I'm Gina Smith

Middle Earth Map: Extreme Tolkien Triviata (anewdomain.net)

aNewDomain.net is collecting Tolkien images and infographics ahead of the release of the new movie coming out this week. Check this out! Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth never looked so good. Find the whole of the story here. Credit: JT Fridsma

The seminar continues. Here's how I'm feeling.

The most beautiful girl in the world.

Sophia Loren today was voted the most beautiful person in the world -- and she's pushing 72. And claims to have had no plastic surgery.

No. 2 is George Clooney.

Brunettes rule, it seems.

An Inconvenient Truth

A message I received from the RFK Jr. people.

The truth is coming soon to a theater near you: Al Gore’s New Global Warming Movie “An Inconvenient Truth”

Al Gore’s critically-acclaimed new film “An Inconvenient Truth” offers the best opportunity we’ve ever had to capture the immediate attention of all Americans and move this country forward quickly to stop global warming. While the problem is urgent, the solutions are clear, and with American ingenuity and leadership, we can avert disaster and restore the world’s confidence in our values. Let’s work together to make this movie a success, and turn the audience interest into action.

One easy way to get involved as virtual marchers is to buy a ticket and bring a friend to see this movie. Then help spread the word. The more people go see this movie on opening weekend, the more theaters will pick it up. Bring the power of the Virtual March to movie theaters across the country.

Marching forward,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Your heart is in my brain. (Story of a German cannibal coming to a theatre near you. Maybe.)

From Reuters.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Armin Meiwes, the German cannibal who gained global notoriety for eating a willing victim, is being immortalized in a movie by a gay filmmaker, and hardly surprisingly, the project is already running into controversy.

The film, whose working title is "Your Heart in My Brain," has received 20,000 euros ($24,580) in public funding from a regional film foundation in North Rhine-Westphalia, the western state ruled by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats.

Meiwes was sentenced in January to eight and a half years in jail for manslaughter after a trial whose gory details riveted Germany.

He admitted killing a Berlin computer specialist he met via the Internet, but was spared a murder verdict as the victim had asked to be eaten in a startling case of sexual fetishism.

Meiwes recorded the deed on video tape and shocked the court with his matter-of-fact account of how he severed the man's penis at the latter's request, and how they both tried to eat it, first raw and then fried in a saucepan.

Billed as a mix of "grotesqueness, thriller and documentary," the film by critically acclaimed filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim, a man, is stirring up political arguments even before its completion, set for December.

"Even the title of the project could scarcely be more tasteless," said Axel Wintermeyer, legal affairs spokesman for the conservative Christian Democrats in the state of Hesse.

"This is creating a monument to a perverted criminal," said Wintermeyer, adding he was appalled that it was being part-funded by taxpayers' money.

'Pieces of April's' Quirky Turkey Day (washingtonpost.com)

I saw Pieces of April tonight. I loved it. See it.

Review from the Washington Post excerpted below.

'Pieces of April's' Quirky Turkey Day (washingtonpost.com)

This film explores what low-budget films do best: the quirkiness of character, and slightly off-kilter comedy. No doubt, if this had been a studio picture, many of Clarkson's caustic edges would have been smoothed out for multiplex-audience comfort and Oscar fine-tuning. But as it is, her performance brings a vital prickliness to the story in contrast to the other, more charming sections. It's a mature drama, only seemingly small in scope, that makes that Lower East Side meal quite an auspicious event. Whether Joy and April unite, and whether that turkey ever gets cooked -- these things matter more and more with each passing moment.

The Matrix Revolutions (reviewed by David Denby, The New Yorker)

David Denby is my favorite movie reviewer. Here is his review of The Matrix Revolutions in this week's New Yorker.

Interesting aside: The philosopher he mentions, Colin McGinn, is a professor I interviewed for a Nightline piece I did on consciousness once. Of the philosophers I interviewed, he was hands down the most articulate, thoughtful. Nice to see he's getting more play.

As for Matrix, he told Denby: "Not much philosophy there."

The New Yorker: The Critics: The Current Cinema

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE by DAVID DENBY

"Not much philosophy there," a real-world philosopher, Colin McGinn, of Rutgers, said to me after a screening of The Matrix Revolutions. I hasten to add that my own unphilosophical temperament found the picture somewhat more entertaining than the second movie in the series, The Matrix Reloaded, a noisy sleeping potion administered to the world last spring. But McGinn is right: this time, as in the second movie, the directors Larry and Andy Wachowski have made the intricacies of the original (the play between actual and simulated reality?) secondary to the main events of spectacle, fighting, and stunningly wooden dialogue. At its best, the picture is violently exciting; at its worst, banal and monotonous. Yet the relative absence of mighty significances did not prevent the Matricians sitting all around me, mostly men aged about thirty, from remaining utterly still, as if at a High Mass, throughout the movie. It is, I suppose, far too late to bemoan the obvious truth that these college-educated gents, and millions of others like them, will spend many hours debating the apocalypse as revealed by the Brothers Wachowski but would die before ...

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