Nothing like two guys talking tough. Here is a preview of two fighters in the upcoming Battle Field Fight League, Clay Ayres and Jason Brooks.
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The Big Lebowski (1998) ****1/2Directed by Joel CoenMy tweet:The Big Lebowski (1998)- Perfect blend of fully baked cinema with a peppering of acid flashbacks. Coens at their most audacious ****1/2 of 5Other thoughts:The only thing more audacious than a Coen Brothers drama like No Country for Old Men and Fargo is a Coen Brothers comedy like Burn After Reading, A Serious Man and The Big Lebowski. Their comedies tend to be exaggerated to the point of absurdity which always runs the risk of becoming cloying. Granted I've only seen the Coen Brothers comedies I mentioned above, but I've always been impressed by the way they are able to go all out without ever cro! ssing the line into tedium. This is especially impressive with Lebowski considering that its audacity is much more aggressive than the other four films mentioned above.Jeff Bridges is amazing and perfectly cast as the abiding The Dude, a washed out hippie who divides his time between bowling, getting high and drinking White Russians all with an occasional acid flashback to keep things interesting. One night, The Dude returns home from bowling to his dilapidated apartment only to find two sadistic thugs who pee on his carpet thinking that he's a multi-millionaire with the name Jeffrey Lebowski. Though that's The Dude's real name, the thugs realize quickly that they've got the wrong man. After attempting to get reimbursement from the Big Jeffrey Lebowski, The Dude becomes involved in an increasingly absurd and progressively dangerous sequence of missions involving kidnapping, bribery and extortion. Things repeatedly go very wrong, mostly due to the hot temper of The Dude's bo! wling buddy Walter Sobchak, a Vietnam veteran, Jewish convert ! played b y a scenery chewing John Goodman who's undeniably fun to watch.The Big Lebowski's appeal does not lie in its inane plot. What makes it a modern classic are its characters and its stoner dialogue. It would have been all too easy for a film about pot smokers to be lazy, languid and disjointed in order to match the experience of being high. Instead, every fully baked moment is imbued with an intelligence and wit that's truly impressive. I can't think of too many smarter films about such stupid people.As is par for the course in a Coen Brothers film, audiences are asked to revel in the schadenfreude towards its characters. Once again, the criticism does seem to hold up that the Coens like to create characters and put them through hell much to their sick pleasure; however, the final scene involving a baritone cowboy narrator puts this and other criticisms of the movie out in the open as we're treated to a kind of review of the film right before the closing credits. I knew the end! was near before this scene so I began to formulate my opinion in my mind, and I was quite tickled by the fact that the cowboy pretty much said exactly what I was going to say about the film's successes and failures. One can't help but be won over by the charm of an intelligent movie that's clearly meant to be tongue in cheek.Despite the purpose of its meta-conclusion, The Big Lebowski is not a perfect film. There are a few scenes that aren't as funny as others, making the whole thing feel uneven. A couple of moments go too far in their silliness including an interpretive dance performance by The Dude's landlord. Overall, though, The Big Lebowski is a brilliant, one of a kind exercise in audacity that proves once again that the Coen Brothers are working on a level above just about every other filmmaker out there today. 
Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh (2009) ****Directed by Roberta GrossmanMy tweet:Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh (2009)- Amazing, well told story of a dynamic heroine. **** out of 5Other thoughts:Regarding films about the Holocaust, a troubling conundrum exists. On the one hand, too many Holocaust themed films are released each year, and on the other hand, can the human race ever have enough reminders of the worst event in world history? It's interesting to think back on all films of this sort that I've seen, from ultra-serious fare like Schindler's List and Sophie's Choice to lighter cinema such as Life is Beautiful and Inglourious Basterds. I doubt a film about the Holocaust will ever be made that's better than Schindler's List. That film spells out all the atrocities in unflinching detail, so it's almost futile for a film to generally try to focus on the horrors alone. T! he best historically sound Holocaust films (which excludes Inglourious Basterds from the analysis altogether) tend to tell a more focused tale of an aspect of the Holocaust we've not yet seen before on screen. The documentary Blessed is the Match is a really fine example of this.I'd not heard of Hannah Senesh and knew nothing of the mission she was a part of to save Jews being brutally slaughtered en masse in Yugoslavia in the early 1940s. The film begins with an image of a group of people parachuting from a plane and tells us that Senesh's parachuting mission is the only official military effort to save Jews during the war. Hannah, born into a comfortable life in Hungary, finds her calling while experiencing early anti-Semitism at a Protestant boarding school. She dreams of moving to Palestine in order to help build the homeland of the Jewish people, a dream she realizes when she gets accepted to an agriculture school there. Her writings from the time tell of a stubborn yo! ung woman with conflicted emotions about leaving her family an! d dealin g with the news of the plight faced by European Jews. She eagerly signs up to leave the safety of Palestine for the mission that will ultimately lead to her arrest, subsequent torture and finally her death.Much of the narration of the film comes from the memoirs of Hannah's mother Catherine who herself was arrested and held at the same prison as Hannah. Joan Allen provides the narration in a way that does not distract one bit. As a matter of fact, I would never have known that it was Joan Allen's voice I was hearing had I not read the film's Netflix envelope. As usual in documentaries such as this one, we hear from talking heads, including historians, biographers, descendants as well as Hannah's now elderly contemporaries. Listening to those who survived the war, one can't help but be moved by the sadness and semi-palpable guilt they emote over the fact that they made it out alive and Hannah did not. Certainly, these emotions can also be felt in the writings of her mother.I'! m not a fan of recreations in documentaries, especially when they're done in such a way that actor's faces are conveniently not shown for long periods of time. I suppose the idea is that the audience is meant to imagine the face of the actual historical figure as a part of the body and actions of the actor in the recreation. This almost never works for me since I feel like I'm being manipulated which results in my being taken out of the film completely. Grossman tells much of the story through recreation, and some sequences fail because of this gimmick; however, once we are taken inside the prison walls, the actresses playing Hannah and Catherine are no longer hidden, and we're even shown extended close-ups on both faces from time to time. From then on, the recreations work. As a matter of fact, they're especially impressive considering that often the recreations transition into an actual photo, and the actors and the settings match real life impressively well. It's clear t! hat Grossman paid meticulous attention to detail, and the docu! mentary ultimately proves richer as a result.There's no doubt that there will continue to be Holocaust films released year after year. It's easy for a film with this subject matter to adopt an heir of importance. This historical monstrosity is too important for filmmakers to exploit with motives that are insincere. Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh proves itself completely sincere as a veneration of someone who refused to ignore the worst kinds of injustices against her people.
A Fistful of Dollars (1964) ***1/2Directed by Sergio LeoneMy tweet:A Fistful of Dollars (1964)- Solid practice run for a director that has better things in store. Simple & shallow yet cinematic. ***1/2 of 5Othe! r thoughts:I'm starting to get the feeling that Sergio Leone is all about style over substance as I reflect on A Fistful of Dollars, the film which many credit with starting the success of the Spaghetti Western genre. As such, I'm guessing that I might end up preferring his epics over his low key, low budget Westerns. This is the second of what will be six films in My Sergio Leone Marathon. Once Upon a Time in the West is a breathtakingly impressive film precisely because of its unabashedly melodramatic style. Sure, there are moments that rival mustache-twirling, "woman tied to the train tracks" melodrama within A Fistful of Dollars, but as a whole, the scope is too modest to truly satisfy on its style alone.Yet, no one can argue that A Fistful of Dollars is a feat of storytelling. Other than its relatively brutal violence, there's nothing within that hadn't been explored before. Case in point, the plot about a drifter who saves a town by pitting two rival renegade clans ag! ainst each other was stolen from Kurosawa's Yojimbo. In fact, ! Kurosawa sued for copyright infringement, eventually winning a percentage of the film's profits.So if A Fistful of Dollars doesn't satisfy on a style level and it doesn't have anything new to say on a story level, you might ask why I'm giving the film three and a half stars. The answer lies in the fact that I had a lot of fun watching this unoriginal story play out. Much like a really good novel written for teens, the entire film plays below my intelligence level, but it does not insult the viewer's intelligence. Instead, it's a simple film, and simple can be refreshing and easy to digest.Of course, Clint Eastwood deserves credit for much of the film's success. Granted, he stands firmly on the line between acting and line reading. He's no Lawrence Olivier when he's the "Man with No Name," but he's got undeniable charisma and presence which more than carry the film from scene to scene all the way to the end. To emphasize the film's simplicity, take for example the fact that the "Man ! with No Name" suffers from what I like to call Jack Bauer Syndrome, named after the lead character on the television series 24. Bauer is the smartest, fastest and most skilled man alive until his perfection is taken away. Then he's bruised, bloodied and beaten often to within an inch of his life. What always follows is a ridiculously fast recovery after which he becomes perfect again. This is exactly what happens to the "Man with No Name." He's smarter, faster and more skilled than anyone in the outlaw Rojos and Baxter families. He's beaten, and then he reemerges perfect once again.A Fistful of Dollars is a film of importance more than it's a film of quality. That being said, it's admittedly compelling which merits it being called a success despite tempered ambitions.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) **1/2Directed by Terry GilliamMy tweet:The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)- Clunky & underwhelming...sorry to say, those words also apply to Ledger's performance **1/2 of 5Other thoughts:Maybe it's unfortunate that this film is sort of my introduction to Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam's solo directing career. Granted, I have seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is maybe my favorite comedy of all time, but that classic was co-directed by Terry Jones. Looking through Gilliam's directorial filmography, I'm impressed with the quality I've heard described about many such as Brazi! l, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys and Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. At the same time, I'm ashamed that I've not seen a single one of those I just mentioned. Without a doubt, I'll have to do a Terry Gilliam marathon in the near future.The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has ambitions of magical visual film making, but sadly it's instead a clumsy, clunky, disappointing mess of a movie. The screenplay, written by Gilliam and Charles McKeown, offers a story that's totally uninteresting. Mr. Nick (Tom Waits), who is also the devil, returns to Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) in order to collect on a promise made many years prior that, in exchange for eternal life and a resurgence of youth in order to win the heart of a woman, Parnassus must hand over any children that resulted on their 16th birthday. Wouldn't you know, Parnassus did in fact have a daughter named Valentina (Lily Cole) and yep, she's about to turn 16. For reasons that! are not totally clear to me, Parnassus headlines a traveling ! carnival show where people can pay to walk through a mirror into their own imaginations. He's assisted by Valentina, a loyal dwarf named Percy (Verne Troyer) and a wide-eyed young man named Anton (Andrew Garfield) who has a bit of a thing for Valentina.As Parnassus freaks out and drinks himself to a stupor over Mr. Nick's return, a strange man is found hanging from a bridge with a flute lodged in his throat to prevent his neck from breaking. His charm, charisma and way with the ladies is just what their lackluster sideshow needs to bring in the bucks. We learn that his name is Tony, and he's played in real life by Heath Ledger and in the Imaginarium by three actors--Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Ferrell. Within the Imaginarium, we learn more and more who Tony is and what he wants from the traveling company.As you can tell, there are lot of elements of fantasy, and the Imaginarium scenes are done with a jarring and somewhat crude style of CGI animation. Unfortunately, this makes th! e real world scenes downright soporific in comparison. Visually, they come off as a blend of Dickensian England with disjointed glimpses of modernity. If you want a film that successfully mixes old and new England with a bit of fairy tale invention, watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Also, I never thought I'd say this about any director, but Gilliam should have tried to be more like Michael Bay. There's one real life scene involving the sideshow vehicle crashing through the streets causing explosions that goes down as one of the most awful executions of an action scene I've ever seen. You'd need to inject yourself with adrenaline in order to get excited while watching this sequence.The Imaginarium scenes are adequate and occasionally special, but they don't feel complete. Had someone like Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry tackled this material, perhaps the magic could have registered more significantly. This is vintage Monty Python animation, but that film was meant to! be campy and cheesy. This time around, the goal is to illicit! whimsy and wonder, and sadly, Gilliam doesn't deliver.I'm not going to temper my take on the film in order to honor the memory of a truly great actor who tragically died way too soon. Therefore, I say without hesitation that I hated Heath Ledger's performance as Tony. He alternates between overacting and looking terribly bored. There's one exchange with Lily Cole that is painfully uncomfortable to watch. Ledger bizarrely delivers his lines while stroking her face, and during the whole thing, Cole looks scared. Depp, Law and Ferrell perform Tony inside the Imaginarium with consistent wide eyed caprice, which made me long for one of them to have been originally cast in the role. Out of the three, Jude Law impresses the most, so he would have been my choice. Ledger is an amazing actor which he proved in both Brokeback Mountain and The Dark Knight. Maybe his personal life got in the way of his performance because it's truly horrendous. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus will always be! remembered as his last film. Personally, after this review, I'm going to forget that he was ever in this movie.Note to Hollywood, please stop casting Verne Troyer. He can't act--at all. There have to be other little people out there who actually know how to develop a character and deliver lines with some emotion and nuance. Peter Dinklage, though not a dwarf like Troyer, would have been excellent as Percy, whose character is key to audience affection for Parnassus. Lily Cole is one of the most beautiful actresses working today, yet her beauty is very odd. She evokes Hollywood glamor from the 1920s and 1930s, inviting comparisons to Myrna Loy and Lillian Gish. No other actress out there looks anything like her, and I predict that she might just become a huge star because of it. Christopher Plummer looks like he's having a lot of fun, but I think he was miscast. He's never without class and charm, which doesn't quite fit his character's self-loathing and frustration.Andrew G! arfield is high on my list of actors to keep an eye on. Though! he over acted in what should have been a tempered performance in Boy A, I thought he was the standout in Lions for Lambs, which is saying something considering that the cast includes Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise and Robert Redford. By far, he delivers the best performance in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, bringing a frantic energy and charisma. It's clear he knows how this material ought to be played. If only everyone else could have matched Garfield's spirit.Every great director is bound to have a few missteps in his or her career. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus does not belong on a list of Gilliam's better films. For this reason and for his actiong, let's all agree to call The Dark Knight Ledger's unofficial swan song.
New material for the military arts nomad fisticuffs blog came with the show of The river Extreme MMA Championships for 2010, The Red histrion Theatre in Coquitlam BC on Friday night, April 23. Fighters from BC, Alberta, Yukon, and Ontario were on the bill to watch in 19 fights who would be the national champions in Amateur MMA In Canada across sextet coefficient divisions. This title program was presented by the river Amateur Combat Sports Council, that designed the program to wage important undergo and acceptance for teen and upcoming fighters, meet as river jurisdictions are prototypal to sanction pro integrated military arts events. 
Michael Germoudi and Brian Ernst
The fisticuffs program took the name of ‘Extreme’ for digit reasons: prototypal existence that a fighter may hit to fisticuffs up to threesome nowadays in the aforementioned period to claim the sectionalization title, and ordinal that the program prefabricated use of a ‘30 ordinal connector rule’, where fisticuffs that has gone to the connector for 30 seconds is obstructed by the referee, the fighters are stood up and the fisticuffs continues. Use of a 30 ordinal conception has been discussed in other MMA fisticuffs program since it has been planned as a solution to help ready the state alive and fights decisive; MMA fisticuffs organizers want rules to attain meliorate fighters with meliorate fights. The Extreme program could be titled a testing connector for the conception and it was seen to impact substant! ially in this context. The 30 ordinal conception enabled fighters, whatever who are from a standup striking background, to hit a quantity for a meliorate connector game. The fighters would either verify the quantity more ofttimes to shoot in for a takedown, or impact hard to indorse knowing that they would not intend equal up for too long on the mat. What the fisticuffs fans got as a termination was more difference between stand-up and connector action, and they would cheer in sequence with the changes in action. 
Following long-standing fisticuffs period traditions, bill girls were on assistance to ready the circumstance streaming same clockwork. But someone hired bill girls so sexy they needed a military escort. That job was filled by threesome men who could truly be said to be among the toughest guys in Canada, represented by the honour protect of the Royal Westminster Regiment. The gentlemen soldiers were otherwise in commendation by the modify of the period that bearing our national alarum and escorting the bill girls carefully finished the ropes beat overseas deployment.
Some rattling fast fights happened on the matted and few lasted the duration of 2 transactions for one or digit rounds for the later matches. Some of that could be attributed either to beatific craft of choking the guy discover or by effort outclassed, plain and simple. Once that got classified there were lots more fights lined up for the event. The maximal sectionalization for the period was Welterweight, from 156 to 170 lbs. In the prototypal round, the meliorate fighters won by TKOs from rear naked chokes, quick and deciding strikes and connector submissions. The exception of Danny Doing and Rob Woodcock in the prototypal fisticuffs of the evening which overturned discover to be an evenly matched unify of fighters and came to a unanimous selection for Doig. Johnny Kozlowski and Eli Wyse got to the belt ammo with Doctor’s act and TKO, and Kozlowski took the sectionalization with a critic declared strong at the modify of a 30 ordinal connector conception whistle. 
The Featherweight category(135-145 lbs) prototypal ammo would see Oren Hanscomb and Shane Jung front to face soured against each other with 30 ordinal wins by anaconda and cloture tap-out respectively. Their title ammo fisticuffs apace became anti-climactic with 5 transactions of act due a earnest bulwark injury due to an unintended strike, and Hanscomb walked absent with the belt. 
The Lightweight sectionalization (146-155 lbs) prototypal ammo featured a substantially matched effort between saint Stainthorpe and Mark Shean, in a fisticuffs demonstrating beatific striking and escape skills from clinches and mounts. There would be whatever debate between the judges selection after the fight, given to Shean. But as a termination of neither of the other digit fighters in this sectionalization existence healthy to come backwards for the belt round, the sectionalization title was awarded to saint Stainthorpe. 
The Middleweight sectionalization (175-185 lbs) modern archangel Guermoudi by judges selection in a fisticuffs with digit connector stoppages, who would go against Brian Ernst who won by a rear naked turn tap-out in 42 seconds. While Brian Ernst defended well, restablishing protect individual nowadays against Guermoudi while on the ground, Guermoudi’s crack connector fights in the guard, his sweeps, strikes, throwdowns, and slams enabled him to verify the fisticuffs with a test beatdown. 
The Light-heavyweight division, for 186-205 lbs had exclusive threesome fighters. The sectionalization introduced Brad histrion to the topical fisticuffs scene in a substantially matched, hard standup win against Kyle Warman. histrion would then go to the belt ammo against President Warman (bro of Kyle?). histrion would verify the fisticuffs of the period in an INSANE FIGHT, feat finished bounteous ordeals as he was almost choked discover with a front guillotine, with a beetroot red face, escaping exclusive to intend rocked hard individual nowadays by strikes from President Warman, crumpling to the matted exclusive to intend correct up again, bouncing soured the ropes same a drunken sailor, to assail everyone with effort Warman with a strike and takedown. He then mounted and pounded Warman with massive, vengeful headshots alternated with knees to t! he torso. The gathering went absolutely nuts, he was almost discover of it… for a moment everybody was counting histrion out, and then he bounded backwards brilliantly with an righteously exalting conclusion after almost losing it. The student and paraprofessional were brought in to the anulus for Warman after the critic obstructed the fisticuffs by knockout. histrion was on CBC Radio One on Monday April 26 to share his personal story, which is meet as exalting and a little surprising. He is a past arrival to BC from backwards east, incoming less than a assemblage past in Vancouver on a Greyhound with less than 40 bucks in his pocket, unerect at shelters for the prototypal pair of months, volunteering at The Gathering Place Community Centre, doing what he could until he could intend on his feet. histrion is not bespoken to any topical military arts gym and used a borrowed onerous activity to attach his training. He has whatever undergo bouncing at bars, but he has to ! hit whatever raw talent in there and amazing intend to face ch! allenges right the anulus same he does inside of it. Surely whatever gyms around municipality are feat to look at this guy as a actual prospect.
Craig Garriot would verify musician Moon in the 3 Negro Heavyweight sectionalization (206-265 lbs) in the effort of the bounteous guys. Reece Doherty from Fort St. John who did not front in the judges separate selection held up the circumstance with a special announcement. He titled his lover to the ring, got down on one knee, and planned to her. She accepted, and there was a general significance of comfort in the crowd, as no-one wanted to see a mma effort between couples. The critic noticeable love victorious and they display for kisses with a sway on his new fiancee’s finger.
Full Photo set on Flickr.com: http://www.flickr.com/photos/superwebdeveloper/sets/72157623940552622/ Link for fans of the lovely bill girls: http://www.flickr.com/photos/superwebdeveloper/sets/72157623279493008/
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