Deliciously Dysfunctional Tryst

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If a love story is called for, Angel Eyes delivers romance and drama wrapped up in mystery and suspense.

A Film Critique by The Commentator

The 2001 drama/romance Angel Eyes, directed by Mexican-born Luis Mandoki and starring Jennifer Lopez and James Caviezel, exhibits the finer side of main-stream "commercial" movie making by resisting the sell-out of shallowness and predictability . The main characters are well crafted and well developed in the course of the film and reveal depth of emotion and convincing inner conflict. The subtle plot clues are achieved by using points of view and camera angles and nothing is given away until the final denouement.

For a script that relies heavily on an undercurrent of mysterious off-screen events and early psychological trauma as the foundation and validation of the plot, Angel Eyes is exceptionally well laid out and right on target.


About the actress

Jennifer Lynn Lopez (born to Puerto Rican parents in 1969 in the Bronx, N.Y.), is a Hispanic American actress, singer, songwriter and business entrepreneur.
Lopez's childhood friends nicknamed her "The Supernova," and her first husband, Cuban Ojani Noa, called her "La Guitarra". This first marriage lasted barely a year. In 2001 she married actor and choreographer Cris Judd (divorced in 2003) and is currently married to the popular Salsa and Latin pop star Marc Anthony (2004–present).



[For details about plot and cast go to Angel Eyes]



[Read a review of a film from a completely different genre]



:: Have you seen this movie? Please comment ::

The Second Quarter Of 2007

by our Editor

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We'll always have Paris... or so it seems. Between the relentless news coverage of Paris Hilton's incarceration and subsequent release from jail and the hype about Apple's much anticipated iPhone launch, one might reach the conclusion that nothing else of great concern was going on in the world.

We need to remind ourselves that long after Paris' peccadilloes have been forgotten, the Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and other parts of the world will still be there and will still matter. Not to mention the tragic and needless war in Iraq, now in its fourth year, which weighs heavy on our budget and our conscience (or at least on the conscience of those who still have one.) Incredibly, the Cost-of-Iraq-War-Calculator has reached a stunning $378 billion, halfway through fiscal year 2007.

However, global economic growth in general is strong and will continue to expand, fuelled by emerging and developing markets in China and elsewhere. But this is a force that cuts both ways, creating new demand for goods and services, but also creating strong competition for precious raw materials and human resources. This growth explosion is sure to present an additional strain on our already compromised eco-system.

Now more than ever, we must put in place stringent measures to halt global warming worldwide.

The challenges are many as we look down the road.

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[See also article about global warming on Wikipedia]

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[Read Check List on CROSS CULTURAL OUTLINE]

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Lock out Link Spammers and throw away their Key

: Attention All Blogspot Bloggers:




Ever click open your blog, quick-scan the 'Comments' numbers and notice that several new ones have been posted? Oh, the glee, oh, the anticipation of resonance, of popularity, of meaningful dialog!
You click the permalink only to discover that your comments page is cluttered up with imbecilic one-liners, thinly veiled advertisements containing hyperlinks to this commercial site and that. - Yep, you have been link-spammed!

Do not fret, the clever folks at Google/Blogger have come up with a feature that lets you SCREEN each comment before it goes live on your blog. Works just like your trusted friend, the telephone answering machine: You choose who you talk to - you choose which comments get posted and which ones deleted. See how to activate this new feature.

We sure hope that other blog-hosts will follow suit and implement comment-spam screening tools, if they have not as yet done so.

[Find more details on blocking spam links on the googleblog.]

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[Related reading: "So, now you are a blogger..."]

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UP IN ARMS

Forbes v Bloggers

An Amalgamated Perspectives Editorial


"You might be aware of the pissing match currently going on between the mainstream media, i.e., the corporate 'News' moguls, and the Blogger community. Confronted with the fact that the not-so-new phenomenon of blogging is taking up more and more bandwidth in cyberspace, the media giants take a stand.

Whereas Business Week and Fortune Magazine came out in support and praise of the ever expanding blogosphere, Forbes, while initially positive, published an article by Daniel Lyons accusing Web logs of "spewing lies, libel and invective". Predictably, this affront hit like the proverbial match in a powder keg: Acerbic volleys have been flying ever since.

We cannot help but notice, that BOTH sides are guilty of hyperbole and slander. The very practices that each side condemns, each side also engages in. What does this scenario remind you of? Yes, it is suspiciously reminiscent of the infantile squabbles in kindergarten! Whoa, is it not time that we put these childish rivalries behind us?
Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing except when it is (ab)used for petty and inflammatory obfuscation.

C’m on, guys, enough already: it is high time to kiss and make up. Let us rise above all this self-defeating anger mongering and come together in TOLERANCE and Peaceful Coexistence.


After all: The World Wide Web is big enough for all of us."

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[See also: a Post by Jason Goldman]
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[About us: The AMALGAMATED PERSPECTIVES Platform]


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^^On Cruising the Blog-Scene^^ (OP-ED)

EDITORIAL by Ana Elsner

"Crank up your espresso machine, you’ll need all the caffeine you can stomach, as the hours go by while you click your way through an endless labyrinth of diaries and diatribes.
Pull up your emotional bootstraps and be prepared to wade through a vast pool of heart-wrenching exposés on the minutiae of a million private lives.
This journey is not for the faint-hearted.

As you deftly maneuver around the spam sites, the porn sites, the 404s,
as you dodge the incoming barrage of pop-ups,
as you turn down the volume so you don't get blasted out of your chair by various midi, wav and other sudden sound effects,
you find yourself getting snagged by this blog, sucked into another, turned off by the third, turned on by the next ... and, sooner or later, depending on your stamina, utterly exhausted.
You have just embarked on a Kafkaesque rollercoaster ride minus the pink cotton candy.

Yes, it is all in there, right there in the digital box in front of you, coming alive at a mouse-click.
The entire panoply of human caricature is mirrored in these web-logs:
There is the recluse, the addict, the whiner, the cynic, the former hippie, the former inmate, the fallen angel, the pollyanna, the eternal optimist, the borderline illiterate, the borderline schizophrenic, the self-proclaimed genius, the frustrated poet, the con-artist, the babe-in-the-woods, the narcissist, the tattler, the prowler, the punster, the pundit, the proselytizer, the producer and the prosecutor - the sexy, the nasty, the desperate.
All of them are busily pouring their hearts out to no-one-in-particular: Sigmund Freud would have a field day in the blog-o-sphere.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, 'All the Web's a Stage'. The curtain goes up each time you go blog-surfing. The players strut their stuff, many of them stripped of all restraint and modesty.
Their voices echo eerily in cyberspace. No audience steps forward in applause. Their pages are devoid of comments. Their hit-counters stalled out at 106, their email boxes empty. No dialog ensues.

And here you sit, the anonymous voyager, unbeknownst to those whose posts you just read, whose lives you looked in on. You've had all that you can take. Your head's still spinning. Time to log out of blog-o-rama."

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