Tastemaker

More goodness from eFilmCritic:

5 Stars for Choking Man
5 Stars for Return To Rajapur

And I just found out a friend did the sound for "Marvelous," premiering tonite!
Matty Tauber's The Architect premieres tuesday!

Spring in NYC makes me buzz like a happy bee. The Nets beat the Pacers. Sudan accepts a peace deal. Bush has a sense of humor about himself. For a moment, everything feels right.

5 stars for The Big Bad Swim from eFilmCritic!

And a great review for Choking Man:

"Sometimes I don't realize the impact a film has on me until days later... when I can't shake emotions and images that hunt me down whether I want them back or not. Such is the case with Choking Man.

Choking Man, though itself somewhat of an oddity -- part conventional cinematic story, part pastiche, and part tone poem, it does what movies at their best are supposed to do: pull you inside the canvas of its inhabitants to experience directly their moral or emotional transformations without resorting to didactics. Credit here goes not only to Barron's visual conceits and thematic concepts and his top-notch editing team, but to A+ performances across the board, not the least of which comes from the precocious Octavio Gomez Barrios who utters barely ten words throughout." -IndievilleNYC

Nick Lachey's new album "What's Left of Me" will be released in two weeks. Song titles: "I Can't Hate You Anymore," "On Your Own," and "Outside Looking In." I gotta hand it to him, he's come out of this fracas smelling of thwarted devotion, which must be pretty hard with the entire Simpson publicity machine against you. Fortunately, he's had Jann Wenner's mags Rolling Stone and Us Weekly on his side, and at just the right time for his album release. Awww. Ain't love grand.

So regardless of whether it's a good or bad film, the right or wrong time to release it, and true to the facts or embellished, United 93 is fueling quite a lot of talk. i will admit, I have not seen it, and considering that i only made it through the first 20 minutes of Monsters Ball (granted, a very different film)before breaking down in hysterics and having to physically remove myself, I probably won't . I know tragedy deep in my bones, and I seem unable to keep that protective "4th wall" in place with big tragic movies...

Anyhoo, as you all know I'm also fascinated by government shadow organizations, and prone to disbelieve the drivel fed to us as patriotic truth. I like to dig, i like to question. I like to draw parallels all the way back to the founding of this country and before. So I am interested intellectually in the United 93 story. I went on to IMDB.com to see if I could sniff out which government agencies provided financing by following the names of the Executive Producers (British, actually) etc, you know, just nosing around. What I actually found was a very lively chat board, full of people from both sides of the conspiracy debate. Note: I wish we could stop calling the search for alternative explanations "conspiracy."

So follow the link if you like. Here's a juicy tidbit that caught my eye. Especially because I've actually READ the once Top Secret JCS plan that they refer to in the following entry:

"The original plan was written in 1962 by the JCS and was called Operation Northwoods. It was a pretext for starting a war with Cuba. Kennedy, who was president refused to go along with the plot and fired the JCS Chairman and later the CIA director for even conceiving such a diabolical plot to kill Americans using fake terrorist attacks by crashing airplanes as a pretext for war. All these morons in the Bush Administration did was implement that same plan forty years later. "

I wish I still had the full JCS report, I'd scan you all some pages. It really is eerily similar. and pretty fucked up that our government was actually planning to do this once before, as CONFIRMED in the JCS document.

Charlie Sheen may be an angry man, but I must say I've never been a Denise Richards fan. And now I can breathe a sigh of relief - she really is a bitch. Looks like she and Ritchie Sambora were up to something before either of them had split from their significant others:

“[Denise Richards] was the one who told Heather to file for divorce,” an insider told the mag. “Now it looks like she had an ulterior motive.”

The Sheens and the Samboras were neighbors in Westlake Village, a ritzy area in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. After both couples split, the hubbys moved out, but the wives stayed in the houses. The friendship, however, is kaput.

“Heather thinks Denise is the worst kind of woman — a backstabber,” a “pal” told the mag. “She wants nothing to do with her ever again.” -Life & Style Magazine

Michelle Rodriguez, who plays officer Ana Lucia on the hit series "Lost", chose to spend 5 days in jail and pay a $500 fine rather than perform 240 hours of community service after being charged with drunk driving in Hawaii where the show is filmed.

Her lawyer offers up the explanation that it was a "personal choice" adding, "I would suspect that because she has a hard time even going out for a meal without being intruded upon for an autograph or photograph, it's really difficult for her to do community service."

Uhhhh, OK? I don't see too many of her pics in the rags myself but hey, I also don't watch "Lost." I just think she did the math and thought, "if i do 10 hrs/week it will take me 24 weeks to complete that sh**t and I've got too many parties to attend."

Rodriguez herself said, "I kind of have to get back to my life, go back to making some money." And, "It kind of gave me a hard hit. I'm human."

This coming from the same woman who back in 2004 pleaded no contest in LA to three traffic violations including drunk driving. For that she completed a three-month alcohol program and was placed on three years of probation. Seems she's been "hit" with the bottle a few times and has been dealt with rather leniently. I'm also confused as to how someone on probation can walk away and pay only $500 and 5 days time? I hope her license has at least been suspended??!!

In NYC we're lucky we can get everywhere we need to go via taxi and subway and be as drunk as we damn well please and it would be foolish for me to think that people don't drive drunk ALL the time. However, her glib comments and lack of contrition really rub me the wrong way. When priviledged starlets who get paid oodles of money per episode claim they need to make more money so they can buy fancier cars to drive drunk in I have very little sympathy. Not when we have people like Angelina Jolie serving as Goodwill Ambassadors to the U.N.

Excerpt from Rodney Stich's book "Defrauding America" :

In 1963, Bush Sr. was living in Houston, busily carrying out his duties as president of the Zapata Offshore oil company.

It is also worth noting that a CIA code word for Bay of Pigs was Operation Zapata, and that two of the support vessels were named Barbara and Houston.

Kevin Costner has been revealed as the celebrity accused of performing a sex act while having a massage at a prestigious hotel in Scotland, after a tribunal ruled there was not a strong enough reason to keep his name suppressed.

The Hollywood star was accused of taking off his towel during the massage at The Old Course Hotel in St Andrews, Fife, in October 2004, exposing himself and then performing a sex act.

An earlier legal ruling had prevented his identity being revealed, but the tribunal chairman Nicol Hosie ruled that following widespread newspaper and magazine reports outside Britain, as well as internet blogs, which alleged that Costner was the culprit, his name had already fully entered the public domain.

A lawyer acting for the Daily Mail newspaper had argued that Costner’s had been published in papers including the Sunday Times in Perth, Australia, The National Enquirer and the Himalaya Times in Nepal.

The 51-year-old actor had been on honeymoon with his new wife in St Andrews when he went for the massage. -London Times Online

Stone. Cold. Busted. And by the Himalaya Times, no less!

Esera Tuaolo is out of the closet. And he is my new hero.

"I am Esera Tuaolo, and for nine years I made my living as a gladiator in the NFL. I was a 280-pound nose tackle who could run a 40 in 4.8. I was voted the best defensive lineman in the Pac-10 in 1989 at Oregon State, and I made the NFL all-rookie team two years later with Green Bay. I played in the Super Bowl, played for five different teams, sang the national anthem at the Pro Bowl and earned the respect of players like Brett Favre and John Randle and Jack Del Rio.

I was all that. And I am a gay man.

I live with a partner, Mitchell, I have loved for six years, and we have beautiful 23-month-old twins -- Mitchell and Michele -- we've adopted and are raising together. Got a house in the suburbs (of Minneapolis) and a lawn and two dogs. I've recorded two pop albums. I'm just your typical gay Samoan ex-nose tackle who'd like to break into show biz."

Read the article, you can just feel the wheel of change turning in a positive direction. Tuaolo does say he thinks it'd be too hard for a gay man in the NFL to come out while still playing - I can't imagine what it would be like to be on an NFL team if members felt animosity or phobia - but it's just so great to know that he and his partner are intent on raising their children without a cloud of fear or shame regarding their family. Tat's the key, they're a FAMILY. Children have a great way of making parents confront their own baggage.