On the bus home from a night out at a lesbian club, Fort Greene teenager Alike (Adepero Oduye) swaps her tomboyish outfit for earrings and a pink t-shirt, something clearly not of her own choosing, something selected to appease her mother. Alike is 17 and closeted, at least at home. Her mom Audrey (Kim Wayans) is uptight, religious and almost quivers with the effort of seeing her daughter as she wants her to be and not as she actually is. While Alike’s closer to her father Arthur (Charles Parnell), a cop, he’s chosen to step back from the tensions at home and in his marriage. Liking boys and makeup comes naturally to her younger sister Sharonda (Shamika Cotton) — our heroine is alone in her own personal form of camouflage, trying to blend into the background wherever she goes. What sets writer/director Dee Rees’s sensitive feature debut Pariah (expanded from her 2007 short of the same name) apart from the standard coming out story is that Alike is just as much an outsider at the club as at home, adrift and uncomfortable while her more outgoing best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) picks up girls on the dance floor. She hasn’t found the place in which she feels she can be herself. Alike knows that she’s gay, but her understanding and acceptance of that fact doesn’t mean she knows where she fits, in the scene or out of it — she doesn’t easily fall into the divisions of butch and femme, and she doesn’t seems to do any better at school, where she’s a good student in whose writing a teacher has taken a special interest, but other dangles outside the established social groups. Pariah is a coming of age story that’s uncommonly aware of just how heartbreakingly important the trappings of fashion, of music choices, of hobbies are when you’re young — they’re symbols of everything you think you are or aspire to be, even as they’re woefully inadequate shortcuts to establishing your identity. Alike’s journey take place in a larger landscape of shifting identities — just as the lesbian community isn’t a monolithic entity, neither is the black neighborhood in which the majority of the action is set. Her family has worked its way into the middle class, and Audrey’s consciousness of this achievement informs her stiffness around the coworkers she clearly feels she’s a cut above and her overall fussy propriety. It’s this sense of the type of people with whom her family belongs that leads her to insist Alike hang out with the daughter of an acquaintance from church, Bina (Aasha Davis), as if enough time in each other’s proximity would make a friendship inevitable. Alike begrudgingly walks to school with Bina and hangs out with her on the weekends, and finds a connection with the girl she never expected, one that blossoms into a possible romance when Bina gives our heroine her first kiss. Bina’s the opposite of Alike in many ways, bold where the latter is shy, but also uncertain where she’s fully decided, and the halting tenderness with which their relationship builds is tinged with the knowledge that Bina is probably going to break her heart. Pariah wouldn’t work without Oduye’s luminous performance, capturing the emotional nuances of a character not prone to letting her emotions show. She makes Alike’s vulnerabilities clear through her defenses — Alike’s convinced she has the world fooled, but isn’t anywhere near as in control as she’d like to believe. It’s a lovely, subtle portrayal that’s deservedly been getting a lot of attention for Oduye, who originated the role in Rees’s short and who may also be familiar as the grocery store clerk Louis C.K. awkwardly follows home to try to ask out in the first season of Louie . It’s a performance that good enough to smooth over the fact that the film’s gears grind as it arrives at an ending that feels neat, with Alike finally confronting her parents and encountering the results we’ve been primed to expect from the outset. Pariah is a small story of a painful, formative era in its protagonist’s life, and it sometimes feels roughly hewn to fit into an arc it doesn’t necessarily need. It’s the intimate, unforced details — an exchange between Arthur and his friends at a store, the way Laura chooses to shut Alike out after feeling betrayed by her new relationship — that speak volumes more than the film’s obvious butterfly metaphor, and that attest to a filmmaker and actress worth keeping an eye on. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There is a group of individuals whom Movieline would like to salute: The passionate, faceless people who lovingly record, in surprising detail and with confounding care, the full plot summaries for horrible movies on Wikipedia. Wikipedia movie plot historians, your day has come. I first recognized this phenomenon last month. While researching several pivotal roles in Kirsten Dunst’s career for the actresses’s 9 Milestones in the Evolution of… feature, I noticed (and greatly appreciated) that an Internet user had heroically outlined the entire plot of her long-forgotten and laughable 1998 television movie Fifteen and Pregnant . The plot summary is delivered in four straightforward paragraphs which remarkably do not acknowledge the ridiculousness of this poorly-scripted and self-righteous project. Here is just a taste… “The film opens with fourteen year old Tina having sex with Ray. A few days later Tina is sitting in the car with her mother and Tina’s mother asks her if she knows anyone who is sexually active at her age, or if she has ever been sexually active, and Tina nods her head yes, although her mother doesn’t know what she is admitting.” Granted, the person who was so moved by the melodramatic play-by-play of Fifteen and Pregnant that he/she rushed to his/her computer and tapped out a painfully accurate recap, is by no means a scholar. But skill or grasp of the English language is not the point here: The dedication is. For example, do you know how much you’d have to pay me to watch Troll 2 again and compose an entire 11 paragraph summary without a single critical inflection? (The most derogatory statement about the film in its Wikipedia entry is that it is “widely considered to be of poor quality.”) Do you know how severely you would need to threaten me before I typed out 1,000 words on the detestable Rob Reiner film North ? Do you know how many Target gift cards you would have to hire Woody Harrelson to strew onto a hotel bed Indecent Proposal -style before I agreed to not only view New Year’s Eve but to pen an earnest six-paragraph summary of this particular Garry Marshall’s holiday disaster-piece ? (The answers to these three questions are “a ton,” “very severely,” and “like, $10,000 worth.”) The heroic Wikipedia users who composed the above plot summaries may not have saved any lives. But they did save brain cells — brain cells that could have met a similar fate as the millions of those left to be swept up along with the neglected candy and self-respect on the floor of every Jack and Jill -screening multiplex auditorium in America last month. Because hopefully, some smart moviegoers elected to just read the Wikipedia plot summary of the film so that they could appropriately rag on it at the water cooler without paying for a partial Adam Sandler-performed lobotomy. Or maybe a few intelligent viewers decided against seeing the film after its detailed Wiki page informed them that the “comedy” would feature “cameos” from Bruce Jenner, Regis Philbin and Drew Carey. Or maybe that is all just wishful thinking and Wikipedia plot summary movie-going prevention is just a hope for the future. Either way, I am thankful for the bold Wiki user who dared to recount every minor plot twist in Showgirls so that I never have to re-watch the film to rediscover how much Cristal and Zach paid Nomi for a lap dance at the Cheetah ($500). So please, in honor of these Wikipedia movie plot historians, take a moment and scan through a few detailed recaps of your least favorite movies of all time. Recognize the effort, thank the faceless writers in whichever way you deem fit and maybe consider tapping out a few future plot summaries of your own. For without these loving recaps, human beings might actually have to sit through a screening of Gigli to fully recognize the film’s atrociousness. Follow Julie Miller on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
This is going to be hard to hear, but the truth is, for those of us working to combat the aging process, sugar is a formidable enemy. I know it tastes really good and we’re conditioned to love it, but unfortunately, the sweet stuff pillages our skin’s elasticity . What’s even worse is that pigging out on sugar can make us deathly ill and dangerously fat. Sorry folks, but we’ve had our fun fling with sugar; time to kick it to the curb. Let’s be real though, most of us (myself included) will never be able to get over sugar entirely. We’re going to creep back to it, ’cause the stuff is just so good. But, we really have to learn to keep it to minimum if we care about our health and youth. Here’s why: Sugars (ALL sugars, even natural sweeteners like agave, honey, and maple syrup) raise our blood glucose level. Natural sugars are a little better for us, because they raise it less, or more slowly, and they do contain some nutrients (white sugar has none), but, all sugars raise the blood sugar level and that is a problem… According to anti-aging specialist Dr. Nicolas Perricone, a spike in our blood sugar level causes inflammation on a cellular level, which causes our skin to wrinkle. Did he say wrinkle ? Sugar gives us wrinkles? Yes, it does . Time for us to drop the donuts. Back away from the Krispy Kreme. Dr. Perricone is hardly alone in his assertion about sugar and wrinkles. Because I read books and articles on anti-aging as frequently as most of us check Facebook and Twitter, I know that many of the anti-aging doctors including Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Howard Murad, Dr. Jessica Wu and Dr. Adrienne Denese advise us to avoid sugar. Dr. Wu, a Beverly Hills dermatologist, says: “Glucose actually eats away at your skin’s collagen and elastin .” The horror. Here’s the science behind the claim: When our blood sugar spikes quickly and repeatedly, the sugar attaches to the proteins (collagen and elastin) in our skin, rendering them stiff and inflexible . This process is called “glycation.” These harmful sugar molecules form compounds called “advanced glycation end-products,” or AGEs. As these “AGEs” accumulate they damage adjacent proteins, which leads to sagging skin, and wrinkles. This is sad news for those of us who just can’t go without something sweet. I’m sorry, but life is not worth living without my daily dark chocolate! (It’s okay, we can indulge in a little .) But, if you’re serious about staying young-looking, even as you move into middle-age, you have got to consider cutting back your sugar intake considerably. Now, you might be saying some of the same things I said myself at first: “I’m not gonna worry about this. I have good genes. My mother ate sugar and she still looks good. Black don’t crack.” I hear you. If wrinkles aren’t enough to get you off the sweet stuff, though, I’ve got more for you and the news gets worse. In April of 2011, The New York Times published an article called “Is Sugar Toxic?” written by Gary Taubes. The article discussed the work of a hormone specialist, Dr. Robert Lustig, who presented a lecture in 2009 called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which I highly recommend. You can find it on Youtube. Lustig’s research concludes that sugar is, indeed, toxic and that it is not only aging us , it’s making us sick and fat . His evidence, which includes statistics on diabetes and obesity levels since the “low fat” craze began, is compelling. Processed “fat free” foods generally contain more sugar , which helps make them taste better after all the delicious fat has been removed. Sugar and its evil twin High Fructose Corn Syrup , which is ubiquitous in processed foods and beverages, is not just bad for us; according to Lustig, it’s a POISON akin to alcohol and cigarettes. I knew that too much sugar could contribute to diabetes, but Lustig’s research found that sugar consumption also leads to heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers as well. Astonishing, isn’t it? If I didn’t know people who’ve had heart disease, hypertension and cancer I might be disinclined to believe this. But knowing the dietary habits of friends and family who have been victims of these conditions makes me less skeptical. Each of them ate sugar with abandon. Another surprising and disheartening thing I learned via Lustig is that fruit juice isn’t as good for us as we thought. Whole fruit is much better than juice, because whole fruit contains fiber which helps keep it from suddenly spiking our blood sugar level. Fruit juice has a lot of sugar, with no fiber to mitigate it. Too much of it can raise the blood glucose level as fast as regular sugar. Even if you aren’t convinced of the correlation between sugar and diseases, the fact that it speeds up the aging process has been accepted in the anti-aging community well before Lustig’s 2009 lecture. Doctors overwhelmingly agree that sugar and HFCS cause inflammation and inflammation is an enemy to our skin. Omitting sugar from our diets entirely is probably never going to happen, because even fruits, vegetables and whole grains turn to glucose (the type of sugar that fuels glycation) when digested. And we’re never giving up chocolate, right? Of course not. But we can cut back. An article in Prevention, written by Karen Repinski recommends the following guidelines: “Keep added sugar to no more than 10% of total calories. If you’re a 45-year-old woman of average height (5-foot-4), that’s 160 calories (or 10 teaspoons) from added sugar–about the number in one 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola or six Hershey’s Kisses. By comparison, the average American consumes 31 teaspoons per day of added sugar, or the equivalent of 465 calories.” So, if you’re among those who can’t live without regular sugar, follow her guidelines. Processed sugar doesn’t do it for me, because it’s got no health benefits at all, but I do like honey, maple syrup and agave, so I’m trying to stick to no more than 160 calories per day from those. I also recommend Stevia , which is a natural sweetner (made from a plant) that doesn’t contain harmful chemicals. Stevia has very few calories and it’s recommend by Dr. Wu, author of Feed Your Face, and also by by Dr. Howard Murad, author of The Water Secret . Other than Stevia, most anti-aging specialists do not recommend artificial sweeteners, like Equal, because the chemicals in them cause us to crave sweets. Here are some recommendations: 1. Read labels and check for sugar in prepared foods. Don’t eat foods that contain high fructose corn syrup . This is easier said than done, because it’s in so many things, but if you eat fewer processed foods and more whole foods, you can avoid it. 2. Consider omitting sodas from your diet. Instead drink water, carbonated water with a splash of lemon or lime, tea, or coconut water. 3. Stop adding processed sugar to food and beverages. Replace it with honey, agave or maple syrup, but use the least amount your taste buds will allow. 4. Drink less fruit juice (which is all sugar, no fiber) and eat the whole fruit instead. Or make smoothies from low sugar fruits, like strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries. 5. Eat fewer high glycemic carbohydrates like white flour, white rice and pasta. Instead, eat whole grains, like brown rice, oatmeal, quinoa or whole wheat pasta. Sorry to have been the bearer of bad news. The fact that sugar is so damaging to us is hard to accept. Sugar has comforted us throughout our lives and it’s immensely difficult to revise our view of it and to curb our habit of consuming it without worry. Still, knowledge is power and it is empowering to know the consequences of what we feed ourselves. That said, I’m not suggesting that we live joyless, abstemious lives never eating anything fun and sweet. Just cut back and eat less sugar. You know you’ll be better off if you do, even if you’d rather not hear it. Wishing you good health and great beauty. For many more anti-aging tips, please check out my book, VIBRATING YOUTH available on Amazon in paperback or as an ebook. And please follow me on twitter @Vibratingyouth and on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vibrating-Youth/291243730912385 www.vibratingyouth.com The Top Foods That Will Fight Dry Skin, Low Immunity & More This Winter! How To Beat The Mid-Afternoon Energy Slump
Y’all seemed to like this broad the last time we put her up , so we figured we’d why not show you some more? Apparently this chick has other talents besides modeling — the kini she is rockin’ is of her own design, she’s got her own clothing company called the Leiluna Collection. Get a better look at her cakes on the flip.
Disney has updated their successful puzzler Where’s My Water? with 20 all new levels. The levels are part of a new “Stretched Thin” campaign that adds a new element to the game in the form of water balloons. Now players not only have to deal with guiding water to Swampy the Alligator, but they must Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Android Phone Fans Discovery Date : 20/12/2011 01:18 Number of articles : 2
The All-American Rejects have been toiling away prepping their fourth studio album, and all the hard work is about to pay off. After releasing a variety of teaser clips — “Talking To The Water”, “Chris On Auto-Pilot”, “Man’s Best Friend”, “The Voice Of Reason” and “Word Pictures” — we’re delighted to be the ones to help reveal … More » Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Idolator Discovery Date : 16/12/2011 00:38 Number of articles : 2
Claudia Galanti is one of those gorgeous women that you would love to see nude and here she is slipping a breast in the water in this tit slippage Continue reading →