Terrorist attacks on President Obama

Friday the 13th of March white house was under attacked by terrorist.
Intelligence believe them to be from north Korea though president Obama was not harmed in any way but this present a major security issue.
CIA is investigating the matter though this has been kept quite as to not create panic to the American citizens

Top Ten Movies of all time

Heres my list of top ten movies of all time

1) The Lord of the rings trilogy

2) Titanic

3) The Shawshank Redemption

4) The Prestige

5) The Gladiator

6) The Godfather

7) The Dark Knight

8) Fight Club

9) Braveheart

10) The Usual Suspects

Donkey Punch

Despite my predilection for stories of the perverse and profane, I feel it is not my place to describe to any sort of public the act that gives director Oliver Blackburn's scrappy debut its name. For those who have spent any small amount of time in a frathouse, you know what a donkey punch is and have suggested engaging in it after at least three keggers. For the rest of you, these are the sort of things Wikipedia, if not the Internet itself, was made for. For the price of a movie ticket, however, you can now have a rather scummy British DJ explain it to you and then, a few scenes later, witness the event in all its glory.

A lesser filmmaker could have done nothing more than give the film its title and gone home. You'd certainly think that was the case from the film's opening notes: Three scantily-clad Brit birds (Nichola Burley, Jaime Winstone, Sian Breckin), on vacation in Spain, decide to take a spin on a yacht with a pack of tanned Aeropostale-types (Robert Boulter, Tom Burke, Julian Morris, Jay Taylor) with hits of ecstasy, a few Heinekens, and a DJ setup in tow.

While the more soulful pair (Burley and Boulter) spend some personal time on the stern, the rest of the group head downstairs for a wholesome orgy that crescendos with the youngest member (Morris) attempting the titular move, with fatal results. The body is then thrown to sea and the brood is sent into hysteria as they decide what to do with videotaped evidence of what happened. The law of the land being bros-before-hoes, the men band together while the surviving women employ knives, flare guns, and (why not?) a small boat engine to rid themselves of these hyper-masculine horndogs.

Like The Signal and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Donkey Punch is endemic of an inventive sect of the indie horror/thriller genre that, while often embedded in conventional scenarios, finds ways to minutely upend certain archetypes, reconsider mood and tone, and conjure suspense through crafty visuals and character development rather than piercing sound design and crass editing schemes. As the film transitions from the blissed-out daylight to the harrowing night, Blackburn carefully transitions his camera from shots taking in the entire bodies of the bikini-clad cohorts to close-ups of their panicked faces and wounds, including an agonizing shot of a piece of glass being pulled out of a knee and a flare burrowing into and shooting sparks out of a man's chest.

The fourth film in Magnet's ongoing Six Shooter series (which includes one of last year's best films, Let the Right One In, and the immensely entertaining Timecrimes), Donkey Punch is ultimately too minor and inconsequential a work to be taken seriously, too constricted by its own premise and unwilling to do away with certain totems. It does, however, serve as a thankful reprieve to the junkyard of Christmas season holdovers and studio mistake-purging that January so often affords the audience. Since nothing could be as good as the film's title, that's at least a small surprise.



Needs more Eeyore.

Yonkers Joe

Making a film about a scam artist is probably a lot like being one -- no matter how solid an idea seems, it's really all about the execution. The life of a cheat lends itself to high drama and conflict, but it can also be riddled with clichés. Throw in a mentally disabled son and a shot at the big score, and you've got a combination of storylines so obvious, they seem destined to fail. But Yonkers Joe doesn't fail. It's a spunky little indie that succeeds past its cheap conventions.

Both the credit and the blame go to writer-director Robert Celestino. His cornball plot shouldn't work, but his direction, especially with actors, does. Chazz Palminteri (Celestino's executive producer) is the title guy, a gambling stiff with an amazing ability to cheat crap games. He'll belly up to a table, pull some David Blaine-like moves to drop tainted dice into a game, and make a fortune. Unfortunately, Atlantic City security has his number, and private games are too small for his ambitions.

Enter Joe's 19-year-old mentally challenged son, Joe Jr. (Tom Guiry), staying with Dad after being booted from assisted living for being crude and violent. If Joe Sr.. can't straighten Junior out -- or make enough cash to pay for an alternative -- his gambling lifestyle will be seriously impeded. But if Joe can pull off one giant payday in Vegas…

You get the picture. Despite all the seen-it-before ideas, Yonkers Joe feels just a little different. Palminteri, an actor who telegraphs the "tough guy" image too often, softens here and lets his age (56) work for him, conveying a good sense of last-chance desperation and an inability to change. He's thinner and more wrinkled than in, say, The Usual Suspects, looking like a guy who's suffered too many bad bets, too many lonely nights.

He's countered well by Guiry, who understands that his rougher, more ridiculous lines ("Suck on a bowl of cocks!") are meant to deliver comic relief without cheating Joe Jr.'s intensity. Unfortunately, Guiry's performance is poorly timed; any able-minded actor playing a retarded character will now be judged by the infamous "Never go full retard" recommendation offered in Tropic Thunder. That said, I can't comment on whether someone of Joe Jr.'s intellect would react with the actions and comments we see here.

But suspending disbelief is not a problem with Yonkers Joe. You'll need it to get caught up in the assorted sleight-of-hand scams from swapping cards to palming dice. Celestino pulls back the curtain for us and never goes too far in explaining a scenario, letting Palminteri and buddy Michael Lerner chit-chat with their cheaters' lingo. It's all clear once the game's afoot.

Celestino is to be commended for keeping Yonkers Joe moving, with just a touch of awkwardness that balances out some run-of-the-mill dialogue. But his greatest achievement is in casting Christine Lahti as Joe's friend Janice. With honest and pursed-lip strength, Lahti reminds us how important she can be to a film, with a performance that recalls her achievement in Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty more than 20 years ago.

If you can watch Yonkers Joe without thinking it's a mild Rain Man rip-off, you'll enjoy a film that could have been plagued with plot issues, but rises above it. Hey, sometimes it's a crap shoot.



Let's get this bus going. Wapner's coming on.

Cargo 200

The lone indie release to butt heads this weekend with Edward Zwick's shallowly-scripted Defiance -- a revival of Nicholas Ray's lost technicolor opus Bigger Than Life not withstanding -- Cargo 200, the latest from Russian crime artisan Aleksei Balabanov, trades in the hired-gun thrills of the director's popular Brother trilogy for a highball of venomous gallows humor and satiric perversity.

Left in the dense thicket of Brezhnev's sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan, the term "cargo 200" was given to soldiers who found their way back to the motherland in zinc-lined coffins. Fitting, then, is the opening scene which sees a discussion of the cultural climate between two phantoms of a de-Stalinized USSR: two brothers, one a high-ranking member of the Party (Yuri Stepanov) and the other a professor of scientific atheism at a local university (Leonid Gromov). It's the latter's trip to Leninsk that finds him on the side of the road, garnering help from God-lovin' distillers (Aleksei Serebryakov and Natalya Akimova) and their Vietnamese servant (Mikhail Skryabin).

As the professor goes ten rounds with the distiller over the existence of the Almighty, Valera (Leonid Bichevin) steps out on his fiancé with her friend Angelica (Agniya Kuznetsova). A few spins at the discotheque, a long swig of booze and a quick hook-up later, the two are on their way to Valera's uncle's house to get "the good stuff." In classic interlocking fashion, the uncle happens to be the Commie-baiting distiller who has just sent the professor on his way home. Valera passes out on the floor while all the men begin to leer at his lady fair. It's the farmer's friend Zhurov (Aleksei Poluyan, a natural, plain-faced deviant), a Captain in the Party, who shoots the servant only moments before he forces poor Angelica to get on all fours and penetrates her with an empty bottle.

What at first appears to be a moderate Red remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is quickly impregnated with satirical lunacy so grim that one might call it Russia's answer to American Psycho. Valera, an embodiment of yearning bourgeois ethos with his CCCP t-shirt already looking vintage, ditches the scene while Angelica becomes a "love" slave for Zhurov and the distiller goes down for his servant's murder. One of film's culminating images, a naked Angelica wailing, handcuffed to a bed and surrounded by a swarm of black flies and rotting corpses, is so bleak and horrifying that you might think Francis Bacon served as DP.

Merciless in his eccentric brutality, Balabanov pirouettes on the line between dissent and patriotism. Made as a reaction to a burgeoning nostalgia for the days of wine and Bolsheviks, Cargo 200 is minor and discombobulated by its own outrage, but it is that very same outrage that gives it its rabid urgency. That the film flourishes from controlled dread to flailing hysteria and finally lands at its ominous (or is that hopeful?) coda is thanks to Balabanov's focus even in the most hectic of scenarios. More engaging and effective than its French equivalent (Frontier(s)), Cargo 200 sees the emergence of wicked days to come in the eyes of the erstwhile Union that, between Brezhnev's death in 1982 and Gorbachev's mid-'80s perestroika, found itself without leaders, hope, or conscience.

Aka Gruz 200.

Eden Log

Credit where credit's due: Franck Vestiel's Eden Log grabs your attention immediately and doesn't relax its grip for a solid 20 minutes. A man (Clovis Cornillac) awakes in a pool of muck with a light pulsing on him every two seconds or so. He is in a cave of some sort but not much more can be gathered. That is until he finds the pulsating light that is emanating from a small contraption wrapped around a dead man's shoulder. Stumbling upon a small gated area, a simulation tells him that he is helping with the titular project and that he must go on, tangling with all manner of chuds and super guards along the way. The revelations continue, but this is about the point where you might consider walking into the theater bathroom, taking out your trusty Swiss Army knife and performing seppuku.

The trials and tribulations that face the man, who eventually finds out his name is Tolbiac, are those more suited that of a video game programmer than a young filmmaker. It is eventually established that Eden Log is some sort of natural habitat that holds a large plant with rejuvenating sap and roots that release a toxin that turns humans into the roving chuds. Among the monsters and the guards running around, Tolbiac encounters a being in what looks like a hazmat suit who ends up being a rogue female worker. Together, they attempt to find a way out of the labyrinthine root system, just as Tolbiac begins to feel the effects of the toxins.

There are more happenings that include a few carcasses filled with roots and some elongated video entries featuring the guards and Tolbiac. The latter goes a long way to destroying all the provocation that had been built up by the film's strong opening. Mainly corresponding in fits of grumbles, moans, and grunts, Cornillac's performance is ostensibly one of simple physical presence, and it calls for nothing but to summon the ability to run, mutter and, every once in awhile, tangle with a monster. It's an uninteresting performance that puts more stress on Vestiel's direction and writing than the French first-timer may want.

In 2006, Vestiel served as a first assistant director on Ils, one of the most acute and harrowing horror-tinged thrillers to come from France in the last decade. Eden Log deploys a similar scenario in that it is seemingly based in real time and revolves around one figure running away from a pack of intruders, though it is one set in a post-apocalyptic eco-nightmare rather than a country mansion. There are many reasons that Eden Log fails where Ils soared, but the most damning is that nothing ever seems to be at stake for Tolbiac. The monsters attack him about as often as they leave him alone and we're never quite sure what to make of the character's declining mental state besides a mildly violent outburst every so often. The audience isn't allowed to like or dislike the character in any capacity until the very end, and by then the cheat has already settled in. Like a video game, Eden Log accepts no emotional stakes in its premise and gives the viewer only the simple task of reaching its finale. At 98 minutes, a conclusion about an hour earlier would have been far more merciful.

The Class

Based on the French best-seller Entre le Murs, which literally translates into "Between the Walls," Laurent Cantet's The Class casts the author of that book, François Bégaudeau, in the role of himself as a real-life inner-city high school teacher embedded in the trenches of the war between classical education and the ever-changing face of modern culture. What initially bears the components of a typical retread of white-teacher-inspires-multi-ethnic-students melodrama turns out to be something much funnier than one might expect from the director of brooding dramas the likes of Time Out and Human Resources.

Cantet spent months auditing Bégaudeau's classes and ended-up casting many of the students as themselves in the film. Like many of its egregious American counterparts (Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, to name a few), Cantet has outfitted Bégaudeau with a melting pot of cultural and racial variants to contend with, including a goth and a smart Asian kid. Unlike those films, however, there is no effort to pigeonhole these identities, nor is there any effort to sanctify François. Though it garners much of its action through simple debate, one of the film's central dramas concerns François accusing two of his students of "acting like skanks." The teacher never becomes characterized as sinner or saint, and it reveals a great deal of depth in Cantet's material.

Cantet keeps the camera on a tight leash, rarely venturing outside Bégaudeau's classroom. The little history we are given about the students is delivered in boyish braggadocio, excited chatter, and whispered rumors. At one point, a gaggle of Bégaudeau's students bully the teacher by berating him about a popular rumor that he's gay. Thanks to Cantet's unrelenting focus, we are never told if Bégaudeau is gay, a Sarkozy supporter, or has a German granduncle who fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Later on, it's the violent outburst of one of François' more outspoken students that becomes a concern, prompting a meeting over possible expulsion. Accompanied by a mother who can speak only scattered French phrases, the student becomes the lynchpin of the movie when it is argued whether or not he should be kicked out of the school. This orderly tribunal allows for high-minded debate between François and his colleagues, but the teacher gets the business from his students. Hopelessly unable to find common ground, Bégaudeau and his fiery teens allow for one of the more simple and engaging looks at the victories and turmoils of democracy to ever be put on the screen.

Though its ideas on the political majority prove fascinating and hugely entertaining, it's ultimately the film's clashing concern over education that elevates The Class from simple intrigue to a work of fervent discourse. Bégaudeau attempts to teach the students through classical texts, including The Diary of Anne Frank, but he is consistently overcome by a rambunctious, Internet-educated culture. So weak is Bégaudeau's own confidence in classical teaching that when one of his more sassy students quotes Plato's Republic, he is completely dumbfounded. Similar is Cantet's reaction to the hyper-modern, surprisingly well-rounded discussions that the kids often initiate, discussions in which François is scrambling simply to keep up. It begs the question: What shall we do if the teachers are the ones who need a better education?

Aka Entre les murs.



The heads of the class.