oOPs!?
Saturday, March 31, 2012
NIGERIA THRASHES ZIMBABWE 3 - 0...under20 female football
Nigeria's under-20 female soccer team, the super falconets popped Zimbabwe's under-20 female team 3 - 0 in a FIFA world cup qualifier at abeokuta, ogun state nigeria today 31st, march 2012.
CANCER CURE BREAKTHROUGH!!!
 |
| Meet the molecular structure of Metformin the diabetes drug that may soon cure cancer |
Metformin is a workhorse drug for people with diabetes. It helps patients control their blood sugar and makes them more sensitive to insulin. But soon, metformin may take on a new role fighting cancer.
Results of a preliminary study presented Saturday at the American Assn. for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in Chicago suggest metformin slowed the growth of prostate cancer tumors. The study involved 22 men with prostate cancer. All of them were scheduled to have their prostates removed, and some of them took metformin for about seven weeks beforehand. After the prostates were excised, researchers from Toronto compared them and found that tumors grew more slowly in men who took the diabetes drug than in men who didn’t.
Those findings were augmented by a flurry of studies published Saturday in various AACR journals. Taken together, they offer hopeful signs that the diabetes drug may help prevent or treat an array of cancers.
Among them:
* In a study that examined 302 patients with pancreatic cancer, 117 were taking metformin. Researchers from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center found that the one-year survival rate for patients on metformin was 64%, compared with only 46% for patients who weren’t on the drug. After two years, the survival rate was 30% for those taking metformin and 15% for those who weren’t. The findings were published in Clinical Cancer Research.
* Liver cancer tumors grew less in mice that were given metformin than in mice that didn’t get the drug. University of Maryland School of Medicine researchers found that metformin’s ability to prevent the formation of fat in the liver helped keep the cancer at bay. The study was published in Cancer Prevention Research.
* In another mouse study, researchers from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research induced the animals to grow pre-cancerous lesions in their mouths. Mice who took metformin wound up with fewer oral cancers, and the tumors that did grow were smaller. These results also appear in Cancer Prevention Research.
Metformin is derived from the French lilac plant, Galega officinalis. According to this report in the journal Practical Diabetes, it is “reputed to be the most widely prescribed agent in the treatment of diabetes.”
Researchers have been on to metformin’s potential as a cancer treatment since at least 2010, according to this Los Angeles Times story.
By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times / For the Booster Shots blog
KATY PERRY RUNS WITH MESSI, DAVID BECHAM N DERRICK ROSE
Sports kit giant Adidas has picked Katy Perry to run with sports greats Lionnel Messi, David Becham and Derrick Rose in the new Adidas advert!
watch:
Byron Purkiss Sr now safe
The family of Byron Purkiss Senior gave a huge sigh of relief when he was located yesterday at the Kingston Public Hospital, recovering from minor injuries they believe he sustained in a mugging. Mr Purkiss suffers from memory loss. We will keep him and family in our prayers.
Finnegans Wake: Book I, Chapters 1-4
From the very first page of Finnegans Wake, I knew I was in for a rough ride. Beginning in the middle of a sentence that will eventually be completed by the other fragment closing the book, the Wake plunges into a dense mire of language that collides various tongues into an idioglossia of puns and references so obscure as to be their own words, a sort of twin-speak warping of Dublin's geographical makeup that makes the esoteric written atlas provided by Ulysses seem as easy to read as a star map.
It's heady stuff, a gnarled (if flowing) run of portmanteaux and wordplay that seems to delight in instantly alienating the audience. The first chapter (and the next three) read like the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses, that book's most challenging, obscurant part. With fewer resources handy for the first-time reader than I had for Ulysses, Finnegans Wake proved an instant struggle. It took hours, whole hours, to read even one chapter.
With a couple of pushes in the right direction by a few resources, I even managed to get something of a grasp of the "narrative": starting with a retelling of the comic Irish song about Tim Finnegan, a hod carrier who falls from a ladder to his death, only to be revived by whiskey, Finnegans Wake instantly complicates and expands upon the ballad to become the story of Ireland, maybe the world itself.
The "protagonist"—if he can be called such—who amusingly takes Finnegan's place when he resurrects but is urged to stay dead by his mourners, is tavern owner Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who will go by many names in the shifting dreamscape of the book. This being a book of dreams, HCE is at once vaguely aware of his humble reality yet a vast force in the subjective, fantastical realm of sleep, not merely a god but seemingly all gods. HCE is then shown to be running in a local election, only to be undone by a scandal of some vaguely sexual nature that, true to the shifting textures of this dream book, is never clearly stated and transfigures constantly until some minor sexual misconduct has become distorted through gossip until, by the fourth chapter, HCE is on trial for various misdeeds foisted upon him by hearsay and conjecture.
Now this was more familiar ground. Those familiar with some of Joyce's preoccupations might see some of ol' Parnell in HCE's treatment: Parnell was certainly aiming higher than this modest (literal) everyman, but both were undone by sexual shenanigans and the court of public opinion. HCE's indecency somewhat recalls the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses, in which Leo Bloom and a lame girl named Gerty MacDowell engage in an implicitly stated explicit act that suggest both parties have participated in arousing the other and getting off on it. It's unclear what HCE does in Phoenix Park, and one won't get a clearer view from his gossiping pub patrons, who distort the already thin story until HCE is turning into different people, even different species, and doing all sorts of mischief. The more they speculate, the more HCE's non-native Irish heritage, stressed by puns that play on Norwegian and Dutch words, appears to come to the fore, eerily reminiscent of the race-baiting fury that informed the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. Joyce has swapped Bloom's Jewishness for some vague nationality, but both men's everyman qualities serve to bring out the hatred and rejection in empty racial nationalism. I can't point to any specific passages that made this clear, but something in the book's tone changed when the 12 patrons ( later, the trial jury) seem to turn to xenophobic distrust of HCE; it makes the absurdism of the man's metamorphoses and expanding list of ills nightmarish, not airy and silly.
Chapters 2-4 all deal with this scandal and its fallout, and Joyce constantly recapitulates his ridiculous tangents in recaps that I'd swear represented the author taking pity on the reader and acknowledging that, already, we could do with a bit of catching up. At least, I'd more readily believe that if these summaries were any more legible, but I still laughed at Joyce's nominal sympathy with the audience. Or maybe this is just the incidental byproduct of basis his work on Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nuova and the theory of human history as a repeating cycle of stages. In that sense, the occasional recap is merely another, smaller reset in the larger cycle of the Wake. I still need to look into Vico more thoroughly, but being told the basics about his views is one of those key clues that clarifies so much of the larger framework of what Joyce is doing. There will always been unfathomable minutiae in Joyce's writing, but a tip like Vico's ricorsos or the Oxen in the Sun episode being about the gestation of English itself can make the hardest material at least framable.
By the fourth chapter, in which HCE, or some form of him, is put on trial, I was hooked. By devoting pretty much all of chapter three to restating and expanding upon (and restating again) chapter two, Joyce gave me enough space to settle in and get as comfortable as I am liable to get with the Wake. And I have to say, it made a difference: while I was so overwhelmed at first that only a few of the puns broke through my confusion and frustration to make me chuckle, chapter four made me laugh out loud. Be it a quick note about a witness being suspected of being a "plain clothes priest" to lewd puns, obscure and allusive enough to slip by censors but unmissable in intent, I was absolutely rolling at times. It was here that I truly surrendered to the book, despite getting Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake in between chapters three and four. Even as I read that supplement, I prioritized the flow of the ridiculousness over what was being said. I started to really get a hold of the book, even if there are still whole pages that smack dully against my face like a thrown fish.
That's not to say I had to wait that long to find something of merit, however. Even on this first page, where I already questioned the wisdom of even opening the damn book, I found something that provided a sort of early revelation of the way to process Joyce's nigh-impenetrable work. The second paragraph mentions "the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's giorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time. As a Georgia (giorgios?) boy, I'm familiar with the Oconee River, which snakes through Laurens County and our very own Dublin, GA. Skeleton Key makes reference of this connection across the pond but also alerted me to the fact that there is a Laurens County in Ireland; I did not, happily, need to be told that the country has a Dublin too.
Nevertheless, even if Joyce intended to stay within Ireland for his introduction—likely, given how the rest of the first few paragraphs contains several Dublin locales—this brief snippet kept me going despite initial doubts and fears. As much as the puns made in other languages and the various historical in-jokes, this connection to something with which I was completely familiar let me in on the true nature of the Wake: it has a plot, to be sure, and one that begins to become clearer after getting a basic grasp of what's going on, but the true delight is in its universality. One of the names Joyce uses for HCE is "Here Comes Everybody," which stresses the breadth of HCE's connections to figures past, present, historical and mythological. If the book exhibits that same range, then it must include something of the whole world. Ergo, Joyce floods the early chapters with puns in other languages, so why not include a winking reference to Dublin's New World copy?
This made me realize: Finnegans Wake is not a book to be "figured out," to be sussed from the author's intent, or the critic's. It's a strange thing: I've never read a book so obviously the work and intent of an author, that so flagrantly violates the concept of the death of the author (even 30 years before Barthes wrote his essay). Yet I've also never come across a book that so openly, encouragingly belongs to everyone. There truly is something here for everyone, even if that necessitates it not being any one discernible thing. That didn't make it any easier to read, but it did make the thing impossible to put down, even at its densest and most taxing. I decided to start writing these update posts to will myself to continue with the Wake, but finishing chapter four helped me to slip into the book with as much enthusiasm (and acceptance of ignorance) as I did with Ulysses. Who knows if it will continue to improve or, in a metatextual ricorso, I'll slip back into hissing barbarism. For the moment, though, all is well, and I can't wait to keep exploring Joyce's mad, hypersexualized, guilt-ridden dream.
It's heady stuff, a gnarled (if flowing) run of portmanteaux and wordplay that seems to delight in instantly alienating the audience. The first chapter (and the next three) read like the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses, that book's most challenging, obscurant part. With fewer resources handy for the first-time reader than I had for Ulysses, Finnegans Wake proved an instant struggle. It took hours, whole hours, to read even one chapter.
With a couple of pushes in the right direction by a few resources, I even managed to get something of a grasp of the "narrative": starting with a retelling of the comic Irish song about Tim Finnegan, a hod carrier who falls from a ladder to his death, only to be revived by whiskey, Finnegans Wake instantly complicates and expands upon the ballad to become the story of Ireland, maybe the world itself.
The "protagonist"—if he can be called such—who amusingly takes Finnegan's place when he resurrects but is urged to stay dead by his mourners, is tavern owner Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who will go by many names in the shifting dreamscape of the book. This being a book of dreams, HCE is at once vaguely aware of his humble reality yet a vast force in the subjective, fantastical realm of sleep, not merely a god but seemingly all gods. HCE is then shown to be running in a local election, only to be undone by a scandal of some vaguely sexual nature that, true to the shifting textures of this dream book, is never clearly stated and transfigures constantly until some minor sexual misconduct has become distorted through gossip until, by the fourth chapter, HCE is on trial for various misdeeds foisted upon him by hearsay and conjecture.
Now this was more familiar ground. Those familiar with some of Joyce's preoccupations might see some of ol' Parnell in HCE's treatment: Parnell was certainly aiming higher than this modest (literal) everyman, but both were undone by sexual shenanigans and the court of public opinion. HCE's indecency somewhat recalls the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses, in which Leo Bloom and a lame girl named Gerty MacDowell engage in an implicitly stated explicit act that suggest both parties have participated in arousing the other and getting off on it. It's unclear what HCE does in Phoenix Park, and one won't get a clearer view from his gossiping pub patrons, who distort the already thin story until HCE is turning into different people, even different species, and doing all sorts of mischief. The more they speculate, the more HCE's non-native Irish heritage, stressed by puns that play on Norwegian and Dutch words, appears to come to the fore, eerily reminiscent of the race-baiting fury that informed the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. Joyce has swapped Bloom's Jewishness for some vague nationality, but both men's everyman qualities serve to bring out the hatred and rejection in empty racial nationalism. I can't point to any specific passages that made this clear, but something in the book's tone changed when the 12 patrons ( later, the trial jury) seem to turn to xenophobic distrust of HCE; it makes the absurdism of the man's metamorphoses and expanding list of ills nightmarish, not airy and silly.
Chapters 2-4 all deal with this scandal and its fallout, and Joyce constantly recapitulates his ridiculous tangents in recaps that I'd swear represented the author taking pity on the reader and acknowledging that, already, we could do with a bit of catching up. At least, I'd more readily believe that if these summaries were any more legible, but I still laughed at Joyce's nominal sympathy with the audience. Or maybe this is just the incidental byproduct of basis his work on Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nuova and the theory of human history as a repeating cycle of stages. In that sense, the occasional recap is merely another, smaller reset in the larger cycle of the Wake. I still need to look into Vico more thoroughly, but being told the basics about his views is one of those key clues that clarifies so much of the larger framework of what Joyce is doing. There will always been unfathomable minutiae in Joyce's writing, but a tip like Vico's ricorsos or the Oxen in the Sun episode being about the gestation of English itself can make the hardest material at least framable.
By the fourth chapter, in which HCE, or some form of him, is put on trial, I was hooked. By devoting pretty much all of chapter three to restating and expanding upon (and restating again) chapter two, Joyce gave me enough space to settle in and get as comfortable as I am liable to get with the Wake. And I have to say, it made a difference: while I was so overwhelmed at first that only a few of the puns broke through my confusion and frustration to make me chuckle, chapter four made me laugh out loud. Be it a quick note about a witness being suspected of being a "plain clothes priest" to lewd puns, obscure and allusive enough to slip by censors but unmissable in intent, I was absolutely rolling at times. It was here that I truly surrendered to the book, despite getting Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake in between chapters three and four. Even as I read that supplement, I prioritized the flow of the ridiculousness over what was being said. I started to really get a hold of the book, even if there are still whole pages that smack dully against my face like a thrown fish.
That's not to say I had to wait that long to find something of merit, however. Even on this first page, where I already questioned the wisdom of even opening the damn book, I found something that provided a sort of early revelation of the way to process Joyce's nigh-impenetrable work. The second paragraph mentions "the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's giorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time. As a Georgia (giorgios?) boy, I'm familiar with the Oconee River, which snakes through Laurens County and our very own Dublin, GA. Skeleton Key makes reference of this connection across the pond but also alerted me to the fact that there is a Laurens County in Ireland; I did not, happily, need to be told that the country has a Dublin too.
Nevertheless, even if Joyce intended to stay within Ireland for his introduction—likely, given how the rest of the first few paragraphs contains several Dublin locales—this brief snippet kept me going despite initial doubts and fears. As much as the puns made in other languages and the various historical in-jokes, this connection to something with which I was completely familiar let me in on the true nature of the Wake: it has a plot, to be sure, and one that begins to become clearer after getting a basic grasp of what's going on, but the true delight is in its universality. One of the names Joyce uses for HCE is "Here Comes Everybody," which stresses the breadth of HCE's connections to figures past, present, historical and mythological. If the book exhibits that same range, then it must include something of the whole world. Ergo, Joyce floods the early chapters with puns in other languages, so why not include a winking reference to Dublin's New World copy?
This made me realize: Finnegans Wake is not a book to be "figured out," to be sussed from the author's intent, or the critic's. It's a strange thing: I've never read a book so obviously the work and intent of an author, that so flagrantly violates the concept of the death of the author (even 30 years before Barthes wrote his essay). Yet I've also never come across a book that so openly, encouragingly belongs to everyone. There truly is something here for everyone, even if that necessitates it not being any one discernible thing. That didn't make it any easier to read, but it did make the thing impossible to put down, even at its densest and most taxing. I decided to start writing these update posts to will myself to continue with the Wake, but finishing chapter four helped me to slip into the book with as much enthusiasm (and acceptance of ignorance) as I did with Ulysses. Who knows if it will continue to improve or, in a metatextual ricorso, I'll slip back into hissing barbarism. For the moment, though, all is well, and I can't wait to keep exploring Joyce's mad, hypersexualized, guilt-ridden dream.
TV Review: Vampire Diaries: The Murder of One (Pic Overload)
-I love Klaus trying to supposedly bond with his big brother. He is up to no good once again. I love it.
-I love how Damon touches Elena and tells her that she is playing Klaus in their scenario and she just hated being touched by him! It was too funny.
-Damon drinking from Elena was so intimate. I felt like I shouldn't be watching them! It was so beautiful, it brought tears to my eyes as usual.
-I love how heartless Klaus looks to Bonnie. I love it when he's bad. He has such an animalistic entity about him. Those fangs are too sexy.
-They killed Finn! They did it! I didn't think they could!
-I feel bad for Bonnie. She couldn't take any more.
-I knew Sage would be after Stefan! But then, she just died.
-The new spin in this show is too much! Killing an original could mean killing every single vampire there is!
-I love Klaus but not when he's hurting Damon!
Has any of you seen this awesome poster/picture?
Anyway, enough about my comments. Did you see this episode? Did you love it as much as I did? Talk to me in the comments!!
-I love how Damon touches Elena and tells her that she is playing Klaus in their scenario and she just hated being touched by him! It was too funny.
Caroline: Why do I always have to be Klaus bait?
Damon: Because he's obsessed with you. But for right now, we need you to play Rebekah. We use the quarterback to distract you. Just keep her talkin'.
Matt: How?
Damon: Act interested. She's lonely, desperate.
Caroline: Clearly. She slept with you.
Damon: I gotta admit, even for me, it's a little kinky.
Caroline: Right after I turned, into a vampire, I killed someone. A stranger. I just killed him. And what's worse is, I liked it. I have blood on my hands, too. We all do. Yeah, the blood in your hands is my father's, and maybe the guy I killed was someone's father, too. Look, all I know is, I'm no better than you. So, I'm going to take a page from the Elena Gilbert handbook and choose to believe that you can be saved. Okay?
-Damon drinking from Elena was so intimate. I felt like I shouldn't be watching them! It was so beautiful, it brought tears to my eyes as usual.
-I love how heartless Klaus looks to Bonnie. I love it when he's bad. He has such an animalistic entity about him. Those fangs are too sexy.
-They killed Finn! They did it! I didn't think they could!
-I feel bad for Bonnie. She couldn't take any more.
-I knew Sage would be after Stefan! But then, she just died.
-The new spin in this show is too much! Killing an original could mean killing every single vampire there is!
-I love Klaus but not when he's hurting Damon!
Stefan: What is wrong with you?-I really do love that speech (above). Klaus is not bad. He's just misunderstood.
Klaus: What is wrong with you?! Do you really have no appreciation for me? I have given you someone to hate, to loathe, a target, for all of your anger, so you don't have to turn it on yourself. I have given your life purpose as your friend. I really think you should be thanking me.
Rebekah: The Salvatore brothers may fight like dogs, but in the end, they would die for each other. At least they know what family means. You destroyed ours.The scene between Stefan and Elena was so sad! It just broke my heart and seriously made me cry. Why is it so complicated? Why can't they just have each other already? (I think I want to remake the scene if I can find an awesome Stefan)
Klaus: I wanted a family. They just didn't want me.
Elena: Hey.-Seriously, Alaric would potentially be the one to kill Damon's bloodline. Darn that alter ego!
Stefan: Hey.
Elena: You haven't said much since you got back home.
Stefan: I'll be a ball of sunshine once Damon gets Alaric's stake back. Promise.
Elena: You really scared me today. You wouldn't have survived if you went up against Klaus on your own, you know that right?
Stefan: Well you don't have to worry about that anymore.
Elena: Why?
Stefan: Because he's not worth it. All this time and energy that I've wasted hating him, it was for nothing. It's done, it's over. We lost. I'm right back where I started.
Elena: That's not true. Yeah, Klaus dragged you through hell, but you came out the other side. You beat him by being better than him.
Stefan: And what did I lose in the process? Look, hating Klaus was easy. It allowed me to ignore everything that was happening around me. Everything I let slip away. Now I have to deal with them.
Elena: Stefan-
Stefan: I know, just admit it. Admit it to me, Elena. I know you don't owe it to me, but I just need to hear you say it.
Elena: I-I can't. Because it's not true, Stefan. I never stopped loving you.
Stefan: I know that. I know you did. Even though I did everything possible to push you away. It's my fault. It's all my fault. I mean, this is all my fault.
Elena: What are you talking about?
Stefan: I'm talking about the fact that you're also in love with Damon.
Elena: What? No, Stefan, I, We're just-
Stefan: Hey, I love you. I will always love you. I just want you to look me in the eye and tell me that you don't feel something for him.
Elena: I don't know what I feel.
Alaric: Where the hell is it?Darn it, why are they going on another hiatus? It's like, they just give us two episodes and then make us wait again for too many weeks.
Damon: Ha-ha-ha, look harder Ric.
Alaric: It's not here, Damon.
Damon: Maybe you just forgot what shelf you put it on.
Alaric: No, I didn't forget it, I put it right here. A stake doesn't just vanish into thin air.
Damon: Who else did you tell, Ric?
Alaric: I didn't tell anybody, Damon. I'm the only-
Damon: What?
Alaric: I'm the only one who knew about it Damon.
Damon: No. Are you telling me that your vampire-hating alter ego has a stake that can kill an entire line of vampires, possibly mine?
Alaric: That's exactly what I'm telling you.
Has any of you seen this awesome poster/picture?
Or this one?
Or this one?
Or this one?
Anyway, enough about my comments. Did you see this episode? Did you love it as much as I did? Talk to me in the comments!!
Friday, March 30, 2012
Warner Bros. begins production on “SEVENTH SON” | Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore & Ben Barnes lead the stellar cast!
BURBANK, CA, March 26, 2011 – Principal photography is underway on Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ fantasy action adventure “Seventh Son.” Shooting began on March 19, under the direction of award-winning filmmaker Sergei Bodrov, director of the Oscar®-nominated foreign language films “Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan” and “Prisoner of the Mountains.” “Seventh Son” stars Academy Award® winner Jeff Bridges (“Crazy Heart,” “Iron Man”), Oscar® nominee Julianne Moore (“Far From Heaven,” “The Hours”), and Ben Barnes (“The Chronicles of Narnia” films).
In a time long past, an evil is about to be unleashed that will reignite the war between the forces of the supernatural and humankind once more. Master Gregory (Bridges) is a knight who had imprisoned the malevolently powerful witch, Mother Malkin (Moore), centuries ago. But now she has escaped and is seeking vengeance. Summoning her followers of every incarnation, Mother Malkin is preparing to unleash her terrible wrath on an unsuspecting world. Only one thing stands in her way: Master Gregory.
In a deadly reunion, Gregory comes face to face with the evil he always feared would someday return. Now he has only until the next full moon to do what usually takes years: train his new apprentice, Tom Ward (Barnes) to fight a dark magic unlike any other. Man’s only hope lies in the seventh son of a seventh son.
The film’s international cast also includes Alicia Vikander (“The Crown Jewels”), Antje Traue (“Pandorum,” upcoming “Man of Steel”), Olivia Williams (“Hanna”) and Kit Harington (HBO’s “Game of Thrones”).
Bodrov is directing the film from a screenplay by Matt Greenberg, Charles Leavitt and Steve Knight, based on the book The Spook’s Apprentice by Joseph Delaney. “Seventh Son” is being produced by Basil Iwanyk (“The Town,” “Clash of the Titans” upcoming “Wrath of the Titans”), Thomas Tull (“Inception,” “The Dark Knight” upcoming “The Dark Knight Rises”) and Lionel Wigram (“Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” the “Harry Potter” films). The executive producers are Jon Jashni, Brent O’Connor and Alysia Cotter, with Jillian Zaks and Erica Lee serving as co-producers.
The behind-the-scenes team collaborating with Bodrov includes director of photography Newton Thomas Sigel (“Drive”); three-time Oscar®-winning production designer Dante Ferretti (“Hugo,” “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” “Aviator”); Oscar®-nominated editor Paul Rubell (“Collateral,” “The Insider”); Oscar®-nominated costume designer Jacqueline West (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Social Network”), and Oscar®-winning visual effects supervisor John Dykstra (“Spider-Man,” “Spider-Man 2”).
“Seventh Son” will be filmed entirely on location in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
A presentation of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures, “Seventh Son” will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.
Monsters bring hell on earth in “WRATH OF THE TITANS”
As the title indicates, Warner Bros.' new, 3D fantasy adventure “Wrath of the Titans” called forth some mammoth and mythical adversaries to pit against the demigod Perseus (Sam Worthington).
These include the multi-headed Chimera, three one-eyed Cyclops and an army of double-bodied Makhai. Perseus' most formidable opponent is, of course, Kronos, the gargantuan, heretofore imprisoned Titan and father of Zeus (Liam Neeson), Hades (Ralph Fiennes) and Poseidon (Danny Huston), who is on the verge of breaking free and bringing hell down on the earth.
“There’s truly a smorgasbord of action to be had in this movie,” says visual effects supervisor and second unit director Nick Davis, who also worked on the first film.
The first foe Perseus meets is the Chimera, a fire-breathing beast with the heads of a lion and goat, dragon-like wings and a vicious snake’s head at the end of its tail.
“The main heads work in tandem, with one throwing out fuel and the other a haze of heat that ignites it,” director Jonathan Liebesman says of the brute that tears through Perseus’ village, a terrifying warning shot of things to come if he doesn’t take action.
“The Chimera descends on the village like a meteor and immediately starts ripping it apart,” Davis says. “There’s a huge pyrotechnical explosion, then the ground starts to crack, followed by a very elaborate, 400-foot trench blast that snakes its way through the town before blowing up a house and finally erupting out of a building. Then it really gets going.”
With the Chimera forcing his hand, Perseus is now committed to the battle to save Zeus and all of mankind from Kronos, and sets off to find a way into Tartarus, catching a ride with an old friend: the winged horse Pegasus, who takes him to Queen Andromeda’s (Rosamund Pike) encampment.
Once Perseus, Andromeda and Agenor (Toby Kebbell) are on their way, they sail off to find Hephaestus, whose remote island home is booby-trapped and heavily guarded by a group of 30-foot-tall Cyclops, one of Liebesman’s favorite creatures in the film. Prosthetics designer Conor O’Sullivan provided the director with about 15 different maquette heads, and worked closely with Davis in the full body design, before they determined the final blueprint for the Cyclops.
“The biggest challenge was to get them to appear as photorealistic as possible. Well, as much as a one-eyed, 30-foot monster can be photorealistic,” Davis smiles.
Heralding the emergence of Kronos from his ages-long confinement, legions of two-torso Makhai rage through the battlefield in a swarm of death and destruction. An invention of the film’s writers, they are warriors who had been sent to Tartarus and melded together by Kronos. “He created his own army by merging two tortured, warrior souls into one, and then sent them to wreak havoc on earth,” Liebesman relates.“They are eight-foot-tall, two-headed, six-armed warriors who can run and roll and fight and jump with strength superior to any man,” Davis says. “But they are really just the prelude to the evil that’s about to come, the huge, final battle for Perseus, Zeus, Hades… everyone.”
The war comes to a climax as the over 1,500-foot Kronos bursts free of his bonds and begins to attack.
“Kronos created the world from chaos, and he wants to return the world to that state,” Liebesman notes. “What I love about him is that he reminds me of an atomic bomb when he hits the screen—this massive explosion with tons of volcanic debris flying off of him and setting fire to everything in his path.”Davis adds, “Kronos has forever been this unstable, volatile force that the humans have unwittingly been sitting on, and as soon as Zeus’ strength fully empowers him, he erupts: rocks cascade off of him, the prison walls start to collapse and lava bubbles up from underneath.”
He goes on to describe the Titan king as having “human proportions, but he’s comprised of streams of solidified and molten lava that is constantly pouring off his body. He’s also covered in pyroclastic clouds that billow off of him, and as he moves, he hurls lava bombs toward the people below.”
Kronos was achieved entirely via CG, but that was no deterrent for Sam Worthington, who has become something of a master of fighting green screen beasts. For the actor, it’s all in a day’s work. “It’s simple: you have to believe in the world. When my nephew runs around pretending he is fighting monsters, it’s the same thing. As long as you commit and believe, then the audience will also commit and believe. We know it’s computer generated, because Kronos and Cyclops and Chimera don’t exist, but if I dive into the situation 100 percent, then hopefully the audience will follow and not be pulled out of the world.”
Opening across the Philippines on Thursday, March 29, “Wrath of the Titans” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.
TOP10 NAIJA SONGS OF THE WEEK(FRIDAYS)30/03/2012
BEZ FT PRAIZ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi6VmTu1Sgc
NNEKA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcMNzxeArRc
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OMAWUMI FT FLAVOUR
http://www.4shared.com/mp3/p58OjuiX/omawumi_ft_flavour_-bottom-bel.html?
.jpg)
FLAVOUR FT TIWA SAVAGE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaH9oB2g82w
ELDEE
TERRY THA RAPMAN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwNB23hfoQk
NAETO C
.jpg)
PSQUARE AKON MAYD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17vC8qZILJE
DJ JIMMY JATT FT OREZI, SINZU, MUNA
http://www.4shared.com/mp3/z_ux98I9/DJ-Jimmy-Jatt-Komije-ft-OreziS.html?
SUSPEKT FT SKALES, EEDRIS, ICEPRINCE
Robbie williams and wife Ayda are expecting their first baby CONGRATULATION
hilo kisssssxxxxxx yummy
Mwanamziki mkongwe wa England kaanounce rasmi kuwa mke wake ayda anatarajia kujifungua mtoto hivi karibuni na he cant wait being called a daddy for the first time wooooow haya ndo maneno robbie mwenyewe akiiambia media
'Hey friendlies, I've been keeping a secret from you all. Me and Ayda are going to be a Mummy and Daddy this year!!!!!!!!
Alice in Wonderland
I'm obsessing about Disney movies lately. Nothing new, really. Today's obsession is Alice in Wonderland!! I wanted some crazy nails, and that's definitely what I got. I probably should have planned this a bit more, but I actually think this came out pretty well.
Cheshire Cat
The first character I tried to paint was the Cheshire Cat. I did a purple base coat then taped over where I wanted the stripes. Believe it or not, it took ages to find tiny tape.
Alice
This was the toughest one to do. I'm terrible at free-handing stuff, and somehow this bow just didn't want to work out. It looked good, then I played with it, and then it was terrible, so I fixed it again... now it's ok.
Queen of Hearts' Rose Garden
Ya got me, this is not a person. But it's preeeeetty! I feel like this one came out of the best - which is a minor miracle. I basically blobbed on paint, outlined with a sharpie, and hoped for the best.
Queen of Hearts & Card Guards
My card guards (pointer finger) are meh. The paint pen just wasn't working and ended up smudgie. And that's all I have to say about that. My Queen is a really sweet glitter I got a while back. Give me a break, everyone in Wonderland is stoned anyway.
Here's all the colors I used!!
Revolon Top Speed: Cherry, Violet, and Jelly
Ulta: Mint Condition and For Bitten
Spoiled: Ants in My Pants
Kiss Nail Art White
Nicole by OPI: One Time Lime
I think the next movie on my list is Snow White... Wish me luck!
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