Granada Nicaragua | Trip Advisor
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g580113-d1392274-Reviews-Casa_Silas_B_B-Granada.html
Explore Posterous
Search posterous
Search all posts and users. Type a name, type a favorite song title, whatever! See what comes up.
More posterous blogs
Here are posterous posts filed under reviews...
Movie Review - ‘A Christmas Carol’ by ScreenRant
Rating:
3 out of 5
Short Version: There are already so many great adaptions of the classic Dickens story – this one adds nothing but CGI and gimmicky 3D effects.
Screen Rant reviews A Christmas CarolA Christmas Carol is one of my all time favorite Christmas stories. Maybe because most of the year I feel like a somewhat cranky Ebenezer Scrooge but once Thanksgiving is over my mood lightens over the spirit of the upcoming holiday. It seems that every few years someone feels the need to do an update on the classic tale, and sometimes it works. Heck there have certainly been a lot of versions over the years (over two dozen on TV and in movies according to IMDB), and I’ve enjoyed many of those myself.
This time director Robert Zemeckis (who seems intent upon never making another live action film as long as he lives) brings us another 3D, IMAX, CGI motion-capture extravaganza. If the number of buzzwords there don’t tell you what this film is really about, then I can’t help you.
The movie stars Jim Carrey in a variety of roles, most notably old Scrooge himself. The Scrooge character, with it’s caricature-like features is actually the most effective one in the film (thankfully, since he’s the lead). Carrey also plays the three ghosts that come to haunt Ebenezer as well as Scrooge at younger ages. We also have Gary Oldman playing primarily Bob Cratchit and Bob Hoskins (briefly) playing Scrooge’s old boss Mr. Fezziwig. I mention these two in particular because someone made the decision to make the characters look very similar to the actors portraying them. I don’t know what effect they were going for, but I can tell you what the result was: Creepy.
It was just bizarre watching a CGI character that looked so much like Oldman, but not – with the only semi-human animatronic look that defines the “uncanny valley” (the very subtle things that aren’t right in attempted photo-real computer animated portrayal of humans). Most of the characters suffered from the same thing – it was like watching an animatronic display at Disneyland.
On the other hand there were glimpses of amazingly realistic people in the film – but these were always at a distance. There was one scene where I wanted to believe that they inserted a live actress into the film just as an “Easter Egg.” I respect Zemeckis for what he’s doing, I really do – he’s trying to push the frontier when it comes to people rendered as CGI. Problem is you have to get it PERFECT, otherwise your brain just kind of short-circuits looking at this “almost-real” person on the screen. This is why most CGI animated films use caricatures of humans – it’s easier for the mind to accept. By making blue-skinned, overly tall aliens with odd facial features I think James Cameron will get around this in Avatar.
And speaking of the upcoming 3D Cameron-helmed extravaganza, A Christmas Carol is in 3D. I’ve said many times before that I’m a fan of of 3D cinema, but not when it’s used as a gimmick. Overall I really enjoyed the 3D look of the film but there was one sequence that was stuck into the film that just didn’t belong and was there only for the sake of showing off the roller coaster effects and exaggerated 3D in the film. It was at least a five minute sequence and I was mentally tapping my fingers waiting for it to be over so we could get back to the story. Side note: There seemed to be a little tribute to the “tiny Ash” scene from Army of Darkness.
So what did I like? The story, of course, but they don’t get credit for that. I did enjoy the opening scene, which was very effective in showing just HOW miserly and feared Scrooge was. On the flip side, I also really enjoyed the “post-mean” ending of the film – it really gave us more time with the repentant Ebenezer than I’ve seen in any version to date.
Besides what I’ve mentioned, what I didn’t like was that the film was all over the spectrum in terms of tone – sometimes it was goofy-funny, and at other times had scenes that I think will scare the heck out of little kids. When his doorknob comes to life, that’s a heck of a scare and Marley’s jaw coming loose was worthy of a horror movie IMHO. Of course then they put a little “ha ha” moment on the end of that one, but by then your kids has had the poop scared out of them. Oh, and I have to mention the ghost of Christmas past – one of the most unexplainedly ridiculous characters I’ve ever seen on screen. Then again, maybe it’s me, some people were laughing at it, but frankly I was perplexed by the point of what is was doing and thought it was just plain stupid.
No doubt there will be comments below wittily calling me a Scrooge, but you’re too late, I did that in the opening paragraph.
But seriously, as I said, I love this story – and I wish that Zemeckis had left the CGI behind and made it a live action film based on the classic tale.
Movie Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)
BY: Brad Brevet | November 6th 2009 at 3:11 AM
George Clooney in The Men Who Stare at Goats
Photo: Overture FilmsIf you've seen the trailer you've seen the movie. In fact, choose any scene from the trailer, extend it, duplicate it and give it no real reason to exist and you have The Men Who Stare at Goats, a film that's got plenty of laughs but nothing holding it together.
Directed by Grant Heslov, the Oscar-nominated co-writer and producer of Good Night, and Good Luck., The Men Who Stare at Goats is an adaptation of Jon Ronson's book of the same name. I have since been told it's only loosely based, which the film would also like us to believe as it opens saying, "More of this is true than you would believe." Just what part is true? Who knows? How much do I believe? Perhaps the proper question there would be How much do I want to believe? The answer to that would be "very little," which is to say the truth of the matter actually frightens me.
The film follows down-on-his-luck journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) who heads to Iraq looking for a story and finds Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) who claims to have been part of a top secret government project to create an army of soldiers with super powers, or what he calls "Jedi warriors". Lyn says he's on a mission and Bob jumps at the opportunity to follow him having briefly heard of the secret unit in the past. From there we head back and forth in time learning about the origins of the program and where it is today, and ultimately ending up nowhere. Perhaps that's the joke. It's a subtle one if it is, and while this movie isn't terrible it just doesn't really get the motor running as much as it feels like a series of "Saturday Night Live" skits on the same subject packed into one 95-minute feature.
Both McGregor and Clooney are in top form and a lot of fun as a pair, in roles that suit both of them perfectly. Kevin Spacey plays a rival psychic soldier who is actually more of a parody of a parody than anything else, but good for a laugh or two along the way. And Jeff Bridges plays Bill Django, the founder of the psychic soldier program, and the man Lyn still receives his orders from.
If we were to use The Men Who Stare at Goats to judge how far director Grant Heslov could go as a director I'd say we should anticipate his next feature with some enthusiasm. Considering this is his first major feature film and he is working hand-in-hand with Clooney at Smoke House there is likely to be a lot to look forward to. This just happens to be a bit of a one trick pony that will likely play far better at home on DVD than it does in theaters.
GRADE: C+The Men Who Stare at Goats was released by Overture Films on November 6, 2009 and was directed by Grant Heslov. The MPAA has rated it R for language, some drug content and brief nudity. The cast includes George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges.For more information on this film including pictures, trailers and a detailed synopsis click here.
Related post categories: Movie Reviews : The Men Who Stare at Goats
Zombieland Review
I was not expecting this to be good. I was certainly not expecting it to be one of the best films of the year!
From the trailer I saw a second rate Shaun of the Dead knock off, but American.... and it really is a shame because the film itself is very, very sharp. Just as much as Shaun. And in fact it's only a whisker not as good as Shaun, purely because a) it is really taking the same basic zom-com idea, and b) I connect to the dry humour of the English version slightly better and more affectionately. I think anyone who has seen both films and is English (or lived in the UK for any length of time) will essentially came away with the same thought.
The writing in Zombieland is fantastic and you care for the characters, and that they live. This is important because despite the "rules" theme that Columbus has devised for staying alive, the movie doesn't really follow the standard zombie film "rules" i.e all of the good guys survive. So good character development and knock-out performances are essential for this to work.
The 4 leads are all brilliant, these are great comedic performances. Woody Harrelson just embodies Tallahassee so well it's frightening. At one point he's on top of some American Chevy 4x4 or something, and twatting the shit out of it with a baseball bat, looking like he's getting into that role a little too much! But I'm not gonna spoil it any more!
There are so many legendary quotable lines from this movie that you will be googling them when you get home just to remember before you can get back to the cinema to watch it again.
To sum up, this film is very funny, genuinely scary, and also charming and heart warming. Oh did I say absolutely hilarious?! Go see it!
dB
Panasonic FE-KLE03
After one agonizing hour at Bic Camera choosing between a 1. humidifier, 2. air purifier with humidifier, 3. ceramic fan heater with humidifier - I finally settled on 1. My priority was to get a humidifer and undoubtedly 2 and 3 would have less humidifying power as compared to 1. Additionally I don't have much use for an air purifier, I suppose (not forgetting that those are bloody expensive! They cost around 24000yen?!); and my air-con should be sufficient for warmth. Although I was quite amused to see that the humidifier I was looking at (the one I ended up buying) was more expensive than the ceramic fan heater + humidifier I was interested in.
So. Panasonic FE-KLE03! 15800yen at Bic Camera. Kind of pricey but has more functions than others. A brief breakdown:
- Covers 5 ~ 8jou. (14 meters square max.)
- Hybrid type humidifier
- L 33.6cm B 19.0cm H 30.1cm
- Humidistat included
- Basic off-timer function (no on-timer function)
- Child lock (kind of unnecessary for people living alone but oh well)
- Air-purifying function (basic; not as dedicated as full air purifiers)
- Different modes - see picture for controls.
I've only used it for one night so I can't say much but so far I'm pretty satisfied with it for the following reasons:
- Area coverage is just right. People with bigger houses may need something more powerful but for a 1R it's good.
- Hybrid type → no harm of getting burned by steam.
- It's different humidifying modes - automatic (leaves it up to the humidifier to detect and adjust accordingly), powerful, throat/skin (best option for sore throat and dry skin, IDK) and night-time. Especially the last, because while in the first three modes it's quite audible (though not enough to be an annoyance), in night-time mode it's quieter.
- Humidistat. Granted, not very accurate, but works.
I suppose I'll have more to say after using it more often, but so far it's made a good first impression. My throat wasn't quite so sore this morning when I woke up, so either the humidifier did its job or I'm quickly recovering thanks to medication. Heh.
Trip Advisor | Granada Nicaragua
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g580113-d1392274-Reviews-Casa_Silas_B_B-Granada.html
Alternative Cancer
From: Croft Woodruff [mailto:croft.woodruff@gmail.com]
Sent: November 5, 2009 12:36 PM
Subject: Alternative Cancer
Alternative Cancer on
CNN's Larry King Live
© By Peter Barry Chowka
(October 18, 2009) Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D., the subject of a two part interview series published in September 2009 in Natural Healthline, has informed me that an hour long program he taped one week ago on Larry King Live is scheduled to run on CNN during the week of October 19, 2009 – most likely on Tuesday 10/20 or Friday 10/23 – at 9 PM EDT with replays at 12 midnight ET and 3 AM ET.
The main subject of the program is actress and best-selling author Suzanne Somers. A long time proponent of alternative medicine, Somers has written a new book, Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer--And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place (Crown), which is being published on October 20, 2009 and, as of this writing, is #188 on Amazon.com.
Also appearing on the program, according to Gonzalez, are Stanislaw Burzynski, M.D.,Ph.D., and two alternative cancer therapy “antagonists.”
On March 28, 2001, Somers, then 54 years old, appeared on Larry King Live to announce that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000 but had chosen to use primary alternative instead of conventional treatments.
As I reported on April 1, 2001:
Somers, a high-profile celebrity and author of best-selling diet and fitness books who initially rose to fame on the ABC-TV sitcom Three's Company in the late 1970s, said she was going public after a year-long private battle with cancer in order to counter the National Enquirer's recent reports that she had undergone liposuction because her much-hyped diet program had failed. On the CNN program, Somers confirmed that she had undergone procedures at the Lasky Clinic in Beverly Hills but said that “What I had done [there] had to do with my breast cancer.”
Somers said her cancer was diagnosed in April 2000 after which she had surgery (she implied it was a lumpectomy and not a mastectomy) followed by radiation therapy. She then went against her doctors' wishes, she said, and declined chemotherapy — and she started taking the alternative treatment Iscador, a mistletoe extract. Iscador is popular in parts of Europe but relatively unknown in the U.S. Somers incorrectly described Iscador as “homeopathic.” In fact, it is an herbal therapy that is part of Anthroposophical Medicine, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, PhD (1861-1925), a European philosopher, scientist, educator, and the founder of Anthroposophy.
Back in 2001, Somers’ decision to go the alternative therapy route was immediately challenged by the medical Establishment. A feature article in People magazine on April 20, 2001, “A Matter of Choice,” described Somers’ treatment and the ensuing controversy.
On May 1, 2001, I reported at length on the story and on a new study of Iscador, published May 1, 2001 in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. My article included an interview with the journal’s editor, David Riley, M.D.
Regarding Burzynski, I wrote about him at length in an article originally written in 1993 and later published in 1997 in Nutrition Science News. Some excerpts:
Stanislaw Burzynskii, M.D., Ph.D., Houston, TX, 2007 at the 30th Anniversary Celebration of his work
Stanislaw Burzynski, M.D., Ph.D. Burzynski is one of the leading contemporary pioneers in the field of nontoxic cancer therapy. His therapeutic discoveries are interesting, and his personal story is fascinating and instructive. Burzynski's work was reported on positively on the probing network television investigative series 20/20 (ABC-TV, October 22, 1981) and Street Stories (CBS-TV, July 23, 1993), and more recently, ABC-TV's Nightline and CBS This Morning (April and March, 1995, respectively).
One of the youngest and brightest M.D.-Ph.D.s in his native Poland, Burzynski left home in 1970 in search of personal and professional freedom in the non-communist West. What he found instead in the U.S., he has said, was a situation reminiscent of the authoritarian one-party state he had left behind -- a scientific system in America that was run like a Communist politburo, where true innovation and independent discovery were frowned on and where pioneering thinkers were relegated to a “medical gulag.” Through the mid-1970s, Burzynski was an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The research projects he worked on received funding from traditional sources including the federal government. Burzynski's decision in 1977 to leave Baylor and start up his own small research and treatment facility where he and his colleagues could pursue their myriad ideas and discoveries and treat late-stage cancer patients free of bureaucratic rigidity and interference, however, did not sit well with the medical powers that be. Before he left Baylor but especially after he began working independently, Burzynski and his associates published numerous scientific papers on antineoplastons -- his term for the nontoxic urinary peptides that he discovered and that form the basis of his novel approach to treating cancer. Burzynski followed the accepted practice of publishing scientific papers on his discoveries, which he initially tested in laboratory tissue cultures and later in animals and humans. Typical of Burzynski's extraordinary results were the outcomes for early groups of advanced cancer patients treated with antineoplastons: 60 percent enjoyed objective remission, 47 percent experienced complete remission, and 20 percent survived for over five years without cancer. These and other results are far superior to anything reported then or now for standard cancer treatments. (For example, in 1985 interleukin-2 was heavily promoted by orthodoxy, supposedly as a highly promising new treatment after a single study showed it to have been associated with a complete remission from cancer in only one patient out of twenty-four treated -- a positive response rate of only four percent!) By choosing to work indepedently, on his own, outside of a mainstream institutional setting, Burzynski ran up against the closed mindsets and vested interests that dominate orthodox cancer research and treatment. In 1983, the influential American Cancer Society (ACS), without actually testing Burzynski's therapy or even visiting his facility, added Burzynski's antineoplastons to its list of “unproven” or “questionable” methods -- a kind of blacklisting that typically represents the first step in official marginalization. In the view of journalist [Robert] Houston and other independent observers, it is highly unlikely that a scientist whose name appears on this list can ever succeed in gaining official funding or recognition of any kind. “It's like trying to get out of hell,” Houston quips.
The entire article including more about Burzynski can be read here.
In 2007, Burzynski was a honored at a 30th anniversary celebration attended by 600 guests including long term recovered patients marking his three decades of work curing cancer with alternative methods. Julian Whitaker, M.D.’s account of the event was published in 2008 in The Townsend Letter.
Peter Barry Chowka is a writer and investigative journalist who writes about politics, health care, and the media.
My review of "The Case For God" by Karen Armstrong
My first review for WETA.org's The Book Studio is now up. Managing Editor Bethanne Patrick (better known online as The Book Maven) has been putting together an outstanding online home for book reviews and fascinating video interviews with authors of all stripes. I'm thrilled that I'll be reviewing regularly at The Book Studio, though I may have bit off more than I could chew with my first title: The Case for God, Karen Armstrong's sweeping history of man and God. Here's my take:
Religion poisons everything… God is a delusion… the end of faith... these are phrases lately found among the burgeoning supply of books by "new atheists" who take arms against a sea of holy rollers and jihadis. In an age of faith-based politics, resurgent creationism, and religious terrorism, aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have become bestselling authors.A new book attempts to take a stand against both the religious fundamentalists and their militant atheist foes. The Case for God is a landmark work of intellectual and theological history by the renowned scholar of religion Karen Armstrong.
The book is nothing less than a comprehensive history of human religion in just over three hundred pages. From painted traces of Paleolithic hunter-shamans on the Lascaux Cave walls to hip postmodernist theology, Armstrong offers a lucid narrative of humanity’s relationship with the divine. In her telling, the story of God and man unrolls like an ancient tapestry richly embroidered with scholarly insights and references from the world's many religious traditions.
It is a compelling story, but it isn’t clear that many people—secularists or religionists—will find it persuasive.
Read the thrilling conclusion of my review of The Case for God at The Book Studio.
My List of iPhone Apps - UnJailbroken Version
These are the very best iPhone apps of most I use on my daily life.
10 Reasons Why iPhone is the Best
Personally, I have never been so comfortable with a smartphone the way I am with iPhone. And I will try to put in 10 points.
