- River Phoenix has been dead for 20 years, but his final
film is just now making its way to the big screen. It has been two decades
since Phoenix
died of a drugs overdose at the age of 23, just 10 days before the completion
of “Dark Blood,” but the film only made its debut at the Berlin film festival
this week. Phoenix’s passing brought an abrupt end to its production, but Dutch-born
director George Sluizer rescued the completed rolls of film from the vault of
the movie's insurance company, which assumed ownership of the unfinished
material just days before it was due to be destroyed. In the film, Phoenix plays
a young widower with Native American roots who kidnaps a Hollywood couple.
Sluizer finished the movie last month, voicing over the scenes from the screenplay
that Phoenix never filmed. The director explained that his fundamental idea was
to "put something together so that the material could be preserved in a
proper form, rather than in a wastepaper basket.” "I'm missing about 25%
of it, and we lack a number of scenes, but having shown it to a few people
after I salvaged it, who raved about the performances, I felt safe enough to
continue," he said. Before it screened at the festival, Sluizer described
the finished work as a "chair with three legs" and warned the
audience they were about to see an incomplete work. "The fourth leg (of
the chair) will always be missing but the chair will be able to stand
upright," he said. Along with Phoenix, British film and theater actor Jonathan
Pryce plays the well-to-do husband of Judy Davis’ character and their problems
begin when their Bentley breaks down during what is supposed to be a romantic
weekend in the desert. Pryce fondly recalled the experience of working on the
movie with his late co-star. "I've got only very fond memories of River. I
found him a remarkable young man and I can't believe looking back that he was
only 23 at the time. He was a very old head on young shoulders and was
absolutely delightful," Pryce said. Some scenes are still missing from the
original video footage and have not been recovered, but Sluizer and his
cinematographer, Edward Lachmann, suspect they may be in the possession of
someone who hopes to sell them separately………
- Some men simply cannot be confined by the normal
constraints of Valentine’s Day gift giving. They refuse to simply buy one or
two dozen roses, an expensive box of chocolates and dinner at the nicest
restaurant in the city. Those men are men like Nathan Rebman, who decided that for the
perfect Valentine’s gift this year, he would combine his love of getting drunk and
his love of his lady. No, he did not build her a statue of herself made of beer
cans, although that would have been sufficiently epic. No, the Battle Ground,
Wash. resident came up with a unique way to display his love by, um,
immortalizing his wife Trisha in a mosaic made with thousands of leftover wine
corks. In total, Rebman collected 2,862 corks to complete his work of art, but
didn’t say how many of those came from bottles he consumed personally. He organized
the corks by shade in order to create the proper depth for the piece and when
one steps back and looks at the entire picture, it shows a fairly accurate
representation of Trisha Rebman’s face. “When I finally got the eyes and mouth
right, it worked,” Nathan Rebman said. “Definitely the eyes were the hardest
part, because you've only got so many corks to work.” Rebman said his wife was
shocked when he presented the gift to her. “I was really surprised, actually
amazed,” she said. “Our kids are huge daddy advocates. They say he can build or
make anything. It’s true. I had no idea he could do this.” In one of the cornier elements of his
effort, Rebman titled his new work of art "2,862 ways that I love her.”
Because she had little choice once presented with the mosaic other than to hang
it somewhere within her home, Trisha Rebman allowed the image to be hung in the
entryway of the house………
- Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is making a strong push
to be the most-hated owner in all of sports. That will happen when you strong-arm
citizens into paying for two-thirds of a state-of-the-art new stadium, make a
few big-name signings to give the illusion of trying to compete for your first
year in said new stadium, then unload those big names at the end of the year
and move forward with a gutted roster that gives you no hope of contending any
time soon. Loria has held similar fire sales in the 11 years he has owned the
team, but this year’s rendition was perhaps the most egregious and offensive.
Not only did he insult the fan base in Miami by forcing them to watch a crappy
team with no hope for a winning record this coming season, but he also managed
to offend both players still with the team and those traded away. Slugger
Giancarlo Stanton is the lone star left on the team and he spent the weeks
after the trades of pitcher Mark Buehrle and shortstop Jose Reyes lighting his
own team up on Twitter. Reyes didn’t sound much happier when he showed up in
Dunedin, Fla. this week for spring training. Three months removed from what
he called a "shocking" trade that sent him from Miami to the Toronto
Blue Jays, Reyes claimed Loria had encouraged him to buy a house in Miami as
recently as three days before he was shipped out. "I was shocked, because
Jeffrey Loria, he always told me he's never going to trade me," Reyes said.
“He
always called my agent and said, 'Tell Jose to get a good place here to live,'
and stuff like that." He wondered how Loria could have made such a
suggestion when the two of them had dinner together three days before the trade
and the answer is simple: Loria is an irredeemable d-bag. Reyes had signed a
six-year, $106 million contract in December 2011 and there was no way Loria was
ever going to keep him around for the duration of that deal. Reyes admitted he
feels sorry for Stanton and the other
Marlins players who remain on a team that has cut more than $70 million in
payroll since last season and he’s not the only one……..
- Black holes suck….literally. That doesn’t mean
researchers aren’t fired up to have found what may be the youngest black hole in the Milky Way
galaxy. NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory identified the black hole, which
researchers described as not far from Earth based on their viewpoint here on
the galaxy’s most-inhabitable planet. This supposed space phenomenon is
relatively close at a mere 26,000 light years away and NASA, still without the
money to shoot people into space due to budget cuts courtesy of the Obama
administration, plans to study the new find closely. Based on their initial
efforts, the research team that discovered the black hole pegged its age at
just 1,000 years old. “It appears its parent star ended its life in a way that
most others don’t,” said. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Laura
Lopez. Lopez went on to say that the supernova explosion that occurred when
this star ran out of fuel was “peculiar.” The star exploded, according to
Lopez, with “jets shooting away from the star’s poles,” making the supernova
elongated and elliptical. The explosion was also unusual because of what the
supernova failed to leave behind: a neutron star. When many massive stars
collapse, they leave behind a dense, spinning core. There was no spinning
core this time. Megan Watzke, press officer at NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory,
explained that the lack of this type of evidence points to the existence of a
black hole. “In this case … the lack of pulsations from the other possible explanation
(a rapidly rotating dense star called a neutron star) add to the evidence that
a black hole is there,” Watzke said. “In other situations, however,
astronomers can detect the black hole’s presence by its influence on the
material around it.” For now, the potential black hole and the reason behind it
remain something of a mystery……….
- The battle lines have been drawn and on one side is
Iceland, a quirky island nation at the north end of the Atlantic Ocean, a place
where frigid temperatures reign and summer is but a rumor. On the other side is
a well-known and familiar friend to men (and women, but mostly men) everywhere:
porn. The powers that be in Iceland are attempting to, gasp, ban Internet porn
from their country on the grounds that explicit online images are a threat to
children. Before commenting on how absurd the idea is, just remember that this
is a country whose parliament (smartly) banned strip clubs two years ago on the
grounds that they violate the rights of the women who work in them. The push to
prevent porn from reaching Iceland’s laptop, desktop, tablet and smartphone
screens is the next great quest. '"There is a strong consensus building in
Iceland," Halla Gunnarsdottir, an adviser to the nation's Interior
Minister. "We have so many experts, from educationalists to the police and
those who work with children behind this, that this has become much broader
than party politics. "At the moment, we are looking at the best technical
ways to achieve this. But surely if we can send a man to the moon, we must be
able to tackle porn on the Internet." What a great line: “If we can send a
man to the moon, we must be able to tackle porn on the Internet.” It’s a nice
thought, but the reality remains that porn IS the Internet. There are plenty of
serviceable uses for it, but porn dominates the web and has for a long time.
Iceland already has laws banning the printing and distribution of pornography,
but the Internet has remained untamed. If the campaign succeeds, Iceland would
become the first Western democracy to try and block pornography online. Interior
Minister Ogmundur Jonasson has appointed committees to study the best methods
for keeping porn away from children and among the options being considered are blocking
the IP addresses of known porn sites and making it illegal to use credit cards
from Iceland to subscribe to X-rated sites. Blocking porn would be easier in
Iceland, which has a population of 322,000, than in a porn-loving nation of 260
million like the United States, but still no easy task. Not everyone is on
board with the idea, as Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland's parliament,
wrote an editorial suggesting a porn ban has "near zero" chance of
passing parliament. So you’re saying there’s a chance……….
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