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Thursday, July 29, 2010
Comedy is perhaps the most delicate of storytelling balancing acts. Most comedy, for better or worse, is based on cruelty. We are just as often laughing at someone as we are with them, and for decades all forms of comic media have poked fun at people for qualities of birth or circumstance entirely beyond their control, traded in stereotype and caricature, and made mirthful sport of every manner of misfortune imaginable, from homelessness and war to terrorism and death itself. But the basic reaction to a comedy is laughter, a joyful action, and if your material pushes the despairing undercurrents of its subject matter too far into the forefront, you run the risk of people losing the fundamental ability to laugh at it. So the comic writer, actor and filmmaker must always worry how far to push their work into that red zone. Do you want your audience to be laughing because it's funny, or because it's likable? Jay Roach's Dinner For Schmucks is a textbook example of this conflict, presenting a situation rife for devastatingly cruel comedy that finds itself frequently hamstrung by its simultaneous desire to make us care about, even love, its characters. Laughter gets in a few jabs here and there, but it's sentiment that wins the ultimate war here, and the result is a film that's never as funny or as sharp as its material promises.
A remake of Francis Veber's successful French comedy The Dinner Game, Schmucks stars Paul Rudd as Tim, an up-and-comer at a financial management company. Tim's head over heels for Julie (Stephanie Szostak), a charming art curator who, despite her love for Tim, nevertheless fends off his frequent marriage proposals. He needs a more stable situation in his professional life, she insists, before she'll be Mrs. Tim. It's a real pickle, but then opportunity knocks for Tim in the form of an invitation to a special dinner party hosted once a month by his caddish boss (Bruce Greenwood). At these dinners, each invitee is responsible for bringing a second guest...namely, the biggest idiot they can find. It's a glorious evening of behind-the-back malice, and at the end of the night, the king idiot of the dinner gets a trophy without ever once knowing that the entire thing is a travesty, and he's the goat. Despite Tim's generally sympathetic personality, he realizes that this dinner might be his one shot to get himself a leg up both at his job and with Julie. And it also doesn't hurt that one of his boss's guests will be a Swiss millionaire (David Walliams) looking for investment opportunities and dimwits to mock. Fortunately, for Tim, he literally runs into a prime potential guest when he crashes his car into Barry Speck (Steve Carell), a four-eyed, windbreakered doofus with a passion for small-rodent taxidermy (he crafts dead mice into striking tableaux he calls "mousterpieces"). Tim strikes up a friendship with this cretin, and it's up to him to get Barry to the dinner without incurring the wrath of Julie, who knows about the purpose of the dinner and thoroughly disapproves, or Barry himself. What he doesn't count on is Barry's destructive nature, as the simple fellow proceeds to wreck Tim's apartment, not to mention his job and potentially his relationship. It all culminates at the titular dinner, a cavalcade of freaks including a ventriloquist with his dummy "wife" and a medium who can only channels the spirit of dead animals. Also at the dinner: the odious Therman (Zach Galifianakis), a would-be mesmerist who also happens to be the man who stole Barry's wife. At this point, if I told you the party culminates with a huge fire and an escaping vulture, you wouldn't be shocked in the slightest.
You would not have been able to spin two separate films out of Dinner for Schmucks's premise if it wasn't inherently ripe with comic possibilities, and Roach and his screenwriters, David Guion and Michael Handelman, have not erred in their choice of source material. The main issue here is one of tone, as Roach seems unwilling to push the humor into the truly transgressive places it could very naturally go. In the past, Roach has shown himself to be unafraid of making his characters the butt of the joke. He gleefully turned Mike Myers into a grotesque in the Austin Powers films, and even the comparatively more sedate Meet the Parents largely traded in jokes that made Ben Stiller the fool. Here, however, with a premise that is entirely about mean laughs at the expense of others, Roach soft-pedals the nastiness, and the result is a somewhat flavorless stew with harsh but delicious spices just out of reach.
The film begins with a quite lovely sequence showcasing one of Barry's "mousterpieces". This tranquil scene of gamboling, picnicking, quite deceased mice, scored to the Beatles' wistful "Fool on the Hill", had me expecting something really special. But I didn't realize at the time that this sequence wasn't meant to be ironic. Roach and his writers genuinely sympathize with Barry. They're rooting for him, and by placing themselves firmly on the side of the character who's supposed to elicit the film's biggest laughs, they neuter the picture's comic potential at its source. Barry, really, is more of an innocent than an idiot, more naive than nimrod. He's a little clumsy, and makes some bad decisions, but there are none of the moments of transcendant stupidity that were found in a comedy like Dumb & Dumber, which was utterly willing to make its feeble-minded characters truly thicker than bricks (and nevertheless masterfully danced the dance of making those characters both funny and likable). Try as I might, I found it extremely hard to laugh at Barry and regard him as an idiot simply because his wife has left him for another man. Granted, Therman is indeed a five-alarm moron, with his hard-staring mind-control techniques and ridiculous master-hypnotist cape...but that's not Barry's fault in any way. It just means his wife has bad taste in men. Even the oddest thing about Barry, his dead-mouse art, is more charming and quirky than idiotic. Barry's actually quite gifted as a taxidermic craftsman, and those pieces of his would probably wind willing homes in many art collector's galleries. This man, in short, is hardly an epic idiot. The film likes him just fine, though, and so Roach and the writers refuse to make Barry into the authentically dense, weird, creepy idiot they nevertheless want the characters to believe him to be. This keeps the very core of their comic idea tethered on a short leash, and it never really manages to break free and take flight.
It's not, however, that Dinner For Schmucks is without characters who push the boundaries of freakishness. In addition to Therman, there's also the hideous Darla (Lucy Punch), a lunatic stalker-type who is inadvertently brought back into Tim's life when Barry mistakes her for Julie on the phone. Julie likewise has another potential suitor, this one a pretentious Cindy Sherman-style photographic artist named Kieran (Jemaine Clement) whose work consists of erotically ridiculous animal-costumed graphics and who insists that crazy, random sex with many partners is an essential part of his process, because of course it is, right? Galifianakis and Clement admittedly make the most of their roles. The former is right now unparalleled at creating creepily intense comic characters (I insist to anyone who'll listen that he should have been a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee for The Hangover), and with this performance and the little-seen Gentlemen Broncos, Clement is emerging as cinema's go-to self-absorbed creative-arts buffoon. The script also gifts him with the funniest dialogue exchange in the film, an absurd bit of business about his stint living with a family of goats. As Darla, Punch labors mightily to create a "wacky" misfit character, but she's trying way too hard, and the effort shows in scenes that add nothing to the narrative and don't even generate real laughs. The conceit of the character is a smart one, but Punch's strident performance kills any chance it might have had of working. Truth be told, though, both this character and Clement's are ill-served by the material, anyway, being essentially isolated from the central story and with bits that seem almost like self-contained sketches within the main film. Since they're the biggest clowns in this circus, after all, why aren't they at the dinner with Barry and Therman? If it was an idiot he was looking for, there's much better people in the world of this film that Tim could have hit with his car.
Dinner for Schmucks mostly veers between scenes that seem set up for big laughs but don't push for them, and sequences that cram "comedy" down our throats and fail to make us laugh. An early board meeting, in which Rudd presents goofy lamps made from disarmed World War II rockets, could have been an excellent showcase for Rudd's gift for good-natured comic smarm, but it's not approached from any interesting angles, and the scene fails to garner more than a cursory chuckle at how silly the lamps look. Conversely, a lunch scene in which Tim is forced to gladhand the Swiss investor with help from both Barry and Darla, who's posing as Julie, could have been a manic farcical set piece, but once the main situation is established, the laughs do not arrive, despite Punch straining so hard for them that she practically sprays her co-stars with sweat. The climactic dinner, which climaxes with Carell and Galifianakis locked in absurd hypnotic combat, could have been a bravura comic sequence, but the brakes are put on the laughter during Barry's mousterpiece presentation. These are beautiful little creations. Why are we supposed to laugh at them, and at the talented artisan who created them?
The performances, inevitably in such an uneven film, are a mixed bag. Rudd can be as charming and funny as anyone in movies today. But here he seems constrained by the material's split personality; anyone who enjoyed his manic self-delusion in Anchorman knows that Rudd would be more than capable of the comic flights this film seems reluctant to take. It also doesn't help that, as with Barry, the film seems determined to make Tim a likable guy...death to laughs when you're dealing with a character who's basically throwing another human being under the bus for personal and financial gain. Carell does score a few laughs here and there, but he's given much more inspired idiot material each week on The Office. It's also an interesting comment on the importance of proper direction to actors' chemistry that Rudd and Carell, so dynamic together in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, here fail to spark off of each other in truly interesting ways. Szostak is a pleasingly outside-the-box choice for a role like this with her kicky pixie haircut and sexy accent, and she manages to make Julie a sweetheart despite the fact that she's holding Tim's feet to the romantic fire. Greenwood does everything that he can with the douchebag boss, but Walliams is too restrained by half as the Swiss magnate. This is a character who could have been the film's most inspired creation, a piece of nouveau-riche Eurotrash with a penchant for mocking his betters, but Walliams never musters the cruelty necessary to make the character zing (perhaps Clement taking this role would have been a better fit; Kieran really adds nothing to the main story, anyway). Also disappointing is the cast of dinner guests, none of whom get enough screen time to really make the impression they deserve. The whole film is building up to this dinner, after all; why give the assembled idiots such short narrative shrift? The casting of Jeff Dunham, a real-life superstar ventriloquist, as the man with the wooden "wife" is a sign of the film's middle-of-the-road ambitions. A more daring film might have picked an edgier comic talent and cranked this character up to eleven. Instead...hey, Jeff Dunham's a ventriloquist! Let's cast him as the ventriloquist!
I grant you that making a successful mainstream comedy is no easy task. But I believe that Dinner for Schmucks should not have even been a mainstream comedy. This material, with its basic plot rooted in poking fun at the less fortunate, was crying out for treatment as a rough, caustic, perhaps indie comedy, the kind of film that strafes the establishment with satire and takes no prisoners. What we've gotten instead is a safe, slight, unremarkable Hollywood comedy that should please audiences looking for a few easy laughs, but won't win Rudd or Carell many new converts to their cause. I know that most of this smacks of me reviewing the movie that I wish had been made instead of the movie that was made, but you know what? The movie that was made was a comedy. And it didn't make me laugh nearly enough.
Posted by The Movie Zombie at 3:17 PM 4 comments:
Monday, July 26, 2010
The Writers
Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren; story by McDowell and Larry Wilson
Why It's Here
Film scholars tend to underestimate the importance of screenwriting to the success of Tim Burton's early directorial career. Given his wildly creative visual imagination and penchant for the macabre, it was natural for the cinematic establishment to credit Burton almost exclusively with the qualities of his first feature films, but the director himself has acknowledged that he was fortunate enough, his first few times out, to be working with top-quality scripts. On the DVD commentary track for his first feature, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Burton takes numerous opportunities to praise the work of the film's screenwriting team, and though Burton's second film, the lunatic supernatural comedy Beetlejuice, provides an even grander showcase for the filmmaker's flights of imagistic fantasy, much of the credit here must go to the writing as well. Burton certainly brings a lot to the table as the director of Beetlejuice, but it doesn't hurt that he had found, in the work of screenwriters Michael McDowell and the late Warren Skaaren (from a story by McDowell and Beetlejuice co-producer Larry Wilson), an absolutely perfect showcase for his visual style and thematic interests. The resultant collaboration is a film that, as much as any artistic work I can recall, spearheaded the acceptance of the morbid, the macabre, and pitch-black death-obsessed humor into the American mainstream. Such humor was always there, but on the fringes and usually nurtured by obsessive, insular coteries of fans (Monty Python's Flying Circus, for example, frequently showcased death and bloody mayhem in their sketches). Beetlejuice struck a different chord in people, and somehow managed to be accepted by the average moviegoer with true warmth and affection. How many other films about cockroach-eating pervert ghosts can you think of that inspired a Saturday morning cartoon series? I truly believe that without Beetlejuice, there would be no Marilyn Manson, no Hot Topic, perhaps even no Twilight. It's a film that turned America into a culture of virtual necrophiliacs. It helps, of course, that the film itself is a marvelous entertainment, consistently funny, inventively thought out, and in several of its narrative implications and relationships, surprisingly thoughtful and even touching.
In its first ten minutes, Beetlejuice gives the appearance of being a much different kind of comedy. The Maitlands are a young married couple living in the lush green hamlet of Winter River, Connecticut. Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) share a beautiful country house high on a hill, where Adam putters over a scale model of the town while Barbara fends off the overtures of her friend Jane (Annie McEnroe), a real-estate broker who is constantly trying to sell the house out from under them. These early scenes establish a gentle, bucolic tone, with Adam and Barbara playfully pulling each other down onto the couch for kisses and Adam, when he runs into town to get some supplies from his hardware store, wishing a friendly hello to Bill the barber (Hugo Stanger), who rambles on about a young hippie who came to his shop for a haircut ("He's got hair down to his goddamn shoulders...") without noticing that Adam has already come and gone. It almost feels like we're watching a film adaptation of one of Garrison Keillor's "News from Lake Wobegon" monologues. The town is too pretty, Adam and Barbara almost sickeningly perfect.
Then, the Maitland's two-week staycation is tragically interrupted when their car crashes off the Winter River Bridge. They arrive home to find that things are not right. They have no reflection in the house's mirrors. Not remembering how they got home, Adam steps off the house's front porch to find himself in a swirling interstellar space menaced by a gigantic sandworm. And then there's the book they find on their coffee table: Handbook for the Recently Deceased (published, of course, by "Handbook for the Recently Deceased Press"), which outlines, in excessively vague and complex fashion, all the rules and regulations of being ghosts...which is just what Adam and Barbara have become, condemned to haunt their earthly home for the next 125 years. Despite the fact that Barbara can't properly clean anything with the vacuum cleaner stuck in a garage they can't get to, spending a century-plus in their beautiful home might not be the worst fate imaginable. But then Jane sells the house to the Deetzes, a horrible family of misfits from the Big Apple. Charles (Jeffrey Jones) is a real-estate broker, recovering from a recent nervous collapse, who has come to the country to get away from it all...but his shrew of a second wife, trendoid sculptor Delia (a boisterous performance by Catherine O'Hara) insists on bringing the city with her in the form of her grotesque sculpted work, which looks like discarded props from Eraserhead, and by inviting her smirky interior designer friend Otho (Glenn Shadix) to join her in completely redoing the house the Maitlands loved so much. Only Lydia (Winona Ryder), Charles's emo-style, amateur-photographer daughter from his previous marriage, seems marginally acceptable. She likes the house (and hates Delia) as much as the Maitlands do. Plus, it turns out that she, alone among the new residents, can see and communicate with the ghosts. (She explains it thus: "Live people often ignore the strange and unusual. I myself am strange and unusual.") Lydia develops a strong bond with Adam and Barbara, who have no children of their own, but the Deetzes's destruction of their home and way of life becomes too much to bear...and it becomes worse when the whole family gets wind of the ghosts and Charles hatches a plan to turn the entire town into a supernaturally themed amusement park. Desperate, and against the advice of their spiritual case worker, Juno (a wonderfully dry Sylvia Sidney), the Maitlands call on outside help from a freelance "bio-exorcist" who claims to be able to "exterminate" the living from haunted houses, and who happens to be hiding out, in miniaturized form, inside Adam's model. That would be the titular ghoul, Betelgeuse, a rowdy, sleazy, spike-haired huckster of a creature, played by Michael Keaton in a performance that (along with his work in the same year's Clean and Sober) won him the National Society of Film Critics' Best Actor award. But Betelgeuse has his own dastardly schemes, and he uses the Maitlands and Lydia as dupes in a plot to escape from the underworld and back into the land of the living, where he can really do some serious damage.
As you can perhaps tell from the description above, Beetlejuice has an unusually strong narrative structure for a comedy. The writers have worked out a genuinely compelling dilemma for the ghost couple to grapple with, and they introduce a smart narrative wrinkle in the form of Lydia, who sympathizes entirely with their predicament (to the point of making plans to kill herself and join them on the other side) and causes them to question their entire drive to get the Deetzes out of the house. Likewise, the overarching conflict of the story, with the small-town, just-folks Maitlands against the monstrous hipsters from the big city, was expertly suited to the film's end-of-the-Reagan-years release date, when the staunchly American midwestern values espoused by Reagan were in combat with the greed-driven, poisonously self-centered yuppie philosophy that the era likewise spawned. (It also makes the film an interesting time capsule, as we now live in an era where big-city dwellers are more commonly painted as bulwarks of sanity and intelligence against the tide of perceived middle-American ignorance and intolerance.) The film's characters are admittedly broadly drawn, but within their individual parameters, they act believably and with consistent logic. When Adam and Barbara first attempt to "haunt" the Maitlands, their methods, which consist of throwing sheets with eyeholes over their heads and moaning like remote-control Halloween toys, strike one as exactly what a naive young pair of ghosts would do to scare someone. Then, when they finally figure out their haunting style, they do not hit the Deetzes with demons and danger the way Betelgeuse later does, but instead possess the family and their dining companions and throw them into a raucous dance number set to Harry Belafonte's "Day-O" (Adam is a big fan of calypso music, a nice quirky character touch). The characters all have perfect little moments like this, from Charles chirping a sotto voce "birdies" as he flips through an Audubon book to the relentlessly self-dramatizing Lydia composing a suicide note and changing "I am alone" to the much more anguished-sounding "I am utterly alone". Otho, a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none type, makes constant references to a seemingly endless string of bizarre and short-lived jobs; it is in fact his past stint as a paranormal researcher that finally brings the family in direct contact with the ghosts in a seance gone horribly wrong. Of the main characters, only Delia remains essentially a caricature, but since she and Betelgeuse (more on him later) are, for lack of a better word, the film's villains, the writers can get away with making her a little more shallow. Poorly developed villains are more or less standard in most comedies; if you make your villain too strong, after all, you run the risk of making the threat too dire and overwhelming the humor entirely.
Beetlejuice's writers very wisely avoid doing this by limiting the onscreen time of their titular monster. Many audiences may have been surprised, upon first seeing the film, to find that Betelgeuse is only onscreen, in the entire 92-minute picture, for about twenty minutes total. Save for one fleeting appearance where we don't see his face, and a hilarious used-car-style commercial beamed to Adam and Barbara's TV (where the cowboy-hatted Betelgeuse promises "a FREE demon possession with every exorcism"), the bio-exorcist is not in the first half of the film at all. But he is spoken of several times by other characters, always with fear and disgust (Juno warns the Maitlands not to even say his name...for reasons that become clear later, as it's saying his name three times that calls him into conscious being), and this slow buildup to the character's true narrative emergence makes the audience giddy with anticipation. Because of all this, the writers know that they are going to have make every second of Betelgeuse's time on the screen count, and when the character finally bursts forth from his grave, he definitely does not disappoint. He cuts a genuinely horrific appearance with his wild mane of hair, rotten teeth, dark-ringed eyes and face flecked with patches of filth and moss. He grossly forces himself on Barbara, spits loudly into his own jacket (telling Adam, "I'll save that guy for later"), feasts on insects, and praises himself ostentatiously as "the ghost with the most". He also has moments of goofy, unexpected drollery, as when Adam asks him his bio-exorcism qualifications and he coolly rattles off a resume including stints at Julliard and the Harvard Business School. Betelgeuse is like some nightmare combination of lecherous pimp, carnival barker, sleazy game-show host, and the worst stand-up comic you've ever seen (after one particularly explosive stunt, Betelgeuse declares, "That is why I won't do two shows a night anymore, babe."). He functions almost like a trickster figure in ancient myth, the pitch and tone of his humor so radically discursive from everything around him that he seems, as "wild man" characters in comedies so seldom truly do, like a genuinely disruptive force in the film's universe, an effect he would likely not have been able to achieve had he been front-and-center from the beginning. One does not want to discount the contribution of Michael Keaton, who here gives one of the most spectacularly unhinged comic performances in film history, but as they say and as is the case here, if it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage.
It is of course the world of Beetlejuice, as much as the film's characters and story, that make it soar, and the writers have set their tale in an inspired and utterly unique vision of the afterlife. The netherworld of Beetlejuice is like the most awful bureaucratic experience of your life, magnified tenfold. It starts with the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, which is actually full of useful information, but all delivered in a cryptic or sometimes completely inscrutable fashion (in a slightly dated but still effective joke, a frustrated Adam declares that the book "reads like stereo instructions"). Adam and Barbara find themselves at one point in a dingy, uncomfortable otherworld waiting room, surrounded by beings who bear the marks of the manner in which they died. There's a charred-to-the-bones ghoul who apparently went up while smoking in bed (trouper that he is, he's still puffing away), a man in a food-spattered bib with a lodged chicken bone bulging in his throat, even an unlucky magician's assistant whose severed torso sits on a sofa next to her legs. Exorcised spirits and demons are banished to the hellish Lost Souls Room, described as "death for the dead", and if that wasn't bad enough, even the "life" of a ghost is a seemingly endless welter of rules and regulations. Adam and Barbara can only have three meetings with Juno over the course of their 125-year stint in the house, and when they can't figure out how to properly scare the Deetzes, the case worker directs them to the dreaded Handbook's "intermediate interface chapter on haunting". Though Adam mentions at one point that the Handbook doesn't mention heaven or hell, if this afterlife world's heavy emphasis on bureaucratic frustration is any indication, then the Maitlands are definitely in hell. And they seemed like such a nice young couple. Maybe they cheated on their taxes or something.
As the description of the waiting room denizens above makes clear, Beetlejuice was also radical for a mainstream '80s comedy (keep in mind, this film was not an indie cult item, but a major studio release...and a box-office hit at that) in its detached, almost blase manner of joking about the most horrific subjects imaginable. Being burned or choked to death, being sawed in half, getting your throat slit...these are not inherently hilarious occurrences, but Beetlejuice is endlessly willing to exploit these kinds of images for laughs, as when smoke from Juno's cigarette pours through the deep gash in her throat, or when the receptionist in the waiting room jokes about her "little accident" while holding up her slit wrists. An intercom in the waiting room announces the arrival of "Flight 409", a reference to a famous unsolved airline crash from the fifties, and obituary pages in the Afterlife newspaper are much different than ours, inviting readers to "Please Welcome The Maitlands" (this is how Betelgeuse finds out about them; he regards the obituaries as the paper's "business section"). It's almost hard to remember how unusual it was, in 1988, to see this sort of pitch-black stuff in a big-budget studio comedy, and Beetlejuice is often insufficiently valued for its role in bringing truly transgressive humor into the mainstream.
This is not to say, however, that Beetlejuice is blithely unaware of the serious implications of death, and in the relationship between Barbara and Lydia, there are allusions to the true gravity of the end of life. In an early scene, Jane makes a callous comment to Barbara that such a big house really would be better suited to someone with a family. Barbara's sad expression and Jane's abrupt apology make it clear that the Maitlands' childless status is not by choice. Naturally, their early death will prevent them from ever knowing the joys of parenthood, but the nesting instinct is strong enough in Barbara that even in death, she feels maternally drawn toward Lydia. The girl is likewise receptive to Barbara's attentions. Her relationship with her stepmother Delia is almost entirely antagonistic, and though what happened to Lydia's mother is never discussed, her all-black wardrobe and morose personality lead us to believe that Charles is not a divorcee, but a widower. Lydia thus sees the replacement of her mother with Delia not just as a betrayal, but a desecration of her real mother's memory, leading to her feelings of solitude and desire for death, perhaps out of an unspoken (by the film) desire to rejoin her mother on the other side. (The fact that the film doesn't take this narrative step when Lydia learns of a real afterlife, and that it indeed doesn't definitively identify Lydia's mother as deceased, is probably mostly due to the genre; a comedy, even one as death-drenched as this, would have a hard time pulling laughs from such a predicament.) The film builds some surprising pathos out of the relationship between this sad young girl and her ghost mother, a bond made somehow more fragile and precious by the unbreakable membrane of death separating them. Even Betelgeuse, the netherworld's number one party animal, realizes that death is no ultimately no laughing matter. His plot to use the Maitlands to escape from the afterlife indicates that he wants "out, for good", and in the film's most intriguingly philosophical moment, when a miserable Lydia tells him that she wants to be dead too, his only answer is an utterly baffled "Why?" Beetlejuice is certainly no deep treatise on death and dying, but if one bothers to look, it is not nearly as flippant on the subject as its constant macabre jokes might initially indicate.
Like the previously reviewed Happy Gilmore, and indeed like many comedies, Beetlejuice has its uneven moments. A number of narrative incidents and aspects of the film's netherworld go unexplained (we never find out, for example, how Barbara tames the sandworm that saves them from Betelgeuse in the film's climax), and the picture suffers from a frequent cinematic narrative problem in that the characters react almost too serenely to something overwhelmingly incredible. After all, if confronted by the true existence of the afterlife, my first response would not be to build a theme park on top of it. Of course, I am not a character in a cinematic comedy, and as film comedies go, Beetlejuice is a great one. The picture cemented Tim Burton in the public imagination as a master of macabre subject matter and imagery, an image he has cultivated and grown into a lucrative career with films like Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, and The Nightmare Before Christmas...all pictures that bear the influence of Beetlejuice's visual tropes and narrative implications. Tim Burton is a visionary, no question about that. But he might never have gotten by without a little help from his screenwriting friends.
Personal Note: There has only been one occasion in my life so far when I have gotten to hold an Oscar...and it was an Oscar won for this film, by makeup artist Robert Short, who shared the 1988 Best Makeup award with Ve Neill and Steve LaPorte for their work on Beetlejuice. When you see what they did to the face of the actually quite handsome Michael Keaton, you'll understand why they won.
AWARD NOMINATIONS: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Award, Best Writing
Posted by The Movie Zombie at 7:41 AM 2 comments:
Monday, July 19, 2010
In a number of ways, Clint Eastwood's 1990 buddy-cop action thriller The Rookie represents the end of an era. From even his earliest days behind the camera, Eastwood always harbored ambitions to be something greater than a purveyor of mindless action spectacle and violence. But despite a filmography that encompassed everything from the elegiac Depression-era drama Honkytonk Man to the moody jazz biopic Bird, the general public and much of the critical establishment still chose to regard Eastwood as a manufacturer of junky action pictures for the Saturday-matinee crowd. The fact that many of these action thrillers were enormous commercial successes simply muddied the waters even further; after all, something so across-the-boards popular couldn't possibly have serious artistic merit, right? Then, in 1992, Eastwood released Unforgiven, a grim, serious-minded western from a script (by David Webb Peoples) that Eastwood had purchased almost a decade before and sat on, waiting to reach the age when he could invest its cold-blooded recovering-killer protagonist with the appropriate gravity. Not only was the film a box-office hit, but it also scored with the critics, who finally saw in Eastwood's work the sober intentions and aesthetic consideration that a stalwart few had detected all along. The film went on to win four Academy Awards, including two for Eastwood as the film's director and producer (he also received his first-ever nomination for Best Actor for Unforgiven), and from that moment forth, even when delivering straight genre films like 1999's crusading-newsman tale True Crime, there was no escaping the fact that this was a film by ACADEMY AWARD WINNER CLINT EASTWOOD, and attention would be paid.
As Unforgiven's immediate predecessor in Eastwood's catalog, The Rookie thus represents the final product of an era when the filmmaker was taken less than seriously, if not outright dismissed...and truth be told, the film is one that Eastwood himself likely regarded as more or less disposable. It is generally believed that Eastwood made The Rookie, a thoroughly unoriginal but blatantly commercial action picture, in exchange for the studio greenlighting and financing the same year's White Hunter, Black Heart, an ambitious tale of artistic and savage hubris inspired by John Huston's adventures during the filming of The African Queen. Though critically praised, White Hunter was the latest in a string of financial underperformers for the filmmaker, and The Rookie hit theaters at a time when the box-office drawing power of Eastwood, who turned 60 the year of the film's release, was falling under question for the first time in his career. For this reason, perhaps, the grizzled action veteran was here paired with a hot young co-star, Charlie Sheen, who has arguably more screen-time than Eastwood and who carries the brunt of the film's most furious action on his shoulders.
That action kicks off when tough-talking, cigar-chomping LAPD auto-theft detective Nick Pulovski (Eastwood) finds himself in need of a partner after his right hand is killed during a high-speed chase of an East L.A. band of car thieves. His supervisor assigns him to work with David Ackerman (Sheen), a stoic son of wealthy social-climbing parents who joined the force to combat the overpowering guilt he feels over his brother's death, the result of a childhood accident Ackerman believes he caused. The old dog has no desire to teach this kid any tricks, new or otherwise, but soon they find themselves in the thick of an all-out crime war when they target the chop-shop ring led by Strom (Raul Julia), the German-born mastermind who's been lifting autos all over the city and who, not incidentally, killed Pulovski's partner.
As you can probably tell from the description above, the film's screenplay, by Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel, is straight off the shelf, Action Storytelling 101. There is virtually nothing you expect to see in a film like this that Yakin and Spiegel neglected to shoehorn into their scenario. A furious commanding officer (Pepe Serna) takes Pulovski off the chop-shop case because, with his dead partner and all, it's now "too personal". Pulovski and Ackerman have a face-off scene where they trade insults and nearly come to blows...but it's balanced out with a scene of male bonding, this time over cigars and motorcycles (Pulovski is a former race driver, Ackerman an engineering student who effortlessly fixes the older cop's ailing bike). A brawl in a bar lit all in piercing red, a scene where the two cops confront the wealthy criminal at a country club, a confrontation in which Ackerman tells his father "you were never there for me"...hell, there's even a moment where Ackerman, facing his police review board, is accused of murdering his brother and grows increasingly furious until he awakens, drenched in sweat. Because you see, it was all a dream! With all this and more, there are moments where The Rookie plays like an ad for a clearance sale at Crazy Clint's Cliche Warehouse.
Eastwood the director here finds himself in the unenviable position of having to play catch-up to a genre he virtually helped to invent. For years, action cinema had followed his lead, with every quick-gun cop a Dirty Harry wannabe and every hard-riding cowboy a pseudo-Man with No Name. But in the 1980s, a new breed of action thriller, exemplified by producer Joel Silver's high-tech, funny-but-furious Die Hard and Lethal Weapon pictures, turned the genre up to 11, and in The Rookie, the story of a young cop trying to impress a more experienced mentor, we find the mentor, Eastwood, ironically trying to outdo his action-film pupils. And it cannot be said that The Rookie does not deliver when it comes to high-flying, literally quite explosive action. The film's opening chase sequence, with Pulovski in high-speed pursuit of an auto-transport truck, becomes an epic smash-up when the criminals start shedding cars in an effort to slow the old cop down. Pulovski and Ackerman escape from a wired-to-blow warehouse by driving through a window about five stories up; the resultant explosion hurls the car onto a neighboring roof and through a skylight, with the two cops battered but alive. ("Engineered," Pulovski quips, "like no other car.") The final chase sequence, in which the cops pursue Strom and his machine-gun-wielding mistress Liesl (Sonia Braga) through a busy airport, features an impressive sequence in which Pulovski and Ackerman outgun an oncoming private plane that collides mid-runway with a jumbo jet. These sequences, in a film released seven months before James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day forever changed the way filmmakers would handle fx-driven action scenes, represent a pleasant reminder of the glory days when good old-fashioned stunt work gave the action thriller its zing. (At the time of its release, The Rookie was seen as an omen of the declining importance of story in action thrillers, as the film famously utilized twice as many stuntpeople as actors.) Eastwood's films had delivered plenty of spectacular action and stunts over the years, but nothing quite as hyperbolic as this; in fact, some critics, when confronted with the film's neverending welter of narrative cliches and over-the-top mayhem, chose to read The Rookie as some sort of poker-faced parody of action thrillers.
Whatever its tone, The Rookie reminds us why films like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are looked upon as benchmarks of their genre while this one is largely seen as a failure. For no matter how big the explosion, how vast the army of stuntmen, how wild the array of action moments, if you don't care about the characters, the movie won't work. When John McClane jumps off the roof of the Nakitomi Tower in Die Hard, it's thrilling not because it's a guy cheating death. It's because it's John McClane cheating death, because we've come to know him and care about him and fear for his life. None of the characters in The Rookie inspire this kind of passion in the viewer, and the actors do what they can to little avail. Julia and Braga are colorless villains with an ill-defined scheme and none of the delight in their own evil that the greatest movie heavies often possess. Much was made at the time of the film's release about the relatively ridiculous fact that Julia and Braga, both actors of Latino descent, are here playing Germans, but the nationality of the characters makes no difference, and something tells me that if Jurgen Prochnow and Hannah Schygulla had been playing these roles, the results wouldn't have been much better. Braga comes off better than Julia, if only because it was still something of a novelty, in 1990, to see a woman mowing down cops with a machine gun and dishing it out as hard as the men in an action picture. She also figures prominently in the film's most notorious scene, in which she has her way with Pulovski while he's bound to a chair; some cited the moment as a provocative role reversal within the frequently misogynistic action genre, while most simply decried it as arguably the most tasteless scene of Eastwood's career.
Lara Flynn Boyle brings nothing to the party as Ackerman's worried girlfriend; she exists primarily to offer him moral support and to be menaced by Julia's henchman while Ackerman races home on a motorcycle to rescue her. Tom Skerritt makes little impression as Ackerman's father, and Sheen is surprisingly colorless as the fresh rookie cop. He is not exceptionally impressive in the action scenes, and he handles the dramatic moments, well, with the same stoic generic intensity he always has utilized in his non-comedic roles. The summer following The Rookie's release, Sheen starred in Hot Shots!, a Top Gun spoof in which his steely-eyed style proved to be a brilliant send-up of itself, and after which it was virtually impossible to take him seriously in films like The Rookie again. Not surprisingly, it's Eastwood who sparks the most interest on the screen, the actor bringing nearly 30 years of experience to an underwritten character and making him compelling through sheer charisma and goodwill alone. He makes everything he can out of Pulovski's seemingly relentless string of one-liners (he has one genuinely funny scene where he regales a TV reporter, and her live audience, with a brusque string of expletives), he makes the character's stereotype of a cop's hard life seem somehow lived-in, and even in his sixth decade, he handles himself in the action scenes with aplomb (though I caught myself trying to spot the stunt double in a scene where Pulovski pulls a slick contortionist's move to free himself from a handcuffed prone position). This film most likely represents the last time Clint Eastwood will ever play the wisecracking, shoot-first avenger, and it's pleasant to watch even if he's just going through the motions.
Fortunately, Eastwood's technical crew are not just phoning it in here, and The Rookie looks as good as virtually any action picture of the era. Cinematographer Jack N. Green gives the film a dark-hued, noir-style atmosphere that's honestly classier than the material deserves, and editor Joel Cox cuts the action scenes for maximum intensity and velocity (two years later, he would take home one of Unforgiven's Oscars). The star of the film is arguably stunt coordinator Buddy van Horn, who had directed several of Eastwood's earlier pictures and who here, working with a larger cast than Eastwood himself, spearheads easily the film's most memorable moments. I have often had mixed feelings about the usage of music in Eastwood's films, and the jazzy score provided here by Eastwood's longtime collaborator Lennie Niehaus is no exception. While Niehaus's compositions are enjoyable on their own, they are often integrated haphazardly into the action, and the film's principal theme, a brassy sax-and-trumpet-driven number that blares over the opening credits, sounds like something you'd hear on a '70s cop show, not in a feature film from the last decade of the century. It gives the film an ersatz, dated feel that the cliches surrounding that music do nothing to dispel.
While it didn't exactly set the box office on fire, The Rookie was a moderate success, mostly with audiences who suspected that this was perhaps as close as they were ever going to get to seeing a sixth Dirty Harry picture. Eastwood would have to wait one more picture before he received his unqualified and perhaps overdue critical laurels. In the meantime, The Rookie was greeted with some of the harshest reviews Eastwood has ever received. Many still regard it as a low point in the filmmaker's career, and longtime Eastwood compadre (and official biographer) Richard Schickel has gone on record and called it "the nadir" of his friend's creative output. Presenting as it does one of the last gasps of a particularly entertaining brand of action picture, The Rookie is a hard film to hate. But it's a nearly impossible film to get excited about, and unless you're a die-hard Eastwood fan, you're better off, well, just watching Die Hard.
NOTE: Follow these links for the Zombie's take on Clint Eastwood's Changeling and Invictus.
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Maggie is a 93 year old woman whose husband worked in the mines until its closing. In this clip, she talks about house work and chores that she did as child. Also, she talks about foods that her and her family grew in their garden and animals that they raised for food.
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Denali Motorcycle Electronics
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text: A.L. Rheinstrom | IBDB: The official source for Broadway Information IBDB: The official source for Broadway Information Official Broadway League sites: - sites - broadway.org broadwayleague.com broadwayfanclub.com kidsnightonbroadway.com stagespecs.org tonyawards.com Quick Search For: In This Category: All Show People/Org. Theatre Season A.L. Rheinstrom Manager Male Productions ProductionsDate of ProductionsPride and Prejudice[Play, Comedy, Original] Company Manager: A.L. Rheinstrom Nov 05, 1935 - May 1936The Shining Hour[Play, Drama, Original] Company Manager: A.L. Rheinstrom Feb 13, 1934 - May 1934Rain[Play, Drama, Revival] Manager: A.L. Rheinstrom Oct 11, 1926 - Oct 23, 1926 Find out where A.L. Rheinstrom and are credited together © 2001-2015, The Broadway League, All Rights Reserved. (Copyright and Disclaimer)


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01335 390 519 / 07905 257 650
Orchard Farm, Parwich, Nr. Ashbourne, Derbyshire, DE6 1QB
Well, we have been away for a week, visiting friends and family in Kent and East Sussex, hence the silence on the blog, but of course behind the scenes it has been business as usual.
We've returned to warm sunshine, evening sundowners outside the barns and talk of barbecues planned for tonight; all the tubs are gasping and suddenly it feels like the summer we have dreamed about for so long is nearly here. Having said that it is almost inevitable that the snow will return, as has been known in April before now. Let's hope not.
While we were away we spent three nights with my sister and husband who are over from South Africa, staying in a holiday cottage they had rented. Personally, this was most enjoyable and fun as we don't get to see each other that much; professionally, it was quite intriguing as one couldn't help comparing.
Although it was clean, warm, comfortable and adequately equipped it felt functional and impersonal, lacking any sense of excitement or 'magic'. It provided a convenient base for us all, rather than a soothing retreat! Describing it thus is easy; much harder is to define why…


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By Randy Kirby
Managing editor
Randy Melick's newest recording effort, "Whalesong II," is now available.
The seven-track CD features Sedalia songwriter and musician Melick on classical guitar and keyboards mixed with sounds of whales, sounds of the ocean and even tribal drums to create a sense of relaxation as it seamlessly progresses through the various pieces of music.
"Each song begins with a fade in and ends with a fade out. The reason behind this allows for continuous playback, avoiding any interruptions between tracks. I used a volume pedal with an electric guitar to simulate some of the various humpback whale sounds," Melick said.
"The songs sung by humpback whales are present throughout this CD, helping to produce a very calm and relaxed state of mind," he stated.
"This is mainly therapeutic for people who have a lot of anxeiety and stress in their lives," Melick noted. The five-track "Whalesong I" was released in 2009.
"My goal is to write music for therapists, and sell this (CD) all over the country. I have a lot of people interested in it. Instead of just going to Wal-Mart and buying a relaxation CD, I can create something that they need," he explained.
Melick told of a woman who has a 10-year-old autistic son who has a hard time winding down at night.
"The whales are so fascinating to listen to, that when the boy focuses on it, he just starts drifting back to sleep," Melick said. "So it works, and the sounds penetrate stress, anxiety and other issues such as ADD and ADHD.
"This type of music is often played for the benefit of patients experiencing negative symptoms from various mental health disorders," according to his website, Therapuetic strings.com. Listeners can preview one entire track from the CD, "Whale Lament," at the site.
Melick spent six month producing the disc, which he personally copyrighted and published through Melick Music.
And the African drumbeats can facilitate meditation, yoga and study sessions, he noted.
Whalesong II is now for sale at Instrumental Influence, and also online at CD Baby here, where all seven tracks can be previewed. Currently, Melick has total of eight CDs for sale on the site. His music may be purchased on CD or downloaded.


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HotSpa Nail Bubble Spa with Water Heatup
We know you want the goods as soon as possible, which is why orders received by 3pm ET leave our warehouse the very same day. We'll send you an email that day to confirm shipment and the email will include your tracking information.
Our warehouse is closed Saturday & Sunday, so orders received after 3pm ET on Fridays will not ship out until Monday.
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Mary H.I Am The Only Manicurist At 3 Different Locations. Each Location Is At A High-end Clientelle.Just don't add so much soap an water that it bubbles over. Don't be in too much of a hurry to notice how much is added. I have used this item for 5 years and it allows me to stand out as a Manicurist. My customer's love it! I want to know where i can buy these now that it is being discontinued! please help!
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Article ID: 2716163 - View products that this article applies to.
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Consider the following scenario:
RemoteApp Error:
The program Program Name was not found.
For assistance, contact your system administrator.
This issue occurs because both the remote document path and the .rdp file path are sent to Mstsc.exe when you try to open the file. In this situation, a Remote Applications Integrated Locally (RAIL) request is sent to the server. Therefore, a race condition occurs when RAIL processes a shell execution before the rdpdr component receives notification.
Hotfix informationA supported hotfix is available from Microsoft. However, this hotfix is intended to correct only the problem that is described in this article. Apply this hotfix only to systems that are experiencing the problem described in this article. This hotfix might receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by this problem, we recommend that you wait for the next software update that contains this hotfix.
If the hotfix is available for download, there is a "Hotfix download available" section at the top of this Knowledge Base article. If this section does not appear, contact Microsoft Customer Service and Support to obtain the hotfix.
Note If additional issues occur or if any troubleshooting is required, you might have to create a separate service request. The usual support costs will apply to additional support questions and issues that do not qualify for this specific hotfix. For a complete list of Microsoft Customer Service and Support telephone numbers or to create a separate service request, visit the following Microsoft website:
http://support.microsoft.com/contactus/?ws=supportNote The "Hotfix download available" form displays the languages for which the hotfix is available. If you do not see your language, it is because a hotfix is not available for that language.
PrerequisitesTo apply this hotfix, you must be running Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1). For more information about how to obtain a Windows Server 2008 R2 service pack, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
(https://support.microsoft.com/kb/976932/ )Information about Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2
Registry informationTo use the hotfix, you do not have to change the registry.
Restart requirementYou must restart the computer after you apply this hotfix.
Hotfix replacement informationThis hotfix does not replace a previously released hotfix.
File informationThe global version of this hotfix installs files that have the attributes that are listed in the following tables. The dates and the times for these files are listed in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The dates and the times for these files on your local computer are displayed in your local time together with your current daylight saving time (DST) bias. Additionally, the dates and the times may change when you perform certain operations on the files.
Windows Server 2008 R2 file information notesImportant Windows 7 hotfixes and Windows Server 2008 R2 hotfixes are included in the same packages. However, hotfixes on the Hotfix Request page are listed under both operating systems. To request the hotfix package that applies to one or both operating systems, select the hotfix that is listed under "Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2" on the page. Always refer to the "Applies To" section in articles to determine the actual operating system that each hotfix applies to.
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(https://support.microsoft.com/kb/824684/ )Description of the standard terminology that is used to describe Microsoft software updates
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Article ID: 2716163 - Last Review: July 11, 2012 - Revision: 2.0
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Surprising Langston Hughes stuns Newnan
By DREW BRANTLEY
Special to The Newnan Times-Herald
Langston Hughes' steady dominance on both sides of the ball Friday night kept its offense moving and held down Newnan's offense for a 34-14 region victory at Drake Stadium.
While the Panthers were taking advantage of its offensive opportunities, the Cougars could not move the ball across midfield in the first half and finished the game with 58 yards on the ground.
"Give them credit," Newnan coach Mike McDonald said of Hughes. "They played really well on defense. We weren't able to move the ball on the ground in the first half. It's not our thing to sling it 50 times. They took away what we like to do."
The win gives the Panthers (6-1, 2-0) the early edge in the Region 3-AAAAAA standings, and leaves the Cougars (5-2, 1-1) with an idea of what they need to improve.
"We've got to go back to work," McDonald said, "and not repeat this performance. In the first half, we did not play well at all. I was proud of how they came back in the second half and fought. But it was a little too late at that point. You can't get behind to a good football team and expect to win."
Entering the game having lost its two previous meetings with the Cougars, including a 34-16 win for Newnan's homecoming last year, the Panthers were strong enough this year to overcome its own faults with a scoring drive on its first possession.
Despite yielding 30 yards to the Cougars by offensive penalties, Hughes opened the scoring with a 46-yard field goal from Stephan Whitehead. Newnan turned the ball over three plays later at its 25.
Kenny Moxey threw to Keion Davis for a 12-yard touchdown to cap the short drive, and Davis added a short scoring run in the second half, as the visitors led 17-0 at halftime.
Whitehead added another 44-yard field goal late in the third quarter. Newnan was able to find the offensive success it wanted on its next possession.
A mix of inside runs and passes, including a 39-yard post from quarterback Bailey Bryant to Traon Moss moved the ball inside the Panthers 20 and led to a 1-yard plunge by Quinton Dix.
The Cougars defense held on three plays and forced a punt, which was partially blocked by Cameron Walker after a miscue on the snap delayed the kick. Tray Matthews covered the wobbling ball at the Hughes 13.
Bryant pitched to J.K. Britt on an option five plays later for a 1-yard touchdown.
After mixing short passes and mid-range runs with consistency for the first three quarters, the Panthers responded with its biggest play of the game.
Davis burst through the left side of the line for a 65-yard touchdown to push Hughes' lead to 27-14 with 6:35 to play.
Newnan appeared to be moving the ball slowly again, but its fumbled the ball back to the visitors for the second time inside its 20. Each turnover came when the Cougars abandoned its primary shotgun look and took the snap under center.
"We work (under center) plenty," McDonald said. "We just pulled out a little early."
Kinan Humphrey entered the game at quarterback for the Panthers and led a scoring drive on five plays that ended the scoring with 2:31 left in the game.
After the score, the officials called an unsportsmanlike penalty against Newnan. Maurice White left the field, but McDonald said White was removed from the game but not ejected, and will not be forced to sit out the Cougars' home game next week against Douglas County.
McDonald said no players were injured in the game.
"Our pride got hurt a little bit," McDonald said.
SCORING SUMMARY – Langston Hughes 34, Newnan 14
Hughes 10 7 3 14 — 34
Newnan 0 0 0 14 — 14
1st quarter
LH — Stephan Whitehead 46 FG 3:57
LH — Keion Davis 12 pass from Kenny Moxey (Whitehead kick) 2:46
2nd quarter
LH — Davis 2 run (Whitehead kick) 3:26
3rd quarter
LH — Whitehead 44 FG 4:29
4th quarter
N — Quinton Dix 1 run (Tyler Mulvenna kick) 11:07
N — J.K. Britt 1 run (Mulvenna kick) 8:11
LH — Davis 65 run (Whitehead kick) 6:35
LH — Kinan Humphrey 5 run (Whitehead kick) 2:31


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Friday (June 18) the Monitor underscored the problems of economics going forward we face.
The Hannemann/Holsapple debate will, I suspect go on about how well business development happens here.
But the lead story about our station, KRSN, still having antenna placement problems, shows the difficulties that many here, including myself, see as over commitment to code and under commitment to community needs.
We all got an update on the Trinity site recently with our utility bills: after three years of nothing with Boyer, we now have a new consultant and a new economic leader who will hopefully have an anchor store commitment by the end of next year.
While there are powerful voices in the community concerned with realistic hopes of that matter, I think what really counts is, what do the people of this community think about where we're going?
Soon, I guess, we'll see charter review and how much impact community voices play in the outcome.
And come November, we'll elect a new County Council, all of whose candidates say they want to listen to us better.
The outcomes of those two events will better prognosticate how well we move ahead in the near future.
Robert Nunz
Los Alamos
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Guest Editorial: International aid and beekeeping: is it working?
Michael Burgett
Over the past decades international programmes to assist in the development of beekeeping have abounded. Funding has come from a wide variety of sources both public and private. (As an aside I was at first tempted to title this editorial 'Aid and acronyms' due to the breadth of sources that have provided fiscal support for beekeeping development.)


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Is Ronnie From "The Jersey Shore" Going To Deliever Snooki's Baby?
April 18, 2012 8:54 AM
Ramblin' Ray
Hello! My name is Ray, and this is my bio. It's supposed to tell you...Read More
C'mon admit it! You secretly watch The Jersey Shore when no one's around?
Ronnie Ortiz from The Jersey Shore gave us a holler this morning!
We think he might help deliver Snooki's baby!


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Chicago's kings of emo rock boast an odd dynamic. Patrick Stump is Fall Out Boy's lead singer and chief music composer, but its driving force is Pete Wentz, the limelight-loving bassist who writes all of the band's lyrics. Married to pop-rock singer Ashlee Simpson, Wentz puts his sardonic stamp all over Fall Out Boy's excellent fifth album. Among a surplus of witty, boisterous rock numbers, the piano ballad "What a Catch, Donnie" stands out with such droll lines as "I've got troubled thoughts and self-esteem to match."
January 2009


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Health Language
Health Language® provides leading healthcare terminology management solutions and professional services that normalize all data within a healthcare organization into standardized code sets such as ICD-10, SNOMED CT® and LOINC®. By establishing a data infrastructure in which disparate information is fully integrated, the advanced Language Engine (LE) and supporting tools enable healthcare providers and payers worldwide to simplify the management and analysis of critical patient, financial and operational information. This, backed by a team of HIM experts that support the integration process, helps hospitals, health systems and other healthcare organizations to overcome industry challenges such as Meaningful Use, ICD-10 and health information exchange.


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SRV799 - Built Environment Integrated Project
Unit details
|2016 unit information
|Enrolment modes:
|Trimester 1: Waterfront (Geelong), Cloud (online)
Trimester 3: Waterfront (Geelong), Cloud (online)
|Credit point(s):
|EFTSL value:
|Cohort rule:
Students enrolled in S700 or S701 must enrol in campus mode
|Unit chair:
Adam Krezel
|Incompatible with:
|Contact hours:
Trimester 1 - Campus: 11 x 2 hour seminars. Cloud (online): Learning experiences are via CloudDeakin.
Trimester 3 - Campus (Intensive): 4 x 1 day seminars per trimester (6 hours per day). Dates will be confirmed on enrolment in this unit. Cloud (online): Learning experiences are via CloudDeakin.
The unit integrates knowledge and skills developed in other units through the resolution of the design of a complex architectural project within the context of international contemporary practice. The unit builds upon the concept of urban ecologies and sustainable urban development as students synthesise social, cultural, environmental, information and economic objectives within a design management process. The unit draws on the theory and practice in the field of design management from the perspective of the various disciplines. Design collaboration methodologies and processes will be introduced to create an authentic learning experience of the key activities of strategic and functional brief development to achieve client requirements. Unique project environments will be presented through various case studies allowing the individual disciplines to explore key contemporary themes of the mega project, collaborative practice, internationalisation and reflexivity from their perspective.
Through a case study approach, the student will develop skills in knowledge and process integration applied to project evaluation and strategic decision making within the context of a collaborative multidisciplinary environment. The process of resolution is undertaken via seminars with trigger guest lecturers from experts in knowledge areas such as: international collaborative practice. Students shall work in online multidisciplinary built environment teams simulating current international distributed teams towards developing high level reflective practice skills in relation to design and construction collaboration to inform and effect action. The focus is on developing design management process abilities through the development and refinement of a strategic and/or functional project brief informed by debate, discourse and critical thinking. The process enables a development of research for project skills including information searching, critique and synthesis.
One individual assignment 50%, one group assignment 50%
Unit Fee Information
All Commonwealth Supported Place (CSP), fee paying undergraduate and pre-2016 commencing students
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2016 commencing International and full fee paying postgraduate domestic students
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Harlow Family Hotels
Displaying 54 Hotels in London
More IHG Hotels in Harlow, United Kingdom
Hotel Indigo London - Paddington
This stylish boutique hotel overlooks a garden only seconds from Paddington Station. A short walk takes you to the beautiful Hyde Park and Kensington Palace Gardens as well as Oxford Street and the West End, full of London's best theatres and restaurants. The traditional exterior leads into an inspirational modern lobby with a glass staircase spiraling up into the indulgent, colorful bedrooms.
4.5 /5 (427 reviews)
12 to 20 London Street, Paddington, London, W2 1HL, United Kingdom
Hotel Reservations : 1 888 465 4329 | Hotel Front Desk : 44-020-77064444
Hotel Indigo London Kensington - Earl's Ct
We're located just 150m from Earl's Court tube station, which makes all of London within easy reach. You can enjoy spacious bedrooms, warm service and all modern facilities, including invigorating spa-inspired rain fall shower, iPod docking station and free Wi-Fi. The Kensington Quarter deli, restaurant and bar, is the perfect place for unwinding for all day dining and leisurely drinks.
4.6 /5 (605 reviews)
34 - 44 Barkston Gardens, London, SW5 0EW, United Kingdom
Hotel Reservations : 1 888 465 4329 | Hotel Front Desk : 44-20-73737851
Staybridge Suites London - Stratford City
The Staybridge Suites is located in the heart of Europe's largest urban shopping mall, Westfield Stratford City, and overlooks the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Enjoy quick and easy access to Canary Wharf, London City Airport, Excel London Exhibition and Conference Centre and the O2 Arena. Enjoy complimentary Wi-Fi access throughout the hotel and breakfast included during your stay.
4.7 /5 (445 reviews)
10b Chestnut Plaza, Westfield Stratford City, London, E20 1GL, United Kingdom
Hotel Reservations : 1 888 465 4329 | Hotel Front Desk : 44-203-3019090
Staybridge Suites London - Vauxhall
The Staybridge Suites London Vauxhall is located within the developing area of Vauxhall and Battersea. Less than 5 minute walk from the hotel is River Thames and Albert Embankment. A stroll along the riverside takes you towards Southbank and Westminster and many restaurants and bars,
4.8 /5 (184 reviews)
100 Vauxhall Walk, London, SE11 5EL, United Kingdom
Hotel Reservations : 1 888 465 4329 | Hotel Front Desk : 44-203-0961555


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Tour more efficiently, break trail easier, and charge harder.
The Voile Switchback X2 Telemark Ski Binding turns a good idea into a great one. Designed with the same free-pivoting, ice-free concept as Voile's original Switchback Binding, the Switchback X2 features a longer toe plate for greater contact with your boot and stiffer cartridge springs for extra control when driving those big powder skis. With all that tech, you'd expect to pay a weight penalty, but Voile Managed to keep it around 3.2 pounds per pair, which makes it the lightest AT tele binder around.
- Steel toe plates are almost 3cm longer than the original Switchaback to provide more contact with your boot and better energy transfer for steep lines
- Separate tour and ski mode enables you to tour with zero heel resistance and then then switch back into ski mode to rip the descent
- Redesigned cartridge springs increase stiffness by 25-percent over the original Switchback
- Enclosed design helps eliminate ice build-up
- Dual-height heel elevators help conserve energy on the up-track by delivering either 65- or 100mm of rise
- Note: not compatible with the Voile Release Kit
Share your thoughts
What do you think of the
Voile Switchback X2 Telemark Ski Binding
? Share a...
Kayla Weiser, Gearhead
They have Pops Approval
- Familiarity: I gave it as a gift but have feedback to share
I got these for my dad as a birthday gift, and with that I won some serious good-daughter points. He mounted them up on a pair of 191 Voile Chargers and he is one happy Dad. He uses them for backcountry, and loves the free pivot. Says that it's super easy to get up the hill, he won't ever go back to something without the free pivot function. Not only does he take them out on serious tours in the Wasatch, he also rallies the resorts with them. He's in a pretty big ski, and says that the energy transfer is top notch. Overall, it sounds like these are a mega win, two thumbs up!
Touring lever broke after one flip
- Familiarity: I returned this product before using it
Didn't get a chance to ski it. I received the binding and was checking out the slick operation of the touring lever and switched it back to ski mode with a loud pop and then nothing. The lever moves back and forth, but the binding is locked in ski mode and the internals are rattling around. I was hoping for more, but this has shaken my confidence. I'll opt for exposed simplicity and ski the AXL.
Voile Switchback X2 is a good compromise
I think this binding is a great compromise for those who want a touch more power but aren't willing to haul the admittedly amazing 22 Designs products around in the backcountry. I can't see much argument for using anything but a Hammerhead if you're a resort-only type, but to each their own and I love seeing the old schoolers getting low with infinitely better technique than me. For those who want to tour and resort, I love this binding. I have the regular switchbacks and these are a subtle improvement (not going to change your world but I can feel a bit more power for sure). I'm currently skiing this binder on a 181 K2 Anti Piste (basically the current Coomback). No complaints at all.
Are you getting more of these in stock. ...
Are you getting more of these in stock. Do I need the x2? I weigh 160 and will mounting them to ski logic pitons for my backcountry ski. I do ski aggressively and just tore off and bent the o1.
Since the Piton isn't that wide of a ski, the X2 should run them no problem. Voile builds a terrific binding, and backs it up with an excellent warranty. I would choose the X2 over the 01 any day. For skis over 110 underfoot, though, I'd choose nothing but the 22 Designs Axl, especially if you like to charge hard and jump off of things.
Why cant the switchback x2s mount up on a ski wider than 110 underfoot?
They can, they just aren't as powerful as a burlier binding for driving a fatter ski.
Good so far
I replaced my Hammerheads with these. They aren't really as powerful, but I end up using better technique because of that. When you start to drop your knee, they're like a Hammerhead in position two. When your heel gets all the way down, its more like position four. All this means is that I drop my knee less in powder and more on groomers, and it all works out great. They seem to engage the bellows on my boot even more than Hammerheads, but they don't seem as stiff. My bellows actually bottom out with these if I drop low enough (which is to say too low). That only happened on my Hammerheads when they were in position 4 or 5, but its not a big deal unless you touch your knees to your topsheets a lot. Touring is way better, they don't weigh any more, they seem pretty durable, and they look cool.


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H-Hour World's Elite interview
We're back with another developer interview, people! This time, our host is David Sears, a true veteran of the industry who previously worked on both the SOCOM and Rainbow Six series. He is now creative director at SOF (Special Operation Forces) Studios, a new development studio working on H-Hour World's Elite, a tactical, team-based military shooter being crowdfunded via Kickstarter (five days left as of today).
Without further ado, here's the result of our chat.
First of all, welcome to Worlds Factory! Please, introduce yourself and your game to our readers.
I'm David Sears, the creative director of H-Hour: World's Elite. Most recently I was creative director for Rainbow Six: Patriots but I'm probably better known for directing the first two SOCOM games. I've been making games professionally for over twenty-two years now. H-Hour is a tactical, military, team-based shooter developed in conjunction with Special Operations forces veterans. The core gameplay is very similar to that of the firt two SOCOM games with greatly expanded support for clans and community.
Let me start by saying that I'm a die-hard fan of tactical shooters, so I'm extremely glad to have this interview and generally to see the genre coming back to life. However, my favorite franchise in the genre has always been Rainbow Six, so after hearing that you worked as a Game Director on Patriots I can't but ask you what happened there. I understand you might be under NDA contract, but can you shed even the tiniest bit of light?
You're right. NDAs are forever. I can say that the vision for the project had support from the top levels of management and the community at large but despite being well planned, something can always happen to derail even a great project. I can't say what that was, unfortunately.
Onto H-Hour. You mentioned that you intend to "push the PC to the limits of its rendering possibility" and that "the game will be visually stunning". That's a pretty strong statement – what kind of engine are you using with H-Hour to make this happen? Also, what do you think of Sony's PS4 and do you believe you'll be able to match PC graphics in the console release?
Yes, it's a strong statement. But that's really the easy part about making this game compared to getting the multiplayer aspects right. Our artists have been doing this a while and until now they've been frustrated by hardware limitations. We have less of that problem with next generation consoles, and the PC will continue to evolve after those consoles are released. I think we'll have remarkable graphics on PS4 and the PC is scalable so if you want to spend more on a tricked out rig, you'll see some improvements graphically there.
We can't announce the engine we're using just yet because we haven't signed the contract for the license. Announcing early would put us at a disadvantage in negotiations. However, we've been working with it a while now and not only does it have a great renderer, but it's generally easily customizable for our needs. And of course people are familiar with it, having seen multiple AAA titles ship with this engine.
You've already said that there will be no regenerating health in H-Hour, which is a relief in the current shooter roster. However, I'm wondering to which extent of realism are you willing to take gameplay – for example, let's say that our player takes a bullet in one leg, will he be penalized in movement for the rest of the match? Also, is there any way to use patch oneself/others or be patched with bandages?
I'll say "no" to that example. Our approach is that even after you take a couple of non-lethal wounds (and you can't take very many) adrenaline keeps you going. We assume that after the round you visit a medic. Rather than slow things down with a limping character, we want to keep character responsiveness high throughout a match. Also, it's fairly expensive to create the design, animations, and code for a good "limp" system, not to mention the tuning. We'd rather put that effort into more maps, modes, characters and so on. Plus the community has been very clear on the subject: they want a return to the style of core gameplay that was so addictive in the early SOCOMs so we're going to stick to that.
You mentioned how the game is a hybrid third person/first person shooter. However, I must admit I'm not the biggest fan of such a solution it creates a conflict where third person users clearly have an advantage in terms of awareness – will you add a server option to limit the game to third person or first person only? Also, will the player's weapon be displayed in first person? That's very important for immersion.
Third person POV definitely gives you an edge in terms of situational awareness. However, the first person view, with its FOV shift is about precision and feeling closer to the enemy target. Both POVs have their strengths and liabilities. Having said that though, we're giving players the option to choose to limit a game they create to first person or third person views if they want.
Another important aspect for tactical shooter gameplay is the inclusion of the prone position. Some games have it, others don't – will we see it in H-Hour?
Prone was a big part of character navigation and player tactics in SOCOM and we're supporting it for H-Hour. Crawling through brush, trash, tall grass—all while feeling concealed—is fun and a lot of players like to be able to do that. So, yes.
Many games, with the power of PC and next-generation hardware, are betting heavily on environment destruction. What kind of physics based interaction will be featured in H-Hour?
I'd say overall this will be used in moderation. There are some major, tactical destruction events that players can trigger but to make sure these always synch properly, we'll focus on getting that right rather than trying to support lots of smaller physics/destruction events. You will not be able to tear down a building with machine guns or grenades—H-Hour is all about the "boots on the ground" experience, not urban renewal. Of course we'll be supporting a lot of aesthetic damage such as chipping, scorching, pocking, cracking, and so in. Since these sorts of visuals are less an influence on tactics we can be generous with them.
I have checked but couldn't find anything on player count. What kind of numbers are you targeting right now for the final release?
Right now we're targeting 8 v 8 players online. The main reason for this is that we know how to create maps and game modes that will absolutely work with that number of players. We do not want to commit to adding more players without taking time to carefully investigate the effects that more players would have on the classic balance that was created in the early SOCOMs. But if the experiments reveal that we can enhance play through adding players without destroying what we've already built, we may do that. Ultimately it's up to the community to tell us how they like it.
As a clan leader, I'm extremely happy to read that you intend to develop specific tools to help the community. I really feel that many recent shooters have dropped the ball on this. You mentioned being able to "issue and accept clan challenges" – does that work with a betting system, like in Killzone 2? Also, is there a working clan matchmaking system, where an entire clan can queue up and find another clan with ease?
You'll be able to issue challenges to other clans, select the clan members to participate, have back-up team members standing by in case someone can't make the match, and the option to invite a neutral third party (or two) to spectate and arbitrate (among other things). Clan leaders will be able to communicate with other clan leaders privately outside of matches and will be able to find one another easily. And of course there will be a clan ladder.
I've read that you intend to launch with six maps and add more via DLC. That certainly seems a good approach given the nature of the project, but – at least for PC – more and more games are supporting modding tools, which majorly extend the longevity of a title. Are you considering the release of modding tools to the community?
That's right. Since we're going through Kickstarter for the funds to pull together the demo, we have to be careful to not over promise. That's why we projected a launch with six maps—but we should have no trouble shipping more than that. It's the same with the launch date itself. Rather than be another Kickstarter project that falls behind, we gave ourselves a generous timeline but hope to release sooner than our initial deadline.
Regarding modding, we don't really need to release tools since the engine itself is quite accessible. At launch we are not intending to fully support user created maps simply because there is so much other stuff to do. But we are not discouraging them, either. After the launch, we'll work on actually supporting that kind of user generated content and rewarding people for creating great maps. We believe that the game is the players game—it's not a hermetically sealed "product" that can't be explored. We want it to spark player's imaginations after all. Having said all that, we have a strong stance against cheaters and exploits, so we don't mean explore the game that way!
Is anything else you would like to tell our readers about H-Hour?
Sure. We often say this is old school gaming for the modern era. But this doesn't mean we're overly hardcore or short on features. What it means is that you can customize your game to be harder or "friendlier" as you see fit, and that most of our features are targeted at the core gameplay and community/clan tools rather than meta-features that don't really reflect to the skills of players.
Our Kickstarter campaign concludes this Saturday at 5:00 PM. It looks like we're going to make our minimum funding target but exceeding that makes more features and content possible in the game early on. Plus we're only offering most of the pledge rewards though Kickstarter. Once the campaign is over, you'll be able to but the game, but you won't be able to get the cool digital rewards. I don't want people that like this kind of game to miss out on the chance to enter on the ground floor.
Thanks for your time.


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Jody's Tooting Dog
January 6, 2014 5:25 AM
Jody Dean Read More
It was late Saturday night, it had been kind of a weird day anyway, and I found myself awake – and recording audio of our pug Max tooting in his sleep.
Chasing dream rabbits, I suppose.
This is the oddest, most inscrutable old man dog ever. Who has every old man idiosyncrasy.
We were watching a movie the other night when he got up and shook head to tail, like dogs do?
It's funny enough to watch his squat little bowling ball body do that, but then he toots at the end of the shake.
I know it's probably not polite to say, but it sounded like he played the scale.


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The town of Windermere is located in southwest of Orange county 14 miles southwest of Orlando, 6 miles southeast of Winter Garden, 2 miles south of Ocoee and approximately 6 miles north of Walt Disney World. Windermere is surrounded by sand bottom lakes. Lake Butler (the largest) is on the west, Lake Down on the east, and Lake Bessie on the southeast. By means of a system of canals, Butler, Down and six other lakes are connected to form what is known as the Butler Chain.
We offer both Homes for sale in Windermere and Windermere Rentals. If you are buying a home, an important question may be; how can I feel certain that the home I have chosen to purchase is priced realistically and that I am receiving the best possible value for my money? Our site and our real agents offer all of the tools and information necessary to help you make the right decision. Windermere real estate foreclosures are at an all-time high throughout the country. Many homeowners are negotiating short-sale options to pay off loans with their lender to avoid foreclosure and likewise, many home buyers and bargain hunters are buying these financially distressed properties at prices below market value.
This new dynamic has without doubt temporarily changed the personality of the Windermere real estate market, but this inventory of foreclosure and short-sale properties will not last forever. These changes from high to low, although painful at times, remind us that real estate prices are cyclical and will always remain a consistent long-term investment.
Windermere Rentals
Another option is to rent for a period of time before buying. Renting will allow you to test the area and give you time to make a decision. Seasonal rental are also a great option for vacationing. Whether you're planning a vacation or a long-term stay, we can help you find the right Florida rental. We have the tools to search for Florida vacation rentals, Florida annual rentals, and Florida real estate agents. If you're interested in renting a home or renting a condo in Florida, we can help. Windermere Rentals.
At Prudential Florida Realty, our Windermere real estate agents have been helping home buyers and sellers make sense of the Windermere housing market for a long time, so we are accustomed to using past expertise to read and understand current trends and give informed advice to our clients.
Buy Homes in Windermere
We have the resources to help you make an informed decision when deciding to buy or sell a home. Our in-house mortgage company can give you several excellent loan programs to choose from and give you exact principal and interest payment information on each. Our experienced sales associates can help you shop for homeowner's insurance and receive quotes as you are shopping for homes. They can also help you estimate your property taxes and any possible increases due to a reassessment when you make a purchase. Finally, our in-house title company can give you an accurate estimate of the closing costs, escrow accounts, and pre-paid items you can expect at your closing.
Refine your real estate search in Windermere, FL by price, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, property type (including townhomes, condominiums and single-family homes), and more. Use our interactive Windermere home price map to view real estate activity across Windermere ZIP codes and in other cities nearby Windermere. See local real estate trends, and compare your home to homes for sale in Windermere. View our real estate market snapshot to see average listing prices, sale prices and other local information.
For more Information about Windermere real estate, including statistics and more information about Windermere's neighborhoods, CLICK HERE


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Mark Reardon: Mayor Francis Slay & Police Chief Sam Dotson
July 11, 2013 6:26 PM
Mark Reardon Read More
Sue McNamara has a great story about the Joshua Chamberlain Society and United States Marine Corp. Corporal Justin McLoud.
The Mark Reardon Show
Illinois Congressman Rodney Davis discusses immigration reform and the farm bill.
The Mark Reardon Show
Mehlville Superintendent, Dr. Eric Knost responds to Dr. Spurgeon's interview with Charlie Brennan from earlier this morning.
The Mark Reardon Show
St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and Police Chief Sam Dotson discuss the investigation from this morning where more than 150 were charged in an undercover ATF operation in St. Louis.
The Mark Reardon Show


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The financial awards below have different eligibility criteria, please read the
award details carefully and ensure you meet the conditions before application. Only
prospective or current Lancaster University students are eligible to apply for awards
Back to ALL awards page
These range from £25 to £150 per person.
Vacation grants are available to Pendle students (individuals or groups) who are planning to travel abroad. Grants may be awarded to those undertaking a project that will broaden the mind and provide the opportunity to experience something worthwhile and different, and preference will be given to projects which will benefit others. Grants are not usually awarded for travel undertaken as part of a degree scheme. A condition of the grant is that you provide a report about your trip.
To apply for your vacation grant, please collect a form from Jill Harpley, College Administrator in the College Office. This should be completed and returned to Jill with a letter of application addressed to Dr Nigel Watson, Assistant Senior Advisor, Pendle College before the end of WEEK 9.
Decisions will be made by week 10 and applicants notified before the end of term.
This page is also accessible from: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/funding.
Further Postgraduate Awards are listed at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/pgfunding.
Departments can add an award by completing an
award form and emailing it to the
Student Finance Manager. For University policy relating to the provision
of advice and information on financial awards to students please see section 7 of
the University's
Office of Fair Access (OFFA) agreement.
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MSE - Top students accounts
UK Undergraduate scholarships and bursaries - FAQ's
Direct.Gov - UK Undergraduate Student Funding Calculator
Student Services financial award database
Nominate University Direct Credit Account
2009 Funding Summary
2010 Funding Summary
University Staff


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V Festival Tickets Selling at Record Speed
17 March 2003
The 8th annual V Festival takes place in Weston Park, Staffs and Hylands Park, Chelmsford on 16th & 17th August 2003, with headliners Coldplay and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Festival Director, Bob Angus, says:
"We were always fully confident that tickets would sell quickly, as we have great headliners in Coldplay and Red Hot Chili Peppers and a hugely impressive support line-up with the likes of Foo Fighters, David Gray and Queens Of The Stoneage. We are very pleased to have beaten our previous sales records."
Tickets are available now, priced at; £42.50 for a one-day pass; £75.00 for a weekend pass; £90.00 for a weekend pass with camping; £30.00 for camper van area with a weekend camping ticket, exclusive of booking fee, and are available to buy here.
Please support Virtual Festivals by buying your tickets through us. Unlike other websites, we do not mark up our prices, so you won't get them any cheaper by going direct, but the commission we receive helps us pay the bills.