yeah, but still if you're a rich daddy's boy who thinks that he should live in the forest cause its "a self discovery", i want you dead before you reproduce, even if you're young and silly.

Yeah, I didn't sympathize as much with him specifically because he was this upper middle class entitled kid who was raised with a certain level of privilege. So when people like that say, "Oh, what's money? Money's not important at all" it just kind of irks me. Like when really gorgeous people try to tell us that looks don't mean anything. Like Lauren pointed out on the show, BURNING your money instead of doing something constructive with it is a seriously douche move.

Totally agree on Tarantino, but if you even watch his early stuff he's still very coherent and understands what he's trying to do with the movie (too bad he couldn't have directed Natural Born Killer and True Romace, those would have been interesting).

As for horror...somewhere Eli Roth and his soulless black eyes are plotting revenge for that statement in the grossest, yet most boring way possible. And I really can't say anything good for Avatar except it gave James Cameron even more money to push his kindergarten view of the world on people... oh wait.

And to kind of get back to Into The Wild, as I forgot to mention this before, I'm not ultra concerned with the reality of the situation and how it pertains to the film, it's more if I relate to the point the filmmaker is trying to get across. It's kind of like Braveheart where the battle of Sterling Bridge failed to have an actual bridge in it, and the depiction of King Edward is pretty inaccurate as Scotland asked for him to intercede in the civil warring that was going on, but I could overlook that because I liked the story depicted in the movie. It's more Into The Wild didn't appeal to me on the theme of leaving society literally behind, as that just seems a lot of work to me, I like my iPhone, and a movie trying to get that point across to me about the ills of society is going to fall on deaf ears.

i hated the way Penn used all forms of emotional manipulations to win the viewer over to this obnoxious prick's view. even as a non fan of Herzog, i think he approached the idea of one douche who decides to go against nature way better (aguirre?) and without trying to pull a manifesto for young rich hippies who never even camped one day in their lives.

yeah tarantino started already directing like a pro (reservoir dogs already had camera work that most film students would kill for). thats another thing i hated about the idea of film school snobs. i heard a million of those douches calling him a "hack" or "overrated", when they couldnt film that well even if they wanted to.

as for cameron, yes he has silliness in his views but he can shoot epics well, i still think T2 is one of the best action movies of all time.

It helped that Herzog and Kinski were batshit insane, (I believe at one point Herzog had to threaten Kinski with a gun to get him back on set) filming a movie about a character who was batshit insane. Penn is...well, Penn. He protests for banning guns yet then has an unregistered gun in his car, and says something to the effect "I'm a celebrity, I'm different". He just a tad clueless, condescending, and is very heavy handed and self righteous. I doubt you were the only person who was put off by him, I know I was. But then you take a guy like David O Russel who is a notorious jackass (I think his rant at Lilly Taylor while filming I Heart Huckabees was played by Keith) and I love his movies. I don't know. And that was the thing to me about Into The Wild - the guy made the most arrogant mistake possible, that he could just survive with nothing. No training, no maps, no food, no clue. It completely took me out of the story, and made the point Penn was trying to get across to me invalid. It's just not something I could suspend my disbelief for.

And as for Cameron, I totally agree. Aliens and T2 are two of my favorite movies ever (my top 10 is very action heavy). It's just too bad he went full blown into his messiah complex, and while Avatar was amazing to look at, and he's probably the best at directing epic stuff, the actual story was just what the fuck. I think I would have liked to see Cameron do Saving Private Ryan, it probably would have been the same movie but minus some of the sentimental Spielberg stuff that didn't fit.

And I am remiss as I haven't made this clear earlier:

Count me in for Chemda's new show. I can't wait to hear this.

I told you Lauren was crazy.

This "dude" isn't an alcoholic, he's a schizophrenic.

i totally am psyched for Chemda's show too. SERIOUSLY. can i hope for some music stuff on it too? (yeah i know, one step at a time, but hope's hope)

Hmm. Well, I'm pretty skeptical of all this. There's always people talking about how this or that will cure cancer, but "Big Pharma" doesn't want you to know. Given how long people live, I could also imagine a lot of people claiming that this or that diet will prevent cancer - which they could likely do for decades (even if it had zero effect on their cancer rate). It reminds me of Deepak's claims that aging can be reversed (and yet, he continues to look older and older each time you see him).

It's also worth pointing out that the word "cancer" comes from the ancient Greeks. People were dying of cancer two thousand years ago: "Hippocrates (ca. 460 BC – ca. 370 BC) described several kinds of cancers, referring to them with the Greek word carcinos (crab or crayfish), among others" (Cancer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) Obviously, they weren't eating processed modern foods.

Cancer also has a multitude of causes - everything from smoking to environmental carcinogens (like asbestos), to sunlight (e.g. melanoma) and even viruses are known to cause cancer (lookup HPV). In Australia, the Tasmanian devils are being killed off by tumors that can be passed from one individual to another (it's transmitted between animals when they bite each other) - Devil facial tumour disease - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Certain breeds of dogs are prone to certain cancers (which is obviously related to genetics), and certain mutations are known to put people at high risk of cancer - see the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations ("a woman who has inherited a harmful mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2 is about five times more likely to develop breast cancer than a woman who does not have such a mutation.").

Given this information and the fact that wild animals also die from cancer and they aren't eating processed foods ("Cancer accounts for about 10 percent of all human deaths. If you think that sets us apart, scientists have news for you: Wild animals die of cancer at about the same rate" Cancer Kills Wild Animals Too | LiveScience), I have a hard time believing in the diet-based magic bullet. If such a thing did exist, then I think it would be pretty easy to show it using animals like mice since they have short lifespans. Trying to prove that diet reduces the chances of cancer in humans would take a good 50 years, allowing people to make all kinds of false claims about a diet-cancer link in the meanwhile.

On a related note, I read a good article recently combating the idea that there is a cure for cancer, but the powers that be don't want anyone to know about it: The NESS » What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You

Epic newsflash: talking rationally to vegetarian women will have no effect on their stance.

I once met a woman who had her kids on ADHD medication. She told me that their issues could probably be controlled by diet, but that they whined so much when she tried to take sugar out of their diet that she just kept them on the medicine and let them eat shitty junk food. Ugh.