Leila Miss Angola Lopez wins Universe 2011; Miss USA does not participate in 5 Top

And won the 25-year-Lopez Leila Angola from 88 contestants to be crowned Miss Universe in the 60th anniversary of the competition the largest in the world on Monday night in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Lopez, Angola is the first to capture the crown, she hopes to use the winner has to help her native country in its efforts to get out of the history of war and poverty to escape. She also said it aims to help in the fight against HIV in all parts of the world.

“We have worked with social issues different. I work with poor children; I work in the fight against HIV. I work for the protection of the elderly and I have to do everything that my country needs,” said Lopez after the contest is over. “I think now as Miss the universe will be able to do much more than that. “

Lopez replaces last year’s winner, Ximena Navarrete Mexico. Came in second and third respectively were Olesia Stefanko Ukraine and Priscila Machado in Brazil. Completed miss the Philippines and China in the final round Miss.

During a question and answer section of the show and asked about the Lopez character of the material would change if they can answer the question with poise.

“Thank God I am very satisfied with the way God created me and I will not change anything,” said Lopez. “I consider myself a woman with inner beauty, I have gained a lot of principles wonderful family and I intend to pursue this for the rest of my life.”

Missing out on the top five and Miss Alyssa Campanella, California United States. Was crowned Miss Universe Brook Lee of America since 1997.

Forex research by ForexTV.com

It’s absolutely no surprise to be taught Colombiana was inspired by co-writer plus producer-Luc Besson’s script for the unmade follow-up to The Professional. Besson’s outstanding 1994 dramatic thriller starred Natalie Portman as a 12-year-old girl who’s now lost her family and falls into the arms of her after that door neighbor who just so happens to be a professional assassin who instructs her the trade as she seeks her own revenge. However, to compare the two films is folly as The Professional had substance, character, emotion, style and a character you could empathize with because Besson wasn’t more interested in blowing things up than telling a story.

Colombiana helmer Olivier Megaton, on the other hand, previously proved story was of little interest to him in 2008 with Transporter 3. Here he’s improved a small bit, but in a situation where you’re commerce with a nine-year-old girl spending the next 15 years of her life training to become a killer every one in a search for revenge you can’t help but have a small emotion in your story… along with random dance sequences and a bit of impromptu sex. I mean, come on, he’s just human.

“Colombiana” is a TriStar Pictures release, directed by Olivier Megaton plus is rated PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, intense sequences of action, sexuality and brief strong language. The running time is 1 hour 47 minutes

The cast include Zoe Saldana, Michael Vartan, Jordi Molla, Cliff Curtis, Lennie James with Amandla Stenberg.

To be fair, Colombiana isn’t every worse than every other film of its sort. Ludicrously fast paced without much purpose and when it slows down for random “beauty” shots such as slow motion shower scenes or even a pillow fight between groups of scantily clad escorts none of it means anything. Here the FBI doesn’t knock a door down, they blow it the eff up as this is just another one of today’s commercial-driven PG-13 actioners and while some can be better than others, Colombiana is now one of those below average ones that sit at the base of the barrel on its way to the bottom of the bargain bin.

Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Star Trek) plays Cataleya, the young girl I told you about in the lead. She watches as her father and mother are killed simply to pull her own parkour, out-the-window escape act so she can live another day. On her father’s advice she sets out from Colombia to America where she meets up with her uncle Emilio in Chicago. It’s obvious at the outset Emilio is his own brand of bad guy as he’s seen pummel a guy strapped to a chair when we first meet him. We don’t know why, but I like to think it’s because he ate Emilio’s last Popsicle without asking. Rude.

The nature of the film takes a turn when Emilio ask Cataleya what she wants to be when she produces up. The small nine-year-old answers, “A killer.” The audience laughs, but not Emilio, his response, “Okay!” So he takes her off to school, a notion Cataleya refuses before he teaches her a lesson by shooting wildly into traffic and a big group of passers by, sending a car crashing into a fire hydrant and pedestrians ducking for cover. Don’t worry, its okay, no one died. The police show up, Cataleya has learned a few kind of lesson (what precisely I’m not so sure) and they walk home free and clear. Just another day with uncle, now let’s go get a Popsicle.

Flash-forward 15 years later on and Cataleya is a professional killer and as the victims start piling up she’s tagging every one with a similar message, hoping the men that killed her father will finally understand she’s after him and come out of hiding. The FBI and CIA get involved, things get hairy for a bit, Cataleya has sex with a guy (Michael Vartan) who thinks her name is Jennifer, he takes her picture, and blah, blah, blah… stuff happens. It’s every one very routine and as each scenario plays itself out you watch with a stone face, not surprised by a thing you are seeing and just hoping something entertaining will happen.

There’s a wild scene with a few sharks that’s more funny than exciting because it’s so dumb, a sex scene with Vartan where he tells her, “Let me this time,” asking for permission to take the guide and be the one to take her shirt off and the film’s climactic fight scene that apes each Bourne fight scene you’ve seen, particularly the towel in Ultimatum the pen in Identity. In short, there’s nothing fresh to see here. Only a “red dot” moment in a CIA office in fact generated every level of excitement out of me, but it was over before it even started.

Saldana is a talent and one of these days I think she’s going to get a role and lastly be recognized the way she should have been with Avatar. However, roles like this aren’t going to help her on her way. I can appreciate having a little fun and taking on an action role where you she gets to be the bad ass in arraign, but at least choose the scripts a little more wisely.

As for this Megaton guy, he actually needs to sit back and search for a few kind of originality because the two films of his I’ve seen play like a most hits record. The just problem is, outside of the Bourne films, he’s stealing from similarly like-minded PG-13 junk. I can’t say I’m too excited to see what he does with Liam Neeson in Taken 2.

 Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart) in the Twilight sequel New Moon

The bad information for all those screaming, stalking, fainting, fervent fans of Twilight star Robert Pattinson is that he is largely absent from most of the follow-up, The Twilight Saga: New Moon. But that’s the good information for everybody else.

If pressed to name the weakest link in Stephenie Meyer’s four-book series, fans will typically point to New Moon, for the easy reason that the hero — hot, brooding vampire Edward Cullen — decides to leave his mortal soul mate Bella in order to defend her from himself and his kind. He disappears on page 73 and does not go back to full-time smoldering duty until page 451. The heart of the story is about how much Bella misses him — as does the reader. When the first copies of the book appeared, Meyer had to urge a few fans to read it twice after she found that they were so anxious (or annoyed) by Edward’s absence that they were skipping to the end. The interim consolation provided by Bella’s hunky, smitten buddy Jacob Black is nowhere near enough to make up for Edward’s absence. At least not on the page. (See portraits of the New Moon stars.)

On the screen, it’s a special story. The worst thing about New Moon the book is the most excellent thing about New Moon the movie. As Edward, Pattinson is every pale passion and tortured restraint; his eyebrows, like muskrats determined to mate, hunch together in the middle of his sunken face; the few times he smiles, it looks as if it hurts, and he still seems reluctant to move his mouth when he talks. If you had not read the series, in which Edward is infinitely more attractive and dimensional, you’d wonder what Bella was doing staring off into space in bottomless mope over this guy for weeks on end. (Read a Q&A with Kristen Stewart.)

Especially when Jacob Black arrives on the scene to sidetrack her from her melancholy. Where Patterson’s Edward is cold, bloodless and trapped in his head, Taylor Lautner’s Jacob is warm, tawny, genial and able to get Kristen Stewart’s shrink-wrapped Bella to stretch out and relax a small onscreen. It’s as though the sun can come back out once Edward leaves; there are genuinely funny moments in their scenes together, not to mention sexual tension. wait for an eruption in the theater during the scene in which a thrill-seeking Bella wrecks the motorcycle Jacob rebuilt for her and he strips off his T-shirt to tend her bleeding head. From that point on, his torso remains so middle a character it should be given its own credit line.

What the plot of New Moon reveals is that Edward and his vampire family are not the just residents of foggy Forks, Wash., to have secrets. Jacob and his Quileute Indian friends, as readers will previously know have a monstrous side as well; when there’s a vampire in the area, they transform into werewolves to fight them. And when the wolves appear — ginormous, growling, leaping and lunging predator-protectors — the movie springs to life. The scene in which they chase the vengeful vampire Victoria through the deep woods is vivid and furious, a bracing smash from the long stretches of teen heartbreak. (“You gave me all just by breathing,” Edward tells Bella. Oy.) Where Twilight is and remains mainly a love story, this section of the tale involves far more action, vampire-on-vampire violence, wolf on wolf, wolf on vampire, you name it. (See Hollywood’s most famous werewolves.)

Along the way, the supporting characters also seem to be having more fun. Bella’s dad Charlie is once more played to sweet, dry perfection by Billy Burke. The other Cullen vampires get personalities, rather than merely orbiting the periphery of Edward and Bella’s obsession. Alice is no longer presently a cute little pixie; she can scheme and snarl as needed. Even silent Jasper gets to work his supernatural power to create us feel good. For the first time, we meet vampire royalty, with Michael Sheen as Aro, a kind of vampire Pope, and a wonderfully creepy Dakota Fanning as his princess of torture.

It’s in the look of the movie that the added time and cash committed to New Moon, compared with Twilight, become most apparent. The scenes are lusher, the foliage leafier, the makeup mercifully better so that the vampire characters don’t every look coated in calamine. And the settings, from the coastal cliffs and old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest (Forks has migrated north to Vancouver) to the sun-drenched Tuscan glories of Volterra (the Italian scenes were filmed in Montepulciano, no doubt to the everlasting gratitude of its tourism board), give the movie a richer feel, even as it maintains its indie sound track and infrequently surreal diversions. Twihards will appreciate director Chris Weitz’s faithfulness to the source text, even as he get betters on it. And Weitz (with the help of Lautner’s abs) might suddenly find himself responsible for a series of mass conversions: from Team Edward to Team Jacob.

Read a profile of Twilight author Stephenie Meyer.

The PC trade has produced no shortage of stinkers over the past 30 years. From luxurious messes to ridiculous designs, here are the most horrible of the worst, in honor of the 30th anniversary of the PC.
We’re every familiar with the most winning personal computers—the IBM PC, the Apple Macintosh, the Commodore 64—but what about the other side of the coin? In the 30 years since the IBM PC was launched there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of models that arrived with huge fanfare just to tank at the marketplace. These are the redundant, the shameful, and the stupid. These are the duds.

 Sometimes a computer with lots of agrees dies because of poor marketing. A lot of have been done in by a high price tag. For others, it’s a design flaw. For a few, it’s a host of design flaws. And each now and then you get a machine where the extremely concept of what it’s supposed to be is fundamentally flawed. Examples of all appear in our list, often multiple times.

While every one of these machines is failures as commercial products, a few are notable for the influence they’ve had on the industry after their passing. Occasionally a manufacturer brings to market a computer that’s just ahead of its time. While the buying public rejects it, visionaries can see what it brings to the table and often re-introduce those features years later when technology and computing habits have caught up. Witness tablet computers preceding the Apple iPad.

Then there are the true Edsels, the ones that promised so much, plus delivered so little. Because of bad planning or sheer hubris, these machines truly live in reputation, with their names—and sometimes the names of the companies who made them—becoming synonymous with failure.

The 12 computers on this list stand as both an exercise in train-wreck nostalgia and as a warning to manufacturers and customers alike. It’s as true nowadays as yesterday: Good specs and marketing are no substitute for usability. In fact, finding the lines between them is the reason PCMag exists.

Click here to see “The 12 Biggest PC Duds Ever” slideshow >

The oil corporation says it’s struggling to find enough skilled engineers to get bigger its North Sea operations. And it’s not the just company having issues.

 It’s fair to say that the jobs market hasn’t precisely been flourishing lately. So it’s a little surprising that the head of BP’s North Sea oil operations, Trevor Garlick, went on record this weekend in a dialogue with the Sunday Telegraph to say that the company is having problems recruiting sufficient people to fuel expansion of its operations in the North Sea. Apparently, it’s having ‘a real issue’ finding engineers with the right skills to fill 150-300 latest jobs it’s created. Which rather puts paid to the Government’s argument that companies should ‘hire British’.

BP’s now made a £3bn investment into the Schiehallion and Loyal oilfields, just to the west of the Shetland Islands. By Garlick’s reckoning, there are other 450m barrels of oil waiting to be extracted from the fields. He added that the area is seen as so central by other parts of the company that they frequently cherry-pick the most talented engineers to work in other parts of the company. ‘We are an exporter of a couple of hundred people to other regions,’ he said.

That BP is prepared to invest so much in the region is fairly significant to workers in the field, given that a £2bn tax on oil producers in the North Sea shut down a lot of operations there earlier this year: companies including Centrica and Norwegian firm Statoil both mothballed a few of their fields there (although Statoil later reopened its operations). So you’d think there would be enough workers to go around. But BP isn’t the just one struggling to find people with the right skills: according to oil and gas trade body Opito, companies in the manufacturing are planning to make 10,000 latest jobs over the next five years – but more than half of them are worried that attracting people with the right skills will pose a ‘key operational challenge’.

This will raise questions over Iain Duncan Smith’s assertion in July that companies should be trying extra-hard to ‘hire British’, rather than resorting to foreign workers to fill the gaps in their workforce. In fact, it provides employers with a attractive strong argument against the Government’s decision to introduce a cap on workers coming in from outside the EU.

There’s no question that BP’s ‘employer brand’ took a kicking from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, putting off potential workers. But one solution to its problems might be found in taking a more lively role in creating the engineers of the future, ramping up its vocational training efforts. It wouldn’t be the just company doing it: Morrisons launched its own version this weekend. Seems the idea is becoming downright trendy…

Further Reading

1. 1,000 jobs put the steel back into Redcar

2. Teachers: teach us to teach enterprise
3. Y gud spelin cn mek all tha diffrnc
4. Government says businesses need to start hiring British
5. How the HE white paper may help to address our skills gap

From a world infested with zombies to a world inhabited by a combine of low rent criminals obsessed with oral sex, Jesse Eisenberg stars in this latest, almost hilarious action/comedy 30 MINUTES OR LESS from ZOMBIELAND director, Ruben Fleischer. The stress here is more comedy because the action is fairly minimal, but neither feature ever shines as bright as it could. Fleischer once again proves himself as a competent director, but the story never seems completely developed and almost like the writer indeed tried throwing a script together in 30 minutes or less.

Jesse Eisenberg follows up his Academy Award nominated performance in THE SOCIAL NETWORK with the character Nick who delivers pizzas for a living. Nick is one way or another friends with Chet (Aziz Ansari), a substitute teacher, even though they both have huge personal problems with the other. Nick is called on a delivery to two bumbling idiots Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson), who strap a bomb to Nick and tell him he must get them $100,000 in 10 hours. Dwayne needs the cash to pay a hitman to murder his millionaire father who treats Dwayne like a loser. Nick someway talks Chet into being an accomplice to the crime.

Fleischer’s follow-up to ZOMBIELAND isn’t a total departure from his style in the zombie horror/comedy, at least in terms of original character comedy. 30 MINUTES OR LESS is similar in that even when grave and violent things are happening there’s still a light hearted tinge to the proceedings. Visually, this film is much different from ZOMBIELAND because the wide range of apocalyptic horizons and deserted cities are gone and things are simplify down to plane ol’ sets with a limited amount of action. It’s improved because of the simplified formula, but also flawed for different reasons.

The simplified visual approach works to the films favor, however there are half parched plot elements that do not flatter the brief hardly 80 minute runtime. There’s the relationship between Nick and Chet’s sister, the strained history between Nick with Chet where they have all done or said morally questionable things that affected the other, the relationship between Dwayne with Travis, Dwayne and his dad, Dwayne and a stripper and Dwayne’s connection to a hitman. Naturally, with every these things squeezed into a fast paced film several of them suffer in terms of their relevance to the film. All technically gets worked in to the film in a somewhat satisfying way, but none of them stick out and create every one relationship resonate to a memorable extent.

Danny McBride and Aziz Ansari are the two funniest characters in the film. McBride is a confident, loud and each other sentence out of his mouth has to do with oral sex of a few kinds. Ansari just states the total obvious but in a totally sarcastic and animated way, but also squeezes comedy out of even the dullest of moments. Eisenberg has a sure amount of charm, but doesn’t come across as likable or charismatic as we’ve previously seen him. Nick Swardson and Fred Willard are- well they’re just Nick Swardson and Fred Willard.

The parts that stick out during 30 MINUTES OR LESS are when it seems like the actors are apparently improvising their lines. I could be totally wrong and there following the script word for word, but there were several moments that illicit the main laugh out loud moments that felt unscripted. There are a lot of well staged jokes and sequences though it’s just that there are sections that feel forced or not completely fleshed out. Another flaw in the film are a few severely outlandish scenarios that are obviously set up to get laughs (and they do), but the constant shifts from outlandish comedy to action to character moments back to outlandish comedy and so on create it almost impossible to establish a connection to any character or specific moment in the film.

30 MINUTES OR LESS has a formula that mimics that of a friend cop film, but here there are two buddy films stuffed into one. There are highs and there are lows- I’m happy to be on the positive side as I got a lot of enjoyment from the absurd comedy. The script does seem to have been pretend during a night of partying and friends riffing out as a lot of penis and vagina jokes as they could think of, but the results hit more often than they miss. Aziz Ansari and Danny McBride are hilarious and Jesse Eisenberg definitely gives the film a few power but no one gives 30 MINUTES OR LESS that extra push I feel like it needs. Ruben Fleischer’s comedy isn’t as impressive as his debut, but it has a lot of laughs to create it a perfectly watchable flick.

Top 10 fresh movies today in Canada with the United States. Figures are given in United States dollars (USD) and are shown based on totality receipts or tickets sold.

1. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Apes, a totally fresh take on one of the Studios most beloved and successful franchises. Oscar-winning visual effects house WETA Digital employing certain of the groundbreaking technologies developed for AVATAR will render, for the opening time ever in the film series, photo-realistic apes rather than costumed actors. “Rise of the Apes” is an origin story in the truest sense of the term. Set in present day San Francisco, the movie is a reality-based cautionary tale, a science fiction/science fact blend, where mans own experiments with genetic engineering guide to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.

2. The Change-Up

Release Data:	August 5th, 2011
Studio:	Universal Pictures
Starring:	Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde, Alan Arkin,
Director:	David Dobkin
Writer:	Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Genre:	Comedy
Rating:	R
Review

Growing up together, Mitch and Dave be inseparable best friends, but as the years have passed they ve leisurely drifted apart. While Dave is an overworked lawyer, husband with father of three, Mitch has remained a sole, quasi-employed man-child who has never met a job he liked. To Mitch, Dave has it every: beautiful wife Jamie, kids who adore him and a high-paying job at a prestigious law firm. To Dave, living Mitchs stress free life without obligation or consequence would be a dream comes true.

3. The Whistleblower

Based on a right story, “Whistleblower” chronicles the trials of a women cop from Nebraska who serves as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and exposes a United Nations cover-up of a sex trafficking scandal.

Kondracki and Ellis Kirwin wrote the film, which will shoot in Budapest. The pair based the script on the story of Kathryn Bolkovac, who traveled to Bosnia in 1999 as a U.N. peace lover.

4. Dirty Girl

Its 1987 and Danielle, the high school “Dirty Girl”, is running away. With her is chubby, gay Clarke, a bag of flour called Joan with a Walkman complete of glorious 802s tunes.

5. Julias Eyes

Julia, a women suffering from a degenerative eye disease, finds her blind twin sister Sara hanged in the basement of her house. Julia decides to look into what she feels is a murder case, entering a dark world that appears to hide a mysterious presence. As Julia begins to uncover the frightening truth about her sister’s death, her sight deteriorates, until a series of unexplained deaths and disappearances cross her path. The film stars Belén Rueda with Lluis Homar.

6. Bellflower

Bellflower follows two friends as they business enterprise out into the world to begin their adult lives. every their free time is spent building flame-throwers and arms of mass destruction in hopes that a global apocalypse will happen and clear the runway for their imaginary gang “Mother Medusa”. While waiting for the world to end, their call to excitement approaches unexpectedly when one of them meets a charismatic young women and falls hard in love. Rapidly integrated into a fresh group of friends, they set off on a journey of betrayal, love, hate, infidelity and extreme violence more devastating and fiery than some of their apocalyptic fantasies.

7. The Perfect Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Two estranged early days friends channel their talent plus passion for music into a cross-country road trip that brings them face to face with their past on a search to confront the future.

Spyder (Kevin Zegers—Transamerica, Dawn of the Dead), a world well-known musician those debut album is a huge hit, retreats to his hometown after his sophomore attempt? Ops. There he reconnects with his former friend with collaborator, Eric Genson (Jason Ritter—Happy Endings, W), now a middle school music tutor. It’s a reunion that forces the two to recall their youthful ambitions and re-examine the choices they’ve complete. Accompanied by legendary rock ’n’ roll impresario August West (Peter Fonda—Easy Rider, Ulee’s Gold), Spyder’s raucous team of musicians, the missing Soulz, and their? ery manager, Rose Atropos (Taryn Manning—Hustle & Flow, 8 Mile), they set off on a journey along historic Route 66 in hopes of salvaging a long misplaced dream and rekindling the mojo that made Spyder’s debut album such a huge success.

Featuring appearances by a few of the world’s greatest blues artists, a killer soundtrack, and scenes of mayhem, triumph and tragedy, THE PERFECT AGE OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL is an unforgettable wild ride that brings two friends closer to all other, their destiny, and the truth behind the music.

8. Magic Trip

In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest, set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by The Merry Band of Pranksters, a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s On the Road, and the driver and painter of the psychedelic magical Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters future to create a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained almost unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) and co-director Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented right of entry to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film records to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary part of American history.

9. Gun Hill Road

After three years in prison, Enrique is back in his beloved Bronx, back in the arms of an estranged wife and back in the life of his teenage son, who is stumbling towards an alteration that will put the bonds of their beleaguered family to the test.

10. Mysteries of Lisbon

Raul Ruiz’s masterful adaptation of the eponymous nineteenth-century Portuguese work of fiction (by Camilo Castelo Branco) evokes the complex intertwined narratives of Victor Hugo with Charles Dickens. The core story centers on Joao, the bastard child of an ill-fated story between two members of the aristocracy who are forbidden to marry, and his mission to discover the truth of his parentage. But this is very soon the start of an engrossing tale that follows a multitude of characters whose fates are next to, separate and then rejoin again over three decades in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy.

Limitless, 2011

Directed by Neil Burger.
Starring Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Abbie Cornish, Anna Friel with Johnny Whitworth.

SYNOPSIS:

A writer takes an experimental mind-enhancing stylish drug’, attracting the attention of shadowy forces determined to use his newfound abilities for their own increase.

Is it possible to be a mastermind in an age when anybody cans Google anything or ask their extremely own digital Jeeves? It’s been hundreds of years since famous intellectuals could at the same time be true experts in fields as varied as mathematics and music, philosophy or physics.
Nowadays the depth of knowledge required is just too huge. It’s a question of knowing how to look for facts, quite than deducing your own. And yet we are continually told to reach out for our true potential because biologically at smallest amount we are using a fraction of the brain’s thinking power.

Perhaps the miracle of modern medicine can provide an answer to the world’s clear lack of fearsomely intimidating brainiacs. Limitless is based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn and tells the story of Eddie, played by The Hangover’s Bradley Cooper, a “novelist” with a book agreement, a hot girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) plus the looks of a beggar, and not much else. With not a word of his masterpiece written his girlfriend quickly becomes his ex. Eddie hits rock bottom and inspiration looks to be concerning as likely as a knighthood for Andy Coulson. But then his ex brother in law turns up, out of the blue, send-off him a pill that utilises each synapse in the brain so it’s running at 100%. Take the pill and you become a silent superhero, a 21st century, pharmacy fuelled genius.

I had a hypothesis about Limitless. I’d heard about the idea and it was undeniably cool. I mean what would you do with an enhanced account of yourself that knew no limits? Maybe you’d end world hunger, sort out peace in the Middle East, come up with the next Harry Potter series and have a few funs with attractive people you’d typically be too scared to approach along the way.

However this being a Hollywood let go it was fairly obvious that Eddie would go crazy and live it up, earning big bucks on Wall Street, squandering his drug pumped intelligence on boring asset dialogue. He’d finish his “grandiose” novel in a mosaic and be in predictable debts with dodgy Eastern Europeans in the blink of an eye, complaining about it all in a moronic and mostly insufferable voiceover.

In fairness to Limitless the endless possibilities behind the idea are practically impossible to express. Director Neil Burger does throw in a few visual trickery to illustrate the highs of the drug and the frightened amnesia that follows. But the rush of motivation and satisfaction after finishing a novel doesn’t translate onto film via Cooper’s swagger or a tumble of CGI words falling from the ceiling as he types.

anyhow back to my hypothesis. Essentially I thought that the interesting premise, once squeezed through the demands of contemporary entertainment, would end up as merely a passably adequate film overall. Stephen Fry, nationwide treasure and king of Twitter, tweeted a while ago that Limitless was silly but fun. I thought that everybody would reach more or less the equal conclusion. Despite dealing with themes like drug dependency and the potentials of the human character, Limitless skips over meaningful answers in favor of an alright watch.

The simply moments that push entertainment levels above the mediocre are ones where the audience are laughing at the film, rather than with it. For instance when Eddie’s ex girlfriend is trapped by a pursuing murderer (I won’t waste time mentioning plot holes) and she must take a pill to think her way out of it, she make a decisions to sprint across an ice rink and swing a child into her attacker’s face. Yup, that’s modern genius for you.

Don’t let it be said that at Flickering Myth we do not test our hypotheses with cautiously controlled experiments. I invite three lab rats to my home, lulled them into a false sense of normality with popcorn and then issued them with scientifically designed score cards to rate Limitless. Here are the results.

As you can see, Guest 1 thought Limitless be “Ok”…

…when did Guest 2.

Guest 3 decided to try to mess with my system with write a few thoughts on the back of her scorecard, hence the scrawled “P.T.O”. She wrote a few kind of valid stuff about Limitless being morally wrong because it doesn’t actually show that drugs have bad consequences and it just has a 15 certificate, every of which I decided to leave out of my review. After every it’s only a bit fun, which as even she acknowledged, was “Ok”.

Limitless is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from the 1st of August.

By Michelle Turpin, World-Skills International

The World-Skills Premiere Experience is a convention and events programme you will not want to miss!

Being held 4-9 October, 2011 in conjunction with World-Skills London 2011, the World-Skills Premiere Experience includes conferences and results such as the World-Skills Leaders Forum, the Global Skills Marketplace seminars, the Big Conversation conference, and the Farewell Lunch with Champions just to name a few. Speakers from a lot of different countries/regions and organizations will share their stories, their best practices, and their planned plans for the future of skills training and the economic impact of skills training around the world.

Leaders in government, industry, learning and business should plan to attend a lot of the ‘pick and mix’ components of the World-Skills Premiere Experience. Speakers and conference information are now confirmed and details for each day of the programme can be     establish by visiting www.worldskillspremiere.com.

For more information, visit the website or send us a message at wspe@worldskills.org.

Register today, don’t delay!

Adobe announce Tuesday that its fresh HTML5 tool, known as Adobe Edge, was downloaded more than 50,000 times in the opening 24 hours.

“That’s pretty, pretty good for a growth tool,” Adobe’s Russell Brady wrote in a blog post. “Response has been huge so far, from the group of people and the pundits.”

Adobe released a preview version of Edge, an HTML5 progress tool that will let Web developers to build those “small beautifully designed jewels on the Web featuring animations,” according to Devin Fernandez, Adobe Group product manager. As PCMag software psychoanalyst Michael Muchmore noted, Edge is amazing of an acknowledgement by the premier design software house that the Web is touching away from Flash to focus on open-standard HTML5 and it’s a lot of sub-standards, which are capable of making the equal effects in a non-proprietary manner via compliant Web browsers, with no a plug-in.

But in a Monday blog post, Jack Nack, chief product manager at Adobe, dismissed the idea that Edge will produce a face-off between Flash plus HTML5.

“It’s worth note that both Dreamweaver & Go-Live were pushing Web animation starting in the 90′s, that Adobe championed SVG near the beginning on, and that it has been a main contributor helping to improve jQuery and lots of other HTML/JS/CSS tech,” he wrote. “Point is, Adobe’s been heavy both rich, animated HTML5 and Flash for 15 years, and the corporation will keep evolving both to address different customer needs.”

Also yesterday, Adobe released Expressive Web, which showcases the skin and functionality obtainable with HTML5 and CSS3. “Look for future Edge update as we integrate new features over the next few months, with profitable release slated for 2012,” Brady wrote.

Edge is obtainable for download on the Adobe Labs Web site.

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