From the director of Blue Valentine comes a drama that is sure to move and amaze people who are old enough to understand it, The Place Beyond the Pines. Set in Schenectady, New York, this crime drama features great direction in Derek Cianfrance, touching screenplay, unique cinematography and a star-studded cast in Ryan Gosling, Bradley…
Category: Menagerie
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Rant and Rave: ‘Despicable Me 2’
After he inadvertently made a family in his attempt at an ‘out of this world’ robbery, Gru (Steve Carrell) has left villainy behind to care for his three lovely daughters and make a living as a seller of funny-tasting jelly instead. Meanwhile, everyone thinks it’s about time the new father meets a lady friend. One…
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Rant and Rave: 4 Sisters and a Wedding
Once in a while, an unlikely gem of a Filipino movie comes along, and this is arguably one of them. Its trailer is not at all enticing, appealing and inviting to viewers. It seemed very mundane and typical of a Filipino movie, with the same melodramatic plot…
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Rant and Rave: ‘Smash’
TV Series Rare is the show whose pilot episode was deeply applauded and appreciated by critics the world over, calling it “smart and slick”, “pretty damn perfect” and “excellent”. However, it isn’t rare to see a show lose its quality and appeal within a year or two; in Smash’s case, people started to dislike the…
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Head to Head: Rain, friend or foe?
It starts off slowly: the soft growl of thunder, the beat of a raindrop or two, and without warning, everything is suddenly striped by falling rain – the long strokes painting the landscape with the sort of still rawness only capable by nature. The warm blues and greens and browns of nature melt away and…
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25 Cents’ Worth: Fragile
The night breeze softly sends its unnerving caress. Nagging whispers aggravate the storm of my hazy consciousness. As I look down at the pavement, the scorned shadows etched on the ground were staring back, silently nodding heads in approval. Tonight, the ghosts of those who have gone clam up to this soul losing direction. Recalling…
The famous British playwright William Shakespeare once said that the eyes are the window to the soul; one may think that he simply used the quote as a figure of speech, but scientists from Sweden’s Orebro University have backed up the claim, proving that Shakespeare’s statement was not just one born from an imaginative mind.…
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Glimpse: The mannerisms of anxiety
There are more ways than the sophisticated utterance of a succinct “Uhh…” when faced with an attractive specimen of the opposite gender. There are more ways than the fit of convulsion (presumably the inspiration for ‘The Harlem Shake’) that increases in direct proportion to the imminence of a speech. There are more ways than the…
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Crash Course: Weird food combinations
Weird food. What constitutes weird? What kind of food will it take to make the average Joe’s stomach churn? Certainly not all foods are considered unusual or quirky but, through time, plugging in man’s natural curiosity to the equation of culinary oddities, the human race has experimented with combinations of ingredients and such in order…
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Vignette: The phobias we live with
Underneath the outward pretense of each human lies a variety of the deep-seated fears acquired through time. Throughout the course of life, frequent exposure to painful circumstances develops a particular fear, which may possibly inhibit a holistic view on life itself. There are no distinct symptoms in each phobia; although the intensity of fear may…