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West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller says that he will not run for reelection in 2014. Rockefeller would have been very hard-pressed to win in his increasingly conservative state, particularly against the popular Shelley Moore Capito. As I noted, in November, when Capito announced her candidacy, she leads Rockefeller in the polls. And during her congressional career, she has represented roughly 40 percent of the state's voting population.
As things stand now, Republicans need to pick up a net of six seats to take control of the Senate in 2014. It is not overly optimistic think that West Virginia will contribute to that cause. Rockefeller himself acknowledged that Democrats will have a hard time holding onto his West Virginia Senate seat.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey mentions a possible downside to Rockefeller's decision:
[T]his means that Rockefeller doesn't have to spend the next two years looking over his shoulder and shifting to the right to protect his seat. For the next two years, Rockefeller can vote without any accountability to the more conservative voters in West Virginia.
But the aristocratic Rockefeller doesn't strike me as the bending, "accountable" type. With the possible exception of a few hot West Virginia issues, I wouldn't have expected him to shift to the right even if he had decided to run in 2014.


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How Big Do Koi Get?October 23, 2009
Well, as you can plainly see, they can get downright huge! Please do remember this photo when you're trying to stick a 4" little koi yearling (tosai) into a 350 gallon pre-formed pond. Koi can quickly outgrow small ponds, which often leads to death or an unpleasant situation.
If you've got a small pond, stick to goldfish--as they do better in smaller quarters and will restrain their growth to the size of the container it is in. Koi can reach 24 inches or more at maturity. Heck, by their second summer they can easily be at 10-12 inches! Realistically, a pond of less than 1,500 US gallons is not really suitable to house koi. But, If you're insistent on it however, at this size stick to no more than 2 or 3 (considering for their future size), and make sure your filtration is maxed out.
So, when you see that cute little baby koi in the shop, please do think about how big it will ultimately get. After all, you wouldn't buy a 2 foot tall dog house for your Great Dane puppy, would you? It's no different with koi.
photo by wefish.de on flickr
Posted In : Koi

subset: commoncrawl


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People with Last Names of Fabbozzi
USA-People-Search > People Directory > F > Fabbozzi > Page 1
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If you can supply further details about the person you are looking for, such as their last known address or phone number, you can key that in the search box above and refine your results. This is a quick way to find the Fabbozzi you are looking for if you happen to know a lot about them.


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Review: The Woman Who Left
It suffers by resembling arty, didactic bloat when it most begs for a more sophisticated dramatic touch.2.0
The films of Lav Diaz often seem to take place in a shadowy world beholden to no specific era, a nation where dejection and suffering exist more as existential conditions than circumstantial byproducts. The Woman Who Left, however, provides a pointed timestamp when an overheard radio address cites the recent deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa amid discussions of ongoing rapes, kidnappings, and other street violence in the Philippines under President Fidel V. Ramos—all of which place the film in the summer of 1997. It doesn't take much to ascertain the symbolic significance of the chosen epoch: Diaz, who has a weakness for schematic binaries, is juxtaposing the escalation of meaningless violence against the corrosion of hope, with the radio show implicitly suggesting that as chaos reigns, faith dies.
It's certainly a valid artistic point, and an especially urgent one for Diaz given the uptick in extrajudicial murders under current Filipino leader Rodrigo Duterte, but it's one that the solemn auteur, in characteristic fashion, spends half an eternity elaborating. At nearly four hours, The Woman Who Left technically qualifies as "short" within Diaz's remarkable catalogue of marathon-length, largely ensemble-driven features, but its compressed narrative focus actually makes it feel equally colossal. Culled loosely from Leo Tolstoy's short story "God Sees the Truth, But Waits," the film devotes its time to the tale of Horacia (Charo Santos-Concio), a middle-aged woman who, shortly after the film begins, is being relieved of a prison sentence that she's spent three decades wrongfully serving. What follows is the sustained stupor of societal reintegration, a shell-shocked process for Horacia composed of both hesitant attempts at familial reunion and a pursuit of vengeance toward the man largely responsible for the crime that imprisoned her.
These twin missions, however, gradually recede from the foreground in Diaz's digressive telling, which sidesteps expected routes to catharsis in favor of dwelling on the detours along Horacia's meandering path. In early scenes at the rural penitentiary, Horacia is shown to be something of a compulsive altruist, tending to the unwell under the surveillance of heavily armed guards, and that penchant for selfless nurturing in the face of dire circumstances only continues in the clammy, rubbage-strewn back alleys of small Filipino towns. Nearly everyone she comes across is under extreme duress, be it economic, psychological, or physical (and in one case all three), and in each situation she proves a persevering listener and impromptu clinician. In fact, the sanctification of this woman gets so repetitive that her potential complexity as a heroine is shortchanged. While Diaz is working overtime to erect Mother Philippines, his Horacia shrinks to little more than a cipher—the resolute, anchoring presence of veteran actress Santos-Concio notwithstanding.
Having demarcated his world cleanly into abject cruelty, haunted victimhood, and pure saintliness, Diaz eases into The Woman Who Left's primary plot around the two-hour mark when a trans woman, Hollanda (John Lloyd Cruz), on the brink of death after a brutal beating, collapses her way through Horacia's front door. The scenes that follow, which feature Horacia patiently fielding Hollanda's torrents of self-loathing, healing her open wounds, and talking her down from a cliff, represent the tender highpoint of the film, and yet they're also dramatically inert, functioning transparently as allegory for a wounded nation. That the eventual resolution of this thread implies transference of violence from one outlet to another hints at the director's pained and pessimistic assessment of the country's past and present.
Diaz's long-take, chiaroscuro style excels at capturing the grubby texture and atmosphere of ghostly estrangement that permeates the Philippines's forsaken working-class quarters. A documentary-like pivot in the final hour that finds Diaz temporarily departing from Horacia to observe the trash pickers and stray animals of Manila is the film's most potent passage, the episode in which the smothering dark shadows and pockets of harsh fluorescent street lights most directly correspond to a void on screen. What the style is less well suited to is dramatizing the soul-bearing commiseration that dominates the film's narrative. It's often difficult to discern whether or not it's even Horacia providing soft-spoken counsel in pitch darkness a dozen feet from the camera for minutes on end, and the total omission of close-ups starts to feel like overly rigid mannerism during the scenes with Hollanda. Well-meaning as it all is, The Woman Who Left suffers by resembling arty, didactic bloat when it most begs for a more sophisticated dramatic touch.
Cast: Charo Santos-Concio, John Lloyd Cruz, Michael De Mesa, Nonie Buencamino, Shamaine Buencamino, Mae Paner, Mayen Estanero Director: Lav Diaz Screenwriter: Lav Diaz Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 226 min Rating: NR Year: 2016
Maryland Film Festival 2019: The Hottest August, Donbass, & American Factory
This year's selections exhibit a scope and ambition that should continue to draw adventurous filmgoers for years to come.
Judging from the enthusiasm of the surprisingly high number of New York filmmakers and critics this writer met in Baltimore this past weekend, the Maryland Film Festival isn't seen as a pale shadow of Big Apple filmgoing. Rather, it's a vital supplement to it—a program that compresses many of the festival season's essential offerings into a manageable four-day run in an easily walkable city with comparatively chill crowds.
Those who made the commute to Baltimore for the festival this year had the chance to encounter one of the more trenchant New York-set films of recent memory in Brett Story's The Hottest August, an essayistic documentary made in the intellectually vagrant spirit of Chris Marker. Shot in August of 2017 around a principle of "organized spontaneity," per producer Danielle Varga, the film spans New York City's five boroughs while adhering to a nebulous, difficult-to-define but nonetheless valuable objective: to take the temperature of the times we live in and tease out the collective mood of the country's most densely populated area.
Willfully biting off more than it can chew, The Hottest August features rich people, poor people, scientists, skateboarders, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, barflies, artists, and more waxing extemporaneous on topics including climate change, economic inequality, automation, racism, and the future. The mood is off the cuff, conversational. A pair of women in lawn chairs joke about how their street's rat population has swelled as a result of gentrifying construction in adjacent neighborhoods. Two former cops reframe the term "racism" as "resentment" in a sports bar just moments after demanding that no politics enter the hallowed space of the drinking hole. A loft-dwelling futurist pontificates on what the tax system might look like if the country embraced robotics instead of fearing it as a job killer. Occasionally we hear the filmmaker off screen, tersely prompting her subjects with open-ended questions, but mostly this is an ensemble of eager talkers, their openness running contrary to the old chestnut about closed-off New Yorkers.
Finding form in this seemingly disconnected mass is editor Nels Bangerter, who managed a similar feat with Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson. The film drifts subtly from subject to subject, pointedly using B roll not just to evocatively provide a sense of place, but to extend someone's thought or offer counterpoint. Three streams of information exist at once: whatever opinion is being put forth by the person on screen; whatever in-the-moment perspective Story takes on her subject's response through the questions she asks or the camera angles she chooses; and the question of how that segment ultimately interacts with the film in its final form, where images have been invested with meaning through context.
The Hottest August is a film that's constantly "thinking," and that thought isn't fixed or authoritative, but rather in flux and negotiable. Story isn't setting out to answer any pressing political issues so much as capture the tactile sense of how those issues permeate everyday settings. Hers is a form of ambient reportage that feels very welcome in our contemporary moment, when the daily barrage of information can sometimes make it difficult to recall how one felt about something two days earlier, let alone in that turbulent August of 2017.
Similarly macro in its approach is Sergei Loznitsa's Donbass, which adopts a sprawling, vignette-driven structure as it catalogues the miseries and grotesqueries of the eponymous eastern Ukrainian territory. A region occupied by pro-Russian paramilitary forces (specifically the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics) ever since the Ukrainian Revolution in 2014, present-day Donbass is a morass of conflicting sympathies and ideologies that Loznitsa doesn't so much seek to clarify with this film as reflect in all its muddy complexity.
In fact, Loznitsa goes so far as to call into question the very possibility of the truth of this situation he captures on camera. Whenever reporters appear on screen, they're portrayed as ineffectual stooges waiting to be chewed out as propaganda peddlers by their political opponents, and the film's bookending sequences, set at the trailer park of a movie set, build toward a thesis statement on the dubiousness of contemporary reporting with its tendency to stage and reframe reality according to the mandates of whatever affiliation is being placated.
Cameras, we're repeatedly reminded by the mise-en-scène, are violators, as they merely augment the dangerous power of the person wielding them. Donbass's most harrowing elucidation of this theme comes in a scene on a public street, where a Ukrainian loyalist, tied to a telephone pole by a pair of armed separatists, endures a humiliating beating at the hands of a growing mob of passersby, one of whom decides to record the grisly spectacle with his smartphone. As Loznitsa's camera circles the action, the heckler's phone presses right up into the face of the prisoner, relishing in the man's suffering, and we get the sense that the escalation of violence may have never come to pass in quite this way were it not for the spontaneous idea to turn it into a video meme. Later, the recording gets shown to a hooting crowd of Novorossiya sympathizers at an absurdly overemphatic wedding celebration, assimilating smoothly into the atmosphere of nationalist fervor.
Donbass is fueled by such collisions between the grave and the comic, a tonal oscillation mastered by Loznitsa in his documentaries and carried over here to support a vision of a society cracking under the weight of its own inconsistencies, corruption and mob mentalities. Less tightly structured than Loznitsa's preceding fiction work, the film adopts the immersive observation of films like Maidan and Victory Day with a more active, roving camera but a similar degree of durational endurance. In one scene, Loznitsa even seamlessly integrates an extended use of documentary language into a longer fictional setup when his camera descends into a cramped and overcrowded bomb shelter, where a local host, lit by a camera-mounted source, walks us through the destitution of those living inside. As with the later street scene, the dreariness is eventually spiked by a dash of absurdism, but the counterpunch isn't intended to lighten the mood so much as further disorient, ultimately giving Donbass an unnerving precarity that must come somewhat near the feeling on the ground.
If these two films, content as they are to revel in ambivalence, seek to grasp the experience of the now in all its bewilderment, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar's American Factory takes a more committed stance on an issue that's equally topical. Fuyao Glass America, an outgrowth of a global glass manufacturer owned by a Chinese billionaire, opened in Moraine, Ohio in the shell of a shuddered General Motors plant toward the beginning of the decade, persisted financially for years while pursuing its awkward goal of unifying Chinese and American work cultures, and then inevitably ran up against controversy in 2017 when safety concerns and low wages encouraged the local employees to vote to unionize.
American Factory charts this entire compelling history with surprising comprehensiveness: When a late scene plays out as an illicit audio recording from an employee over a black screen, it stands out for being one of the only instances when the filmmakers don't appear to have unencumbered access. But this sprawl has its downsides. Though briskly edited and tonally varied, Reichert and Bognar's documentary skims over the surface of some of its most fascinating threads while in pursuit of a rousing decade-long tale.
The American workers depicted in the film, disgruntled by their diminished earnings and recalling a recent past with less bureaucratic oversight, too often blend into one undistinguished mass of Midwestern homeliness, and the few individuals who do get singled out for attention—a woman living in her relative's basement and a rancher who befriends one particular Chinese co-worker—often get neglected for long stretches of time. The Chinese are perhaps even less differentiated, their insistence on dogged work ethic and company allegiance repeatedly emphasized almost to the point of xenophobia. That Fuyao chairman Cao Dewang, who weaves through the film as an amusingly oblivious villain for its majority, eventually gets a moment to fondly reminisce on China's pre-industrial past and contemplate his own complicity in the country's shift to globalized capitalism comes across as penance for the film's occasional treatment of foreigners as misguided corporate drones.
What American Factory ultimately amounts to, however, isn't an exploration of culture clash or a penetrating depiction of rust belt dejection, but rather a rallying cry for worker solidarity (in America, if not across the globe), a message it pulls off resoundingly in the final hour. Reichert and Bognar smartly detail all the insidious ways in which corporate messengers mischaracterize unionizing as a threat to individual liberty, and the populist filmmaking vernacular they employ as the union vote nears—fluid crosscutting between different intersecting narratives, plenty of emotional close-ups, a score of almost Spielbergian grandiosity—gives the documentary a genuine shot at trafficking radical politics to a relatively wide audience. If it's any indication of future success, American Factory was one of the most well-attended screenings I went to during my time in Baltimore, but it's a testament to the Maryland Film Festival's outreach that healthy crowds congregated throughout the weekend. Though modest and inviting, this year's selections exhibit a scope and ambition that should continue to draw adventurous filmgoers for years to come.
The Maryland Film Festival ran from May 8—12.
Downton Abbey Trailer Sees the Crawley Clan Prepping for a Royal Arrival
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.
Watch the official trailer below:
Focus Features will release Downton Abbey on September 20.
Review: A Hidden Life Lyrically Attests to a Man's Quest for Moral Purity
Terrence Malick's film means to seek out souls caught in the tide of history, but which move against its current.3
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
Review: Rocketman Is Dynamic and Formulaic in Equal Measure
As a musical, Dexter Fletcher's film is just fun enough to (mostly) distract us from its superficiality.2.5
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
Review: In Pain and Glory, Life and Art Are Wistful Bedfellows
Pedro Almodóvar's latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned intensity of his finest work.2.5
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
Review: Joan of Arc Never Coalesces into a Fully Rounded Character Study
Bruno Dumont seems perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking.2
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
Review: Zombi Child Radically Grapples with Colonialism's Legacy
Bertrand Bonello's quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract.3.5
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
Review: In Diamantino, Strident Political Satire and Whimsy Go Toe to Toe
The film is at its strongest when depicting how Diamantino becomes a tool of politicians hoping to oust Portugal from the EU.2.5
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
Review: The Tomorrow Man Gets Too Caught Up in Its Pursuit of Preciousness
The film is content to peddle the naïve notion that love is the panacea for all that ails you.2
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
Review: The Dead Don't Die Is Undone by its Meta-Film Aspirations
In Jim Jarmusch's film, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality.2
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
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Middle of the pack: Apolo Anton Ohno
Partner: Karina Smirnoff "Star" cred: Olympic gold medalist in speedskating Original season finish Season 4, 1st Apolo was great in his season, but as mentioned before when discussing Joey Fatone, it was a weak season. And he had Julianne Hough as his pro partner. I'd like to see him go far, but I think he may get outshone.
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Leave it to the Mad Hatter to introduce something I've never heard brought up by a football coach at Southeastern Conference media days.
HOOVER — Leave it to the Mad Hatter to introduce something I've never heard brought up by a football coach at Southeastern Conference media days.
Saying how fun it is to come back to these days, an event that "marks the end of summer and the beginning of football," LSU's Les Miles launched into what his summer involved. First off, "some hyperbaric oxygen therapy research."
That's right. Miles spent time doing hyperbaric oxygen therapy research. Anyone picturing him inside a hyperbaric chamber? Well, it actually makes sense when put into context. And not because of how some think of the coach known for his unconventional but often effective decisions.
"We have two of the most noteworthy doctors in that field, Paul Harch and Keith Van Meter, in Louisiana," Miles said Thursday, before explaining. "What we're doing is we're looking at chronic concussion trauma and how best to protect our guys. I see it being done at other schools. I think it's a great step."
OK, so what else did Miles do this summer? "I rapelled down a building," he said. "I don't know that that was all it was cracked up to be. It was tall. It was up there."
What else? "I spent hours at kids' games," he said, talking about attending some of his son's baseball functions, his oldest daughter's swim events and his youngest daughter's fast-pitch softball activities.
What does that have to do with football? It made summer pass by fast, of course.
"I had no vacation," Miles said, adding, "I took meaningful hours watching TCU film. But I'm looking forward to football, in case you wondered. I love baseball, I love watching my kids, but there's an itch that happens. It's one of those things that you can't wait to get to because it's why you're here."
With that, Miles talked football. He quickly reminded everyone how the Tigers lost three games by 13 points in finishing 10-3, including a 21-17 defeat to Alabama he alluded to as having "lost to one Western Division opponent in the last 90 seconds of the game."
Miles said LSU, which returns eight starters on offense and four on defense, will be "talented, but youthful." LSU plays TCU in the Cowboys Classic on Aug. 31, to open a challeging schedule that includes Georgia and Florida in the East along with its West rivals.
"Our culture, bring it on," Miles said.
Why? "It's what we do."
What else? "We look forward to lining up against the best in the East and the best in the West," he said.
Why, coach Miles? "I like us. I like us in any game."
Times Sports Editor Kim Craft can be reached at email@example.com. Follow her on Twitter @GT_KimCraft.


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Hedge Funds, Systemic Risk, and the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008: Written Testimony for the House Oversight Committee Hearing on Hedge Funds
34 Pages Posted: 17 Nov 2008
Date Written: November 13, 2008
This document is the written testimony submitted to the House Oversight Committee for its hearing on hedge funds and the financial crisis, held November 13, 2008, and is not a formal academic research paper, but is intended for a broader audience of policymakers and regulators. Academic readers may be alarmed by the lack of comprehensive citations and literature review, the imprecise and qualitative nature of certain arguments, and the abundance of illustrative examples, analogies, and metaphors. Accordingly, such readers are hereby forewarned - this paper is not research, but is instead a summary of the policy implications that I have drawn from my interpretation of that research.
I begin with a proposal to measure systemic risk, and argue that this is the natural starting point for regulatory reform since it is impossible to manage something that cannot be measured. Then I review the relation between systemic risk and hedge funds, and show that early warning signs of the current crisis did exist in the hedge-fund industry as far back as 2004. However, I argue that financial crises may be an unavoidable aspect of human behavior, and the best we can do is to acknowledge this tendency and be properly prepared. This behavioral pattern, as well as traditional economic motives for regulation - public goods, externalities, and incomplete markets - are relevant for systemic risk or its converse, systemic safety, and I suggest applying these concepts to the functions of the financial system to yield a rational process for regulatory reform. Also, I propose the formation of a new investigative office patterned after the National Transportation Safety Board to provide the kind of information aggregation and transparency that is called for in the previous sections. Another aspect of transparency involves fair-value accounting, and I review some of the recent arguments for its suspension and propose developing a new branch of accounting focusing exclusively on risk. I conclude with a discussion of the role of financial technology and education in the current crisis, and argue that more finance training is needed, not less.
JEL Classification: G12, G14, G38, M41, M44, M49
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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By Christian Leuz and Peter D. Wysocki


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The purpose of a wiki is to involve as many people as possible, and get a wide range of contributors to add to the information already contained. Please help us to build our member base by telling other fans about the project. Every contributor helps!
Social media Edit
In order to help spread the word, Memory Alpha maintains a presence on social media. We encourage you to participate!
Banners Edit
Promotional banner images are also available – please feel free to copy these and use them on your own pages.
Tour Bus Stop Edit
Memory Alpha's Tour Bus Stop. Travel the internet in like it's the mid-2000s and everything is a series of tubes.
Discontinued methods Edit
Promotional text Edit
When Memory Alpha was originally launched, the following promotional text was used to spread the word:
- A new database has been launched for all Trek fans who always wanted to share their knowledge and ideas online, but never got around to creating their own website. Memory Alpha is an open Star Trek reference written collaboratively by the readers. The site is a WikiWiki database, meaning that any fan may edit anything that is not designated as a protected page. This is a unique and new approach in the Trek online community. There are no prerequisites except for interest in Star Trek; no HTML knowledge is necessary to become an editor of Memory Alpha. Users are not required to register an account, although it is encouraged so that one's work is recognized.
- With the help of the Trek online community, Memory Alpha may become the most definitive, most accurate, most recent, and most accessible encyclopedia and reference for everything related to Star Trek. And anyone who notices errors or omissions may just click "edit this page" and fix them!
- Memory Alpha was founded by Dan Carlson of Star Trek Minutiae and Harry Doddema of Titan Fleet Yards. Sponsors included the Subspace Comms Network discussion forum, Trekmania, Federation Starship Datalink, and Ex Astris Scientia.
Partner sites Edit
When Memory Alpha began, the concept of "partner sites" was a large part of the original concept. Unfortunately, with the changing times and websites coming and going all the time, the idea of "partner sites" has more or less gone by the wayside. Regardless, these sites were integral to the early development of Memory Alpha, and are recognized as the original partners of the site:
- Ex Astris Scientia, a huge and competent Star Trek database and commentary. Includes a Treknology encyclopedia, canon starship list, starship size charts, fan-made starships, inconsistencies, time travel, galleries, fun, and Trek links.
- Federation Starship Datalink, a site with extensive information on Federation and alien ships, and a special section on concept art.
- Gigantic Collection of Star Trek Minutiae , an extensive site devoted to the details of Star Trek; includes history, reference, humor, opinion, and much more.
- Titan Fleet Yards, a Star Trek fan website with fan-designed ships, an extensive Federation members list and articles on technology, technobabble, and many other things.
- TrekMania(X), an all-around Trek site with a special focus on starships. Featured a massive collection of 3D designs and media files.


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Reusing Package Objects
New: 5 December 2005
Frequently packages, data sources, and data source views include functionality that you want to reuse. For example, if you created a set of tasks, you might want to reuse the items together as a group, or you might want to reuse a single item such as a connection manager, or a data source view that you created in a different Integration Services project.
Business Intelligence Development Studio and SSIS Designer support copying and pasting package objects, which can include control flow items, data flow items, and connection managers. You can copy and paste between projects and between packages. If the solution contains multiple projects you can copy between projects, and the projects can be of different types. For example, you can copy a data source view between an Analysis Services project and an Integration Services project.
If a solution contains multiple packages, you can copy and paste between them. The packages can be in the same or different Integration Services projects. However, package objects may have dependencies on other objects, without which they are not valid. For example, an Execute SQL task uses a connection manager, which you must copy as well to make the task work. Also, some package objects require that the package already contain a certain object, and without this object you cannot successfully paste the copied objects into a package. For example, you cannot paste a data flow into a package that does not have at least one Data Flow task.
You may find that you copy the same packages repeatedly. To avoid the copy process, you can designate these packages as templates and use them when you create new packages.
When you copy a package object, Integration Services automatically assigns a new GUID to the ID property of the new object and updates the Name property.
You cannot copy variables. If an object such as a task uses variables, then you must re-create the variables in the destination package. In contrast, if you copy the entire package, then the variables in the package are also copied.
To copy objects
See Also
Creating New Packages
Creating Connection Managers
Control Flow Elements
Data Flow Elements
Creating Package Control Flow
Creating Package Data Flow
Other Resources
Integration Services Connections
Creating Packages in SSIS Designer


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Christ Lutheran Church of Fairfax, CA
Worship Service: Sundays at 10:00 a.m.
There's a place for you here!
We are a small church with a big heart, arms opened wide to old and young, rich and poor, gay and straight, and all the marvelous diversity of the children of God.
As a congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), we are connected to a tradition that spans centuries and continents, and are connected to ecumenical partners throughout the world.
Learn more about us from this website. Better yet, come and see for yourself! Worship is at 10 a.m. Sundays. Hope to see you there!
Come as you are…a child of God!


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White Papers and Application Notes
COMSOL Multiphysics: Innovative Design and EngineeringS. Wang[1]
[1]Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kun Shan University of Technology, Tainan, Taiwan
Multiphysics simulation has been used extensively in our research for fluid flow and heat transfer applications. Our projects include: simulation of fluid dynamics in an active liquid heat sink for CPU cooling, impeller design for a pipe flow generator with computational fluid dynamics (CFD), investment casting with plastic rapid prototype patterns, phase change materials with rapid prototyping (RP) technology for quick wax molding, study of rooftop insulation material, and the design of a solar chimney with combined solar panels.


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HackrMeetup is happening soon in your area
Hackr.io is a community to find and share the best online courses & tutorials. Join them, it only takes 30 seconds.
Here's how it works:
Anybody can submit a course or a tutorial
Community upvotes the useful tutorials
The best tutorials rise to the top
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Why like this tutorial (one-liner reviews):
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You can also ask questions or provide any information that might be helpful to the people taking this course.
I have found solutions to many problems that I've faced on this site, as well has numerous tutorials that have made me a better iOS developer. Love this site!
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Number: 111- 20
Date: September 21, 2009
The President Signs H.R. 3325,
"WIPA and PABSS Reauthorization Act of 2009"
"WIPA and PABSS Reauthorization Act of 2009"
On September 18, 2009, the President signed into law H.R. 3325, the "WIPA and PABSS Reauthorization Act of 2009" which became Public Law 111-63. This legislation extends, through fiscal year 2010, funding authorization for the Work Incentives Planning and Assistance program and the Protection and Advocacy for Beneficiaries of Social Security program.
The bill does not include any other provisions.
See Legislative Bulletins 111-18 regarding House passage, and 111-19 describing Senate passage of the bill.


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7/3 Extra bases & Soto
Geovany Soto notched his first multi-RBI game since June 9 with a two-run double in the sixth of the Cubs' 3-1 win over the Reds. Soto had missed chances — along with his teammates — earlier in the game. He came up in the second with a runner at second, and in the third with the bases loaded. There were two on in the fifth in his third at-bat.
"Every time you get guys in scoring position, you try your best to get them in," Soto said. "Everytime you don't do it, it's like, 'Here we go again.' Trust me, we're doing our best out there. Sometimes that's the way it goes. Luckily, today was a good day for us."
Soto now is 2-for-4 with the bases loaded this season.
Some encouraging signs:
* Derrek Lee ended a 0-for-13 skid with a double in the first.
* Starlin Castro drew a career-high three walks. He also had a single.
* Mike Fontenot has hit safely in his last five home games and is leading the team with a .333 average at Wrigley.
* Marlon Byrd collected his 31st multi-hit game and first since June 23. Sixteen of those multi-hit games have come at Wrigley. He had 39 multi-hit games in all of 2009 with Texas.
— Carrie Muskat


text:
Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum
Teacher professional development and classroom resources across the curriculum
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text:
Purposes of Cub Scouting
From MeritBadgeDotOrg
(Difference between revisions)
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(New page: {{stub}}=== ===Character Development=== * Positively influence character development ===Spiritual Growth=== * Encourage spiritual growth ===Good Citizenship=== * Help boys develop habi...)
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Revision as of 07:51, July 18, 2008
| This is a stub... Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page.
Character Development
- Positively influence character development
Spiritual Growth
- Encourage spiritual growth
Good Citizenship
- Help boys develop habits and attitudes of good citizenship
Sportsmanship and Fitness
- Encourage good sportsmanship and pride in growing strong in mind and body
Family Understanding
- Improve understanding within the family
Respectful Relationships
- Strengthen boys' ability to get along with other boys and respect other people
Personal Achievement
- Foster a sense of personal achievement by helping boys develop new interests and skills
Friendly Service
- Show how to be helpful and do one's best
Fun and Adventure
- Provide fun and exciting new things to do
Preparation for Boy Scouts
- Prepare boys to become Boy Scouts


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Auditionees must present a memorized performance of three art songs, at least one in a foreign language and one in English, in contrasting styles, from different historical periods, and from the standard vocal literature. These works should reflect the student's level of technical and interpretive skill. If previous study has included significant repertoire in musical theater, one of the three pieces performed in the audition may be representative of the singer's competence in that genre.
Vocal applicants requiring a Bucknell accompanist for their audition must provide copies of their audition music about two or three weeks in advance of the audition date to the music department. This audition music is to be computer scanned and sent as an email attachment to: firstname.lastname@example.com
String applicants for a degree in music should prepare two works in contrasting style and a three-octave scale (two-octave for double bass) of the applicant's choice. The following repertoire is offered as a guide to applicants in choosing materials for the audition but is not prescriptive.
Violin: One movement of an unaccompanied sonata or partita of J.S. Bach, or a movement from the Telemann unaccompanied Fantasias for violin, or a movement of a Baroque sonata by a composer such as Bach, Handel or Corelli; a movement of a concerto from the standard repertory by a composer such as Mozart, Mendelssohn, or Bruch, or a short character piece such as the Beethoven Romance in F or the Saint-Säens Havanaise; a three-octave scale of the applicant's choice.
Viola: A movement from one of the unaccompanied works by Bach for cello or violin; two contrasting movements from the Telemann concerto, or one movement from a standard concerto of greater difficulty, such as concertos by J. C. Bach, Handel, Hoffmeister, Stamitz, Hindemith, Walton, or Bartók, or a short character piece such as the Hindemith Trauermusik or the Weber Andante and Rondo Ongarese; a three-octave scale of the applicant's choice.
Cello: One movement of a standard concerto such as those by Boccherini, Haydn, Lalo or Saint-Saëns, or two contrasting movements of a sonata by composers such as Eccles, Vivaldi, or Marcello; one movement from a Bach suite; a three-octave scale of the applicant's choice.
Bass: One movement from a major concerto such as Capuzzi, Koussevitsky, or Bottesini, or one movement from a Baroque sonata by a composer such as Eccles, Marcello or Vivaldi; one standard etude (Simandl, J. Hrabe, or Storch-Hrabe); one standard orchestral excerpt (Beethoven, Brahms or Mozart); a two-octave scale of the applicant's choice.
Applicants for Bachelor of Arts in Music with a concentration in Piano Performance are required to audition in order to be accepted into the program. At the audition, candidates will be expected to perform from memory three works from different historical periods, in addition to sight-reading.
Applicants for the Bachelor of Music Education or Bachelor of Arts in Music degrees with piano as a primary instrument are also required to audition. The candidate should present two or three works from different historical periods. Memory of performed works is desirable, but not required. Applicants will also be asked to sight-read.
Wind Instruments
Applicants auditioning on a wind instrument should prepare at least two contrasting compositions (or movements from larger works) from the standard repertoire. Significant etudes from standard etude books that demonstrate a student's performance proficiency are also suitable. Applicants should also be prepared to play chromatic scales demonstrating tone and technique throughout the range of the instrument. Proficiency in major and minor scales is also recommended; however, the performance of the works and/or etudes noted above constitutes the primary focus of the audition.
Percussion Instruments
Percussionists are encouraged to audition on a variety of instruments including mallet instruments (marimba or xylophone preferred), snare drum, and timpani. Audition materials should include contrasting compositions. Works from any of the major etude books written for the respective instruments are also suitable. Applicants auditioning on mallet instruments will be asked to play scales. Applicants auditioning on snare drum should be prepared to play rudiments.
Composition Majors
In addition to satisfying the audition requirement in the primary performance medium, applicants for Bachelor of Arts in Music with concentration in Contemporary Composition must also submit at least two or three samples of creative compositional work — scores and/or recordings of compositions. These scores and/or recordings are to be submitted via SlideRoom. A SlideRoom account can only be created after the completion of the common application to the University.


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We are a team of certified Rhode Island masonry contractors, and we provide specialized stone and brick tuckpointing services. Tuckpointing or damaged and weakened mortar repair is necessary for structural safety, longevity and durability not just aesthetics.
We tuckpoint chimneys, fireplaces, mantels, patios, retaining walls, siding, foundations, veneer and brick mortar. We not only tuckpoint brick and veneer, we also paint, coat, seal, clean, polish the brick and mortar for a clean and finished look. So if you're looking for the best tuckpointing services in the Rhode Island area, look no further!
Please fill out the form here, and tell us a few small details about your brick tuckpointing project, when you need it done and your budget, and our we'll do the rest. Our friendly and professional Rhode Island masonry contractors will also include a free quote and cost estimates.


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15 Creative Ways to Wrap with Brown Paper
Entertaining season is suddenly upon us, and pretty soon we'll be turning our attention (if we haven't already) to gift-giving: what to give to whom, and of course, how to wrap it.
One of the biggest wrapping trends of recent years is the emergence of brown kraft paper as a gift-gussying staple. I'm a fan myself: for the past four years or so, I've wrapped all my gifts in brown paper, and chosen a different way each year to decorate them.
The possibilities for prettying up a brown paper package are nearly endless. Ribbons, washi tape, handmade gift tags, paint, contrast paper... only your creativity sets a limit. Check out some of these ideas for wrapping gifts with brown paper, which go way beyond "tied up with string."
- Pick a color scheme and run with it. This pile of presents from A Creative Mint uses a base of Trader Joes shopping bags and embellishes them with washi tape and string in a strict red-and-white palette.
- Stamp it. Use stamps and ink to create your own pattern or personalize gifts, as in this image from Objects and Use.
- Sparkle and shine. These simple, adorned presents from The Sweetest Occasion prove that a simple bow can go a long way.
- Use seasonal greenery. Jennifer from The Odessa May Society created miniature wreaths using evergreen twigs.
- Layer it. Brown paper can look twice as nice layered with corrugated cardboard or twine, as this DIY from Heartmade shows.
- Keep it simple. A basic bow, like this one from Babble, can be all a brown paper package needs if the color and pattern are interesting enough.
- Tag it. The hand-painted tags are what stand out on these presents from Decor8.
- Fold it. This origami-inspired present, from Essimar, is surprisingly modern looking with the addition of some patterned washi tape.
- Pick up a pen. These super-chic gifts from Lark Crafts show just what a silver paint pen and some simple geometrics can do.
- Personalize it. The only decoration on these presents from The Enchanted Home is their recipients' names.
- Package a pouch. Mandi from A Beautiful Mess used an old paper bag, a black marker and a sewing machine to create this custom packet.
- Get tactile. A basketweave pattern of yarns keeps this gift looking cozy, from Lion Brand Yarns.
- Use a bag. For smaller gifts, a simple brown bag is all you need, from Not on the High Street.
- Decorate it. Including a holiday decoration in your wrapping, like these snowflake ornaments from Peppersprouts, feels like a present on a present.
- Get creative. As this photo from Decor8 shows, tags, handwriting, and objects around your home can all add up to create the perfect present.
Check out our video on 3 creative ways to use kraft paper for entertaining!


text: Prime Location. The Four Points by Sheraton Columbus Airport is an ideal choice for both business and leisure travelers. We are conveniently located just east of downtown Columbus, and west of the Port Columbus International Airport, just a short drive away from a number of excellent attractions and fine dining opportunities. We are less than 6 minutes from the Port Columbus International Airport (CMH), and Easton Town Center Mall. Just What You Need. We offer 110 guest rooms, including 2 suite rooms. And there are no extra charges for the basics, like High Speed Internet Access and bottled water. The indoor heated pool, well equipped fitness room, and airport shuttle are all free for you to enjoy. Meet In Style. With 2,000 square feet of flexible meeting space, we have the rooms and experience to make sure your event is done right. Plus, a business center that stays open all night.Show More


text:
This page contains various documents and forms used by the Academic areas.
Note: Some documents are Adobe PDFs and require Adobe Reader.
- Application for Individual Requests for Faculty Development Funds (Size: 9 KB)
- Faculty Development Funds Guidelines (Size: 22 KB)
- Faculty Handbook 2013-2015 (Size: 921 KB)
- Grade Appeal Form (Size: 7 KB)
- Grade Appeal Form Procedures (Size: 8 KB)
- Syllabus Format (Microsoft Office Word)


text:
Status of Entries
Entries as of 12/11/10 11:00 p.m. PT (list refreshes hourly)All received entries are shown on this page. Entries and statuses subject to change.
Click here for an explanation of entry and declaration status categories
Questions about your entry? Contact Jim Estes (e-mail or 317-713-4661)
Skip to: men | women


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Vernon-Verona-Sherrill boys volleyball caps perfect week with win over Little Falls
VERONA - Vernon-Verona-Sherrill's boys volleyball team won its fourth match in as many tries this week with a 25-27, 25-20, 25-17, 25-14 victory over Little Falls Friday. Jarrett Durant had 12 kills and Jacob Bitz added 11 to lead the Red Devils' offense while Josh Albro had 17 digs to lead the defense. Mat Armlin's 25 kills led Little Falls.
"(We) contained Mat Armlin as the match progressed, which is the only way to be successful against Little Falls," said VVS coach Jim Burton.
LF (5-7): Mat Armlin 25k, 2b; Vinny Visconti 22as, 1k, 1b, 1d; Mitchell Smith 4k, 1b; David Stephenson 1ac, 1as, 4k, 1b; Kyle Barnes 3as; Timmy Failing 1ac; Alexander Fox 1k; Mike Izzo 2ac, 2as, 1b.
VVS (6-1, 12-3): Jarett Durant 12k; Jacob Bitz 11k, 2b, 8d; Devin Vallee 16as, 7k; Josh Albro 1ac, 17d; Brian Burkle 4k, 4b; Kyle Chandler 7k, 2b; Jayme Coe 1ac, 16as; Jonathan Fewer 3k; Logan Mumford 7d.