Consie

Really good commentary on this page. let me also just say I can't stand Jennifer Connelly and never could. :P

I agree entirely, I think people who make historical films have an obligation to be as accurate as possible. As for Gibson, ugh the manipulative racist piece of $h!t. Don't forget how Jesus was scourged and beaten for 3 hours with more blood flying than could have actually been contained in a man's body, like Mortal f***ing Kombat or something!

I think you're thinking of the 2002 Wes Craven flop "They" :lol:

Any fan of the Laura Fabian original couldn't possibly listen to this $h!t all the way through... I like Kelly but this is horrendous, just AWFUL

I love the beginning and end of The Shining. Who would have thought seeing gorgeous, panoramic views of mountainous and beautiful Colorado landscape could be so frightening. And the end in the hedge maze... it's just perfect. In all respects it's a "happy ending" and yet the audience remains terrified and uneasy through the end.

Babel is another incredibly divisive film. Half the audience ADORED the film and the other half LOATHED it. And in "Crash" tradition, it will probably win the Oscar for Best Picture. I agree Hotel Rwanda was far superior. Personally, I'm not necessarily offended by DiCaprio's presence in Blood Diamond (his South African accent was admirable anyway) but I do agree he was probably there simply to make the film more appealing to its obvious audience.

I just don't understand why multiculturalism can be blamed for all this apparent strife in the UK. Why can't there be a recognition and appreciation for multiculturalism AND an encouragement of assimilation and national participation. It seems to work in Australia, the US and especially Canada. Why are Europeans so threatened by multiculturalism? And anyway, if multiculturalism were to blame, how come Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, etc. seem to be doing fine? What makes Muslims so significant? Is it because they're such brutal savages OR..... OR is it because the UK government's Middle East policies can only by classified as a WAR against Islam??? It's been said soo many times on this board but it's NOT them vs us, it's not ideology, it's not fundamentalism. It's P O L I T I C S.

oh GOD the poor thing! :lol: Anyway, such trite c**p in that list... university students use math tricks to make it big in Vegas? A racist cop in LA? A new Get Smart? A new Magnum PI? SUCH NOVEL IDEAS!!! Doesn't look too promising for some of those A listers... Let's hope the steady flow of East Asian and latin American talent can fill the void for good films that all this junk will fail to do

You bring up a good point. The Economist agrees with you... Good food? Dec 7th 2006 From The Economist print edition If you think you can make the planet better by clever shopping, think again. You might make it worse “You don't have to wait for government to move... the really fantastic thing about Fairtrade is that you can go shopping!†So said a representative of the Fairtrade movement in a British newspaper this year. Similarly Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University, argues that “when you choose organics, you are voting for a planet with fewer pesticides, richer soil and cleaner water supplies.†The idea that shopping is the new politics is certainly seductive. Never mind the ballot box: vote with your supermarket trolley instead. Elections occur relatively rarely, but you probably go shopping several times a month, providing yourself with lots of opportunities to express your opinions. If you are worried about the environment, you might buy organic food; if you want to help poor farmers, you can do your bit by buying Fairtrade products; or you can express a dislike of evil multinational companies and rampant globalisation by buying only local produce. And the best bit is that shopping, unlike voting, is fun; so you can do good and enjoy yourself at the same time. Sadly, it's not that easy. There are good reasons to doubt the claims made about three of the most popular varieties of “ethical†food: organic food, Fairtrade food and local food (see article). People who want to make the world a better place cannot do so by shifting their shopping habits: transforming the planet requires duller disciplines, like politics. Buy organic, destroy the rainforest Organic food, which is grown without man-made pesticides and fertilisers, is generally assumed to be more environmentally friendly than conventional intensive farming, which is heavily reliant on chemical inputs. But it all depends what you mean by “environmentally friendlyâ€. Farming is inherently bad for the environment: since humans took it up around 11,000 years ago, the result has been deforestation on a massive scale. But following the “green revolution†of the 1960s greater use of chemical fertiliser has tripled grain yields with very little increase in the area of land under cultivation. Organic methods, which rely on crop rotation, manure and compost in place of fertiliser, are far less intensive. So producing the world's current agricultural output organically would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated. There wouldn't be much room left for the rainforest. Fairtrade food is designed to raise poor farmers' incomes. It is sold at a higher price than ordinary food, with a subsidy passed back to the farmer. But prices of agricultural commodities are low because of overproduction. By propping up the price, the Fairtrade system encourages farmers to produce more of these commodities rather than diversifying into other crops and so depresses prices—thus achieving, for most farmers, exactly the opposite of what the initiative is intended to do. And since only a small fraction of the mark-up on Fairtrade foods actually goes to the farmer—most goes to the retailer—the system gives rich consumers an inflated impression of their largesse and makes alleviating poverty seem too easy. Surely the case for local food, produced as close as possible to the consumer in order to minimise “food miles†and, by extension, carbon emissions, is clear? Surprisingly, it is not. A study of Britain's food system found that nearly half of food-vehicle miles (ie, miles travelled by vehicles carrying food) were driven by cars going to and from the shops. Most people live closer to a supermarket than a farmer's market, so more local food could mean more food-vehicle miles. Moving food around in big, carefully packed lorries, as supermarkets do, may in fact be the most efficient way to transport the stuff. What's more, once the energy used in production as well as transport is taken into account, local food may turn out to be even less green. Producing lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to Britain uses less energy than producing British lamb, because farming in New Zealand is less energy-intensive. And the local-food movement's aims, of course, contradict those of the Fairtrade movement, by discouraging rich-country consumers from buying poor-country produce. But since the local-food movement looks suspiciously like old-fashioned protectionism masquerading as concern for the environment, helping poor countries is presumably not the point. Appetite for change The aims of much of the ethical-food movement—to protect the environment, to encourage development and to redress the distortions in global trade—are admirable. The problems lie in the means, not the ends. No amount of Fairtrade coffee will eliminate poverty, and all the organic asparagus in the world will not save the planet. Some of the stuff sold under an ethical label may even leave the world in a worse state and its poor farmers poorer than they otherwise would be. So what should the ethically minded consumer do? Things that are less fun than shopping, alas. Real change will require action by governments, in the form of a global carbon tax; reform of the world trade system; and the abolition of agricultural tariffs and subsidies, notably Europe's monstrous common agricultural policy, which coddles rich farmers and prices those in the poor world out of the European market. Proper free trade would be by far the best way to help poor farmers. Taxing carbon would price the cost of emissions into the price of goods, and retailers would then have an incentive to source locally if it saved energy. But these changes will come about only through difficult, international, political deals that the world's governments have so far failed to do. The best thing about the spread of the ethical-food movement is that it offers grounds for hope. It sends a signal that there is an enormous appetite for change and widespread frustration that governments are not doing enough to preserve the environment, reform world trade or encourage development. Which suggests that, if politicians put these options on the political menu, people might support them. The idea of changing the world by voting with your trolley may be beguiling. But if consumers really want to make a difference, it is at the ballot box that they need to vote. There's a much longer, more in depth article on the same topic (from the same issue) I can post if anyone is interested...

But it's so much easier for the parents to blame it on the media. Or Doom 2. Or Mortal Kombat. Or Marilyn Manson. Or anti-depressant medications. Or, who's that guy they say was really evil and killed a bunch of people and that's why we had to invade the country because he was such a threat to our way of life? -- oh, Saddam Hussein, that's right!

The stem cells used for research are almost always slated to be destroyed anyway, they are taken for different reasons (usually in vitro fertilization). Some people still think it's murder. Very, very, very few people. Religious nutcases exclusively. The more popular objection is that it will lead to wider genetic manipulation. But the slippery slope argument does NOT apply in science. Even if there's only a fine line in ethics between stem cells and living humans, the distinction is MASSIVE in terms of scientific experimentation. It's not as though using an emryonic stem cell for research will set a precent for killing babies and taking their brains or something f***ing ridiculous like that.

Glad to see they're trying out the UK again. The song is actually from 2005! Thanks for the vid! :D

What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy NEW YORK TIMES By DAVID LEONHARDT Published: January 17, 2007 The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same. The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions. For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives. Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds. The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur. All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another: The war in Iraq. In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so. These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out. But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington. That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending. The two best-known analyses of the war’s costs agree on this figure, but they diverge from there. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion on the war. They include a number of indirect costs, like the economic stimulus that the war funds would have provided if they had been spent in this country. Mr. Wallsten, who worked with Katrina Kosec, another economist, argues for a figure closer to $1 trillion in today’s dollars. My own estimate falls on the conservative side, largely because it focuses on the actual money that Americans would have been able to spend in the absence of a war. I didn’t even attempt to put a monetary value on the more than 3,000 American deaths in the war. Besides the direct military spending, I’m including the gas tax that the war has effectively imposed on American families (to the benefit of oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia). At the start of 2003, a barrel of oil was selling for $30. Since then, the average price has been about $50. Attributing even $5 of this difference to the conflict adds another $150 billion to the war’s price tag, Ms. Bilmes and Mr. Stiglitz say. The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion. And if this war’s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam’s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, “It’s like a miniature Medicare.†In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California. Whatever number you use for the war’s total cost, it will tower over costs that normally seem prohibitive. Right now, including everything, the war is costing about $200 billion a year. Treating heart disease and diabetes, by contrast, would probably cost about $50 billion a year. The remaining 9/11 Commission recommendations — held up in Congress partly because of their cost — might cost somewhat less. Universal preschool would be $35 billion. In Afghanistan, $10 billion could make a real difference. At the National Cancer Institute, annual budget is about $6 billion. “This war has skewed our thinking about resources,†said Mr. Wallsten, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative-leaning research group. “In the context of the war, $20 billion is nothing.†As it happens, $20 billion is not a bad ballpark estimate for the added cost of Mr. Bush’s planned surge in troops. By itself, of course, that price tag doesn’t mean the surge is a bad idea. If it offers the best chance to stabilize Iraq, then it may well be the right option. But the standard shouldn’t simply be whether a surge is better than the most popular alternative — a far-less-expensive political strategy that includes getting tough with the Iraqi government. The standard should be whether the surge would be better than the political strategy plus whatever else might be accomplished with the $20 billion. This time, it would be nice to have that discussion before the troops reach Iraq. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/business...5fa7&ei=5087%0A

:lol: :lol:

Could this be the oldest? 1930! Anyway it's still probably the best: She messed around with a bloke named Smokey She loved him though he was cokey He took her down to Chinatown Where he showed her how to kick the gong around :lol: :lol:

While it's mostly reviled or forgotten, Octopus was one of my favorite albums back in the mid-90's. I think it was really ahead of its time in terms of a pop album.

Quick calculation... that leads to £48.81 every MINUTE (not just working but every minute he is alive of every hour of every day). That's practically nothing compared to many corporate CEO's. In 2005, Terry S. Semel, the CEO of Yahoo!, made $230,600,000. That comes down to $437.59 every MINUTE of 2005. And THEN you consider the people who are worth billions. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, owns over $500 million in yachts alone. In YACHTS. UNREAL.

I actually loved "While The Earth Sleeps" his collaboration with Deep Forest too. He's got a really dynamic voice, it works well in all types of songs. He may not have had recent hits but he's got a HUGE middle-age following and thoser are the people who buy £100 concert tickets.

Will Young performed on AI way back... I don't think he ever persued a career in America though.

Jump In is the new Disney film (similar to High School Musical). Expect it to assault the Hot 100 next week with multiple debuts. Also I'll be shocked if the album isn't #1 on the Billboard 200 this week, even though Dreamgirls won several Golden Globes last night...

It is definitely hard because what I would consider my "top 5" are the 5 films I enjoy the most and watch the most. They aren't necessarily the five most impressive or best films I've ever seen. In fact, some of them are really quite bad! Anyway, In no order: Death Becomes Her Rear Window The Shining Serial Mom Les Quatre Cents Coups Also very close: The Royal Tenenbaums High Anxiety Mulholland Drive The Exorcist Brokeback Mountain Airplane Best in Show Gladiator Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes Clue Rain Man Y Tu Mamá También I'm trying to figure out if there are any trends in that random list... um... Madeline Kahn is in 2 of them! NOT a coincidence! :lol: :lol:

Thankfully Apocalypto bombed at the box office.

Meh, this debate is really going nowhere. It doesn't matter if it felt hotter to you recently or not. And global warming has nothing to do with people being inconvenienced by hot summers or whatever. It's about the rapidly melting polar ice caps, which if melted, would raise the sea level around the world by 15-25 feet. Also don't underestimate the oceans. A great deal of bizarre weather phenomena can be caused by only a slight increase in the temperature of the ocean (wikipedia El Nino for an example). A bunch of cold water from a melting ice cap could threaten the ocean's warm water currents. Shut off the current bringing warm water to the North Atlantic and within just a few years, North America or Europe could be thrust into an ice age. How about a chunk of melting ice falling off Greenland? If big enough, it could send giant tsunamis to Britains shores. The Earth is a fragile environment... And yes the earth has a natural process of heating and cooling, but humans are definitely causing the most recent and probably most sudden increase. And anyway isn't it in the best interest of humanity to try to stop global warming?

I must say the clip of Hilary's new song is VERY good. I'm really looking forward to her album! I like Avril but her new single is dull and sounds straight off her debut 5 years ago. I hope her new album is better. WHITNEY, I cannot even imagine any decent material from her. It'll be Whatchulookinat vol. 2. She is just too trashy. Hope I'm wrong though...

:wub: :wub: Was this ever even released in the UK? It's still something of an anthem in the US and easily the most played song of the early 90's.