The young gentlemen is somewhat portly, and somewhat aesthetically challenged. This effect is heightened as he is juxtaposed with Foxy, who as I may have mentioned, is a smokin’ hot mama. But it is the annoyed look of Fox and the hustling attitude of her handlers that made some call the actress a bitch and the pic a freeze-framed visual definition of cruelty.

Now I think Fox and her entourage were not to blame for this perception. It is pretty clear they are trying to get somewhere and obviously they can’t stop for random strangers who accost them with unknown motives…

But what if the positions were reversed? An incorrigible scalawag on Reddit got hold of the pic and using some photoshop trickery, swapped the subjects’ heads for a joke:

The pics are an awesome display of the perceived value disparities between human and human. Beauty, fame and status are wide gulfs indeed….

The original photo was found here:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3605/3633752862_d2a463fdca_o.jpg

The photoshopped version was submitted by “sluice” to Reddit.com and the original link is:
http://bayimg.com/image/eabfpaacc.jpg

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Can a Band Plagiarize Itself? This is the question posed to Nickelback, a Canadian quartet perhaps second only to Creed in the level of derision received by a sizable segment of rock fans.

The reasons cited range from the band’s image to their reliance on predictable, poppish creations that seem too well crafted for the mass market.

Nickelback’s biggest hit, This is How You Remind Me, reached the top of the charts in 2001. In 2003, the band struck gold again with Someday, a radio-friendly song which fueled the howls of the band’s detractors on account of its suspiciously familiar progression and structure.

A clever sound wiz mixed the two songs to prove this point, resulting in a hilarious exposure of NB’s underlying sonic formula.

The left speaker plays one song while the right plays the other simultaneously.

Here is the appropriately titled: This is How You Remind Me of Someday:

For comparison, below is the video for Nickelback’s This Is How You Remind Me:

And Someday:

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Art, whether film or literature, can translate such faraway events as genocide into exquisitely simple and relatable terms, forcing the viewer to try to comprehend the incomprehensible. What better way to attempt comprehension than through the eyes of a child, whose natural innocence makes him the perfect interrogator, asking questions whose simplicity belies their profundity? Director Mark Herman’s adaptation of John Boyne’s bestselling novel of the same name will no doubt move audiences with its portrayal of a forbidden friendship across barbed wire, but just barely misses the mark.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas follows a small but concentrated cast of characters. It centers on Bruno, a young German boy with high socks and knobby knees, who comes to understand the Holocaust in a very unusual way. Like the viewer, Bruno (played by Asa Butterfield) is a blank canvas. He is a boy just any other eight year-old who desires to stay behind with his friends to play cops and robbers in his family’s comfortable Berlin manor than to follow his father who is assigned to an important mission in service of the Fatherland. His father Ralph, played admirably by David Thewlis better known for his role as Professor Lupin in the Harry Potter movies, is a high ranking Nazi commandant relocated to a forced labor camp in the German countryside to supervise the internees.

The new country house is a bleak structure, built with the same military precision responsible for the efficient camp which is placed at a distance behind it. Bruno hates the new living arrangements, or rather misses his old friends in Berlin, spending each day exploring his new quarters. It is understood that there is only a matter of time before Bruno’s explorations exhaust the house and turn toward the surrounding compound, discovering the ugly secret hidden behind it. The compound’s situation with relation to the camp is at a hypocritical distance, the Nazis being unable to constantly view the emblem of what they so ardently desire. There is, however, one window within the house from which the camp is visible and it is ironically situated in Bruno’s room. One morning, he discovers it and the sight of the internees laboring within the camp begs the question: “Why do the farmers wear pajamas?”

Like any parent dealing with an inquisitive child, the first line of defense is hiding the truth. Ralph does this well, using the all the severity of a Nazi father to distance himself coldly from his children, looking after their well-being but remaining vague with regard the true nature of his work. It is merely described in terms of being a very important service to the Third Reich, as the Nazi tutor employed to indoctrinate Bruno and his sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) would say.

Bruno’s deceptively innocent question embodies the plot’s central theme of comprehending genocide. It is so simple that Bruno’s mother, Elsa, played with a mixture of annoying cluelessness and then later righteous disgust by the talented Vera Farmiga (better known for her role in The Departed), has difficulty figuring out her son’s logic until he points it out to her. Bruno’s explorations finally take him to the camp where he strikes up a friendship with the young Shmuel, played by newcomer Jack Scanlon.

As his friendship with Shmuel deepens, so does Bruno’s questions about what is going on, why exactly Jews are bad. Along with Shmuel, the actions of Pavel, the house servant and former physician who fixes his scrapes when his mother is absent, force Bruno to rethink the lessons of his tutor. Can there be such a thing as a good Jew?

The film runs into difficulties with the abrupt death of one its most likable characters (who is unfortunately given the least screen time). The significance of the death is unclear, and the viewer feels as though the director left in an artificial tear jerking plot mistake of the book that should have been destined for the cutting room floor. Similarly, the film’s climax bears the same unnaturalness in plot construction. It is all plausible, but the viewer gets the feeling that things are a little rushed, as if the story, being about genocide, has doomed itself to only one kind of possible ending which the plot quickly writes itself into in the final minutes.

Also problematic is Elsa’s unlikely transformation from complicit Nazi wife to compassionate bleeding heart. She truly begins to shy away from her husband’s ideas when she discovers that the labor camp doubles as an execution field. That she finds the idea of slavery more than palatable than murder is doubtful. The movie is supposed to center around the friendship of Shmuel and Bruno, but the viewer finds this pairing repetitive and superficial. And, though Bruno’s simple innocence is an important tool to the plot, he comes across as too simple at times lacking the appropriate depth that the film calls for.

Yet, where decisions like these call the film’s quality into question, other scenes are an entirely gripping balance of sensitivity and horror. The dinner scene featuring the hollow eyed, hollow cheeked Lt. Kottler’s explosion of displaced anger is a testament to talented acting and an instance of excellent screenplay.

Many directors, memorably Steven Spielberg with Schindler’s List and Roberto Benigni with Life is Beautiful, succeed in walking the line between compassion and gratuity, to produce remarkable depictions of the Holocaust. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas succeeds in adapting a moving story, but the end product is just shy of its potential, perhaps lacking the adequate ambition to do justice to its subject and its lineage.

images: johnboyne.wordpress.com

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It seemed that nobody knew about this movie and it was incredibly difficult to find, but I knew I had to see it after reading Roger Ebert’s review where he stated:

“Tarsem’s The Fall is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself.”

and called it:

“…a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.”

Strictly speaking, there is a plot but its purpose is to facilitate magnificent visuals. The movie opens with a a movie stuntman named Roy who wishes to kill himself and who enlists a young girl named Alexandria to help him do the job. He slowly gains her trust by telling her a story involving fantastical characters and exotic locations.

Now when I heard that no CG effects were used in the film, I was stunned. There is a scene where birds fly out of a man’s mouth as he is killed, and another where a man is shot with hundreds of arrows and dies lying atop them. In yet another, masked warriors swarm across a dizzying and complex stair structure.

If you’re an arthound like me, you’ll want to see this movie simply for this visual feast.

Tarsem’s personal story is also very interesting. He first came to LA to study film making against his father’s wishes and eventually became a top commercial and music video director. However, he had always wanted to create a visually impressive film and so he began working on what would eventually become The Fall. 28 countries and four years later, his work was finished, debuting in 2006 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

It takes a lot of guts to self-finance such an offbeat fantasy movie. Thank God there are visionary directors like Tarsem who’ll take some potent shrooms, give two middle fingers to the man and follow their own artistic vision…

(images: the fall official site)

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Most people hear of the author via the modern cult movie Fight Club, which was adapted from his novel of the same name. In the film, a disillusioned Edward Norton attempts to overcome the emasculation and hollowness caused by modern American life by starting a club devoted to violence.

The story spoke volumes to a generation of young adult men who felt empty in the absence of a great cause or struggle. After the success of Fight Club, Palahniuk went on to write other novels and short stories, often making use of disturbing incidents to bypass the reader’s walls and go straight for his innards. The author was often accused of gratuitousness, but as he said in a Guardian interview:

“Every time I write something, I think, this is the most offensive thing I will ever write,….but, no, I always surprise myself…..I’m always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point…but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.”

Should a visceral reaction be considered less valid than an emotional or cerebral reaction? I’m still not sure…Every time I read something shocking and feel the resulting emotion I wonder if I should classify it as artistically valuable or the result of cheap manipulation.

Shock value can also cause some extremely dramatic physiological reactions. During a Palahniuk’s reading of his piece “Guts“, several overcome audience members passed out. These fits continued at other readings and the short story is currently said to be responsible for 73 total faintings!

In any case, Guts is not something you read everyday and is worth checking out should you have the ‘intestinal fortitude‘….

All black humor aside, this story is very disturbing and not for everybody, so consider yourself warned:
Guts by Chuck Palahniuk

http://chuckpalahniuk.net

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The topic of the movie is age-old: why do people believe what they believe and how, in the face of rational scientific thinking, can they go on believing it? It targets mainly Judaism and Christianity, diverting for a bit on the subject of Islam. Maher aims to look at how these faiths will react to a number of point-blank questions, to figure out just why people believe in them, and to show the viewer that his own belief in any kind of organized religion is absurd.

Maher himself was raised Catholic being born to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother. Thus, from the beginning, his view on religion straddled the fence of two very different faiths. He makes a point of interviewing people with similarly divided perspectives arguably to prove that the mystical veil becomes thinnest at the fringe. Maher interviews such fringe personalities as former director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins who is a prominently religious scientist. Others include a fervently anti-Israel rabbi, gay Muslim activists, an ex-Jew for Jesus, a man claiming to be the second coming of Christ himself, among many fascinating others. From each of these perspectives, Maher cobbles together the central idea that no one of any faith, when pressed, exactly knows the nature of what they’re talking about. Their seemingly impenetrable certainty is actually a shallow defense for an irrational system of belief.

At one point, in what becomes a recurring line of argument, Maher dresses drably and stands at Speaker’s Corner, a public place to air one’s views located in Hyde Park, London. He begins propounding the central tenets and beliefs of Scientology which are generally agreed to be laughable. His street corner evangelizing gets a good crowd, but they are mostly interested in gawking at and humoring a seeming lunatic; no one thinks he’s actually correct. It is then that you realize Maher is setting up a parallel to any kind of accepted form of evangelizing today. The claims are no less outrageous, but receive a respect beyond question.

It is important to approach Religulous with the right sense of Maher’s agenda and of the film’s purpose. Maher is not an atheist in the strict sense; neither is he an agnostic i.e. unsure of God’s existence. The documentary takes aim directly on the human concept of religion which Maher describes as “a bureaucracy between man and God.” In fact, throughout the film on the subject of each religion’s belief system he maintains that he is only “certain about doubt.” As to its purpose, Maher never claims to be an academic and the film has more entertainment than instructional value. It is meant to be a starting point on a journey of disbelief, an initial cause to question one very important foundation of thought.

The film is also directed by Larry Charles who, two years ago, directed Sacha Baron Cohen’s hugely controversial Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan which tickled and ticked off audiences around the world. This gives you an idea of the film’s purpose: slyly exposing while maintaining a humorous exterior. Maher is first and foremost a comedian, and there are dozens of moments when the viewer will find himself laughing hysterically. Clever editing interspersed with a large variety of sometimes bizarre stock footage drives every humor-tipped point home.

In the theater, the crowd’s reaction varied from jeering to applause, stomping the ground and laughing hysterically to scorn and disgust. This is the kind of movie that will undoubtedly inspire strong feelings in every viewer. However, the viewer’s opinion of Religulous should not suffer on account of Maher’s style. Many viewers find his humor pointlessly caustic and intensely smug which will no doubt play a huge if undeserved role in the degree of the film’s success. A more discerning viewer will realize that Maher’s style shouldn’t overtake his message. That is precisely the point of the movie: that the human idea of religion is ridiculous regardless of the form it takes.

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After the movie’s release, there was a renewed interest in Venetian masks and ritualistic parties.

One company, Castle Events has capitalized on this theme, organizing colorful gatherings in European locations.

Now, before you get too excited, it seems the company has strict guidelines for proper behavior at such events… Still, its nice to know that there are such interesting things going on in the world…

So if you find yourself crashing one of these parties, don’t forget the magic word! …Fidelio…

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