyred saint, from her waning days as a warlord to her trial and inevitable execution for heresy. And while it's almost as surprising as its predecessor, it's considerably less exhilarating. Whereas the latter half of Jeanette, following a time jump, replaced child actor Lise Leplat Prudhomme with the teenaged Jeanne Voisin, the now 10-year-old Prudhomme has been reinstated in the title role here as the 19-year-old Joan. Right away, this recalibration is extremely dissonant, and it's one that Dumont exploits particularly well in the lengthy scenes depicting Joan's trial, during which she's lectured and berated—like the child that she physically is—by misogynistic, condescending "graduates of theology."
Much less easy to parse, in terms of intentionality and of classification, is the film's proximity to the musical genre. An early scene features a suite of songs—sung theatrically by French indie-pop group Kid Wise's Augustin Charnet—that play over a series of stoical tableaux shots of Prudhumme's armor-clad Joan, looking pensively into the camera. Dumont briefly seems to be up to something rather brilliant here, reconfiguring the musical tropes of his Joan of Arc saga as a means to manifest the "voices" that the Joan of historical record claimed she heard in her head. But that interpretation gets ever more foggy as the filmmaker goes on to present various musical-esque scenes, but in fractured and recontexualized forms. The most jarring example of this is a lengthy, wordless interlude that features a battalion of soldiers on horseback moving in elaborate patterns, dance-like, a sequence which Dumont shoots in a way that recalls Busby Berkley musicals, with shots from above of the choreographed horses.
At least one aesthetic decision carries over from Jeanette: Only a handful of sets are used in Joan of Arc, and each change usually heralds a major shift in Joan's lived experience, from battle to trial to imprisonment. (The film's first third is largely adapted from French Catholic poet Charles Péguy's play Les Batailles, while the remainder, almost entirely concerned with Joan's trial and punishment, is based on another Péguy work, Rouen.) However, whereas Jeanette mostly limited itself to exterior shots of the idyllic French countryside, the contrasts in Joan of Arc are striking: The film moves from its opening passage, set amid cascading dunes, to the clean, vertiginous, and imposing interior space of the Royal Chapel, a place that serves to decisively dwarf an already diminutive Joan.
It's in the pristine halls of the Royal Chapel that ornately dressed men of aristocratic pedigree and high authority—each drolly introduced in a kind of roll call—gather and almost instantly turn into savages, indiscriminately lobbing insults and explicating their own intolerance with unfeeling displays of intellectualized theological reasoning. Naturally, Joan retaliates, steadfastly refusing to disavow her devotion to her own spiritual dogma.
The best part of these trial scenes, and of Joan of Arc in general, is Prudhomme, who, despite her age, gives an extraordinarily committed, and convincing, performance as the teenaged Joan. The cinema is filled with iconic portrayals of the Maid of Orléans, but Prudhomme fully deserves a place among those. It's a pity, then, that Dumont's film doesn't really manage to find many new dimensions to the Joan of Arc mythos—apart from its one inspired casting choice. The filmmaker's effort to tap into the currents of modernity that run through this centuries-old story can be traced back through film history, at least as far as Robert Bresson's The Trial of Joan of Arc, if not to Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc—which is, of course, predicated on the particular presentation of the cinematic image.
Dumont does, at least, seem perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking—the aforementioned horse dance, and a musical cameo from the film's composer, French popstar Christophe—and attempts subtle gestures of subversion. Take the final shot of Joan of Arc, which is not unlike the last act of grace and salvation (and blatant homage to Robert Bresson's Mouchette) that concludes 2010's Hadewijch. Here, the instantly recognizable composition from the Dreyer film—for which Bresson infamously voiced his distaste—is rejected twofold, as Dumont shoots Joan's fatal immolation in profile, and from a considerable distance.
Joan of Arc, though, has bigger problems than an over familiarity with its source, as its themes and dynamics also recall other, stronger Dumont films. The articulation of interiority through stylized visualizations of the adolescent Joan is audacious and intriguing, but its philosophical meaning isn't nearly as fleshed out, nor as emotionally accessible, as the transformation undergone by a devout young woman into a radicalized religious extremist in Hadewijch. And the psychological understanding of Joan—the process of her victimization—isn't as acute, nor as visceral, as Dumont's similar biopic on institutionalized sculptor Camille Claudel. Joan of Arc can't even claim to have the same conceptual rigor that ignited Jeanette—all of which amounts to a film that feels like a nexus point for Dumont's influences and his preoccupations, but one that never coalesces its potential into the major work it clearly strives to be.
Cast: Lise Leplat Prudhomme, Jean-François Causeret, Daniel Dienne, Fabien Fenet, Robert Hanicotte, Yves Habert, Fabrice Luchini, Christophe Director: Bruno Dumont Screenwriter: Bruno Dumont Running Time: 138 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Restlessly shuttling between 1960s Haiti and present-day France, Bertrand Bonello's Zombi Child roils with colonialist tensions. But as with the director's prior Nocturama, this quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract. While there are moments here where a history of exploitation informs the relationship between the French, lily-white Fanny (Louise Labeque) and Haitian refugee Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat)—classmates at an all-girls school established by Napoleon Bonaparte—Bonello's interests go much deeper then race relations. Indeed, the decision to switch back and forth between Mélissa and Fanny's perspectives in the film's present-day scenes opens the story up to a more complex examination of how the girls view and relate to their own heritage and culture.
Not unlike Bonello's House of Pleasures, which in its final moments made a jarring jump from a brothel in the early 20th century to modern-day Paris and prostitutes working a city street, Zombi Child explores the factors that have allowed a social practice, voodoo, to become a constant of history. Mélissa's aunt, Katy (Katiana Milfort), is a "mambo," or voodoo priestess, and she's the only surviving member of Mélissa's family in the wake of Haiti's 2010 earthquake. Mélissa is drawn to Fanny because the two share an affinity for Stephen King and horror fiction, and as they get closer, Fanny facilitates Mélissa's initiation into her tight-knit "literary sorority." But after this act of bonding, the young women begin to move in opposite directions: Mélissa makes an effort to fit into the sorority, singing along to angry French rap when she'd rather be listening to music sung in her native Créole language, while Fanny, reeling from her sudden breakup with her long distance lover, Pablo (Sayyid El Alami), discreetly digs into Mélissa's past and decides to use voodoo as a remedy for her heartbreak.
The other half of the film's time-jumping narrative concerns Fanny's grandfather, Clairvius (Mackenson Bijou), who, in 1962, becomes the victim of a voodoo curse that puts him in an early grave and results in the reanimation of his corpse and him having to perform manual plantation labor in a perpetually "zombified" state. Throughout this section of Zombi Child, Bonello fractures the spatial and temporal coherence of scenes, stringing together elemental, horror movie-adjacent visuals, like the recurring image of an iridescent moon shrouded in clouds and first-person perspective shots that careen through dense sugarcane fields. A clear contrast is established early on between the perpetually dark Haitian landscape and the antiseptic, white-walled interiors of the classrooms in which Fanny and Mélissa are lectured by professors spouting one-sided lessons on world history. But just as its racial politics start to seem too explicit, Zombi Child suddenly and radically reframes itself.
Clairvius's death turns out to have been the consequence of familial jealousy, and his exploitation as a slave comes at the hands of black plantation farmers, not white men—at least not that we're made aware of. And if the film is rendered with a veracity that a documentarian would envy, that's a result of Bonello drawing inspiration from accounts of Haitian slaves being put in medically induced states of "zombification" during the early 20th century. This has the effect of recasting a supernatural fiction narrative as reconstructed history.
Bonello also never gives us the racially charged confrontation that Mélissa and Fanny's relationship seems to be building toward, as he's interested in their racial backgrounds only insofar as it shapes their modes of self-identification. Fanny's refusal to accept her life in the present sets her on a collision course with the forces of Mélissa's ancestry, and leads to a cataclysm of psychological horror that sees one of these forces to take possession over the other—an undead history rising up to claim a living one. Mélissa, though, draws her identity from her past and her present, and in the same moment that Fanny has her communion with the spiritual forces of voodoo, Mélissa delivers an aural history on the subject—a kind of counter-lecture to those of the white, blowhard professors in Zombi Child.
The film's off-kilter mix of horror, historiography, and youth movie affords Bonello plenty of opportunity to indulge his pet themes and motifs. He spends much time lingering throughout scenes set at the academy on the sociality of the young women and their engagement with pop culture (notably, Mélissa gives a presentation to her class on Rihanna). In fact, Bonello's fascination with the dynamics of these relationships seems to drive his interest in the horror genre more so even than the film's most obvious antecedent, Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie—as is indicated by a pretty explicit homage to Brian De Palma's Carrie.
The film's most intriguing facet, though, is the way Bonello plays with temporality. The dialectical relationship between past and present has become a central organizing principle of Bonello's artistry, evident in his anachronistic soundtrack choices and his unmooring of characters from their period settings through decidedly modern behaviors or situations, but here he approaches that dialectic in a crucially different manner. Instead of overlaying modern-day signifiers on a period piece setting, as he did in House of Pleasures, Zombi Child suggests two temporalities that exist parallel to each other. And the anxiety this creates—through discursive editing and match cuts—leads to a feverish payoff, one that uses genre and supernatural elements to further Bonello's idea of there being one historical continuity.
Cast: Adilé David, Ginite Popote, Louise Labeque, Mackenson Bijou, Mathilde Riu, Ninon François, Patrick Boucheron, Saadia Bentaïeb, Sayyid El Alami, Wislanda Louimat, Katiana Milfort Director: Bertrand Bonello Screenwriter: Bertrand Bonello Running Time: 103 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
The film is at its strongest when depicting how Diamantino becomes a tool of politicians hoping to oust Portugal from the EU.
Part absurdist character study, part satire of various European political crises, Diamantino envisions a Candide-like soccer megastar, Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta), possessed of naïve but intense imaginations. He lives in a colossal chateau and sleeps on pillows and sheets with his face printed on them, and spends much of his waking life riding the seas on a yacht that's big enough to ferry a small army. Despite being arguably the most famous person in Portugal, and among the most famous in the world, he's oblivious to his star power and the weighty expectations placed on him by soccer fans.
Throughout the film, writer-directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt delight in playing up the precarious balance between Diamantino's self-absorption and his sweet absent-mindedness. Unencumbered by an entourage, Diamantino rarely interacts with anyone besides his loving, supportive father, Chico (Chico Chapas), whose humble kindness is rather jarring when set against the palatial trappings of the family's digs. Even on the soccer pitch, Diamantino doesn't exude the focus one associates with an elite athlete, as he spends matches fantasizing about running with colossal, fluffy puppies—playful daydreams that somehow guide his movements as he slips past other players and scores goals.
Diamantino's carefree, seemingly unflappable temperament, however, is disrupted when he spots a raft of refugees while boating, and his glimpse at real human misery shakes him to the core—so much so that during a make-or-break penalty kick that will decide the World Cup final, he's too distracted to make the shot, costing Portugal the match. The film's manic tone swings into overdrive at this point, as Diamantino's daydreams of haunted refugees are contrasted with his tear-streaked face when it's blown up on jumbotrons, effectively positioning him as a symbol of his country's spectacular defeat. And all the while his evil twin sisters (Anabela Moreira and Margarida Moreira) scream at the television set playing the game inside the family's living room, causing Chico to have a fatal stroke.
This delirious sequence, touching on a celebrity's political preoccupation and viral media culture, exhibits an audaciousness that's disappeared from much contemporary comedy, and it sets the tone for the film's freewheeling style. Humiliated into early retirement, Diamantino announces his embrace of the sort of celebrity activism that regularly comes in for ridicule, declaring that he will adopt a refugee child to honor both the humanitarian crisis and his late father. The Portuguese secret service, already investigating him for suspected money laundering, uses Diamantino's proclamation to set up an undercover agent, Aisha (Cleo Tavares), to pose as a Cape Verdean refugee child, Rahim, in order to get into his house to gather clues for their case. And while Aisha only finds hilarious evidence of the player's innocence (his computer files consist of nothing but pet photos), she continues her ruse, if only for the filmmakers to add yet another wrinkle—a lesbian relationship with her colleague, Lucia (Maria Leite)—to the film's already dense array of plots and themes.
Aisha and Lucia's presence in Diamantino may turn the dial up on the film's hijinks, but in the process stalls its satirical thrust. To be sure, the film wrings much humor from Aisha's infiltration of Diamantino's home, mostly from how quickly she discovers that his innocence is beyond a doubt and that his cruel sisters are comically guilty, as they keep their offshore accounts on a desktop shortcut. Diamantino's interactions with Aisha are amusing insofar as Cotta commits fully to his character's over-eager treatment of "Rahim," serving his adopted child breakfast in bed and getting into tickle fights that underscore the man's emotional stuntedness. Yet these moments soon come to feel redundant, leaning too much on Lucia's petulant anger for comic effect as Aisha grows increasingly close to Diamantino.
That Diamantino and Aisha's relationship comes to define the last act of the film ultimately detracts from the riotous vision that Abrantes and Schmidt sketch of roiling EU tensions and the way celebrity culture can be just another element in the viral branding of extreme politics. Diamantino is on its strongest footing when depicting how its main character becomes a tool of politicians hoping to oust Portugal from the EU. One scene sees him starring in "Pexit" commercial as a folk hero from the Reconquista, during which Muslims were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. The right-wing politicians who fund the ad clearly pledge allegiance to the historical figure's Islamophobia, though it's also obvious that they hope that the pleasure Diamantino takes in dancing around in his costume will undercut that impression.
Elsewhere, Diamantino is used as a lab rat for a company that attempts to clone him in order to produce the world's best soccer team. This stretch finds the film at its most profound, in part because it's impossible to believe that scientists and supercomputers fail to fathom how a man who lives on an all-sugar diet and daydreams about puppies on the pitch could be the world's best athlete. The filmmakers draw a line between the absurdity of these experiments and the insidious quest for racial purity behind most eugenics movements, suggesting that neo-fascists are so prone to celebrity worship that they might mistake their favorite star for the master race. It's rich, relevant material for satire, so it's a shame that the film pivots away from it to resolve around Diamantino's relatively straightforward pursuit of happiness.
Cast: Carloto Cotta, Cleo Tavares, Anabela Moreira, Margarida Moreira, Carla Maciel, Chico Chapas, Maria Leite, Filipe Vargas, Joana Barrios Director: Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt Screenwriter: Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 96 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
The retired recluse at the center of writer-director Noble Jones's The Tomorrow Man spends his days intensely preparing for the apocalypse. When Ed Hemsler (John Lithgow) isn't meticulously organizing his home and secret fallout shelter, he's posting conspiracy theories on an internet forum or glued to the local news. At least, that is, until a female news anchor (Wendy Makkena) starts to directly address him, at which point he turns off his television and tries to get his head straight. But Ed can't really seem to find a way of easing his troubled mind. Indeed, even after engaging in extended human contact via phone conversations with his son, Brian (Derek Cecil), the old man inevitably launches into diatribes packed with half-baked ideas and comprehensive survival advice.
You'd be correct in thinking that Ed sounds a lot like Michael Shannon's Curtis from Take Shelter, and for a short time, he follows a similar trajectory. But where Jeff Nichols's film thrives in the ambiguous space between objective reality and the mind of its strange yet plausibly prescient protagonist, The Tomorrow Man never gives credence to any of Ed's protestations of doom and gloom, seeing them as symptoms of his loneliness and isolation. And while his extreme paranoia is unmistakably a form of mental illness, Jones increasingly treats it with less and less concern as the film moves forward, instead using it as fodder for both quirky comedy and the catalyst for a light-hearted septuagenarian romance.
Enter Ronnie (Blythe Danner), the beautiful but equally socially awkward woman whom Ed meets while stocking up on supplies at the local grocery store. Her subtly twitchy awkwardness serves as the perfect balance to Ed's boisterous neuroticism; her steadfast use of cash and strategic purchasing leads Ed to believe that he's found a kindred spirit, one who's equally prepped for the end of the world. Naturally, there's a catch, and the ever-fastidious Ed eventually discovers Ronnie's deep, dark secret: that she's a hoarder.
It's a fairly ridiculous odd-couple scenario, but when Jones keeps things small and focuses on Ed and Ronnie's burgeoning love affair and Ronnie's clumsy efforts at tempering Ed's cantankerousness, Lithgow and Danner imbue the film with a warmth and generosity that lends their characters a bit of humanity. The two actors' effortlessly charming rapport enlivens, at least in brief spurts, a film that otherwise reduces its characters to their eccentricities, from her love of war documentaries to his appreciation of ball bearings.
But The Tomorrow Man displays an utter lack of interest in exploring how Ed and Ronnie came to be so reclusive. Following their initial meet cute, the film gets caught up in its pursuit of preciousness. And Jones's indifference to the more disturbing elements of his characters' interior worlds effectively reduces serious mental health issues to harmless neuroses. Late into The Tomorrow Man, Ed takes to the message boards to post that "sometimes people need to be who they are even if they don't want to be who they are." It's a sentiment of acceptance that's hard to argue against, but one that ignores the fact that Ed and Ronnie are in dire need of psychiatric help. And that's because Jones is content to peddle the naïve notion that, regardless of your situation, love is the panacea for all that ails you.
Cast: John Lithgow, Blythe Danner, Derek Cecil, Katie Aselton, Sophie Thatcher, Eve Harlow, Wendy Makkena Director: Noble Jones Screenwriter: Noble Jones Distributor: Bleecker Street Running Time: 94 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019
In Jim Jarmusch's film, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality.
Jim Jarmusch's strength has always been his ability to craft films that seem lackadaisical and navel-gazing on the surface, but which are actually very methodical, revealing essential truths about the socioeconomic conditions of modern American life. The filmmaker's latest, The Dead Don't Die, zips through vignettes set in the small town of Centerville in the days leading up to the zombie apocalypse, and for an hour-plus, the film is sharp, acerbic, and surprisingly melancholic, probing at the generational divides between its characters, who behave in vastly different ways throughout the end of days.
Eventually, however, and perhaps because Jarmusch senses that his trademark deadpan doesn't have the same novel appeal that it once did, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality. It's not so much a snapping-into-focus as a whiplash-inducing lurch into meta-film territory that Jarmusch doesn't seem to realize is already a very stale play for this genre of film.
Or maybe he just doesn't care. There's much evidence here to suggest that Jarmusch's prime interest in making a zombie movie is to emphasize the soul-deadening state of America, maybe even the world. So when the film's zombies roam around murmuring the names of the products they consumed when they were alive (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, coffee, and so on), writing this all off as a lame literalization of the most prevalent theme from George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead isn't so much a scathing critique of his approach as a confirmation of the message he's imparting: that our culture is nothing but a zombified version of itself.
The Dead Don't Die is at its best when mulling the contours of the relationships between the cross-generational cast of characters. Neither Cliff (Bill Murray), the resigned, veteran cop, nor Ronnie (Adam Driver), his self-aware but generally unfeeling rookie partner, are particularly well drawn in and of themselves, but their repartee makes them interesting, as Cliff's air of wisdom and experience dissipates when he finally realizes that Ronnie understands the rules of their genre-inflected universe better than he ever will, and Ronnie, all stoical resolve, is unable to process Cliff's sobering, earnest emotional outbursts.
The Venn diagram of all things Jarmuschian and all things Lynchian has always shown a significant bit of overlap, but in working with an ensemble cast that throws together longtime collaborators with a gallery of fresh faces—all populating a mosaic of small-town life that's pervaded by ethereal dread—Jarmusch mounts something akin to his own Twin Peaks: The Return. The greatest affinity between The Dead Don't Die and David Lynch's series, though, is the shared interest in investigating how a younger generation can assimilate into the filmmakers' highly idiosyncratic styles and affect the tenor of their worldviews.
To that end, The Dead Don't Die feels most poignant when it threads the experience of its various characters and exerts a kind of equalizing force over them. The best example of this, and also something like the film's philosophical lodestone, is the eponymous country theme song, recorded by Sturgill Simpson and played in various contexts throughout. The song's ingratiating, hummable melody eventually illuminates how art can have disparate effects on audiences. For the carefree hipster played by Selena Gomez, the tune is an outlet for escape as she drives through the countryside. But it becomes downright oppressive when Cliff gets sick of Ronnie playing it in their police car and chucks the CD out the window.
That range of response is also reflected in the overall trajectory of the film, which begins in a register of playful irreverence—even as characters spout pronouncements of environmental disaster wrought by fracking, or ponder what kind of creature may have mauled two women found dead at a diner—before gradually succumbing to its anger. That isn't inherently bad, of course, but the film's dreary, didactic denouement proves that Jarmusch is unable to translate his righteous fury at the state of the world into a cinematic statement as compelling, creative, or weird as The Dead Don't Die manages to be when it's simply content to be a hangout movie that just so happens to be set during the zombie apocalypse.
Cast: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Selena Gomez, Austin Butler, Luka Sabbat, Rosie Perez, Eszter Balint, Iggy Pop, Sara Driver, RZA, Carol Kane, Larry Fessenden, Tom Waits Director: Jim Jarmusch Screenwriter: Jim Jarmusch Distributor: Focus Features Running Time: 103 min Rating: R Year: 2019
The choreography is as brutal as you expect, but the repetition in style from the first two films makes the effect less surprising.
At the end of another knock-down, drag-out pummeling in Chad Stahelski's John Wick 3: Parabellum, the man with the samurai sword sticking out of his chest says to Keanu Reeves's John Wick, "That was a pretty good fight, huh?" It's a throwaway gag, the kind that action directors like to use for a breather after a particularly bruising melee. But it also comes off as something of a gloat—one of a few signs in the film that stuntman turned director Stahelski, for better and worse, is content to coast on a winning formula.
The third installment in this series about a hitman who would really like to stay retired and mourn his dead wife and dog picks up about five seconds after John Wick: Chapter 2 ended. Winston (Ian McShane) gives Wick a one-hour grace period before he's "excommunicado" from the Continental, neutral ground for members of the criminal underworld, after killing a crime lord. A $14 million bounty has been put on his head, and as roughly one in seven people in the world of the film appears to be an assassin, that means that at least two or three killers with dollar signs in their eyes chase after Wick down every Manhattan city block.
The immediate result of this in the film's pell-mell opening stretch is that the ever-resourceful Wick kills many, many, many people. He kills them with knives, hatchets, and in a particularly imaginative sequence set in a stable, by getting a horse to kick an assailant in the face. Much of this stretch is mindful of what made the prior films in the John Wick series tick. In other words, Stahelski puts Wick through an increasingly absurd and bloody series of confrontations whose intensity plays off Reeves's hangdog demeanor with deadpan comic timing.
That fidelity to what's expected of a John Wick film is initially a relief, at least before the filmmakers start looking for new dramatic terrain to explore. Normally this would be a positive development. After all, just how far can you stretch a concept that's essentially Run John Run? But all the little story beats that break up the central chase narrative, mostly in the form of hints about Wick's origin story, ultimately do little to develop the story or character and just serve to pad out the running time with more human obstacles for Wick to stoically annihilate.
Having more or less set the entire criminal universe against him, Wick has to call in just about every favor he has. Given his long and only hinted-at backstory, that leaves the film's writers a lot of room to play with. Jumping from one roost to the next, Wick asks for help from the Director (Angelica Huston), a member of the high-level crime lords known as the High Table, and Sofia (Halle Berry), an ex-assassin who owes Wick a debt and who's just as good as he is with a blade and a gun, only she has a pair of kill-on-command canines at her side.
It's satisfying to watch as John Wick 3 expands the glimmers of fantastical world-building that had previously gilded the series's retired-killer-on-the-run narrative. The outré garnishes like the gold-coin currency, the killer spies disguised as homeless people, and the Continental—lavish, crooks-only hotels that suggest what might happen if Ian Schrager got the chance to whip up something for the mob—work as a baroque counterpoint to the stripped-down economy of Wick's dialogue. His response to what he needs for help as the High Table's stormtroopers close in for the kill? "Guns. Lots of guns."
The returning cast continues to provide greater and more nuanced depth of character than is called on from Reeves, especially Lance Reddick as a serenely authoritative Continental concierge, a scrappy Laurence Fishburne as the lord of the homeless, and the ever-lugubrious McShane as the New York Continental's sherry-sipping manager. Asia Kate Dillon also makes a fierce new entry to the series as the Adjudicator, a steely emissary from the High Table.
The production design doesn't disappoint, either, with its chiaroscuro portrait of an always rainy and crowded New York. Splashes of neon and lens flare play off the antiquated production design. Anachronisms like old-fashioned yellow cabs and 1970s-era computers are paired with a cutting-edge armory of high-tech weapons and oddball details like the criminal underworld secretaries costumed like Suicide Girls who decided to enter the work force.
As for the action choreography, it's as brutal as you expect, though the repetition in style from the first two films makes the effect less surprising. Wick piles up bodies by the dozen and never puts one bullet in a goon's head when three or four will more effectively splatter his brains over the wall. Besides the previously mentioned throwdown in a stable, though, the only other fight scene in the film that stands out is the one set inside an antique store: The unarmed Wick and his blade-preferring attackers have murderous fun smashing open and utilizing the contents of one display case, throwing knife after knife at each other.
But the further the film illuminates the spiderweb of criminal enterprise undergirding its world, the more burdensome the overlong story becomes. The somewhat blasé tone that played as just slightly tongue-in-cheek in the first John Wick is starting by this point to feel like complacency. But given the repetitive nature of much of this entry's narrative, the eventually numbing action choreography—punch, flip, stab, shoot, punch, flip, stab, shoot—and the setup for more of the same in a now seemingly inevitable John Wick 4, it's possible that even fans could wind up as exhausted as Wick himself.
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Asia Kate Dillon, Mark Dacascos, Lance Reddick, Anjelica Huston, Tobias Segal, Said Taghmaoui, Jerome Flynn Director: Chad Stahelski Screenwriter: Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins, Marc Abrams Distributor: Lionsgate Running Time: 130 min Rating: R Year: 2019
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Personally i'm interested in what sort of grades he got...
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Personally i'm interested in what sort of grades he got...
Haha, looks like a local news programme's joke story for the week.
By Glenn Davis
Brisbane, March 1 AAP - A former New Zealand jockey caught using a *** aid to deceive stewards in a drug test has admitted a moment of panic led to his indiscretion.
Jason Warrington was one of 19 track riders and jockeys nabbed in a drug raid at Toowoomba's Clifford Park racecourse in Queensland on Tuesday.
Warrington had left the track when he was asked by Queensland Racing stewards to come back to provide a urine sample for precautionary drug testing.
Acting chief steward John Hackett became suspicious of Warrington's actions while he attempted to give a urine sample and caught him squeezing urine from a dildo concealed inside his pants.
Warrington confessed he had panicked when asked to provide a urine sample as he had smoked marijuana at a weekend party.
"I tried to cheat the system and I got caught," Warrington told Radio TAB today.
"It was one of those stupid things you do. I've had some bad luck recently. My wife and I have just split up and she's taken the kids.
"I went to a party in Toowoomba on Saturday night and had a puff on a marijuana cigarette. When it came to the testing I just panicked."
Warrington admitted his mistake was unprofessional and it was the first time in his 16-year riding career he had been in trouble with stewards over a drug test.
"To have a puff on a marijuana cigarette was a stupid thing to do," he said.
"My wife and I are against it (drugs) as we're church people and it's brought shame to my family."
Warrington said after he returned home following trackwork he got a call from a steward asking him to return to the course to provide a urine sample.
"I managed to get hold of a device that would hold urine and got some urine from someone I knew wouldn't be positive," he said.
"I've had at least 50 tests in my life but the stewards made me drop my pants down to my ankles.
"It's embarrassing enough to give a sample in front of stewards but to drop your strides was more embarrassing."
Warrington has been stood down from riding pending further investigations by stewards into the matter.
Maradona beat him to it.
Child kills giant pig
That's one ****ing big pig.
Just a really small kid for mine.
I bet somebodies day got a whole lot better :naughty:
severe burns to the anus, lol


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EPA Launches the Process to Protect Bristol Bay
- Date: March 13, 2014
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it is beginning a process to find ways to protect the world's largest sockeye salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, Alaska, from the potentially destructive impacts of the proposed Pebble Mine. This is a significant milestone for Alaskans and conservationists everywhere, and for the thousands who have raised their voices on this issue.
Bristol Bay is one of the most productive marine ecosystems in the world and is a source of food for communities. The salmon runs average 37.5 million fish each year, and produce nearly 50% of the world's wild sockeye salmon. Home to 31 Alaska Native Villages, the bay provides millions of dollars in jobs for commercial fisherman.
The February 28 decision to begin the process of finding ways to protect the bay under the Clean Water Act 404c was requested by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, and reflects the unique value and risks to this complex marine ecosystem. If developed, Pebble Mine—which would be the largest open pit mine in North America— would be located at the headwaters of the Bristol Bay watershed, beneath the source of the world's largest wild salmon fishery. Mining operations must get permits to dredge or fill material into wetlands, lakes and streams. This means that during the EPA process, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cannot approve a permit for the mine.
The decision to begin this process follows the January 2014 release of the EPA's "Assessment of Potential Mining Impacts on Salmon Ecosystems of Bristol Bay, Alaska," in which the agency concludes that large-scale mining in Alaska's Bristol Bay region would have serious negative impacts on salmon and native Alaskan cultures.
There are several steps in the process that include review and chances for the public to weigh in. The EPA is basing its action on available information, including data collected as a part of the agency's Bristol Bay ecological risk assessment and mine plans submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
WWF has supported local opposition to Pebble Mine for years and we work with partners to protect Bristol Bay from offshore oil and gas development.
Change the Way You Think
Learn how seemingly isolated actions we take every day -- from our choice of morning beverage to our choice of business practices -- leave an imprint on some of the worlds most valuable and threatened places.
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Visit the oceans and seas that whales call home with a WWF tour.
- In This Story:


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This topic is not to debate the existence of a god(s). It's not to debate if Christianity is true. In fact, for the purpose of this conversation, the absurdities of Christianity are true.
A large (not all) portion of American Christians identify themselves with conservatism. In fact the Christian-Right makes up significant voice of Christian Americans. The majority of Republicans would identify or label themselves a part of this Christian Right. What do we know about this Christian Right? -Specifically their views concerning the issue of freedom and the role of government. Republicans profess their opposition to welfare states, Socialism, dictators, monarchs, and Totalitarianism. "God" for bid you try to limit their rights in any way shape or form. I happen to share many of their views on freedom. Ok… this is nothing new. We know this already…..
The issue I have a hard time understanding is how/why does the Christian Right not take issue with their (as Hitchens has so eloquently put it)"celestial dictator" ? Even if Christ did live… Even if the bible were true…. How is it that that these men and women who greatly oppose any form of intrusion…any limitations of their liberty… how come they don't take issue with their god? Not only do they not take issue…. They love this sick and twisted set up. They love that they are born with sin. They love to bow down and worship their god of Abraham. They love that the consequences of not accepting Jesus will result in eternal hell fire. They love that they are slaves. They love it.
Now I know what you're thinking… Jason!.. You are asking the wrong audience… we are atheist…you should ask this to the Christian-Right. I have. It's like asking the mental ill why they are mentally ill. The routine answers are:
Well it's not our place to know or understand god's divine plan.
The Bible is the infallible word of god not to be questioned.
No Jason… I don't see the hypocrisy.
You know… answers that only cult following blind herds could provide. This conundrum fascinates me. It also scares the shit out of me.
Views: 484
They don't seem to have a problem with it, IMO, because it's more of a social thing. It's an 'our team' they can be a part of. More importantly, they can disregard any inconvenient part of their god's teachings any time they want for the sake of what they would call freedom. We all know the point about how hard it is for a rich man to pass into heaven. It wasn't that long ago that a guy famously said on Fox News that capitalism is incompatible with Christianity essentially; that Jesus would have been a liberal Democrat.
It's this doublethink that bothers me more than anything really.
Exactly. They are pathologically anal retentive.
Yes. Religion is the ultimate in totalitarianism. Religion tries to dictate your very thoughts and desires.
Thanks for posting your blog... I enjoyed it.
agree this aspect of the religious to me is the most troubling of their traits. To express such a desire for nearly absolute freedom only to give it away to a supposed supernatural deity is just straight up insanity. It clearly states in the bible that Jesus' second coming will result in a world-wide theocratic government ruled by him (Jesus). Yet this aspect fails to be grasped or comprehended by the religious or like the author states simply ignored to fit their idea that they are free. Truly insane is all I can say about this "conundrum."
Huh? I thought Jesus was talking about 'The son of man' will come down from the clouds and reign over the New Kingdom?
I always took Jesus as being a Prophet - Not God himself. John likes to make Jesus speak as if he is God - But the other Gospels do not.
But all in all - I don't think Christians see their Deity as a Celestial Dictator - Because all you gotta do is Love Baby Jesus and accept him into your heart ...
It makes them feel important.
It gives them false hope of an afterlife.
Romans 13 1-6
1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.
2 Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.
3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval,
4 for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.
5 Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience.
6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing.
7 Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.
5 Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience.
6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing.
7 Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.
They like the association because it feeds their need for social power more than it infringes upon their playtime! Religion is as much a power tool as it is a belief system in some circles. And after all, a powerful slave living high on the hog is a happy slave who will gladly eat humble pie if it furthers the cause.


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Feb 18, 2020
Quantum Scholars are delighted to announce that our UK government supported and funded program has been extended by another 2 years to recruit many more outstanding international candidates to teach science in England. Its success has grown rapidly in its three years of operation and we can now continue to offer this wonderful program to US middle and high school science teachers who specialise in physics, chemistry or biology. Teaching in England is a wonderful and unique opportunity and we are recruiting all year round with our next focus on September 2020. To teach science in the UK, not only will you have the long term opportunity to teach in England, you'll receive outstanding subject-specific CPD, ongoing support from a school based mentor and gain an in-depth knowledge and understanding of current science pedagogy. As a science teacher teaching in England you'll also be provided with full support during the relocation phase and visa process and will be matched with a suitable secondary school in the south-east England region. This includes teaching in London. We are also able to offer financial rewards to all science teachers by reimbursing flights to England up to £700. What do our current science teachers think of the program? Kayleigh 'I would definitely recommend Quantum Scholars to anyone looking to teach in England. The entire experience has been great and I am really enjoying teaching in the UK. The school I work in has been a great fit for me and my personality as well as my experiences in the USA.' Alex 'They are prompt, effective communicators that are eager to support you through the process. They are extremely supportive and informative and make an intimidating process seem easy. It is a great program where the representatives are excited to help you with the transition.' Amy 'The advice I received when making a decision to accept my position was extremely honest and helpful. The process to secure a position to teach in the UK was made so much easier by working with Quantum Scholars. I received honest feedback and was helped every step of the way with advice and answers to every question I had!'
Quantum Scholars Cleveland, OH, USA Full-time


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Mplus Discussion
Categorical Data Modeling
posted on Friday, September 03, 2004 - 1:49 pm
I have a few questions about FIML when fitting a multigroup CFA with binary items.
1. Is the distribution of the residuals logistic or normal?
2. Can cross-group constraints be imposed on theta/delta?
3. Can the measurement intercept be used with across-group constraints?
posted on Saturday, September 04, 2004 - 5:08 pm
1. When you use the ML estimator, the residuals are logistic, and when you use the WLSMV estimator they are normal.
2. Yes
3. Yes. If by this you mean that you want intercepts instead of the standard thresholds, you would have to specify a factor behind each item to capture the intercept in the factor intercept.
posted on Thursday, September 16, 2004 - 10:51 am
I had understanding the robust ML estimator was to be used with models that included a covariate (x values) and that WLSMV was appropriate for models that did not (like a CFA with categorical indicators). But, based on the previous message, is this thinking correct?
Can the robust ML estimator be used with categorical indicators? IF so, would this estimator be more computationally intensive than WLS (due to the full-information ML technique), especially when larger models are used?
If so, do we know the limitations of MLMV in terms of model size and fit indices for this technique? And if a requirement for the ML estimator is normally distributed data, is MLMV as sensitive to distributional nonnormality (e.g., item or parcel level skew/kurtosis) as ML or does the mean/variance adjustment help to accommodate this problem?
posted on Friday, September 17, 2004 - 2:43 pm
When the ML estimation technique is used with ordinal/Likert data, is this estimator operating under full information (as under conditional probability formulation)?
How does this differ from limited information, which is what is conducted with WLS, correct?
Is limited information (latent variable formulation) an option with the ML technique?
posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2004 - 4:36 pm
Re: September 16. Both maximum likelihood and weighted least squares can be used with categorical outcomes with or without covariates. Yes, the robust ML can be used with categorical indicators. Yes, it can be more computationally intensive than weighted least squares depending on the model. MLMV is not used for categorical outcomes. Numerical integration is used with ML and the computational work increases with the number of factors.
posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2004 - 4:39 pm
Re: Sept 17. ML always implies full information. Limited info using WLSM implies that first- and second-order moment information is used. ML uses as high-order moments as there are observed variables. Limited-information ML is sometimes referred to as quasi- (or pseudo-) ML but is not available in Mplus in this context.
Jason Bond
posted on Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - 9:57 am
I'm trying to implement the DIF analyses in (Muthen, Kao, and Burstein, 1991) and had a couple of questions.
1) The first sentence at the top of the right column of page 11 says "In these formulas, the trait has been standardized to mean zero and variance one" which I take as meaning that Var(Equation(1)) = 1 but that would appear to cause problems if Var(x) or Var(z) was large. Also, sigma_nu_nu in formulae 4 and 5 would also be 1...that sentence was quite confusing.
2) Related, I take it that the formulation in this paper uses the delta parameterization, where Psi is estimated as part of the model and theta is obtained from Psi and Lambda.
Thanks for any input,
Bengt O. Muthen
posted on Friday, November 01, 2013 - 3:54 pm
1) This sentence was meant to imply that the a and b that you get correspond to a latent ability scale with mean zero and variance one. So like IRT parameters. I don't mean that sigma_{eta,eta} is 1 or that mu_eta is 0.
2) Yes, Delta.
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Men's Shed - Wednesday Gentlemen
Date: Wed. 29 Nov, 2017 11:00 am - 3:00 pm
Duration: 4 Hours
Wednesday - and a group of gentlemen meet at Jackadder Lake to shoot the breeze, discuss the issues of the world, hang out and generally enjoy themselves - oh, and they have a sail as well.
Meet at 11.00am, bring some lunch and sail through till about 3.00pm
The rules are pretty simple - if you get too far ahead, you can wait for the others, and if you fall behind, just miss out a buoy and catch up a bit.
It's all pretty relaxed and the idea is to have fun. Everyone will help you out with advice and assistance, so give it a go.


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Story highlights
- A judge in Italy indicts Sergio Berlusconi, accused of bribing a senator to switch sides
- The former Italian Prime Minister says he didn't do anything wrong
- Trial is set to start in February in Naples
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is facing yet another corruption charge.
A preliminary indictment by a judge in Naples alleges that the 77-year-old bribed a senator to change sides and supported his party in 2006, Berlusconi's lawyer said Wednesday.
Sen. Sergio De Gregorio's change of allegiance eventually helped bring down the center-left government of Romano Prodi in 2008, paving the way for Beruslconi to become prime minster for a third time.
The senator is cooperating with prosecutors and a first court hearing is scheduled in Naples for February 11.
Berlusconi says he is innocent, according to his lawyer, Michele Cerabona.
The former Prime Minister has been the subject of multiple corruption and bribery charges over the years.
In August, Italy's high court upheld a four-year prison sentence for tax fraud, and this month, a lower court ruled that Berlusconi should be banned from public office for two years. Because of his age, it's unlikely Berlusconi will spend any time in prison.


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White chocolate syrup - 1L
Toschi has always been a market leader as for syrups; a well-known brand and its high quality products have ensured Toschi's success in all these years.
Toschi syrups are ideal for fresh-tasting drinks, icicles, water ices, shakes and long drinks.
|The Toschi Vignola Srl, located in Vignola (Modena, Italy), started operating business by conserving cherries in 1945. Today, the mission of Toschi is to offer quality products to the market, at the same time respecting tradition and territorial features. In 2000 Toschi Vignola received the UNI-EN-ISO 9001:2000 certification. In 2006 it obtained the IFS certification for all its products.


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The Map of the Week was a great fun tradition that should never have vanished!!! The golden Monkey must return!KittyonCatnip wrote: MOTW had a loyal following - We didn't really need the maps to be pretty and perfect - We just wanted more shit to click around on.
MOTM gives us less new shit to click around on.
the Golden Atlas is a niffty shinny gif but I have a lot of conquering to do to break GFips'es 'record' of what is it 80+ golden monkeys?
Only 61 more to go to reclaim the world record for most golden MotW monkeys!!!
or perhaps change it to the Map of the Fortnight? Switch the maps every 2 weeks and give out a new shiney gif? nick name it the golden scooter maybe?
p.s. could you also please restore the MotW champions display page please Lord of Luxtopia?


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Taipei Times: When will Transglobe Life Insurance Co (全球人壽) integrate Kuo Hua Life Insurance Co (國華人壽)?
James Liu (劉先覺): We aim to integrate Kuo Hua's assets and liabilities, including its employees, in the first quarter of next year. The integration is positive for the sector and society as a whole after the Financial Supervisory Commission put Kuo Hua under the receivership of the Taiwan Insurance Guaranty Fund (保險安定基金) in August 2009.
There won't be a name change and Kuo Hua will become an empty legal entity afterward. After the integration, Transglobe will strive to become one of the top six insurers by accounts of first year premiums next year. A top-five ranking may be overambitious.
Kuo Hua has been a good insurance company in light of its information technology, administrative abilities and sales performance. First year premiums amounted to NT$5 billion [US$172.1 million] for the first nine months, despite the unfavorable operating environment. Transglobe will seek to maximize synergy benefits — the real challenge following the integration.
TT: Is it true that Transglobe intends to retain 50 percent of Kuo Hua employees, both in-office workers and sales agents?
Liu: We will have to discuss the matter with Kuo Hua's receiver, the Taiwan Insurance Guaranty Fund.
The fund has drawn up a plan detailing how buyers should handle Kuo Hua's 2,700 employees after conferring with the workers' union. All bidders understood and accepted the arrangements before joining the auction last month. It is not convenient for me to reveal the details before the dust settles.
Transglobe knows how to integrate product lines, employees and operations as the company has become experienced in mergers and acquisitions since entering the local market in 1994.
In the past 18 years, we acquired American Family Life Assurance Co (美國家庭人壽保險), Transamerica Life Insurance Co (全美人壽), AXA Life Insurance Co (安盛國衛) and Aegon Life Insurance (Taiwan).
TT: How will Transglobe use the record compensation and become profitable after acquiring Kuo Hua?
Liu: We will use the fund to prop up Kuo Hua's financial health and maintain the rights and benefits of 2 million existing policies.
We intend to use the funds over two to three years as the company's investment officials see fit. There is no urgency or a timetable to allocate the funds.
On principle, Transglobe allocates 85 percent of its investment funds to fixed income assets, mainly US bonds, since they are less risky. Currently, foreign investments take up 40 percent of our assets under management. We invest the remaining 15 percent in equities and real estate properties. Stock investments account for 5 percent of our portfolio.
We expect to turn a profit the first year after the acquisition is completed. It is not an unrealistic challenge based on our knowledge of the company's financial state.
However, it is premature for such talk. The macro-environment, especially interest rates, has much to do with insurers' profitability. There seems to be a small ray of hope that global central banks will start to reverse monetary policy next year as the world's economy is gradually emerging from a slowdown.
TT: Will Transglobe adjust its business strategy after the integration?
Liu: Transglobe prides itself as being a pension-planning expert and will continue to emphasize long-term insurance policies through multi-sales channels: namely sales agents, bancassurance and insurance brokerage. Kuo Hua's sales operations will assume an important role at Transglobe in the future.


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Find our more about the Exec team and Board who set our strategic direction
Find out about our position on a range of subjects which affect our customers
We value our people and respect their differences. Read about how we celebrate diversity at Genesis.
Genesis Housing Association was formed in April 2011, following a group merger between four housing associations. Let us tell you our story
We more than just a housing provider; we provide quality services and create thriving communities
We have a number of schemes and initiatives to help you and the people where you live
We work closely with local authorities to provide temporary housing for families and individuals who, through no fault of their own, have been made homeless.
We provide a number of paths to help you buy a home
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We have schemes to help if you would like to get online.
At Genesis we have different ways to help you make the most of your money.
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We believe all our customers have a right to feel safe and happy in their home.


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Kindle is 1/2 American and 1/2 French. The sire is full blooded French. This is Kindle's 1st litter. The litter was born on June 12, 2009 and she only had 4 pups, 1 female and 3 males. We only have 2 males left. They have been raised in my home with other dogs and children. They are both very intelligent and affectionate puppies.
Buddy is more outgoing and is a blue roan of average size. Duke is black and white spotted. Duke is more laid back and will be larger than average in size. Both are showing very good hunting instincts and will make excellent dogs. I have vet records and AKC registration papers in hand.