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Review: Them
One of the least understood movie monsters is the pronoun.2.0
One of the least understood movie monsters is the pronoun. As killing machines they often work in unfathomable ways (now you don't see me, now you still don't!), though they may also constitute a metaphorical outrage. For at least a good portion of its lean running time, David Moreau and Xavier Palud's Them is effective as an unpretentious rush into the unknown. After the plural personal pronoun kills a mother and daughter by the side of a Romanian road, it's off to rural Bucharest to torment Clem (Olivia Bonamy), a schoolteacher, and her boyfriend Lucas (Michaël Cohen). The couple's cavernous, sparsely furnished manse is the backdrop for a floorboards-creaking, doors-slamming chase sequence that is successful in spite of the fact that it leaves you with the bizarre impression that the flashlight-wielding pronoun may be a parkour dancer with a velociraptor voice box. Clem and Lucas more or less do everything wrong, but that's forgivable given the generally inexplicable nature of their situation, though things quickly get sketchy when the pursuit transitions to the forest outside their renter's paradise. (Spoilers ahead.) After Lucas dispatches a hooded figure after it bizarrely runs out of steam, he travels into a subterranean hovel where he discovers some teenage nut forcing Clem to…huff glue? At last, Children Underground reimagined as a horror film! Except not. Though we should probably be thankful that these children aren't sold to us as representations of the Dark Soul of Europe, the filmmakers don't follow through on the explanation that these fucktards are murdering people simply for fun. The unintentional effect of Moreau and Palud's flippancy is that their wind-up toy too easily reveals its hand as a Hollywood calling card.
Cast: Olivia Bonamy, Michaël Cohen, Adriana Moca, Maria Roman, Camelia Maxim, Alexandru Boghiu, Emanuel Stefanuc, Horia Ioan, Stefan Cornic, George Iulian Director: David Moreau, Xavier Palud Screenwriter: David Moreau, Xavier Palud Distributor: Dark Sky Films Running Time: 74 min Rating: NR Year: 2006 Buy: Video
Review: Wild Rose Both Honors and Upends the Beats of the Star-Is-Born Story
Tom Harper's film empathetically probes the growing pains of self-improvement.3
At the start of director Tom Harper's Wild Rose, Rose-Lynn (Jessie Buckley) puts on her white leather fringe jacket and matching cowboy boots before strutting out of the Glasgow prison where she's just finished serving a one-year stint on a drug-related charge. The 23-year-old hits the ground running upon her release, immediately resuming the pursuit of her lifelong dream of crossing the Atlantic to become a country singer in Nashville. In no small part due to Buckley's dynamic voice and emotionally charged performance, it's obvious that Rose-Lynn has all the charisma, spunk, and talent it takes to become a star. Pity, then, that the young woman's pursuit of fame is always at risk of being stymied by her impulsiveness. As her mother, Marion (Julie Walters), is quick to remind her, she also has two young children for whom, whether she likes it or not, she's still responsible.
As soon as Rose-Lynn starts invigorating local crowds with her performances, Wild Rose seems ripe for setting her on a predictable trajectory toward fame. Instead, the film turns its focus to the tensions that arise from Rose-Lynn's attempts to balance the hefty demands of the two seemingly incompatible worlds of a professional singer and a single mother—not to mention the incongruousness of being a country musician in Glasgow. In the end, Wild Rose is less concerned with whether or not Rose-Lynn will "make it" than it is with discreetly observing how this gifted spitfire tackles the moral and emotional challenges she faces.
As Rose-Lynn fights to gain traction in her career, Wild Rose empathetically probes the growing pains of self-improvement. In a scene where Rose-Lynn, who's supposedly just re-established her commitment to being a present mother, pawns her kids off on various friends and family over the course of a week so she can practice for an important gig, one is given a sense not just of the children's anger and disappointment, but of the emotional toll that Rose-Lynn's virtual double life is taking on her. In portraying such conundrums, the filmmakers resist the temptation to moralize or presuppose that she must choose between music and her kids and, instead, merely examine the harsh realities that come from her desiring both.
Wild Rose moves beyond the struggles of Rose-Lynn's daily grind with an array of captivating musical numbers that illustrate her incredible stage presence and joy she experiences whenever she's performing. After she takes up a job as a housekeeper for an upper-middle class family to help pay the bills, a cleverly shot sequence captures the all-consuming nature of her love for singing. Thinking she's alone in the house, Rose-Lynn begins to sing along to the music wafting through her headphones, and while she carelessly vacuums, the camera pans around the room in a simple but expressive shot that reveals various musicians from an imaginary backing band tucked away in the background, playing alongside her.
Ironically, it's through this performance, rather than any that she gives in clubs around town, that Rose-Lynn finds a true believer in her talent, in the form of her kind-hearted boss, Susannah (Sophie Okonedo). In an all-too-tidy bit of wish fulfillment, Susannah almost immediately becomes Rose-Lynn's benefactor, going out of her way to jump start the musician's career and provide the unqualified support and encouragement she craves from her mother. But this dash of sunshine isn't quite the panacea it first appears to be, and similar to Rose-Lynn's relationship with Marion, this newfound friendship eventually develops into something more conflicted and complicated than its simplistic origin initially might suggest.
The same could be said of much of Wild Rose, which takes on certain clichés of the traditional star-is-born story but often uses them to upend audience expectations. The skeleton of Nicole Taylor's screenplay may be quite familiar, but the additional elements of single motherhood, class disparity, and geographical dislocation (Rose-Lynn firmly believes she was meant to be born in America) lend the proceedings a certain unpredictability that's very much in tune with the gutsy woman at the film's center. As its title suggests, Harper's film has a bit of outlaw in its blood, and it allows Rose-Lynn's myriad imperfections to shine just as brightly as her talent. And that certainly makes her a more textured, authentic character, defined not by a clear-cut transformative arc but her constant state of flux.
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Julie Walters, Sophie Okenodo, Maureen Carr, James Harkness, Adam Mitchell, Daisy Littlefield, Jamie Sives, Craig Parkinson, Bob Harris, Doreen McGillivray Director: Tom Harper Screenwriter: Nicole Taylor Distributor: Neon Running Time: 101 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
The true shock of Rolling Thunder Revue is in how good, how alive, Dylan is on stage.3
Early in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, Bob Dylan reflects on the rotating tour he embarked on in 1975 with Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Ronnie Hawkins, Allen Ginsberg, and other legends. The tour was ostensibly intended to commemorate the bicentennial of the United States, but one may assume after watching this quasi-documentary that it was really about recharging Dylan's creative battery a few years after his tour with the Band, which Scorsese filmed for 1978's The Last Waltz. When asked about the tour here, Dylan looks away from the camera, uttering the cryptic pseudo-profundities that have been his brand for decades, his voice as mythically raspy as ever. Then, breaking character, he says the tour meant nothing and that he barely remembers it. Dylan insists that the Rolling Thunder Revue was so long ago that it was before he was born.
Anyone familiar with Dylan will recognize that last sentiment as only partially figurative, as this is an artist who has been born again many times, who arguably initiated the now routine ritual of superstar reinvention. The ultimate concept of "Bob Dylan," after all, is that there's no ultimate concept, as he has morphed, throughout his career, from folk icon to electric rocker to social justice crusader to burn-out to settled elder statesmen. Nevertheless, Dylan's violation here of the reverential tone that's expected of this sort of autumnal documentary comes as something of a gleeful shock to the system, while affirming the legend's propensity for self-conscious pranks. And this moment lingers over Rolling Thunder Revue, which is informed with a low-thrumming snideness that's uncharacteristic of Scorsese's work.
The film appears to be split between awe and contempt. The former perspective innately belongs to Scorsese, our poet laureate of cinematic rock n' roll, who's rendered the rockers of his generation with the same conflicted adulation that he's extended to gangsters. Meanwhile, the latter attitude belongs to Dylan, who seems ready to admit that the countercultural revolution didn't amount to much beyond various statements of aesthetic. This war of temperaments yields a fascinating mixed bag. Much of Rolling Thunder Revue is composed of footage shot at the tour by cinematographers David Myers, Howard Alk, Paul Goldsmith, and Michael Levine, who have a collective eye that's uncannily in sync with Scorsese's own feverishly expressionistic sensibility. Watching this film, it's easy to forget that Scorsese wasn't involved in the production of this footage, as he was with other concert films.
The footage of the Rolling Thunder Revue has a wandering, druggy intensity, with explosively lurid colors and smoky jam sessions that are occasionally punctuated with a sharp close-up that allows an icon to reveal an unexpected element of their persona. Initially, we see Dylan, Ginsberg, and Baez hanging out in clubs, seemingly patching the Rolling Thunder idea together in between beer and joints and poetry. In a hypnotic image, Dylan and Patti Smith, framed through bars that suggest a prison, discuss the mythology of Superman, with Smith suggesting that the character could crush coal into a diamond. The two artists are clearly playing the role of flake pop-cultural shamans, but they're also revealing the obsession with power and influence that drives performers of all kinds, including flower-child liberals.
Contextualized by Scorsese as a kind of narrator and presiding god, Ginsberg speaks near the end of the documentary of the fragments we've just seen and which we should assemble to make sense of them—a process that mirrors Dylan's obsession with reinvention and ownership of his audience's perception of him. Ginsberg's preoccupation with fragments is reflected in his style of prose, with the beat style of reading poems in a way that emphasizes the isolation of each word, and Rolling Thunder Revue is assembled in such a way as to underscore the similarity between Ginsberg's style and that of Dylan, Baez, and the other musicians.
These artists are all occupied with totems, with iconography that suggests found art, which they assemble into new arts. When Dylan describes the gorgeous and intimidating violinist Scarlett Rivera, who played with him on this tour and is prominently featured on his brilliant 1976 album Desire, he speaks of the objects he remembers her having, such as trunks and swords. (She's billed in the film's credits as the Queen of Swords.) Of course, Dylan is obsessed with bric-a-brac, painting himself in white makeup and wearing a kind of outlaw wardrobe, which is playfully linked here to both kabuki and the band KISS.
Even the title of the tour suggests a kind of multi-purposed phrasing as found art. Operation Rolling Thunder, we're reminded, is the code name for Richard Nixon's bombing campaign in North Vietnam, though it's also the name of a Native American chief whom Dylan honors while on the tour. This duality is almost too neat, reflecting America's genocidal tendencies as well as its appropriation of its native cultures. But one is intentionally inclined, by Dylan as well as by Scorsese, to wonder: So what? Aren't these musicians just more earnest and self-righteous kinds of appropriators? After all, they live in their own world, going from one cavernous town hall to the next, enjoying drugs, sex and adulation, while America is consumed with Nixon's resignation and the end of the war in Vietnam.
Scorsese culls various images together to offer a startlingly intense vision of America as place that, to paraphrase Dylan, essentially believes in nothing, following one demoralizing crisis after another. Rolling Thunder Revue gradually collapses, mutating from a freeform document of the concert into a series of essays and anecdotes, such as on the origin of Dylan's Rubin Carter tribute "Hurricane." The film attains a shaggy shapelessness that suggests the haze of travel, as Dylan and his cohorts push on, delving deeper into their micro worlds.
The true shock of Rolling Thunder Revue, however, is in how good, how alive, Dylan is on stage. All of the make-up and masks he wears—other allusions to reinvention, to the essential, simultaneously nourishing and damaging textures of pop culture—seem to liberate him. On this tour, Dylan performs quite a bit of material from Desire, and his singing is clear and urgent and stunningly divorced of his ironic parlor games; he's connecting with these songs, using the revue concept to channel his canniest and most sincere instincts as an actor and storyteller. And Scorsese frequently contrasts this full-throttle Dylan with the aloof sex symbol who lingers at backstage parties—a pose that's startled by Joni Mitchell and Baez, two of the rare people who appear to be capable of humbling the maestro.
There's enough poetry here, in the music and in the artists' descriptions of one another, to fill 10 movies. (Dylan on Ronnie Hawkins: "He looked like a shitkicker, but he spoke with the wisdom of a sage.") So it's a shame that the film gets bogged down in fictional gimmickry. There's a tone-deaf cameo by Sharon Stone, who pretends to be a young Rolling Thunder groupie, and by Michael Murphy, who reprises his politician role from Robert Altman's Tanner series, which is perhaps intended to complement another Altman cross-pollination: the presence of Ronee Blakely, who sang back-up on this tour and appeared in Nashville. Worst of all, Martin von Haselberg appears as the filmmaker who supposedly shot the footage we're seeing, pointlessly obscuring the efforts of real people with a Euro-snob stereotype.
These sorts of satirical interludes are probably meant to further embody Dylan's own discomfort with the import associated with his legacy (an import he never fails to profit from), and further muddy the film's already ambiguous and diaphanous grasp of "reality." But these themes have already been wrestled by Scorsese and the original cinematographers onto the screen. Dylan's pranks can be tedious, as his astonishing Rolling Thunder performances require no window dressing. On stage, Dylan accesses the brutal, beautiful heart of America.
Director: Martin Scorsese Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 142 min Rating: TV-MA Year: 2019
Review: Tim Story's Shaft Reboot Is a Weirdly Regressive Family Affair
Ultimately, the only truly retro thing about this weirdly reactionary potboiler is its politics.1
Director Tim Story's Shaft certainly makes no effort to disguise its ignorance and prejudice, as it's chockablock with racist stereotypes, sexist pseudo-wisdom, and tone-deaf jokes picking on gay and trans people. The screenplay by Kenya Barris and Alex Barnow even features a plot that bizarrely and nonsensically treats legitimate concerns about the F.B.I.'s Islamophobic practices as some ginned-up media sideshow. Where both Gordon Parks's gritty 1971 original and John Singleton's slick 2000 sequel injected a measure of social conscience into their respective tales of swaggering black men dishing out vigilante justice, this film is nothing more than a tired buddy-cop comedy in blaxploitation drag.
Samuel L. Jackson revives his role as the tough-talking ex-cop John Shaft from Singleton's film, only now he's teamed up with his estranged son, JJ (Jessie T. Usher), an M.I.T.-trained cybersecurity analyst for the F.B.I. who, after not having seen his father in nearly 25 years, suddenly reaches out to him for help in investigating the mysterious death of a childhood best friend, Karim (Avan Jogia). The two eventually join forces with JJ's great uncle, the O.G. John Shaft Sr. (Richard Roundtree), completing a multi-generational family reunion.
Shaft likes guns and confrontation, while JJ prefers spycams and hacking, but despite their differences in approach, they work together effortlessly in torturing Mexican drug lords, prying into the nefarious dealings of a Muslim organization, and engaging in some indifferently directed shootouts that are scored to waka-chicka funk music in a desperate attempt to lend the film's textureless visuals a semblance of '70s-ish stylistic vision. As for the jokes about the lothario Shaft and his nebbish offspring, they practically write themselves. Shaft thinks JJ's Gap-slacks-and-coconut-water lifestyle means he's gay, and so he interrogates his son about his love for the ladies, while JJ is offended by his dad's regressive views, such as "Women want a man to be a man." But as every joke is targeted at JJ's awkwardness and effeminacy, the film simply gives license to Shaft's anachronistic foibles.
The film is strangely committed to proving Shaft right about everything. His use of violence and intimidation to get what he wants always works, as does his advice on women no matter how piggish it may be. Shaft avoids ever having to answer for the fact that he abandoned JJ as a baby, and, in a ridiculous narrative sleight of hand, the film even tries to absolve Jackson's rogue-ish P.I. of any parental guilt by suggesting the man was always deeply motivated by the urge to protect his son. How? Because he sent condoms and porno mags to JJ on his birthdays.
Unsurprisingly, JJ eventually adopts the trappings of his forebears, walking around with a newfound swagger in in his family's trademark turtleneck-and-leather-trench-coat combo. Story seems to think this transformation into a Shaft represents the ultimate in retro cool, but ultimately, the only truly retro thing about this weirdly reactionary potboiler is its politics.
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Jessie Usher, Richard Roundtree, Alexandra Shipp, Regina Hall, Avan Jogia, Method Man, Matt Lauria, Robbie Jones, Lauren Vélez Director: Tim Story Screenwriter: Kenya Barris, Alex Barnow Distributor: Warner Bros. Running Time: 111 min Rating: R Year: 2019
All 21 Pixar Movies, Ranked from Worst to Best
Upon the release of Pixar's Toy Story 4, we're counting down the animation studio's 21 films, from worst to best.
Among the familiar elements on display throughout Josh Cooley's Toy Story 4 is the abandoned and resentful toy as a villain who holds the heroes hostage, which easily invites comparison to Lee Unkrich's brilliant Toy Story 3. It's a comparison that doesn't favor the new film, which isn't as impactful in terms of story or image. Cooley's direction is fluid, seamlessly interweaving the fun escapades and the earnest emotions, but it lacks the visual power of the prior film. There's no equivalent to the moment in Toy Story 3 when, headed into a blazing incinerator, Woody and his friends silently grasp hands, taking comfort in one another as they face their ends head-on. On the occasion of the film's release, join us in revisiting the Pixar canon, ranked from worst to best. Pat Brown
21. Cars 2 (2011)
The effect of the Toy Story films is practically primal. They appeal to anyone who's ever cared about a toy—one they outgrew, gave away, or painfully left behind somewhere. These films, with scant manipulation and much visual and comic invention, thrive on giving toys a conscience and imagining what adventures they have when we turn our backs to them. Conversely, the effect of Cars and its infinitely worse sequel, toons about dudes-as-cars not quite coping with their enormous egos and their contentious bromances, is entirely craven in the way it humorlessly, unimaginatively, and uncritically enshrines the sort of capitalist-driven desires Pixar's youngest target audience is unable to relate to. Unless, that is, they had a douchebag older brother in the family who spent most of his childhood speaking in funny accents and hoarding his piggy-bank money to buy his first hot rod. Ed Gonzalez
20. Cars (2006)
Maybe it's my general aversion to Nascar, or anything chiefly targeted at below-the-line states. Maybe it's that Larry the Cable Guy's Mater is the Jar Jar Binks of animated film. Or maybe it's just that a routinely plotted movie about talking cars is miles beneath Pixar's proven level of ingenuity, not to mention artistry (okay, we'll give those handsome heartland vistas a pass). Whatever the coffin nail, Cars, if not its utterly needless sequel, is thus far the tepid, petroleum-burning nadir of the Pixar brand, the first of the studio's films to feel like it's not just catering, but kowtowing, to a specific demographic. Having undeservedly spawned more merchandising than a movie that's literally about toys, Cars's cold commercialism can still be felt today, with a just-launched theme park at Disneyland. And while CG people are hardly needed to give a Pixar film humanity, it's perhaps telling that this, one of the animation house's few fully anthropomorphic efforts, is also its least humane. R. Kurt Osenlund
19. The Good Dinosaur (2015)
The Good Dinosaur has poignant moments, particularly when a human boy teaches Arlo, the titular protagonist, how to swim in a river, and there are funny allusions to how pitiless animals in the wild can be. But the film abounds in routine, featherweight episodes that allow the hero to predictably prove his salt to his family, resembling a cross between City Slickers and Finding Nemo. There's barely a villain, little ambiguity, and essentially no stakes. There isn't much of a hero either. Arlo is a collection of insecurities that have been calculatedly assembled so as to teach children the usual lessons about bravery, loyalty, and self-sufficiency. The Good Dinosaur is the sort of bland holiday time-killer that exhausted parents might describe as "cute" as a way of evading their indifference to it. Children might not settle for it either, and one shouldn't encourage them to. Chuck Bowen
18. Monsters University (2013)
It's perfectly fair to walk into Monsters University with a wince, wondering what Toy Story 3 hath wrought, and lamenting the fact that even Pixar has fallen into Hollywood's post-recession safe zone of sequel mania and brand identification. What's ostensibly worse, Monsters University jumps on the prequel, origin-story bandwagon, suggesting our sacred CGI dream machine has even been touched by—gulp—the superhero phenomenon. But, while admittedly low on the Pixar totem pole, Monsters University proves a vibrant and compassionate precursor to Monsters, Inc., the kid-friendly film that, to boot, helped to quell bedroom fears. Tracing Mike and Sulley's paths from ill-matched peers to super scarers, MU boasts Pixar's trademark attention to detail (right down to abstract modern sculptures on the quad), and it manages to bring freshness to the underdog tale, which is next to impossible these days. Osenlund
17. Cars 3 (2017)
Cars 3 is content to explore the end of Lightning McQueen's (Owen Wilson) career with a series of pre-packaged sports-film clichés—an old dog trying to learn new tricks, struggling with a sport that seems to have passed him by, and facing, for the first time in his career, a sense of vulnerability. The template turns out to be a natural fit for the Cars universe, organically integrating racing into the fabric of the film and rendering it with a visceral sense of speed, excitement, and struggle. Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo) is a welcome addition, a plucky foil to McQueen who's also a three-dimensional presence in her own right, much more richly developed than one-joke characters like Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) and Luigi (Tony Shalhoub). Cruz's presence also allows the filmmakers to bring some social conscience to this sometimes backward-looking franchise, exploring the discouraging pressures placed on young female athletes while also nodding toward the historical exclusion of women and racial minorities from racing. Watson
Review: Toy Story 4, Though Moving, Sees a Series Resting on Its Plastic Laurels
The film seamlessly interweaves fun escapades and earnest emotions, but it lacks the visual power of its predecessor.3
It's probably uncontroversial to claim that Toy Story's Woody (Tom Hanks), a flawed leader whose genuine concern for his compatriots intermingles with a narcissistic streak that can get him and his fellow toys into trouble, is one of the great characters in the history of cinema. That this animate, outdated cowboy toy continues to feel just as compelling and just as layered and relatable four entries into this series is a major achievement, and speaks not only to the dedication of his creators, but also to the strength of his original conceptualization. While other Pixar sequels have run their concepts and characters into the ground, or cheapened them for laughs, the Toy Story sequels have remained true to Woody, even deepening his character by finding new existential crises to throw him into.
Toy Story 4, though, finds the series suffering from brand fatigue. While prior entries put new spins on the fear of obsolescence that drove Woody in the original Toy Story, this film is a compendium of elements from its predecessors. We've already witnessed Woody desperately try to regain the love of a child, intentionally become a "lost toy" in order to chase down a missing friend, escape from monstrous (but probably just misunderstood) toys, and face the temptation of a new life outside of a child's toy box. That all of these moments recur in Toy Story 4 is one reason the film doesn't quite pack the emotional weight of its precursors.
Gifted to a new, preschool-age child, Bonnie, at the end of the last film, Woody opens Toy Story 4 having fallen from his treasured position as the favorite toy. Your typical preschool girl, after all, has little interest in a cowboy toy from "the late '50s, I think," as Woody recounts his own vague origins. Wistful for his days with Andy, his previous owner, Woody tries to insert himself into Bonnie's (now voiced by Madeleine McGraw) life by sneaking into her backpack on the first day of kindergarten. And it's there that he witnesses her crafting her new beloved toy: a spork with googly eyes and pipe-cleaner arms she calls Forky (Tony Hale).
Forky is a terrible toy insofar as he has no desire to be a toy at all; a very funny recurring gag early in Josh Cooley's film sees the toy repeatedly trying to throw himself in the trash, where he feels that he belongs. Woody gloms onto Forky, partially out of genuine concern for his and Bonnie's well-being, and partially as a way of maintaining a connection to the little girl. And when Forky goes missing during a family vacation, Woody ventures out on his own to retrieve the haphazardly assembled toy and return him to the family RV.
Forky is as familiar as the other toys that populate the Toy Story universe: Many children have made small avatars of themselves out of popsicle sticks and plastic bits and invested far too much emotion in it. As a character, Forky doesn't hold much all that much water, his development from trash to toy more a gimmick than a fully textured character arc. Wisely, though, Toy Story 4 damsels Forky, so to speak, as Woody must engineer a way to rescue him from the clutches of a malicious talking baby doll named Gaby (Christina Hendricks).
Gaby and her army of unsettling, limp-limbed ventriloquist dummies rule over an antique shop that Woody and Forky pass through on their way back to the RV park. A lonely toy discarded decades earlier because of a defective voicebox, Gaby kidnaps Forky to extort from Woody a part of his drawstring-powered sound mechanism. To break into the cabinet where Gaby is holding the sentient spork, Woody must assemble a team of allies that includes Bo Peep (Annie Potts), whom he finds living on her own in the RV park as a lost toy, and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen). Woody and Bo Peep rekindle their (G-rated) feelings for each other as they recruit the daredevil action figure Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves) and the plush carnival-prize dolls Bunny and Ducky (Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele) to help retrieve Forky.
Among the familiar elements here is the abandoned and resentful toy as a villain who holds the heroes hostage, which easily invites comparison to Lee Unkrich's brilliant Toy Story 3. It's a comparison that doesn't favor the new film, which isn't as impactful in terms of story or image. Cooley's direction is fluid, seamlessly interweaving the fun escapades and the earnest emotions, but it lacks the visual power of the prior film. There's no equivalent to the moment in Toy Story 3 when, headed into a blazing incinerator, Woody and his friends silently grasp hands, taking comfort in one another as they face their ends head-on.
So, as well-told and emotionally effective as Toy Story 4 is, it's difficult not to believe the third film would have functioned better as a send-off to these beloved characters. In fact, Toy Story 3 might as well have been a send-off for everybody but Woody, as the new and potentially final entry relegates the traditional supporting cast of the Toy Story films—Rex (Wallace Shawn), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Jesse (Joan Cusack), Slinky Dog (Blake Clark)—to the background. Even Buzz is reduced to dopey comic relief, pressing the buttons on his chest to activate the pre-recorded messages he now misunderstands as his "inner voice." Toy Story 4 is very much a Woody story. His gradual acceptance of his new position in life and his reconnection with Bo Peep are moving, and it's still remarkable how much Pixar can make us identify with a toy. But for the first time, a Toy Story film feels a bit like it's resting on its plastic laurels.
Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Tony Hale, Christina Hendricks, Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Annie Potts, Keanu Reeves, Jay Hernandez, Wallace Shawn, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Jeff Garlin, Laurie Metcalf, John Ratzenberger Director: Josh Cooley Screenwriter: Andrew Stanton, Stephany Folsom Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Running Time: 100 min Rating: G Year: 2019
Review: Men in Black International Struggles to Find Intelligent Life
The film wastes its charismatic leads in a parade of wacky CG creations whose occasional novelty is drowned out by its incessance.1.5
Marvel has had such success staging comic-action team-ups in a variegated and totally incoherent alien world that now would seem to be an ideal time to resurrect the Men in Black series. F. Gary Gray's Men in Black International even reunites two of the stars of Taika Waititi's funny and colorful Thor Ragnarok. In that film, Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson trade barbs and butt heads as, respectively, the daftly optimistic Thor and the despondent alcoholic Valkyrie, a combative relationship that seems ideally suited for Men in Black's brand of buddy-cop action comedy. Trade Thor's hammer for one of the Men in Black organization's memory-erasing neuralyzers and the film would almost write itself.
Men in Black International, though, fails to recapture the spark of either Hemsworth and Thompson's witty dynamic in Thor Ragnarok or of the Men in Black series's original pairing of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Thompson plays Agent M, a rookie at the MiB who stumbles into an intergalactic political conspiracy when she imposes herself on Agent H's (Hemsworth) mission to safeguard an extraterrestrial prince named Vungus. Agent H is on a self-destructive hedonistic streak after a traumatic battle in which he and the head of the MiB London branch, High T (Liam Neeson), defeated an extraterrestrial scourge "with nothing but their wits and their Series-7 De-atomizers." Due to his ostentatiously casual treatment of the mission, Agent H fails to recognize an impending threat, and Vungus ends up dead. In his last moments, the hoodie-clad, lizard-like alien prince hands Agent M a magical whatsit for safekeeping, a mysterious crystalline object that nefarious alien forces are out to procure.
So, as usual for the Men in Black series, the plot hinges on an arcane object of power that motivates the main characters' journey into hidden pockets of the world where every weirdo is an alien and every bodega or bazaar is a façade for a storehouse of hyper-advanced technology. Behind the wall of a Marrakesh pawnshop, Agents H and M discover a colony of pint-sized alien workers and adopt one of them (Kumail Nanjiani) as their de facto third partner in their attempt to keep the whatsit—which turns out to expand into a gun powered by a miniaturized sun—from falling into the wrong hands. Dubbed "Pawny" by Agent M, the tiny alien travels in the breast pocket of her suit and pops out regularly to make quips that are mostly tepid.
Also after the whatsit-cum-MacGuffin is a pair of malicious alien twins (Larry and Laurent Bourgeois) who occasionally become smoke monsters and melt people as they chase Agents H and M and Pawny across the globe. From London to Marrakesh, from the Sahara to Naples, and from there to Paris, the trio's quest earns the "international" in the film's title, but as the film jumps from one CG-infused setting to another, a personal journey for its principal characters never quite emerges. Sure, Agent M is driven and brilliant, and Agent H is indolent and reckless, but these opposing qualities never lead to the conflict that might invest us in the development of the characters' relationship, romantic or otherwise. From the beginning, the pair are generally fine with one another, the individualist veteran Agent H breaking down and letting the overeager rookie join him after about four seconds of cajoling.
From there, there's not much for the two to resolve, as the dynamic between the characters is woefully anodyne. Agent M is initially drawn to Agent H in part because he possesses Hemsworth's good looks, but Men in Black International never commits to a flirtatious tone, and never figures out how to apply a buddy-cop schema designed for a homosocial universe to this cross-gender pairing. The film wastes its charismatic leads in a parade of wacky CG creations whose occasional novelty is drowned out by its incessance.
The film's pacing also plays a part in diminishing one's investment in the principal characters. In its first act, the film feels appropriately zippy, but soon thereafter it becomes a rushed mess, hardly stopping to let the viewer or its characters breathe. On the rare occasion when Men in Black International slows down long enough to get some repartee between its characters rolling, the scenes feel oddly truncated. At one point, the film smash-cuts to Agents H and M stranded in the Sahara Desert with a broken hover bike, with the two bickering over…something. It's just one of several scenes, including and especially the film's absurdly rushed climax, that are inadequately set up, leaving one with the impression that there are missing pieces. But perhaps that's fitting, as watching this film is a bit like being neuralyzed.
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, Rebecca Ferguson, Kumail Nanjiani, Rafe Spall, Laurent Bourgeois, Larry Bourgeois, Kayvan Novak Director: F. Gary Gray Screenwriter: Matt Holloway, Art Marcum Distributor: Columbia Pictures Running Time: 114 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019
Review: The Weepie American Woman Is Elevated by Strong Performances
The film is more interested in how people respond to extreme emotional crises than to everyday life.2.5
If you go into Jake Scott's American Woman believing that family is everything, that mothers possess untold strength, and that the human spirit is indestructible, the film will helpfully reaffirm your preconceptions. This is a film about Rust Belt Pennsylvania that isn't particularly invested in the milieu of the working-class issues except as it forms a backdrop for drama, and one that's much more interested in how people respond to extreme emotional crises than to everyday life. Its sensibility is undeniably middle of the road, certainly closer to that of a weepie melodrama than that of a social-realist portrait.
Still, American Woman is elevated by its performances, especially Sienna Miller's as Deb. Miller lends credibility to a character that in other hands might seem like a caricature of the white underclass. The peroxide-blond Deb is brash and loud—an Erin Brokovich without a social mission—but Miller doesn't let Deb's theatrics define her, conveying the sense of a person behind the cheap fashion and emotional outbursts. As familiar as the character of the gritty, misunderstood working-class woman is, it's hard to imagine anybody but Miller, who also nails Deb's Eastern Pennsylvania accent, carrying this film.
A young mother whose 16-year-old daughter, Bridget (Sky Ferreira), goes missing one night in the early aughts, Deb is left to care for her infant grandson, Jesse (Aidan McGraw), and American Woman follows her as she rebuilds her life—and despite the new, perpetual substratum of grief and the numerous additional obstacles that she faces as a single, undereducated woman in small-town Pennsylvania. These obstacles most often appear in the form of the less-than-upstanding men in her life, but also in Deb's relations with her sister (Christina Hendricks), who lives across the street, and her mother (Amy Madigan). After a grief-and-alcohol-induced car crash in the wake of Bridget's disappearance, the story abruptly flashes forward seven years, to a period when Deb has found a kind of uneasy equilibrium.
Beginning the film as an irascible, confrontational woman in her early 30s, Deb mellows out over the years, redirecting her energy into raising Jesse (now played by Aidan Fiske) and finding a stable career. Seven years after Bridget's disappearance, you can see on Deb's face that she has made a kind of weary peace with the course of her life, though she still calls on her ornery side in moments where she feels threatened or insecure—like when her live-in boyfriend, Ray (Pat Healy), turns abusive toward her and Jesse.
There's a degree of simplistic wish-fulfillment in the conclusion of the Ray storyline, and another sudden fast-forward sees the film skipping over the potential fallout and lasting effects of abuse. There's also a similar bit of flimsiness to Deb's later romance with Chris (Aaron Paul), who appears as Ray's straightforward opposite. But through Ray, Deb's failed affair with a married man, and a pair of final-act revelations, American Woman speaks powerfully about the varying forms of abuse men inflict upon women. Ray may be a one-dimensional woman-beater stereotype, but the second act proves crucial as background for the film's emotional conclusion, in which Deb reaches a major decision about her future that doesn't require any explicit explanations, given what we've seen her go through.
Cast: Sienna Miller, Christina Hendricks, Aaron Paul, Will Sasso, Sky Ferreira, Pat Healey, Alex Neustaedter, E. Roger Mitchell, Kentucker Audley, Aiden McGraw, Aiden Fiske, Amy Madigan Director: Jake Scott Screenwriter: Brad Inglesby Distributor: Roadside Attractions Running Time: 112 min Rating: R Year: 2018
Review: The Reports on Sarah and Saleem Sees Sexual Betrayal as Horror
We never spend enough time with the characters to believe the urgency, and lushness, of their cravings.1.5
The very history of film could be recounted through the ways in which patriarchy's favorite victims have snapped and taken matters into their own hands. From Ann Blyth in Mildred Pierce to Delphine Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman to Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom, the payback can be quite brutal. But it can also be insidious in its violence, as is the case with what Sarah (Sivane Kretchner), a married woman mired in domestic tedium, does with her boredom in director Muayad Alayan's The Reports on Sarah and Saleem.
Sarah lives in West Jerusalem with her perennially unavailable husband, David (Ishai Golan), a colonel in the Israeli army, and angelic daughter, Flora (Raya Zoabi). The film is an exposé of how the politics of an occupation are also, if not especially, achieved through the straitjacketing of sexual desire, especially that of women. Alayan crafts a world where physical assault and murder seem to be the only language available for men to resolve their issues, which might explain why Sarah prefers the horror of sexual betrayal as a way out of her despair. To Alayan, this is presented as the ultimate horror—as a woman putting an end to the fantasy of monogamy is here synonymous to national, and ethnic, treason.
Sarah starts having an affair with Saleem (Adeeb Safadi), a married Palestinian man who delivers bread to her café in West Jerusalem. Strapped for cash and finding himself delivering more than mere bread to local merchants, Saleem eventually asks Sarah to join him in one of his nocturnal deliveries of shady goods "behind the wall." She's torn between going back to her family and enjoying an evening of sex in his van and drinks on a dance floor in Bethlehem. "Is it safe?" she asks. It clearly isn't, but she ends up choosing fun over duty at last. The consequences are dire as Saleem ends up getting into a fight with a man trying to pick Sarah up, triggering a chain of vengeful episodes involving intelligence services and the like.
The Reports on Sarah and Saleem stops flirting with the gripping feeling that is so fundamental to its very genre precisely at the moment where the anxiety of a clandestine liaison gives way to an unending barrage of narrative twists and soap-operatic strife. That is, at the moment the threat of danger, wonderfully performed when Sarah is asked to wait for Saleem in his van while he makes a delivery and she manages to lock herself out, is replaced by overtly palpable spectacles of danger. The film's thriller elements are also marred by the fact that Alayan never allows his characters' emotions to develop and percolate, resorting to ready-made signifiers of drama instead, from gunshots to pregnant bellies. We never spend enough time with the characters to believe the urgency, and lushness, of their cravings.
Alayan is more interested in portraying Israel as a place of and for institutional corruption than observing the emotional and sexual consequences of such a state of affairs. Nadav Lapid's The Kindergarten Teacher deals with similar subject matter, namely the lack of satisfaction Jewish women in a land of predictable truculence feel, but in a much more humane fashion. Lapid chases the radical—and whimsical—consequences of the systems put in place to guarantee female despondency instead of focusing on the trite intricacies of the institutional intrigue driving such systems. In Alayan's film, the consequences of Sarah and Saleem's affair may prove some kind of urgent political point as we see in very clear terms how little Palestinian bodies matter, if at all, but it makes for an overtly cerebral experience divorced from the very element that has supposedly brought the bodies of its main characters together in the first place: the refreshing recklessness of sexual desire.
Cast: Sivane Kretchner, Adeeb Safadi, Maisa Abd Elhadi, Ishai Golan, Mohammad Eid, Raya Zoabi Director: Muayad Alayan Screenwriter: Rami Musa Alayan Distributor: DADA Films Running Time: 127 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Review: Our Time Doggedly, Elliptically Considers the Costs of Partnership
The film elides politics in order to earnestly consider whether love is necessarily an act of possession.3
Filmed in low, awesomely wide angles, the series of vignette-like scenes that make up the lengthy opening sequence of Carlos Reygardas's Our Time are a sociological survey in miniature, observing the nature of the interactions between people of the opposite sex at various ages. Young girls fuss with a broken beaded necklace as boys, sticks in hand, go marauding through a shallow, muddy lake surrounded by distant mountains. "Let's attack the girls," one of them says, as they disrupt a gossip session among pre-teen girls on a large innertube. With a slipstream rhythm, the action pivots to older teens experimenting with alcohol and drugs and maneuvering sexual attraction and frustration. After a while, we arrive at the grown-ups, a set of urbane, cosmopolitan ranchers who haven't left any of this behind.
The backdrop of this sequence, which lasts from bright daytime to well past dusk, recalls the simultaneously transcendent and frightening opening of Reygadas's Post Tenebras Lux, depicting a child alone in the wild. In his first collaboration with a new cinematographer (Diego García, who shot Neon Bull and Cemetery of Splendour), Our Time retains some of the director's penchant for specialized lenses—like fisheye—and prismatic lens flare, but their effect is muted relative to the sometimes outrageous transcendentalism of his previous work. Reygadas's latest unfolds more in the mold of recent work by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, relentlessly probing the more stubborn and outdated aspects of modern masculinity.
Reygadas himself plays Juan, a renowned poet and the owner of a ranch outside Mexico City, and the filmmaker's wife, Natalia López, stars as Juan's spouse, Esther, who manages the ranch. (Their children, Rut and Eleazar Reygadas, play Juan and Esther's two younger children, with Yago Martínez in the role of their teenage son.) The family is rarely alone, and they retain domestic help and numerous cowboys to manage the bulls and horses on their property. At the party that opens the film, Esther connects with an American horse trainer named Phil (Phil Burgers) and begins an affair that gradually undoes her marriage. Our Time is, by all accounts, a pretty faithful biographical account of Reygadas and López's recent marital troubles.
The conflict between Juan and Esther, which elevates from a gentle simmer to physical outbursts over the course of the film, isn't merely about lust; it's also about semantics and self-presentation. The couple have long had an open marriage—an allusion to Juan's ex-wife suggests this decision was an effort to avoid past mistakes—so Juan's feeling of betrayal is less about Esther sleeping with Phil than it is about her concealing the act, along with her continued communication with him. In his roles as writer and director, Reygadas crafts Juan as a self-styled progressive and empath. Unlike the patriarch in Post Tenebras Lux, who ran headlong into class warfare, Juan is exceedingly companionable with his hired help and open-hearted toward his children. Though class markers are everywhere in Our Time, from Juan's clean chaps to his conversations with relatives of his workers (one requests that Juan "sponsor" him with the purchase of a new race car), the film elides these politics in order to earnestly consider whether love is necessarily an act of possession.
As politics drop out of his purview, Reygadas integrates nature—typically an external force of rapture and terror in his work—into his study of human behavior. Often, he does this in the most prosaic of ways, twice transitioning from arguments to instances of wild bulls picking violent fights. At the same time, the ranch is a haven in Juan's very image, and he treats moments like these as violations of his peaceful dominion. Reygadas explores Esther's psychology in more interesting ways, sending her to a timpani performance (by Mexican percussionist Gabriela Jiménez), which is shot with such urgency that it feels like a heavy metal concert, conjuring Esther's turmoil as she texts with Phil in a symphony hall that would be pitch black if not for the slight glow of her phone.
With limited evidence that their affair is continuing, Juan's fixation on Esther's interest in Phil yields a handful of lengthy discourses on Juan's fears for their future. His words are eminently judicious, but they wear Esther down, until she reacts to him with physical sickness and increasing desperation. Their distance yields Reygadas's boldest narrative tactic, which is to effectively turn our time into an epistolary three-way romance for an entire act of the film. Juan, Phil, and Esther all dispassionately say their piece in voiceover monologues reciting letters and emails they've written to one another (one is recited over a bravura shot captured from the landing gear of a plane). In odd instances, a few of these communiques are read by one of Juan and Esther's children, a suggestion that they understand what is happening or are perhaps fated to make the same mistakes as their parents.
Our Time's foundation as a sort of Knaussgardian, auto-fictional overshare may account for both its curiously absent politics and what for Reygadas as unusually vibrant, dimensional characters. (Phil, an inane lunk trying to reconcile conflicting orders about whether or not to have sex with Esther, doesn't achieve such depth.) Though the film suffers in its later scenes, as Reygadas turns Juan's anxieties into actions and assures us that this auteurist self-portrait is appropriately self-excoriating, Our Time is remarkably balanced in considering both sides of its central marriage. As Juan's mixed emotions unfurl in lucid, bountiful words, López reveals in simple gestures and shifts of position how Juan's behavior has robbed Esther of her independence. Though artistically tame by Reygadas's standards, Our Time doggedly pursues ugly truths about how partnership necessarily requires the sacrifice of one's agency.
Cast: Carlos Reygadas, Natalia López, Phil Burgers, Eleazar Reygadas, Rut Reygadas, Yago Martinez Director: Carlos Reygadas Screenwriter: Carlos Reygadas Distributor: Monument Releasing Running Time: 177 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Review: Blue Note: Beyond the Notes Trumpets the Freedom of Jazz
The documentary proves that the history and mythology of American jazz is as intoxicating as the music itself.3
The history and mythology of American jazz is as intoxicating as the music itself. Many of the form's legends knew one another and worked together, and these relationships yielded revolutionary music and stories of intimate collaboration, damnation, and unlikely transcendence. Jazz is the soul of modern America, telling the country's story in intricate, beautiful, simultaneously tight and open and planned and improvisational music. And one of the souls of jazz is Blue Note Records, founded by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, Jews who fled Nazi persecution in Germany and arrived in America to pursue their obsession with the music that was banned by their home government. Which is to say that modern jazz is a reaction to, and transcendence of, multiple forms of oppression.
Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes is an agreeably loose and conversational documentary that's more ambitious than it initially appears to be. Director Sophie Huber interviews the usual suspects of the modern jazz documentary—most notably Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter—and recounts the formation of Blue Note Records. As such, the film's structure will seem familiar, especially to jazz aficionados, but Huber uncovers strikingly intimate material that elucidates difficult jazz concepts. Footage of Thelonious Monk playing the piano, his fingers hypnotically bending the keys to his will, is utilized by Huber to embody the emergence of "hard bop"—a reaction to cool standards that would define the modern concept of jazz.
Huber's interviewees boil their experiences down into tactile and visceral descriptions; their inflections and word choices are themselves innately evocative and musical. Alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, one of the most commanding presences in Beyond the Notes, memorably says at one point that all the other record companies were "white. Cheap, cheap white, too. I should name them but I won't." In 12 syllables, Donaldson poetically outlines an entire history of exploitation, and the refuge that Blues Note offered. Complementing such stories are Wolff's iconic photographs, which poignantly illustrate the unexpected union forged by two middle-aged white men and undiscovered black musical geniuses.
The film doesn't over-emphasize this cross-racial bonhomie for the sake of sentimental uplift; instead, Huber explores the exhilaration and arduousness of the work of making these records. In many photos, we see Lion hovering at the shoulders of legends, seemingly serving and commanding them at once, which Huber complements with audio recordings that capture the toil of playing, playing, and playing again, until Lion's painstaking vision is realized, allowing these performers to reach the apex of their talent. (It says something about Lion and Wolff that they could command the love and respect of even the ferocious Miles Davis.)
Beyond the Notes also features interviews with modern jazz musicians, whom we see playing with Hancock and Shorter, most notably covering the latter's majestic "Masqualero." (Huber is the rare modern filmmaker to accord Shorter the respect he deserves, as he's often recruited by filmmakers to attest to the brilliance of other men.) Pianist Robert Glasper and drummer Kendrick Scott, among others, talk of the importance of carrying jazz into the present day, a project that's been taken up by artists such as Kendrick Lamar, with whom Glasper has collaborated, as well as the producer Don Was, the current president of Blue Note. These sentiments lead Huber to a too-brief visual essay on the link between jazz, R&B, and hip-hop.
If Blue Note: Beyond the Notes lacks the intensity and personality of recent jazz docs such as I Called Him Morgan and It Must Schwing—The Blue Note Story, it's because Huber hasn't chosen one story, favoring a "sampler" structure that would've been better served by a running time that's much longer than the film's 90 minutes. Huber ably accomplishes her stated goal, opening up jazz for new audiences, rendering it palpable without flattening it out with pat explanations. But cinephiles and jazz fans will be left wanting more of everything, especially the jam session between Glasper, Scott, Hancock, Shorter, and others. Such a session inspires Scott to make an unforgettable observation. Playing with some of his heroes, Scott expected Hancock and Shorter to "take the lead." But these men wanted to see what the young bucks got, giving them the gift that is the ultimate promise of jazz: freedom.
Director: Sophie Huber Screenwriter: Sophie Huber Distributor: Eagle Rock Entertainment Running Time: 85 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
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All 21 Pixar Movies, Ranked from Worst to Best
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Reclaiming education
Cassell, 2000 - Education - 258 pages
Reclaiming Education tackles the challenges facing education that really matter -- the ones that academics often ignore, parents demand solutions to and politicians need to confront. Drawing on his global research, James Tooley shows there is an alternative to poor quality and wasteful inefficiency in education -- and that education can be radically transformed to guarantee freedom and higher standards.
Written in Tooley's characteristically lucid and sparkling style, this is the compelling, bold statement of the most controversial educationalist of contemporary times.
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Calibration Method Requirements
|Document Name
|Calibration Requirements Consolidation
|R.Santer et.al.
|Report on current practices of sensor calibration, covering: (a)Requirements of IVOS calibration (b)Methodology (c)In-Situ measurements and RTC
|Calibration Requirements Consolidation, annex
|R.Santer et.al.
|This short note presents the synthesis of the calibration work, performed between 1996 and 2002, in four distinct measurements campaigns, on the MERIS on-board diffusers and additional Spectralon diffusers dedicated to the calibration of MERIS. Additionally, the results of the ESA study Enhancement of diffusers BRDF Accuracy performedat TNO in 2004-2005 are displayed.
|Required information on the sensor for running 6S
|This short note describes the pieces of information needed for a given satellite sensor to use 6S.


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The Korean company Doosan Infracore completed its purchase of Bobcat, utility equipment and attachments businesses from the Ingersoll Rand Company. Doosan Infracore paid $4.9 billion for the businesses. Now the company, based in Seoul, Korea, will become one of the top ten global manufacturers of construction and utility equipment and related attachments.
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No one can ever accuse Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney of not having a sense of humor ... because even she is jumping on the McKayla Is Not Impressed bandwagon.
For those who don't know ... a photo of a scowling McKayla (see below) was taken after she won the silver medal in the vault competition. It spawned a Photoshop movement of putting McKayla in various places ... looking unimpressed (as best evidenced by the site mckaylaisnotimpressed.tumblr.com).
McKayla got in on the gag herself today, posting a photo of herself recreating the face with fellow Fab Fivers Kyla Ross and Aly Raisman.
We give it a perfect score.
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[sny-box color="fff"] In Case You Missed It...
Carmelo Anthony led the Knicks in scoring with 26 points on 9-22 shooting and added nine rebounds.
The Knicks allowed 26 points in the third quarter but only allowed 50 points in the other three quarters
The Knicks only shot 37% from the field but had a season high 15 offensive rebounds.
Paul George led the Pacers with 20 points on 6-15 shooting. Roy Hibbert had only six points and eight rebounds to go along with six turnovers
For the first time season the Knicks out rebounded an opponent, beating out the Pacers 48-47 on the boards
The Knicks 7-1 start is tied with the 93-94 Knicks for the best start in franchise history after eight games.
The Knicks are now 7-0 in the regular season under Mike Woodson following a loss dating back to last season.
As Al Trautwig said before the MSG post game began, good teams don't turn a loss after a winning streak into a losing streak. The Knicks came out a little sluggish for a Sunday Noon time game but the Pacers were even more sluggish and when the Knicks needed to put away the Pacers, they did so with little resistance as they cruised to a 4-0 record at home and a 7-1 record to start the season
Carmelo Anthony started out the game hot scoring 12 of the Knicks first 18 points of the game and once again leading the way on both sides of the court. He was tied for team lead in rebounds with nine including four on the offensive glass. I think its time to stop doubting Anthony's change in his game and welcome it with open arms and not speculating when its going to end. He had a rough couple of games against the Spurs and Grizzlies but still did the little things to help the Knicks get a split and when the Knicks needed him early in this game and to help put the Pacers away, he was there again.
Rasheed Wallace continues to impress as well off the bench for the Knicks as his signing, which was viewed by most a shock can now be looked at as just another shewd move by GM Glen Grunwald and the front office. (Side Note: It's awesome having a GM that actually has done a good job and knows what he is doing. A breath of fresh air at the Garden) Anyway, Wallace only played 16:35, mostly in the first half and was effective playing defense with his ability to use his hands to alter or block shots withoot fouling his guy. Then on the offensive end you saw it all, a three pointer, post play and smooth moves to the rim. He has been a revelation every game he's played so far this year.
Tyson Chandler had a nice game with nine boards, five on the offensive glass and Ronnie Brewer's eight points in a 5 minute span in the third quarter helped keep the Knicks ahead of the game when the Pacers played their best ball and although Felton, Kidd and Prigioni combined to shoot 5-23 for 14 points, they still added 14 assists and four rebounds to contribute to the victory.
Jason Kidd and The Crooked Headband....Yeah, I don't think that it works for him
The Pacers beat the Mavericks by 20 points on Friday Night and I have to say, How in the heck did that happen? The Pacers without Danny Granger looked terrible. They were building a new house with all the bricks in the first half and outside of the third quarter, they played as if they wanted to do anything else but play basketball today. Roy Hibbert has improved since I watched him at Georgetown but played a very poor game today and I was happy to see Tyler Hansbrough not light up the Knicks like he had done in the past.
The Knicks certainly played well enough to win today considering the effort and shooting talents the Pacers put on display today but I don't think Coach Woodson would want them to shore up a few things shooting wise because you normally dont win when shooting 37%. Other than that, another hard nosed grind it out win as the Knicks now head back on the road for three more around the Thanksgiving holiday.
Coming up next, the Knicks head back on the road to take on the New Orleans Hornets at New Orleans Arena, Tuesday Night at 8 PM. The game will be on MSG.


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What would it be like to be an astronaut? Here's your chance to find out!
Complete tasks similar to those used in real-life astronaut training!
Explore sections of a two-story, walk-in replica of the International Space Station. Students will conduct simulated hands-on experiments and learn about life in space.
Discover artifacts, space images, mission patches, and even a flight suit! Learn about the future of space exploration and potential careers. The 'Ask the Astronaut' interactive will allow students to choose questions and get answers from NASA astronauts.
Design a rocket and let it launch! Drop payload parachutes safely to the ground.
See the Zeiss Model II Star Projector, used from 1939–1991 at the original Buhl Planetarium.


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See MoreWith nuvi 2360LT's widescreen display, you'll always get the big picture. View map detail, driving directions, photos and more in bright, brilliant color. Its sunlight-readable, 4.3" (10.92 cm) display is easy to read from any direction.
Get Turn-by-Turn Directionsnuvi 2360LT has an intuitive interface that greets you with two simple questions: "Where To?" and "View Map." Touch the color screen to easily look up addresses and services and get voice-prompted, turn-by-turn directions that speak street names to your destination It comes preloaded with detailed City Navigator NT street maps for the U.S, Canada and Mexico with nearly 6 million points of interest (POIs) such as stores, restaurants, hotels, entertainment venues, gas stations, ATMs and more, and speed limits for most major roads. With 3-D building and terrain view, you?ll see representations of prominent buildings in many cities and map contours at low zoom levels, giving you a realistic perspective of the terrain.
Go Beyond NavigationNavigation is just the beginning. nuvi 2360LT saves you gas and money with ecoRoute, a green feature that calculates the most fuel-efficient route, tracks fuel usage and more. The 2360LT includes many travel tools, including JPEG picture viewer, world travel clock with time zones, currency converter, measurement converter, calculator and more. With photo navigation, you can download pictures from Garmin Connect Photos and navigate to them. With its "Where Am I?" emergency locator, you always know your location. Simply tap the screen to get your exact latitude and longitude coordinates, the nearest address and intersection, and the closest hospitals, police stations and fuel stations. The 2360LT features Garmin Lock, an anti-theft feature, and is compatible with our free Garmin Garage where you can download custom custom voices and vehicles. Enhance your travel experience with optional plug-in microSD cards.
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You've got all that media – photos, videos, recorded TV, music and more – scattered across your network, and now there's a load of online media to tap into as well. If you've got a network of Macs to serve, one of the best ways of sharing all that content is by installing the Plex Media Server.
Once the server is installed and set up, you'll want access to all that glorious material. Mac and Windows users should simply install the Plex Media Center client, which is free.
iPhone and Android users will, obviously, need to download this dedicated app to gain access to their media library. This costs $4.99, but once paid for and installed, is quite easy to set up. We'd recommend making your initial connection while connected to the same wi-fi network as your server – it's easy to spot, and you'll immediately be able to browse and access your media collection.
Should you wish to use the app away from home, things are a little more complicated. With the release of 0.9.5 of Plex Media Server, however, things have potentially got a lot easier - if your router supports uPnP or NAT-PMP, all you need to do is set up a myPlex account and access the myPlex tab under your Media Server's Preferences to connect the two together. If your router doesn't support either protocol, you'll need to manually forward the required port to make it work - click here for some useful guidance.
Once set up, however, you have access to your home and online media direct from your portable device without having to use up any of your precious storage space. And the beauty is, it just works, beautifully.
Important note: when streaming to your portable device over a 3G network, remember that you'll be eating into whatever bandwidth your account gives you, and rapidly too. Thankfully, the app also works over a wi-fi network, which (unless you're on a capped broadband connection) shouldn't cost you anything to use.
A brilliant means of accessing your media collection while away from your computer.


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Study, Apply, Share: Luke (Pastorum Series)
by Miller, Jeffrey E., Ritzema, Elliot•
Lexham Press 2012
Sermon Planning Made Easy
Jumpstart your sermon planning with Study, Apply, Share: Luke—a resource for preparing and presenting sermons and coordinating your worship services. For each biblical paragraph covered, Study, Apply, Share: Luke does the work of several resources: it identifies interpretation issues, provides application suggestions, and suggests worship service ideas. Elegant, professionally designed slides allow you to include biblical statistics in your sermons for illustration.
Study, Apply, Share
- Jumpstarts the sermon- and worship-planning process—Sermon and worship planning requires time, creativity, and energy. This series gives you a head start on the planning process, so you don't have to start from scratch every week.
- Saves time—No need to read stacks of commentaries to discover the interpretive issues.
- Suggests links into your Logos library—You will see instantly which of your commentaries discuss a given issue, so you will know where to turn first.
- Introduces new resources—You will know, perhaps even before you own it, that a particular commentary discusses an issue you want to explore.
- Applies passages—The application suggestions are written by a scholarly pastor who knows both the ancient text and modern audiences.
- Provides intriguing, presentable biblical data, ready to share—Professionally designed slides present interesting statistics, saving you the time it would take to find visual illustrations or create slides on your own.
- Aids in worship planning—The worship service ideas suggest how to incorporate the theme of the passage; this reinforces the message of your sermon and makes worship services more memorable.
Explore interpretation issues and reach your own conclusions. Choose the application most appropriate for your faith community. Foster the creativity you need to plan dynamic worship services. Study, Apply, Share: Luke helps you maximize your time by minimizing preparation time, giving you the freedom to minister to your congregation without sacrificing the quality of your weekly service.
- Series Introduction
- Book Overview
- For each passage:
- Study: 5–7 questions with corresponding links to Logos resources that discuss those questions (one link per question)
- Apply: 2 application ideas that focus on 2 different themes from the passage
- Share: 2 memorable worship service ideas that coordinate with the message and help solidify the application
- Share: Slides with statistical graphs that bring intrigue to presentations and insight to study. Professionally designed, they explore Luke's themes, ideas, and words and compare it to other biblical books.
Product Details
- Title: Study, Apply, Share: Luke
- Author: Jeffrey E. Miller
- Series: Pastorum Series
- Publisher: Lexham Press
- Publication Date: 2012
About Jeffrey E. Miller
Jeffrey E. Miller is the author of Hazards of Being a Man, has served as contributing editor on three commentaries, and is the coauthor of the Zondervan Dictionary of Bible and Theology Words and A New Reader's Lexicon of Greek New Testament. With a Master of Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, he has pastored for 11 years and taught for three.


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Please see the Schedule of Classes for the current semester's offerings.
The courses regularly offered by the chemistry department are listed below. You can view the descriptions by clicking on the title.
CHE 1023L Science of Chemistry: Everyday Life (Lab) (1 credit)
CHE 1023R Science of Chemistry: Everyday Life (Lecture) (2 credits)
CHE 1024L Science of Chemistry: Global Issues (Lab) (1 credit)
CHE 1024R Science of Chemistry: Global Issues (Lecture) (2 credits)
CHE 1045H, 1046H Honors: General Chemistry I & II (Lecture & Lab) (5 credits)
CHE 1045R, 1046R General Chemistry I & II (Lecture) (3 credits)
CHE 1045L, 1046L General Chemistry I & II (Lab) (2 credits)
CHE 1122C Chemical Analysis (4 credits)
CHE 1213L, 1214L Organic Chemistry I & II (Lab) (2 credits)
CHE 1213R, 1214R Organic Chemistry I & II (Lecture) (3 credits)
CHE 1232C Medicinal Chemistry (3 credits)
CHE 1233C Synthesis and Characterization of Organic and Inorganic Compounds (4 credits)
CHE 1375R Molecular Biochemistry (Lecture) (4 credits)
CHE 1376L Biochemistry (Lab) (2 credits)
CHE 1376R Biochemistry (Lecture) (3 credits)
CHE 1378H Chemical Biology (3 credits)
CHE 1379H Chemistry of Metals in Biology (Lecture and Lab) (4 credits)
CHE 1415L Physical Chemistry Laboratory (3 credits)
CHE 1415R, 1416R Physical Chemistry I & II (Lecture) (4 credits)
CHE 1607 Inorganic and Structural Chemistry (3 credits)
CHE 1609H Bioinorganic Chemistry (3 credits)
CHE 1611, 1611H Molecular Structure, and Dynamics (3 credits)
CHE 1930 Selected Topics (2 credits)
CHE 1936 Introduction to Chemical Research (0.5 credits)
CHE 1937, 1938 Seminar in Advanced Chemistry (1 credit)
CHE 4911 Research in Chemistry (1-3 credits)
CHE 1023L Science of Chemistry: Everyday Life (Lab)(1 credit)
Focuses on the study of the properties of matter through experimentation. An emphasis is placed on recording careful observations, collecting data, and analysis of results, including graphical analysis and calculations. Designed to cover concepts which complement the lecture topics, not duplicate them. Corequisite: CHE 1023R.
CHE 1023R Science of Chemistry: Everyday Life (Lecture) (2 credits)
Takes students on a journey from the observations which form the basis of Dalton's atomic theory through the discovery of subatomic particles and atomic structure, leading to trends in bonding. Molecular structures are covered from the simplest hydrogen molecule to DNA, pausing to consider the chemicals encountered in our 'everyday lives.' Corequisite: CHE 1023L.
CHE 1024L Science of Chemistry: Global Issues (Lab) (1 credit)
Examines contemporary environment issues through experimentation and provides an understanding of basic laboratory skills. Corequisite: CHE 1024R.
CHE 1024R Science of Chemistry: Global Issues (Lecture) (2 credits)
Examines contemporary environmental issues, such as fossil fuel consumption, global warming, nuclear power, and ozone depletion with an emphasis on problem-solving and an understanding of basic chemical principles. Corequisite: CHE 1024L.
CHE 1045H, 1046H Honors: General Chemistry I & II (Lecture & Lab) (5 credits)
This honors-level introduction to chemistry offers a rigorous, fast-paced and concept-rich approach that is ideal for students pursuing a major in the sciences or students on a pre-medical, pre-dental, or pre-engineering track. This two course sequence is recommended for chemistry majors and students interested in undergraduate research in chemistry but is also open to all non-science majors who desire a challenging but rewarding introduction to chemistry. Includes laboratory.
CHE 1045R, 1046R General Chemistry I & II (Lecture) (3 credits)
This two course sequence explores the fundamental concepts of chemistry on both the atomic and macroscopic scales. Topics include atomic structure and stoichiometry; properties of gases, liquids, and solids; thermochemistry; quantum theory and the electronic structure of atoms; the periodic table and periodic properties; chemical bonding and molecular orbital theory; properties of solutions; thermodynamics; acid-base and solubility equilibria; chemical kinetics; electrochemistry; and nuclear chemistry. Corequisite: CHE 1045L, 1046L.
CHE 1045L, 1046L General Chemistry I & II (Lab) (2 credits)
Laboratory experiments are designed and scheduled to complement lecture topics and enhance students understanding of the principles introduced. Emphasis on quantitative techniques. Corequisite: CHE 1045R, 1046R.
CHE 1122C Chemical Analysis (4 credits)
This one-semester course introduces science majors and pre-health students to the principles and practice of analytical chemistry. The course begins with an introduction to analytical chemistry, including the analytical process, sampling, sources of error, statistics, and data interpretation. The course also covers major types of analyses, including wet methods, spectroscopy, chromatography, and potentiometric techniques. Classroom topics, discussions and problem solving exercises are closely coordinated with laboratory analyses. Prerequisite: CHE 1045R&L, 1046R&L.
CHE 1213L, 1214L Organic Chemistry I & II (Lab) (2 credits)
Emphasizes basic techniques in separation, purification, identification and preparation of organic compounds. Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H. Corequisite: CHE 1213R, 1214R.
CHE 1213R, 1214R Organic Chemistry I & II (Lecture) (3 credits)
Organic chemistry explores the rich chemistry of carbon. Topics include the structure, synthesis, properties, and reaction mechanisms of the main classes of organic compounds, including compounds of biological importance. Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H. Corequisite: CHE 1213L, 1214L.
CHE 1232C Medicinal Chemistry (3 credits)
The course covers the basic chemical and biological concepts underlying medicinal chemistry. The course content includes an overview of drugs and their action, approaches to drug discovery, quantitative structure-activity relationships, drug delivery, pharmacokinetics, and drug metabolism. Laboratory classes include the modification of a drug's chemical structure with both chemical and biological characterization of the product, determination of acidity and lipophilic/lipophobic drug character, synthesis of a combinatorial drug library, and an antimicrobial bioassay. Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H. Prerequisite or corequisite: CHE 1213R&L.
CHE 1233C Synthesis and Characterization of Organic and Inorganic Compounds (4 credits)
Advanced laboratory techniques; purification and characterization of compounds by physical and chemical methods including NMR spectrometry, UV-VIS and FTIR spectrophotometry, gas and high-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. Prerequisite: CHE 1214R&L.
CHE 1375R Molecular Biochemistry (Lecture) (4 credits)
Molecular biochemistry covers the biological aspects of cellular structure, metabolism, regulation, and replication from a chemist's perspective. The topics will range from the sequence of nucleic acids that give rise to functional proteins to the bioenergetic aspects of oxidative phosphorylation involved in cellular respiration. Particular emphasis will be placed on hot topics in modern biochemistry including protein-ligand interactions, DNA polymerization, and membrane transport.
Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H, BIO 1011R&L.[Crosslisted as BIO 1375C]
CHE 1376R Biochemistry (Lecture) (3 credits)
Structure and function of biological molecules, enzyme kinetics, bioenergetics, metabolism, storage and transmission of genetic information, recombinant DNA technology, and selected topics such as membrane transport, hormone action, and muscle contraction. Prerequisite: BIO 1012R&L, CHE 1213R&L. [Crosslisted as BIO 1376R]
CHE 1376L Biochemistry (Lab) (2 credits)
Illustration of the properties of biochemical substances; design and analysis of experiments. Techniques include chromatography, electrophoresis, differential centrifugation, and various types of enzyme assays, including spectrophotometric and radioactive. Prerequisite or corequisite: CHE 1376R. [Crosslisted as BIO 1376L]
CHE 1378H Chemical Biology (3 credits)
Chemical biology considers a variety of biological systems in terms of their molecular components and potential behavior as defined by chemical functional groups, three-dimensional character, likely internal motion, and inter-molecular interactions with respect to the aqueous and non-aqueous environments that constitute life. Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H, CHE 1214R&L, BIO 1011R&L.
CHE 1379H Chemistry of Metals in Biology (Lecture and Lab) (4 credits)
This course offers a chemical view of the metals in biological systems. Course content includes introductory coordination chemistry, spectroscopic methods used to study metal ions and metal complexes in biological system, and the catalytic properties of important metallo-proteins. Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H.
CHE 1415L Physical Chemistry Laboratory (3 credits)
Emphasizes the measurements and computations of physical chemistry. Experiments illustrate theoretical principles and provide basic experience with quantitative physical measurements including thermochemistry, chemical equilibria, kinetics, electrochemistry, spectrophotometry and computer interfacing. Applications to biochemical systems. Corequisite or Pre-requisite: CHE 1415R.
CHE 1415R, 1416R Physical Chemistry I & II (Lecture) (4 credits)
Physical chemistry explores the underlying physical and mathematical relationships that interconnect a diverse range of chemical concepts. The first semester considers the fundamentals of chemical thermodynamics, thermochemistry, chemical equilibria, phases of matter, aqueous solutions, electrochemistry, and the kinetic molecular theory of gases. The second semester explores the quantum mechanical nature of atoms and molecules, solutions to the Schrodinger equation, vibrational, rotational and electronic spectroscopies, the electronic structure of multi-electron atoms and molecules and chemical bonding. Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H, MAT 1412/1413. Prerequisite or corequisite: PHY 1031/1032R&L or 1041/1042R&L.
CHE 1607 Inorganic and Structural Chemistry (3 credits)
This course introduces students to an advanced physical understanding of inorganic chemistry. Students will learn to use the theories of chemical bonding to predict the electronic structures of compounds and how those electronic structures then give rise to observed chemical and physical properties. Specifically, the transition between two-electron energies of weak ligand fields and one-electron energies of strong ligand fields will be highlighted to describe phenomena found in nature. Students who finish the course will understand how symmetry may be used to predict molecular properties, which metal complexes will be more stable than others, and how interactions between light, electrons, and nuclei are responsible for much of what we see in everyday life. Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H, MAT 1413.
CHE 1609H Bioinorganic Chemistry (3 credits)
Elucidates key inorganic chemistry concepts, including chemical bonding, structure, reactions and characterization methods and their applications in biology and medicine. Bioinorganic chemistry is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field. Topics include metalloenzymes, iron transport proteins, biomineralization in bones and shells and chemotherapeutic agents. Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H.
CHE 1611, 1611H Molecular Structure, and Dynamics (3 credits)
This course introduces the structure of molecules through molecular modelling and covers the theoretical prediction of the electronic structure and properties of molecules, the manipulation and visualtion of structures, simulation techniques such as molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo methods, and familiarity with commonly used software packages. This course incorporates a workship based approach within an integrated lecture and computer laboratory format. Prerequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H.
CHE 1930 Selected Topics (2 credits)
Seminar in current problems and literature in chemistry for seniors majoring in chemistry and selected juniors. Assigned topics, regular conferences and a report. Prerequisite: By permission of the instructor.
CHE 1936 Introduction to Chemical Research (0.5 credits)
This course offers students an early exposure to the current research interests of our faculty as well as information about modern chemistry careers. This course is ideal for students with minimal background in chemistry or undergraduate research and serves to help students (particularly future majors) choose a research mentor during their undergraduate years. Students will have the opportunity to visit faculty research laboratories and obtain first-hand experience of chemical research. Prerequisite or corequisite: CHE 1046R&L/H.
CHE 1937, 1938 Seminar in Advanced Chemistry (1 credit
Seminar meeting two hours every two weeks. Topics in all fields of chemistry. Prerequisite or Corequisite: CHE 1213R&L or by permission of the instructor.
CHE 4911 Research in Chemistry (1-3 credits)
Department approval required; final approval required from Academic Standards in order to proceed. Laboratory fee on an individual basis.


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Clinics, hospitals and entire countries are actively trying to attract medical tourists through costly advertisement campaigns and other promotional efforts. But what about the friends and family who accompany them?
By Valorie A. Crooks 4 Jun 2018
From headsets that help you lose weight without dieting to a smart meat thermometer, here are some of the interesting devices on display at the Mobile World Congress...
28 Feb 2018
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text: AccountingAnimal ControlAssessorsBenefitsBuilding DepartmentCable AccessCouncil on AgingFire/EMSModeratorPayrollPolicePublic WorksTown ClerkTown ManagerTreasurer/CollectorUxbridge Public LibraryUxbridge Public SchoolsVeterans ServicesBoardsBoard of HealthBoard of Library TrusteesBoard of RegistrarsBoard of SelectmenEdward C. Thayer Fund TrusteesHousing AuthorityPlanning BoardZoning Board of AppealsCommittees A - CAdhoc Goal & Evaluation CommitteeAffordable Housing CommitteeBlackstone Valley River & Canal CommissionBlackstone Valley Tech Dist School CommitteeBylaw Review CommitteeCable Advisory CommitteeCapital PlanningCharter Review CommitteeCommunity GardensConservation CommissionCouncil on AgingCultural CouncilCommittees D - Pout PondDog Park CommitteeFinance CommitteeFire Station Design CommitteeFire Station Building CommitteeHistoric Cemetery CommitteeHistorical CommissionHistoric District CommissionIndustrial Development CommitteeInsurance Advisory CommitteeLibrary Board Real Estate Sub-CommitteeOpen Space CommitteeParade CommitteePout Pond Recreation CommitteeCommittees Public Safety - ZPublic Safety CommitteeRecreation CommissionRecycling & Sustainability CommitteeScholarship CommitteeSchool Building CommitteeSchool CommitteeStormwater Pollution Prevention CommSuperintendent Search CommitteeTown Common CommitteeTown Manager Search CommitteeTrustees of Soldiers MemorialsWastewater Building Committee This table is used for column layout. Phone DirectoryReports & BudgetsCharter & BylawsTown MeetingTown CalendarMinutes & AgendasLocal EventsUxbridge Business Guide DonationsLibraryPublic SchoolsGIS MapsCable AccessSubscribe to E-AlertsEmployment & VolunteerZoning MapRecords Access Officer 2015 Town Meeting Minutes Printer-Friendly Version Web Pages and Documents:Web PageDetailsNov. 10, 2015 Fall Town Mtg MinutesWed, Dec 2, 2015 10:09 AMMay 12, 2015 Special Town Meeting MinutesTue, May 19, 2015 4:21 PMMay 12, 2015 Spring Annual Town Meeting MinutesTue, May 19, 2015 4:21 PM Detail Detail Town of Uxbridge, 21 South Main Street, Uxbridge, MA 01569 Phone: (508) 278-8600 Website Disclaimer Virtual Towns & Schools Website


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- Guaranteed to Fit
- Free Same Day Shipping
- Thousands of How-to Videos
Brake Hardware at 1A Auto
What is brake hardware and where is it located?
Brake hardware refers to all of the pieces that hold your brakes together and allow them to work properly. They are not the moving pieces that help you stop in a hurry, but these parts still play an essential role in good braking performance.
The types and amount of hardware you will need can vary depending on what kind of brakes you have. For example, drum brakes usually require more hardware than disc brakes. Drum brakes have a series of return springs, clips, and retainers that hold the brake shoes in place on the backing plate and keep them away from the drum surface when the brakes are not activated. These pieces can be bought in a kit that contains all of the fasteners for one axle's brakes.
Disc brakes have different hardware requirements. Disc brakes use a caliper to push the brake pads into the rotors. The caliper typically sits on a caliper bracket that is mounted directly to the spindle. Most calipers will have a set of slide pins, which allow the caliper to slide back and forth as the brakes are activated. These pins can become worn, rusted, or frozen in place over time and may need to be cleaned and greased or replaced all together when performing a brake service. In addition to the caliper pins, most disc brake setups will have a set of pad slides often referred to as a fit kit. These thin pieces of metal sit on the caliper bracket and give the pad a place to slide on as well as stop them from rattling in the bracket. The last thing you may find with this type of brake system is a "return spring" or "pad spreader". The job of the pad spreader is to hold the brake pads away from the rotor surface when the brakes are not being applied.
Some cars with rear disc brakes use an auxiliary drum brake for the emergency brakes. This is essentially a complete miniature drum brake built in to the back of the rotor. The auxiliary drum brake has most of the same type of hardware components as a normal drum brake.
How do I Know if my Brake Hardware Needs to be Replaced?
Brake hardware problems will make your brakes overall less effective. The brakes might stick, squeal, or make other noises. You may also find that your brake pedal feels soft or low. The best way to ascertain what's causing your braking problems is probably to visibly inspect all parts of your brake system. Look for missing clips, bent slides, broken return springs, rust or corrosion. Check that movable parts can move freely. It's a good idea to inspect your brake hardware any time you are replacing the pads and rotors or drums and shoes.
Can I Replace Brake Hardware Myself?
Replacing brake hardware can usually be done as part of other brake repairs, so if you can change your brakes, then you can change your brake hardware. Drum brakes can be more difficult to work on then disc brakes, so if you don't have much mechanical experience, you may want to check your repair manual to see if you feel confident in tackling the drum brake system. When working on brakes it is a good idea to strip, clean, and replace one side at a time so you have the opposite side assembled as a reference. We recommend replacing any brake parts in pairs to keep the brakes even from side to side. Uneven brakes can be dangerous and pull to one side when applied. Also, be sure to test the new brakes at low speed before taking your vehicle on the road.
Need Replacement Brake Hardware for your Vehicle?
If you need to replace your car or truck's brake hardware, you have come to the right place for your auto part needs! At 1A Auto, we carry a large selection of aftermarket brake hardware kits, for both disc and drum brakes, at great prices. Our brake hardware kits are made to the highest quality standards and are just what you need to get your ride back in working order again!
We also make shopping for drum and disc brake hardware kits for your car, truck, SUV or van easy - we're here to help you select the right parts for your vehicle! Call our customer service toll free at 888-844-3393 if you have any questions about our brake hardware kits, warranty, compatibility or to purchase, or you can buy online.


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Sunbrella 18 foot Square Shade Sails (MCC-SQPB18SS) are used for covering decks, patios, pools, outdoor play areas, and many other applications. They are very inexpensive compared to permanent structures and portable enough to take down and put up, when the need arises. This Square Shade Sail is A=18' x B=18' or A=216" x B=216" from d-ring to d-ring of each side. We keep in stock 8 of the most popular colors and we also offer 8 special order colors for an additional cost and it will add an extra week to the lead time of manufacturing the shade sail using special order colors.
At Least 20° Slope Required
Shade Sail Size
Amount of Drop
|10 Ft
|3 Ft 7 In
|12 Ft
|4 Ft 4 In
|14 Ft
|5 Ft 0 In
|16 Ft
|5 Ft 8 In
|18 Ft
|6 Ft 4 In
|20 Ft
|7 Ft 0 In
|22 Ft
|7 Ft 10 In
|24 Ft
|8 Ft 10 In
|25 Ft
|9 Ft 4 In
A 20° Slope is about a 35%
Sunbrella Shade Sails will give you maximum protection from the heat and UV's from the sun. This state of the art fabric is unaffected by moisture and extreme natural temperature. Sunbrella's solution dyed acrylic fabric is fade and water resistant. The near waterproof fabric also resists stains, mildew and rot. Since they are water resistant, you not only get protection from the sun, but also protection from when it rains or snows.
Sunbrella fabric is water resistant, and shade sails made from this fabric have to be installed with at least a 20 degree slope to allow water to run off and not pool on top of the sail. The chart at the right lists measurements for the amount of vertical drop recommended based on the size of the sail. Measurements are rounded.
All standard size Sunbrella square shade sails are made to order. Therefore, all sales are final. No returns or refunds will be accepted.
All standard size square shade sails are made to order. Therefore, all sales are final. No returns or refunds will be accepted.
Last Updated: 04/10/2019 02:04 PM - ID:1599
Related Terms: Sunbrella Square Shade Sail 18 foot MCC-SQPB18SS