CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

Beyond the Gates of Splendor tells an incredible, nearly unbelievable true story that spans 50 years in the lives of five families and a violent and isolated Ecuadorian tribe. If you think you might see it but don’t know the whole story, I urge you to stop reading and go, then come back here.

Really, I mean it. This is the kind of movie that is best experienced with no prior knowledge. I know, I know, you’re wondering how you’ll know it’s your kind of movie if you don’t what the hell it’s about. I’ll have to ask you to trust me here and just go. Go on, go.

Last warning, the next paragraph tells the tale, and as interesting as the story is to tell I sincerely hope you get to experience it on the big screen. Final warning. Here we go.

The Story

Back in

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Oscar 2006 Fashion Report!
Click here for the 2006 report!
Oscar 2005 Fashion Report Archive
Well, at least there was some color this year! There weren’t too many standouts – my favorite was probably Helen Mirren. She just looked utterly drop-dead gorgeous, no kidding – fun and elegant but unfussy. A close second was Catalina Sandino Moreno, who was the perfect mixture of classy and sexy with a white Roberto Cavalli and a long, sleek ponytail.

Likes:

Beyoncé, for the two seconds she was wearing her “on the red carpet” dress looked great in black velvet — almost a disturbingly hourglass figure, but she looked very elegant — simple dress, big earrings, not-too-fussy hairstyle. I was sick of her by the end of the Oscar telecast, however – they should’ve gotten some other people to sing some of those songs.

Helen Mirren looked fabulous — sexy, eclectic, elegant, put-together, and utterly beautiful.

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Tony Jaa is the next great martial arts star. That fact is very clear after seeing Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior. He has the charisma of Bruce Lee, the charm of Jackie Chan, and the grace and menace of the bastard love child of Jet Li and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In this film he does all his own stunts, a la Jackie Chan, and they are wild, eye-popping moves. And just in case you miss them, the director films them from several angles, and plays them back repeatedly, sometimes in super-slo-mo, so you can see that it was all done with physics, not with wires, pixels, or mirrors. At first this replay action took me out of the flow of the film, but after a couple of times I got used to it and grew to expect it because some of the moves were so unbelievable

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Police, Synchronicity

Eagles, Greatest Hits Volume I

Garbage, 2.0

Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine

Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life

Prince, Purple Rain

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Don’t Stop the Music

I am a listen-to-music-at-work kinda person. Ever since I’ve had a job with enough autonomy and desktime to allow it, I listen to music via headphones while I work. And since I don’t like to have any extraneous apps running on my workstation (much less keep music on a corporate machine), I like to have my music on a device that is disconnected from my actual PC, so I always have something to play my music with. Also, as a former runner, I used to take stuff with me on the hoof. So, I’ve had a few MP3-playing devices in my day.

My most recent device was an iRiver — most specifically, an iRiver 400-series CD player that will play MP3s burned onto CD. (I also have some familiarity with the iRiver solid state MP3 players, having bought the G-I-R-L one for running). The iRiver has a somewhat

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