Monday, March 14, 2011

MOVIE PLAYBACK: WILD THINGS

Wild Things is a 1998 erotic film starring Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, Kevin Bacon, Denise Richards and Bill Murray. It was directed by John McNoughton. In some countries the film was released as Sex Crimes.

Sam Lombardo (Dillon) is a happy, sexually promiscuous high school guidance counselor in Blue Bay, Florida. That is, until the wealthy and popular Kelly Van Ryan (Richards) accuses him of raping her one day after she had washed his truck. When he gets back to work the next day word gets around school of the rumors and students throw a crudely drawn picture of Lombardo raping a young girl anally and pulling on her pigtails while doing so. Due to the Van Ryans' high social status and connections, Lombardo's career and life take a heavy toll. Lombardo hires unorthodox lawyer Kenneth Bowden (Murray), but is later incarcerated when a second student, unpopular, trailer trash Suzie Toller (Campbell), also accuses him of rape, with several factors matching Kelly's description of Lombardo's assault.
Lombardo is put on trial, where Bowden badgers Suzie, who admits that she and Kelly had made the whole thing up to get revenge on Lombardo. The Van Ryans are humiliated by the scandal, and Lombardo and Bowden negotiate a hefty settlement: 8.5 million dollars. Lombardo leaves town to retire after this, and encounters Kelly and Suzie at his hotel. It turns out that the three of them had been working together the entire time, and planned to split the money. To celebrate the money they have a threesome.
However, police Detective Ray Duquette (Bacon) becomes suspicious and begins investigating further. Suzie becomes increasingly nervous, and Lombardo and Kelly begin to worry that she will undermine the plan. Suzie and Kelly fight in the Van Ryan pool, where Kelly nearly drowns Suzie before the two make love. But then Lombardo and Kelly take Suzie down to the ocean, where Lombardo appears to murder Suzie with a wine bottle. Her blood and teeth are later found by the ocean by Duquette, who realizes that Lombardo must have killed Suzie, and goes to Kelly's to protect her. But when he arrives, she appears to attack him, shooting him in the arm, leaving him no choice but to kill her in self-defense. No charges are filed against Duquette, but he is discharged from the police force as a consequence of Kelly's death.
Later, while Lombardo is staying at a tropical resort, he finds Duquette in his shower. It turns out that the two of them had been working together the entire time. Although Lombardo is not pleased that Duquette killed Kelly insteading of framing her as originally planned, Duquette insists that it leaves fewer loose ends. The two drink a toast to "no loose ends", and agree to go fishing on Lombardo's sailboat the following day.
While on the boat far out to sea, Lombardo knocks Duquette overboard, but he soon climbs back aboard and attacks Lombardo. However, he is shot in the leg with a spear. The shooter is Suzie, who is still alive and has altered her appearance, as she had been hiding aboard the boat. When Duquette begs Lombardo to save him, Lombardo responds that Duquette should not have killed Kelly. Suzie fatally shoots and kills Duquette for killing Kelly and her friend, Davie, years before.
Suzie then poisons Lombardo, enabling her to take all the money.
It is revealed, through a series of flashbacks shown in the end credits, that Suzie had planned the whole thing in order to get all the money and not just a third (as well as the aforementioned revenge on Duquette) and that she has a very high IQ. As for Kelly's death, she had not attacked Duquette. Duquette had shot her twice in the chest and she died immediately, and then shot himself in the arm, so as to make it look like Kelly had shot him, and that he had to return fire in self defense.
In the final scene, Bowden meets Suzie at the tropical resort, and gives her most of the money (minus his "usual fee"). As she departs, he calls after her to "be good".

Thursday, March 3, 2011

TODAY IN HISTORY: Sheena Easton Made Music History (1985)

The controversial Prince-penned song "Sugar Walls" reaches #9 on Billboard magazine's R&B Singles chart on March 2, 1985, and makes Sheena Easton the first and still only recording artist to score top-10 singles on all five major Billboard singles charts: Pop, Country, Dance, Adult Contemporary and R&B.

To be fair, this same feat might have been achieved by Elvis Presley had the Dance chart existed during his heyday. But that is not to take anything away from Easton, who in her journey from the sweet and innocent "Morning Train (9 to 5)" to the salacious "Sugar Walls" accomplished a degree of crossover success that even such notorious musical shape-shifters as Madonna, Cher and Olivia Newton-John never matched. And it is also fair to point out Elvis Presley never matched Sheena Easton's additional feat of squeezing in a Grammy for Best Mexican-American Performance (for 1985's "Me Gustas Tal Como Eres"). For the record, the hits that helped Sheena Easton achieve her five-way Billboard record were, in order of release: the aforementioned 1981 Pop and Adult Contemporary hit "Morning Train (9 to 5)"; the 1983 Dance hit "Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)"; the 1983 Country hit "We've Got Tonight" (a duet with Kenny Rogers); and the infamous 1985 R&B hit "Sugar Walls."
"Sugar Walls" also appeared on a very different chart in 1985: The so-called "Filthy 15" chart of the most objectionably dirty popular songs in existence, as chosen by Tipper Gore and her Parents Music Resource Council. The PMRC found the song's unsubtle metaphors objectionable enough to give "Sugar Walls" the #2 spot on the Filthy 15, second only to Prince's even less subtle "Darling Nikki." In the eyes of the diverse fellow-musicians who heaped their scorn upon the PMRC (e.g., Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, Ice-T, Metallica, Sonic Youth), it is quite possible that this accomplishment earned Sheena Easton even more musical street cred than the chart record she set on this day in 1985.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Angeline Quinto Wins Star Power


Angeline Quinto wins Star Power Sharon's Next Female Pop Superstar. Angeline's win is not an easy journey. Krissel, Monica, K-La and Akiko gave her tough competition. But Angeline can not do anything wrong and make her way to the final two with Krissel an eventually won over her. Angeline was a competition of Sarah Geronimo in Star for a Night and she was also a contestant in MTB's Teen Popstar and also won. But this win will surely give her an opportunity to show people that she will be an asset to Philippine's Music Industry. I will be waiting for her to have a duet with Sarah Geronimo and Regine Velasquez. Come to think of it, she look like Regine and sound like her too!

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

TODAY IN HISTORY: The Discovery Of King Tut's Tomb (1923) - Days That Shook The World

On this day in 1923, in Thebes, Egypt, English archaeologist Howard Carter enters the sealed burial chamber of the ancient Egyptian ruler King Tutankhamen.
 Howard Carter
Because the ancient Egyptians saw their pharaohs as gods, they carefully preserved their bodies after death, burying them in elaborate tombs containing rich treasures to accompany the rulers into the afterlife. In the 19th century, archeologists from all over the world flocked to Egypt, where they uncovered a number of these tombs. Many had long ago been broken into by robbers and stripped of their riches.
When Carter arrived in Egypt in 1891, he became convinced there was at least one undiscovered tomb--that of the little known Tutankhamen, or King Tut, who lived around 1400 B.C. and died when he was still a teenager. Backed by a rich Brit, Lord Carnarvon, Carter searched for five years without success. In early 1922, Lord Carnarvon wanted to call off the search, but Carter convinced him to hold on one more year.
In November 1922, the wait paid off, when Carter's team found steps hidden in the debris near the entrance of another tomb. The steps led to an ancient sealed doorway bearing the name Tutankhamen. When Carter and Lord Carnarvon entered the tomb's interior chambers on November 26, they were thrilled to find it virtually intact, with its treasures untouched after more than 3,000 years. The men began exploring the four rooms of the tomb, and on February 16, 1923, under the watchful eyes of a number of important officials, Carter opened the door to the last chamber.
 Inside lay a sarcophagus with three coffins nested inside one another. The last coffin, made of solid gold, contained the mummified body of King Tut. Among the riches found in the tomb--golden shrines, jewelry, statues, a chariot, weapons, clothing--the perfectly preserved mummy was the most valuable, as it was the first one ever to be discovered. Despite rumors that a curse would befall anyone who disturbed the tomb, its treasures were carefully catalogued, removed and included in a famous traveling exhibition called the "Treasures of Tutankhamen." The exhibition's permanent home is the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. 

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

REMEMBER ANN?

Ann Ward

Remember Ann? She is the winner of America's Next Top Model Cycle 15 (and my favorite of all the contestants since cycle 1). The picture shown above is her picture in Vogue website, vogue.it. She really is so high fashion and her look is just exceptional. She is the first model who got best photo for 5 straight weeks. Though she did not won any challenge, her photo shoot are just magnifico.

TODAY IN HISTORY: St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1929)

Four men dressed as police officers enter gangster Bugs Moran's headquarters on North Clark Street in Chicago, line seven of Moran's henchmen against a wall, and shoot them to death. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, as it is now called, was the culmination of a gang war between arch rivals Al Capone and Bugs Moran.
                                                                      Bugs Moran                                        
George "Bugs" Moran was a career criminal who ran the North Side gang in Chicago during the bootlegging era of the 1920s. He fought bitterly with "Scarface" Al Capone for control of smuggling and trafficking operations in the Windy City. Throughout the 1920s, both survived several attempted murders. On one notorious occasion, Moran and his associates drove six cars past a hotel in Cicero, Illionis, where Capone and his associates were having lunch and showered the building with more than 1,000 bullets.
 Al Capone
A $50,000 bounty on Capone's head was the final straw for the gangster. He ordered that Moran's gang be destroyed. On February 14, a delivery of bootleg whiskey was expected at Moran's headquarters. But Moran was late and happened to see police officers entering his establishment. Moran waited outside, thinking that his gunmen inside were being arrested in a raid. However, the disguised assassins were actually killing the seven men inside.
The murdered men included Moran's best killers, Frank and Pete Gusenberg. Reportedly Frank was still alive when real officers appeared on the scene. When asked who had shot him, the mortally wounded Gusenberg kept his code of silence, responding, "No one, nobody shot me."
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre actually proved to be the last confrontation for both Capone and Moran. Capone was jailed in 1931 and Moran lost so many important men that he could no longer control his territory. On the seventh anniversary of the massacre, Jack McGurn, one of the Valentine's Day hit men, was killed him in a crowded bowling alley with a burst of machine-gun fire.
McGurn's killer remains unidentified, but was likely Moran, though he was never charged with the murder. Moran was relegated to small-time robberies until he was sent to jail in 1946. He died in Leavenworth Federal Prison in 1957 of lung cancer.

F**K YOU - Cee Lo Green

I Just wanted to share one of my current favorite songs: F**k You by Cee Lo Green. I first heard this song when Gwyneth Paltrow was a substitute in Glee. But their version was the clean version titled Forget You. This song was even nominated for Grammy: Song of the Year and record of the Year, but lost to Lady Antebellum's Need You Now which grav both awards.