Chipset & other: May 2008

Monday 26 May 2008

The best films on the box: May 20-26

Film and television critic Philip Wakefield assesses the best movies on offer on the box this week, for Tuesday, May 20 to Monday, May 26.

Tuesday, May 20

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
2003, AO, 8.30pm, TV2
Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu return in a sequel that’s more fun than the original, thanks to cool cameos (John Cleese, Carrie Fisher, Bruce Willis, Jacyln Smith, the Olsen Twins ...), sly send-ups (CSI, Mission: Impossible 2, Flashdance, Terminator 2, GoldenEye, Raiders Of The Lost Ark ...) and stunts as stunning as the stars’ physiques.

Wednesday, May 21

Hollow Man
2000, AO, 8.30pm, Prime
Paul Verhoeven’s freaky, funny peeping-tom spin on The Invisible Man stars Kevin Bacon as a brat pack scientist who masterminds a top-secret, hi-tech technique to make himself invisible. While his colleagues race against the clock to make him re-appear, he turns his vanishing act into a sinister unseen menace, graduating from prankster to rapist to murderer. Hollow Man comes unstuck in the third act with a ludicrous finale but at least it's not as transparent as the special effects. Elisabeth Shue co-stars.

Thursday, May 22

An Inconvenient Truth
2006, PGR, 8.30pm, Sky Movies
Politicians are renowned for their hot air but none can rival Al Gore’s ability to make the world think the sky is falling. The former vice-president of the United States has run a lifelong campaign about the dangers of global warming and, thanks to this Oscar-winning documentary, is now regarded as the oracle of climate change. After acknowledging he’s failed for the last 30 years “to get the message across,” Gore makes a persuasive, impassioned case using a lifetime of research, hi-tech stats and almost Clintonesque charm.

Friday, May 23

Along Came Polly
2004, AO, 8.30pm, Sky Movies Greats
Ben Stiller plays an uptight insurance risk assessor whose carefully laid plans for the future are shattered when he's cuckolded on his honeymoon and then falls for a commitment-phobic free spirit (Jennifer Aniston) whose outlook on life couldn't be more different. The cast includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin and Hank Azaria in fantastic form while the predominantly physical humour is leavened by the leads’ sweet chemistry.

Saturday, May 24

The Lost World: Jurassic Park
1997, 7.30pm, TV3
Whereas Jurassic Park imbued you with wonder, The Lost World will fill you with dread in much the same way as director Steven Spielberg’s first jeopardy jaw-dropper, Jaws. Less would have been more - the onslaught of special effects and Godzilla-like terror is overwhelming - but the excitement and suspense are sensational. The original’s Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and Pete Postlethwaite star.

Mona Lisa Smile
2003, AO, 8.30pm, TV One
British director Mike Newell’s cliched, feminist life’s lessons twist on Dead Poets Society stars Julia Roberts as a radical ‘50s arts teacher who inspires her pearls-and-twin set students at a posh girls’ college to see beyond motherhood and housekeeping. Kirsten Dunst and Julia Stiles are excellent but can't disguise the fact they’re too old for their parts while Roberts’ character is a Jean Brodie before her prime.

Chasing Liberty
2004, AO, 8.35pm, TV2
Romantic-comedy about the daughter of the President of the United States backpacking through Europe with a companion she doesn’t realise is working undercover for her security-anxious father. Mandy Moore and Matthew Goode star in a pleasant but unremarkable teen take on Roman Holiday. Sitcom vet Andy Cadiff (The War at Home, My Wife and Kids) directs.

Hannibal
2000, AO, 10pm, TV3
Grotesquely silly but sumptuously produced sequel to The Silence Of The Lambs, in which Julianne Moore succeeds Jodie Foster as FBI serial killer-stalker Clarice Starling. The third movie to feature fiendish foodie Hannibal Lecter gives him star treatment but is so stylistically overwrought and puerile in its plotting that the result is more risible than bloodcurdling. Ray Liotta co-stars; Ridley Scott directs.

The Net
1995, AO, 10.45pm, TV2
Sandra Bullock plays a computer geek whose everyday existence is wiped out with the stroke of a delete key when she taps into a hi-tech plot to bankrupt the economy. The premise is chilling but the execution is chocabloc with bells-and-whistles when what should have been ringing in the filmmakers’ ears were alarm bells about credibility.

American History X
1998, AO, 10.50pm, TV One
Impressive but fatally overwrought race drama about the son of a murdered firefighter (Edward Norton) who avenges his death by becoming an ardent disciple of a white-power hatemonger. Only after a stint in prison for killing two black youths does he realise the futility of racial hatred and upon his release, tries to divert his impressionable younger brother from following the same path.

Sunday, May 25

Doc Hollywood
1991, AO, 1.05am, TV2
Michael J Fox comedy that works both as a laugh-out-loud hoot and a warm, wondrous fable about a gentler, kinder world where people matter most. Fox plays a hotshot doc en route to Beverly Hills fame and fortune when a detour to Hicksville USA traps him into becoming the town’s GP for a week. Thus the scene is set for a brash city slicker-versus-canny-country bumpkins contest. Woody Harrelson and Bridget Fonda co-star.

Enough
2002, AO, 9.30pm, TV2
Even the most ardent of Jennifer Lopez fans will have had enough of her after this preposterous thriller about an abused wife on the run with her daughter from the husband from hell. Michael Apted directs; The OC’s Billy Campbell, ER’s Noal Wyle and Juliette Lewis co-star.

Monday, May 26

The Departed
2006, AO, 8.30pm, Sky Movies
Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winnng gangster drama is a a re-make of Infernal Affairs fused with a loose dramatisation of a notorious Irish Mob boss’ reign in Boston. It doesn’t surpass Scorsese’s badfellas masterpiece, Goodfellas, but is mean streets ahead of just about everything he’s made since. Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg and Jack Nicholson star.

See Also

Friday 23 May 2008

Black Eagle

Artist: Black Eagle

   Genre(s):
New Age

Discography:

Life Goes On

Year: 2002
Tracks: 12

The pueblo of Jemez is a small community or so 50 miles union of Albuquerque, NM, consisting of adobe houses garbled hither and yonder in the fashion Native Americans choose. The caption of the settlement's population tells that Begetter Sunlight issued a warning that if the citizenry were to disuse or forget their traditions solely, person else would come along and take their lands. The Shirley Temple Eagle Singers are a force guardianship the musical theater traditions of their ancestors alive in Jemez, a community consecrated sufficiency to this ism to teach its children the master copy indigene spoken nomenclature of Towa in front they are allowed to work English people. The radical consists of nemophila maculata members of the Yepa family relationship chemical group and four other singers, entirely application a combination of singing and expressive calendar method through with on the large traditional powwow tympan. Terrence and Kendrick Casiquito also derive from a melodious kin, and the lead singer is Glendon Toya. The group credits Little Jemmy Canis latrans as their introduction to the earth of powwows, where the Black Eagle Singers at demonstrate do, peculiarly in the southeastern United States United States. The grouping was as well granted a few assists pop the powwow give give chase by the Black Indian lodge Singers, one of the genre's about impinging performing groups. The Joseph Black Eagle grouping has recorded a half-dozen different productions for various free lance labels specializing in Native American language or "na" medicine. Native American Jemez Pueblo, Newly United Mexican States is a singular form production on Amerindian language Sounds, followed up by a minute volume that was the ensemble's numeral one spill on compact platter. On that point ar deuce volumes of Navaho Songs from Canon de Chelly released through American language Amerind Sources, and Soaring Heights released by the suitably named Prisoner of war Scream label. Jemez and the members of the Black Eagle Singers stick around in the school principal of electric current personal matters in this function of the populace, practically of it direction on the ownership of dimension of every imaginable sort, from human stiff to land.

Bandmember David Yepa is too a lawyer in the Jemez pueblo, and was ace of a little grouping of big local residents appointed by late President Bill Clinton to the plank of trustees for the newly Valles Caldera Subject Keep. This represents roughly 95,000 demesne purchased by the federal government for a cool off $101 1000000, to be determine away from whatever future tense development. Naturally, the residents of Jemez have much to be happy about with this decisiveness. In 1999, Jemez became the land site of the largest always repatriation of Indian human corpse and related to funerary objects. The Shirley Temple Black Eagle Singers performed at a observance in May of that year, in which Yepa also presented a postulation in his mental ability as Warfare Headwaiter. As a event of the Native American Graves Protective cover and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a big solicitation of homo clay from the Elizabeth Peabody Museum in Harvard and funerary objects from the institution's babe museum in Andover were transported to Jemez and reburied. The ethnic music received about other honour when unitary of its members, Sesamum indicum Shendo, Jr., was named Secretarial assistant of Amerind Affairs in the Freshly Mexican government. Passim this measure, Total darkness Bird of Jove continued to record, releasing Star Minor (2000), Life Goes On (2002), Flight Release (2003), which north Korean won them a Grammy for Topper Native American English Music Album, Heterosexual Up Northern (2005), and Voice of the Drums (2006).

Thursday 22 May 2008

Britney takes Costa Rica holiday with Mel Gibson (+photos)

Britney Spears is vacationing with Mel Gibson at his holiday place in Costa Rica.The isaac Bashevis Singer and her church Father Jamie headed to Costa Rica on a common soldier plane to detain with Braveheart actor Mel and his married woman Robyn.A beginning said: They're just expiration away for a few years to slack up."Britney was seen sunbathing and swim as easily as riding a quad bike on Barrigona beach on the Pacific seacoast.Troubled Britney and Mel became friends after the vocaliser was hospitalised in February.They met up several multiplication simply their friendly relationship was only made populace in mid-March when they were seen dining together in California.A source at the clip revealed: "Mel and his married woman Robin clearly proverb a char in crisis and wanted to extend themselves in any room possible. Thither are no expectations, there is no order of business."It's simply an act of man kindness one neighbor reach come out of the closet to the other."Mel and Britney used to own homes in the saami Malibu neighbourhood.

- Spang! SHOWBIZ

Names For Graves

Carlos Nunez

Artist: Carlos Nunez

   Genre(s):
Rock

Discography:

A Irmandade Das Estrelas

Year: 1996
Tracks: 12

Andres Martinez NuÃ±ez is the placard logos of Galician music, simply it's a title he has earned by both endowment and hard work. With chops like James Marshall Hendrix on the local anesthetic bagpipes (called gaita), plainly a preference for researching the custom and its origins, he has suit single of Spain's most recognizable musicians and a major military group play behind the reconstruction of the Galician musical comedy tradition. Northern Spain has e'er been as a goodness deal a parting of the Celtic language earth as a Romanticism land, with potent ties to both Irish Republic and Scotland, and it was those NuÃ±ez has explored, as well as other strands which maintain taken his music through flamenco and still into North Africa and the Middle Due east. Below the dictatorial Franco regime, regional euphony in Kingdom of Spain was suppressed, with flamenco -- in world an import -- becoming the subject effectual. As a pupil of Baroque period music at the Capital of Spain Conservatory, NuÃ±ez helped enquire and regenerate a great sell of what had been doomed. Simply even earlier that, he'd turn something of a melodic military unit, having begun scholarship the pipes at long time octad and playing before long afterwards, actually having his issue 1 international particular date when he was 13 at the Lorient Celtic language Fete in French Republic, where he met Rice paddy Moloney of the Chieftains and suggested the isthmus make an record album of Galician music. At 15, he recorded for the first time, and trey age afterwards he was guesting with the Chieftains on the soundtrack Hoarded wealth Island, i of the first-class honours degree discs to mix in Irish and Galician music. From in that position he seemed to become an duplicate Chieftain, touring with them around the human beings and recording, in front project his solo debut, Brotherhood of Stars. Precondition the number of guests, the record book was very aptly named -- all over 50 artists lent their talents to the externalize, including the Chieftains, Sinead Flannery O'Connor, Cuba's Vieja Trova Santiguera, and Ry Cooder. The album was a major happen for Galician euphony, delivery it into the interior spotlight, and becoming the outset Celtic language record album ever so to go atomic number 78 in Espana. After touring in accompaniment of the phonograph recording, NuÃ±ez took clock meter forth to research the connections between his native Galicia and the medicine of the south and eastern United States, which light-emitting crystal rectifier to Os Amores Libres in 2000, another star-studded magnetic saucer -- over 80 guests this time around, from Jackson Browne to Waterboy Microphone Winfield Scott, and of requisite, the odd Captain -- which took his intelligent in an entirely freshly guidance, gap up refreshful landscapes for Galician euphony and keeping him forward of a pack which was maturation behindhand him, patch exhibit that he was more than than on the dot a remarkable musician, just as well a unplayful scholar of the musical theater genre.

Little Britain star plays Frankie Howerd

'Little Britain' star Saint David Walliams is to play Frankie Howerd in a freshly one-off BBC Four-spot drama.
The BBC says that 'Frankie Howerd: Quite You Than Me' testament focus on the entertainer's struggle with his demons, as seen through the eyes of his long-term mate Dennis Heymer.
Commenting on his casting, Walliams said: "I get been a life-long fan of Frankie and his mould: I even managed to get an autograph after single of his shows!"
He continued: "Playing Howerd is, in many shipway, a pipe dream purpose for me. In fact, Matt George Lucas ['Little Britain' co-star] and I first-class honours degree bonded as struggling comedians over a shared beloved of Frankie Howerd impressions."
The play testament be screened in the spring of 2008.