Want to help support Obscanity.com? Use my Shopping Portal to make your holiday purchases! It won't cost you an extra cent, but it'll help support this site. Doing all your shopping at Amazon.com? Go there now!
You are currently browsing the archives for the Movies category.
There's been a lot of hype surrounding iTunes Plus, but you may not be quite sure whether it makes sense to upgrade the music you've purchased at the iTunes Store to the new iTunes Plus content. Though all music bought at the iTunes Store after Jan. 2008 is free of DRM, and thus is iTunes Plus music, many people have hundreds or even thousands of songs they purchased prior to the change. These people need to decide whether to upgrade. To help make that decision, here are the basics of iTunes Plus:
At long last, it has arrived! After 22 years, the made-for-TV celebrity extravaganza has FINALLY been released on DVD! Yes, you heard me correctly – the 1985 TV movie Alice in Wonderland is now available on DVD for your viewing pleasure! This movie is PACKED with celebrities – some of them in their prime, some of them past their prime, and some of them not quite ready for prime time (hello, young John Stamos! hahaha). Natalie Gregory plays Alice, and throughout her adventures she runs into… let’s see… Sammy Davis Jr., Carol Channing, Sally Struthers, Ann Jillian, Lloyd Bridges, Red Buttons, Sherman Hemsley, Sheila Allen, Shelley Winters, Scott Baio, John Stamos, Imogene Coca, Telly Savalas, Roddy McDowall, Sid Caesar, Ringo Starr, Steve Allen, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick Duffy, Harvey Korman, Eydie Gorme, Pat Morita, and others! I think these days you can pretty much only see such a star-studded list of names if you go down to Hollywood and take a stroll along the Walk of Fame. What more can I say? It’s a fabulous movie and is my very favorite remake, and one of my favorite movies from my youth. Share it with YOUR children! You can find it for $7.99 at Amazon.com.
In 1969, Anthony “Ace” Bourke and John Rendall rescued a lion cub from the “exotic animals” department at Harrod’s Department Store in London. They named him “Christian” and raised him in their apartment, exercising the cub on the grounds of the local church. After a year, though, Christian the lion became too large to keep in their home.
As luck would have it, the two men coincidentally ran into actors Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, who had recently starred in Born Free, the 1966 film about another domesticated lion who had been reintroduced into the wild by the couple whom the actors had portrayed, George and Joy Adamson (author of Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds). They suggested that the two men contact George Adamson in Kenya.
Bourke and Rendall eventually brought the lion to Kenya, and after a few years, they returned to visit him. They were informed at that point that Christian was the leader of his own pride and was fully wild now, and that he would not remember them. See for yourself what really happened when the lion and the men met again.
You can purchase the DVD made about Christian the lion at the Born Free Foundation website.
Over the past several weeks I have seen a huge number of articles spring up in protest of last month’s CA Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriages. I want to address some of the arguments and claims that I’ve seen in those articles.
Myth #1: Four liberal activist judges overruled the will of the people.
What You Should Know: The California Supreme Court, a conservative court, struggled with the issue, looked to the CA Constitution, and concluded that equality means equality for ALL – and that includes those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Many have argued that legislatures, not judges, should be responsible for making marriage law. The CA legislature has twice passed the Religious Freedom and Marriage Equality Act, which equalized civil marriage rights among couples but explicitly stated that no religious institution shall be compelled to preside over a same-sex marriage. The bill was passed by two different assemblies of the legislature, since one passage was prior to a major election and once occurred after. The bill was twice vetoed by the Governor specifically because he believed it WAS an issue for the courts, not for the legislature.
Of the seven CA Supreme Court Justices, six were appointed by Republicans. The CA Supreme Court is traditionally known for being fairly conservative. If you think “CA” and think “liberal judges,” you might be mistaking the CA Supreme Court for the United States Court of Appeals for the Circuit. They are two very different courts. Incidentally, one of the dissenters is personally in favor of allowing same-sex marriage. Judges can and do go against their own personally-held beliefs in favor of upholding the CA Constitution.
The Supreme Court decision did not create a “new right” – rather, it acknowledged prior decisions stating that every person has a right to choose his or her life partner, and determined that this right cannot be abridged based solely on sexual orientation, which the Court views as akin to race and religion as far as discrimination practices are concerned. The judges did not come to their decision easily; they struggled with it, and that struggle is documented in the extremely lengthy opinion released last month (most court decisions are NOT this long – the Massachusetts marriage decision was less than a third of this length). If you think all it took was a stroke of a pen, I challenge you to read the 172-page opinion. I did.
Myth #2: The people of CA already spoke on the issue of gay marriage by passing Proposition 22
What You Should Know: Only 29% of registered California voters (21.5% of eligible voters) voted in favor of Prop 22. Is that an overwhelming majority?
In Re Marriage Cases (CA, 2008) (PDF only, due to length)
While Proposition 22 was a statewide ballot initiative, it was not an accurate reflection of all of CA, for two major reasons:
First, contrary to popular belief, Prop 22 was not approved by an overwhelming majority of CA voters. Prop 22 was passed by an overwhelming majority of the voters who came out in March of 2000 to pick between John McCain and George Bush, since there was no true competition in the Democratic race, with Vice President Al Gore being the assumed winner. True, more Democrats than Republicans voted in the election, but if you count by who they voted for instead of their party identification, you get 2,654,114 voting Democratic and 3,702,487 voting Republican. In a consistently blue state, these statistics are not representative of the true population (about 30 million people). Overall, the election had a pretty low turnout rate. That primary election had around 7 million voters out of about 15 million registered voters. This past February primary (2008) had about the same number of registered voters, but more than 9 million actually turned out – and THAT was with closed primaries, which we didn’t have before, and no real contest in the Republican race.
In a state of more than 30 million people, only 4,618,673 voted in favor of Prop 22, and 2,909,370 voted against it. With only about a third of eligible voters, and barely half of registered voters, having voted on Prop 22 (that’s overall, not just in favor), it’s hard to use the word “overwhelming” to describe the outcome. Basically, 29% of registered voters (21.5% of eligible voters) voted in favor of Prop 22 – and that was eight years ago. The world has changed since then. People have changed since then. I know a LOT of people who voted for Prop 22 and are, in retrospect, utterly ashamed of themselves for it.
Second, Proposition 22, while appearing simple, was actually quite misleading. It came as a response to DOMA, which allowed states to refuse to recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages, and the entire campaign was centered around the notion that CA should not be forced to recognize other states’ marriages. The argument was framed in such a way that many people who had no particular opinion on same-sex marriage voted for Prop 22 because they believed CA should be allowed to make the decision for itself and not be forced into it by another state. While this same Supreme Court ruling ultimately determined that Prop 22 did apply to all marriages and not just those performed out of state, the “yes” campaign intimated otherwise, and countless voters were duped in the process.
Even if Proposition 22 HAD passed with the approval of most Californians (which it didn’t), the CA Supreme Court had the responsibility to ensure that it complied with the CA Constitution (which it didn’t). The Court here didn’t ignore Proposition 22; it attacked it head on and found it to violate the spirit of the California Constitution. Courts have declared other initiatives unconstitutional as well, and in the 1960’s the US Supreme Court even invalidated a voter-approved CA constitutional amendment which sought to overturn a recently-passed legislative act banning housing discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, sex, marital status, physical handicap, or familial status. Propositions don’t just glide into law just because the voters approved them. They still have to meet the rigorous standards of our great state and federal constitutions, and Proposition 22 violated what both the CA and US Supreme Courts have called a basic human right, the right to marry and create a family with your chosen spouse.
Myth #3: Marriage is a sacrament and has always been between one man and one woman.
I could go on for pages about the ways in which marriage has changed over the years. One man can no longer have eight wives. Women are no longer subsumed by their husband’s identity and viewed as property. Couples are no longer barred from marriage based on their racial makeup. Most importantly, however, couples do not have to have their marriage blessed or sanctified by a religious institution, and they do not have to be married by a member of the clergy. This is the key to the constitutionality argument for same-sex marriage. The court cannot, and must not, and WILL not force religious institutions to officiate marriage for same-gender couples. Religions have the right to dictate their requirements for marriage, and the government may not interfere.
However, the state does not “recognize” religious institutions’ marriages; it creates the official status itself, and it officiates marriages outside the religious sphere. We call this civil marriage. It is an entirely different institution from religious marriage; it just happens that the state grants clergymen the status to officiate civil marriages at the same time as religious ones, for convenience’s purpose, so that a couple can be married in a single ceremony. A couple that goes to church and exchanges vows before witnesses is NOT married unless they fill out the necessary paperwork for a civil marriage. Likewise, a couple can obtain a civil marriage license and be married by a judge, a marriage deputy, or other civil servants acting as agents for the state, and never even interact with a religious institution.
Religious institutions can discriminate against certain couples; for example, most rabbis will not officiate at a marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew, because Jewish law only recognizes as valid a marriage between two Jews. However, the STATE cannot discriminate in the same way and purport to be upholding the Constitution, state OR federal. If the STATE offers civil marriage, it must allow it to all adult couples, not just those who fit religious descriptions of propriety. After all, can you imagine the chaos if the state refused to issue a marriage license to a couple because one of them was Jewish and one was not? It is not the state’s business to uphold or enforce religious restrictions on marriage. (In fact, considering the VAST number of religious institutions and clergy who submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in support of same-gender marriage, I would argue that the state would have been in violation of the Establishment Clause had it NOT allowed the marriages to take place, since barring same-gender couples would have been equivalent to expressing a preference for some religions over others, at the expense of individual civil rights.)
If you want Biblical proof that it hasn’t always been about men and women, read I Samuel, not just the lines I have provided below, but the entire story – and read a translation that is as close to the original Hebrew as possible, as modern versions have diluted the story, often explicitly changing words entirely to tone down the relationship. Think about what it means to make a “covenant.” In nearly every other case in the Bible, the word “covenant” refers to the relationship between God and people, or to people promising to serve God. A covenant is an eternal promise – why else would some states institute “covenant marriages,” which are not as easy to dissolve?
1 Samuel 18
1. And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.
3. Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.
1 Samuel 23
18. And they two made a covenant before the LORD: and David abode in the wood, and Jonathan went to his house.
Myth #4: Allowing same-sex marriage will lead to legalization of incest, pedophilia, and polygamy! Next thing you know, people will be marrying their dogs!
What You Need To Know: It’s far too late for that.
Let’s get this one over with: A dog is not and will never be a consenting adult. Nor will a goat. In addition to being morally and utterly repugnant, sex with animals is always rape, because an animal cannot consent. Likewise, a paw print does not suffice as a signature on a marriage license – and no matter how sure you are that your dog is trying to tell you something, absent a licensed dog-to-human translator, “Arf arf” cannot be properly construed to mean “I do.” Get your mind out of the gutter and stick to the issue at hand.
Incest is already legal in the 26 states where individuals can marry their first cousins. Cousins are the next degree of siblings; they are the children of your parents’ siblings. The great irony of today’s marriage laws is that I can marry my black cousin, the son of my aunt, but I can’t marry my wife. Or rather… I couldn’t. Now I can.
Pedophilia is already legal in the 1/3 of states that allow children under age 16 to marry, with some allowing marriage as early as age 13 with permission from the court. I’d be willing to bet that in most cases the men marrying adolescent girls are not also in their teens. If you want to protect children, you can start by lobbying states to prohibit children from getting married before they are old enough to see R-rated movies.
Polygamy is a separate issue because it doesn’t involve marital prohibition so much as it involves individuals trying to “double-dip” on the marital property and tax systems, among other things. A marriage is a union of two individuals into one economic unit. You can’t “become one” with one person if you’re already “one” with another person. There’s an argument to be made for allowing “threesomes” of people to marry, but I highly doubt anybody would take the economic risk, considering that one individual could wind up paying alimony to everybody else in the group if s/he decided to leave. I think the specter of alimony would be enough to prevent anybody from seriously raising this concern – not to mention that it’s an extremely rare arrangement in the first place.
Myth #5: Gay couples don’t need marriage in order to get their legal matters in order. Calling it “marriage” does nothing but devalue the sanctity of marriage.
What You Need To Know: Allowing committed couples to marry encourages and promotes monogamy and family responsibility, two crucial family values. As a result, federal and state governments have instituted a system of rights and responsibilities that have become necessary and irreplaceable for two people sharing their lives together. These rights are not replicable in private legal arrangements since most of them have to do with third-party or government recognition.
First, I have to point out that same-gender couples can’t possibly do more harm to the institution of marriage than that already inflicted by the heterosexuals who have held a monopoly on it for so long. (Hello Britney; hello “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?”) With more than half of all marriages ending in divorce, marriage needs all the good role models it can get. Many of the couples that are getting married in California this week have been together longer than most heterosexual marriages ever last. In fact, some social scientists believe that studying the way same-sex couples communicate and deal with conflict may actually help decrease the divorce rate among heterosexual couples by helping them overcome conflict.
Whether you like it or not, same-sex couples will have children. Children fare better in life when their parents are married. Why would you deny these children the right to be raised by married parents? Studies show that there is no substantial difference between children raised by gay parents and those raised by straight parents. They do, however, show that two parents are better than one. Marriage encourages two-parent childrearing, and provides economic safety-nets for situations where one parent abandons the family. Without marriage, the protections are substantially reduced. Marriage also encourages personal responsibility and shifts economic support responsibilities from the government to the individual and the private sector; with gay marriage legalized, many people will no longer have a need for state-provided benefits because they will be eligible for benefits through their spouse.
Children tend to thrive when they have one parent at home and one parent working to support the family; in an ideal world, families could afford to live on the salary of only one working parent (this is becoming less common as the cost of living skyrockets). Federal marriage recognition encourages parents to stay home with their children; spouses are entitled to their deceased spouses’ Social Security benefits if their own are insufficient. Gay couples do not receive this benefit, effectively removing this incentive to keep one parent at home. Additionally, federal marriage recognition keeps families from being uprooted in case of the death of a spouse; the property passes from one spouse to the other without tax repercussions, which means that in the tragic event of one spouse’s death, the other spouse and their children will not be forced to sell their home to pay estate taxes. Gay partners are taxed on bequests as though they were granted by any acquaintance; a partner of 55 years could be forced to sell her home to pay the taxes on property inherited from the deceased partner. Finally, the federal tax system actually penalizes gay couples who choose to have one partner remain at home to care for the children; the wage-earning partner is taxed on her income as a single person even though her salary is supporting both partners and their children. Stay-at-home moms should relate to this – imagine if your husband had to pay taxes as a single person!
I could go on forever, but I think it’s time to wrap up this article. However, I am happy to answer any questions you might have. As for me, my wife and I got married this past Tuesday, on the one-year anniversary of our religious wedding. We were already married in the eyes of God – it was time for the state to catch up.
We have friends over fairly often, and the game of Cranium is definitely one of our favorites to bring out. The game is terrific because it relies on teamwork and a variety of creative and intellectual tasks.
This is no “Candy Land“; if you want to win, you’re going to have to use your… cranium, as it were. You can get the basic board rules from the game’s instructions; the more important information you need to know is about the different tasks you could be assigned.
The Basic Stuff
Each space on the Cranium game board is marked with a color, either red, blue, green or yellow. At the four “corners” of the gameboard (actually located in the middle of each side) is a purple “brain.”. Regardless of how many spaces a player is supposed to move, they must stop when they reach each brain, even if their roll would have taken them further. Between each “brain” spot is an inside track and an outside track; the inside track has fewer spaces, so you get to the next brain more quickly. The team that goes first is the team including the player with the next birthday. I’m not kidding; this is in the rules!
At the start of the game, every player is on the initial “brain” spot, and therefore they get to pick their first task. If they are successful in their first task, they get to roll the dice and move to the appropriate color via the inside track, and on their next turn, they will draw a card from the deck of this color. If they do not succeed in their first task, their turn is over. When they do successfully complete a task, they must go along the outside track until they reach the next brain. The inside-outside path resets at each brain, so you can still catch up even if you miss your first challenge.
Once you’ve made your way around the board, you enter the center “brain” – the big brain, if you will, and you must answer, on each of your subsequent turns, a question from each of the four categories. Once you finish the fourth, you move to the middle of the brain, and on your next turn, all of the other teams get to pick a card for you. That’s all of the teams, not each of the teams. They will have to agree on a category. Usually this category is red (Data Head), unless your team includes one of those people who just knows everything about everything. In order to win, your team must successfully complete this last task.
So What Are These Challenges?
The game’s challenges are broken up into four key categories: Word Worm (yellow), Creative Cat (blue), Data Head (red), and Star Performer (green).
Yellow is “Word Worm,” and contains such wacky tasks as:
Gnilleps: One player from the team must correctly spell a word backwards on your first attempt, and without writing anything down.
Spellbound: The same as Gnilleps, only you get to spell it the normal way!
Zelpuz: The team must unscramble words using a very vague clue.
Lexicon: Multiple choice definitions. Be careful – these aren’t SAT questions. Here, they ARE trying to trick you; watch out for homonyms, because inevitably both words’ definitions will be potential answers
Blankout: These are the hardest; you must complete a word with letters whited out. You do get a clue, but the clues usually aren’t too helpful.
Green, “Star Performer,” is my favorite; it involves various physical performance skills, including:
Humdinger: One team member must hum the song on the card, while the other members attempt to guess the song. Generally when we play, we allow the team member to hand over the card to another teammate if she doesn’t know the song; she is forbidden to guess. If no player knows the song, then we allow them to pick another card.
Cameo: Basically, charades. In theory, you’re not supposed to be allowed to give any indication of how many words or whether your team is on the right track, but we generally just follow the rules of charades instead.
Copycat: The performing team member must get her teammates to guess which famous person she is imitating by mimicking the person’s speech, actions, characteristics. No names of people or places are permitted, and the team member cannot respond to anything the guessers ask. This challenge can either be really boring or absolutely hilarious, depending on how strictly you adhere to the rules. Given “Elvis Presley,” some people will say something boring like, “I have left the building,” or “Thank you very much.” More creative performances will involve hip thrusting and curled lips. It’s up to the game’s players to decide what they will and will not allow here.
Blue, “Creative Cat,” is my other favorite; it involves artistic tasks such as:
Cloodle: Basically, Pictionary.
Sensosketch: Like Cloodle, except that the drawer’s eyes must be shut. This can be extremely entertaining, and I like to hold on to the most brilliant “Cloodle” masterpieces for reminiscing in future games. If you do this, you might want to label it after the turn is over; some of them will be pretty unrecognizable later on!
Sculptorades: The player has to translate the answer into sculpted form. No gestures/acting/pointing is allowed; this isn’t charades!
Red, “Data Head,” is my least favorite, although some people are freakishly good at this. The tasks include:
Factoid: Random trivia questions. No list to choose from. These can be ridiculously hard.
Selectaquest: Trivia, but with multiple choice answers.
Polygraph: True or false trivia. The logical answer is rarely the actual answer.
Let me preface this part by saying that I am not a fan of “stupid humor” and crude comedy. If a movie is only funny because it exploits sex and bodily functions, odds are I’m going to spend most of the duration rolling my eyes. When I went to see Borat, though, I laughed so hard I thought I was going to throw up. I saw it with my mom, and both of us laughed hysterically throughout most of the movie (I laughed even harder when I learned that the guy sitting next to my mom in the theater got up and walked out halfway through the film!)
Unlike many of the people I know who went to see this movie, I had absolutely no experience with Borat before stepping into the theater, having never seen his television show, and I really had no idea of what to expect, save for the few brief scenes revealed in the previews.
The basic plot of the story is that Borat comes to the USA to make his documentary, but winds up on a detour to Hollywood to track down his new wife to be, Pamela Anderson, who has yet to be informed of her fate. As Borat makes his way to Los Angeles, he catches Americans across the nation with their proverbial pants down. This isn’t just a stupid spoof flick. The thing that makes this movie so great is that the joke is so clearly on us.
Example #1: It’s clear throughout the movie that Borat is intolerably anti-Semitic – which you already know if you’ve seen the clip on YouTube of him singing in a country western bar, as all of the audience sings along with him, “Throw the Jew down the well!” What you don’t know unless you happen to be fluent in certain other languages (which I’m not), is that when Borat speaks in his native tongue, he’s actually speaking Hebrew, sprinkled with some Polish words for good measure. (I didn’t know this until my Israeli friends pointed it out). I’m sure I don’t have to explain why this is hilarious.
Example #2: I’m sure you’ve heard by now that the young men who picked up Mr. “Borat” are now suing him for making them look like idiots. The lesson that should be taken away from this situation: If you don’t want to be shown on film making ignorant, racist comments, don’t make ignorant, racist comments in front of filming cameras. And that, of course, *is* the punchline to that particular joke – people are willing to show their true colors when they think they are influencing the development of some far away country. They’re a bit shamefaced now that they’ve been “outed” here in America. It is absolutely mind-boggling what people will say when they think they can get away with it. Sascha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” character reveals that no matter how much effort some people make to conceal their bigoted views, those hateful sentiments are still there, brewing right beneath the surface. All it takes to stir them up is a charming but socially inept journalist from Khazakstan.
Even more mind-boggling is how other people in the film are willing to tolerate behavior that is at BEST grossly inappropriate and offensive, and at worst violative of human rights, simply because they are naive enough to believe that this is really how things are in “mah cuuuntry.” The running of the Jews? Keeping handicapped siblings in cages? Capturing wives in burlap sacks? Are Borat’s unwitting co-stars so convinced of western (or American) superiority that they really believe civilization ends at the border and the world runs amok outside of North America? Watch this movie and find out!
Be warned – there are scenes in this movie that you don’t want your children to see. There is nudity. Close up, and not pretty. Freaking hilarious, but really, not an image you want to stick with you. Kids may find it really funny to watch a silly guy in a moustache amble around making fools of people, and you may already hear your grade-school kids doing Borat impressions, but I promise – this is not a movie for young kids.
I am SO excited to be linking to Things From Another World (TFAW), partially because they have a TON of really awesome merchandise, but at least for now, mainly because they’re a retailer for the new Buffy comic.
I’m very excited about the pending arrival of this new comic. If it could just come five minutes ago, that would be good. Did I mention I’m excited? More Buffy! Buffy Season 8! An eighth season of my FAVORITE show ever! It’s supposed to pick up where the television series left off. Not that this gap hasn’t been filled by a million fanfic writers, but still – this comes from the TOP: Joss Whedon himself (well, in concept anyway).
Through TFAW you can preorder the next few issues, and see the cover art, which is already posted. They also have lots of Buffy memorabilia and other fun stuff, including the DVD box sets of Buffy AND Angel.
I’m totally in love with Watching You: Intriguing Lesbian Short Films. I’m planning to get this on DVD the next time I place an order! I think somehow I missed a few of the shorts the first time I saw it, but that’s all the more reason for me to get it on DVD! Watching You is a collection of lesbian short films from around the world, though they’re mostly in English (there is one from Israel that is in Hebrew – but it’s subtitled and after a while you’ll be so engrossed you won’t even notice that you’re reading). Some of the shorts are really sweet (ha, short and sweet)! I especially like the hilarious Ten Rules, and I hear that it is being adapted into a TV show for LOGO, the LGBT cable network. I’m totally psyched! Now I just need to get cable!
Description from Amazon (with my favorites in bold):
This exciting collection brings together some of the best lesbian shorts from around the world, included on both the VHS & DVD versions of this film:
4PM (Dir. Sam Backhurst, UK 14 min) Humorous tale of a one-night stand that goes horribly wrong. Winner of Best Girls Short – Melbourne Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.
Bare (Dir. Deborah Strutt, Australia, 9 min) A hot on-night stand ignites a whole neighborhood of passion and romance. Winner of Best International Short – Brussels International Film Festival.
Interviews With My Next Girlfriend (Dir. Cassandra Nicolaou, Canada 13 min) A very particular single woman screens future prospects in a hilarious interview process. Winner of Best Comedy – PlanetOut.com/HBO Short Movie Awards.
Watching You (Dir. Stephanie Abramovich, Israel 32 min) A lesbian’s hobby: photographing a captivating woman neighbor causes trouble with her jealous girlfriend. Winner of Best Lesbian Short Film – Philadelphia Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.
Dear Emily (Dir. Katherine Brooks, USA 7 min) Sara recalls the drama of her senior year, and an intense schoolgirl crush. Winner of IFFCON Pitch Contest.
The Ten Rules: A Lesbian Survival Guide (Dir. Lee Friedlander, USA 28 min) Takes a look at the pitfalls and pratfalls that happen when your friends aren’t just your friends – they’re also your dating pool. Winner of Audience Award, Best Short Film – Boulder Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.
Traveling Companion (Dir. Paula Goldberg, USA 20 min) An upcoming trip to romantic Italy persuades travel writer Helen to tempt fate and place an ad for a traveling companion. Winner of Executive Director’s Award – Newport Beach International Film Festival.
Double Entente (Dir. Jacquie Lawrence, UK 11 min) Erotic tension builds when stressed- out Vanessa tries to meet her gorgeous lover Dulcie for an after-work cocktail. Will she settle for a stranger’s touch?
Here’s another great reason to give Netflix a try: Subscribers can now watch a limited number of movie hours right on their computers. Depending on your subscription plan, you get a selected number of hours each month to watch movies right from the Netflix website! I think it’s related to the dollar amount you pay – so the $9.99 plan gets you 10 hours a month, and the $14.99 plan gets you 15 hours per month – in addition to the DVD rentals.
They don’t have the entire stock of movies available, but there is a HUGE selection, and I have the feeling that they’ll make more films available as the service gets more popular. I believe they’re making the service available to customers gradually, but everybody should have it by June. We’ve already watched a few movies, and it’s SUCH fun! We even upgraded our plan so we can get more viewing hours each month (and more DVDs at a time!).
My partner and I LOVE Netflix. We can rent all the movies, new / old-school / classic TV shows, and documentaries we want for one low monthly price (our queue has at least 250 DVDs in it right now, not counting the dozens and dozens and dozens we’ve already been through! hehehe). We can also connect with our friends and leave cute little notes about the movies we loved and the movies we didn’t love so much. It’s way fun to see what our friends have in their queues.
Netflix is SO easy to use, especially if you’re one of those people who gets lots of late fees because you just can’t get around to taking the DVDs back to the store. They mail you the DVD(s) (the number depends on which plan you get), you watch them, you pop them back into their envelopes (no postage required!) and stick ’em in the mail! Keep each disc as long as you want; there are no late fees!
The turn-around is very rapid; once you mail it, you usually have a new one within a couple of days. You can also switch back and forth between plans, so you can pay less during the school year when you don’t have as much time, and get a better plan during the summer when you’re all about watching movies. I love this, because I’m a law student, so during the year I don’t have lots of time for movies, but the second the school year is over, I want to just park myself in front of the TV and catch up on everything I’ve missed!
Right now, my partner and I are zipping through Punky Brewster and The West Wing, as well as a whole slew of movies we’ve been meaning to see. That’s another great thing about Netflix — new releases come out pretty quickly. If you always manage to miss movies while they’re in the theater, worry no more – as soon as you think of a current release you don’t want to forget, you can save it to your queue, and when it’s released it’ll come to you according to your queue order.
Finally, Netflix is a great way to preview films before you take the step of adding them to your home DVD collection. There are plenty of movies we really like but don’t necessarily want to own… but it’s such a hassle getting to the rental store, and then returning it… this way you don’t waste money buying DVDs you’re going to watch once!
? 
At long last, it has arrived! After 22 years, the made-for-TV celebrity extravaganza has FINALLY been released on DVD! Yes, you heard me correctly – the 1985 TV movie 
, the 1966 film about another domesticated lion who had been reintroduced into the wild by the couple whom the actors had portrayed, 
). They 
[Cross-posted at my epinions account.] 
“; if you want to win, you’re going to have to use your… cranium, as it were. You can get the basic board rules from the game’s instructions; the more important information you need to know is about the different tasks you could be assigned. 
[Cross-posted at my epinions account.]
I’m totally in love with 
