New encounter

"I just shared a cabin with Jake yesterday on the VS024 from LAX to LHR. He flew Virgin Atlantic Upper Class, as did I. He was in row 4, but I was in row 17 - the last in the cabin. It was an A340-600 aircraft.

Regrettably, I didn't get to speak to him. I wanted to respect his privacy and wasn't sure how he would react to a fan approaching him during his stay in the Air New Zealand airline lounge or onboard the flight. Do you think I should have? Have I just missed an opportunity of a lifetime or did I do the right thing?

Virgin uses the ANZ lounge at LAX. I was sitting in view of the entrance when he arrived with two companions. One was a butch-looking security type and the other was a blonde female assistant-looking type. He was wearing a grey hoodie, perhaps to reduce recognisability and also seemingly to hide long hair - perhaps grown for a role - I need to look into that. He walked in and we made that kind of brief eye contact. I held his stare but forced myself to remain unreactive on the outside. God I wish I'd just let out a big smile and waved, but then I feared that may have been cheesy. He didn't appear to want to court attention anyway. After arrival in the lounge the three promptly left again to come back about ten minutes later. Perhaps there was something he wanted to buy at the shops. He went all the way to the back of the lounge - where I had been sitting but left because it's kind of boring and I wanted to sit near the TV in the end. While we waited for the boarding call I popped up to the back a couple of times to look down at the gate. I walked right behind him and I could have patted him on the head. Each time Jake was sitting on his own on his mobile to someone. Reece maybe? He must have stayed on that mobile for the entire time of his stay in the lounge. His minders did not sit with him. They hung around outside of the lounge mostly.

When boarding time came, I thought this was going to be interesting... how would they get him onto the plane... would he wait in an airbridge queue Turned out they timed it so that most of the plane was boarded before he came on. He came on without the minders. He seemed a little sad actually. Lonely perhaps? I leaned forward as he walked past me and tried to see if I could smell his cologne. I couldn't smell anything. He was mere millimetres away from me. He had a backpack and a smaller bag which scraped along the back of the seats to the starboard side of the cabin. He found his seat, which seemed miles away from where I was. As he sat down he looked back and again we appeared to make eye contact. Again I held any reaction.

So this was a 'sleeper' flight. Upper Class passengers are offered a set of PJs to wear. Jake didn't accept them and stayed in his clothes. I changed however. It helps you feel a little more fresher when you arrive.

I wondered if Jake was a seasoned Virgin flyer like myself or if this was his first time. I've had a few celebrity encounters on Virgin Atlantic recently. Madonna flies Virgin Atlantic, probably as part of her trying-to-be-green initiative and giving the private jet a rest. Madonna had an area of the Heathrow lounge sectioned off for Lola and her. So Virgin Atlantic seems to be the hot airline for the stars right now.

Jake wasn't using the in-flight entertainment system. He appeared to have his own little DVD player. I believe it is still possible for Upper Class passengers to get these from the crew, but it's still possible it was his own. It's ironic; a year ago the in-flight system had several of his movies. Right now it had none.

Dinner time came and Jake must have requested a special meal as he was served first with something which wasn't on the menu. Perhaps he went low fat? Would he go kosher? It looked like a salad. That was all he ate. I wondered if he had a anti-jetlag plan. They say you shouldn't eat on sleeper flights. Or eat very little.

The next unusual event was when he had half the Upper Class cabin crew searching for something in his seat. I overheard them saying he dropped something and lost it down the seat. The Upper Class suites are terrible for this. Jake spent the next 30 mins bent over looking for this... so was forced to stare at his ass for the duration. Such a hardship. I don't know if they found anything, but it was a serious carry-on. The FSM (Flight Service Manager) and two or three flight attendants were involved in literally dismantling his seat.

The hood never came down the whole flight.

I slept for the next six hours. Was quite shocked I'd achieved that actually. It was breakfast time and Jake appeared only to have OJ, which he never finished - in fact barely touched.

Read the whole story in Iheartjake.suddenlaunch.com

Black Gold: The Story of Oil, Giant

"One passage in the book conveys its general approach, as well as that of the film. Swofford relates an incident, also depicted in the film, in which reporters from the New York Times and the Boston Globe interview members of the squad in Kuwait. Prepped in advance by their officers, the soldiers repeat patriotic clichés: “This is about freedom, not about oil. This is about standing up to aggression, like the president says,” and “I think this mission is valid and we have all the right in the world to be here and the president has all the right to deploy us and we are well trained and prepared to fight any menace in the world.” Swofford writes: “He [the reporter] wants to look at the psyche of the frontline infantryman, and I can only offer him processed responses.... I wish to speak to him honestly and say: I am a grunt, dressed up in fancy scout/sniper clothes; I am a grunt with limited vision. I don’t care about a New World Order. I don’t care about human rights violations in Kuwait City. Amnesty International, my ass. Rape them all, kill them all, sell their oil, pillage their gold, sell their children into prostitution. I don’t care about the Flag and God and Country and Corps. I don’t give a fuck about oil and revenue and million barrels per day and US jobs.”Left as is, and that is the book’s (and film’s) modus operandi, this “hard-hitting” talk is simply an apology for ignorance and backwardness. Swofford’s responsibility, and Mendes’s, is to make something of the experience, to bring out its truth, not simply to record its surface or the unthinking impressions of a 20-year-old youth with no conception of the war’s significance. What use is that? source: www.wsws.org Black Gold: The Story of Oil Modern America depends on a steady source of petroleum and petroleum by-products to satisfy its ever-increasing and voracious appetite for fuel. Oil, the “black gold” of the ground, is one of America’s most precious and abundant commodities, and yet America still need’s the oil exports of Arab nations to fill its need. Black Gold, The Story of Oil chronicles the birth and rise of the oil industry in the United States, from its fledgling beginnings, through the days of John D. Rockefeller and the robber barons, to the Gulf War and the present. source: www.history.com "Meriwether Lewis did not have any kind of gold in mind, of course, when he toured the valley of the river he called Maria's, and he certainly could not have imagined that beneath its questionable soil lay vast pools of wealth, a black bonanza--petroleum. The market for petroleum products in America and Europe emerged during the 1850s, when crude oil was first distilled into kerosene to become the favored lamp fuel, replacing sooty animal fats such as whale oil. Natural seeps from oil shale were discovered at several sites in Montana in the 1860s, and an oil boom within the present boundaries of Glacier National Park had a short life between 1890 and 1910. With the advent of the automobile after 1900, the demand for gasoline and lubricating oil expanded proportionately, and so did exploration. In 1910, the Great Northern Railroad began converting some of its coal-burning locomotives to oil, which encouraged further efforts in northern and northwestern Montana". source: www.lewis-clark.org "The movie, of course, was George Stevens' oil epic Giant, and the movie people included Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. Five weeks later, they left Marfa a lonelier place — and the inspiration for Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean — but Reata, ancestral home of the fictitious Benedict clan and the film's central image, remains. After 41 summers — and several hurricanes — its skeleton stands on Evans' 47,000-acre ranch, attracting only the occasional pilgrim or wayward steer. James Dean's last film (he died eight days after wrapping), Giant still generates heat for its survivors. ''We were so silly on location. There was a competition,'' remembers Carroll Baker, who was 24 and played Dean's love interest. ''Jimmy decided he was going to take Liz away from Rock. There was no sex involved; [Dean] was just, like, 'Ha, ha, ha! I may have third billing, but I'll show you who gets the most attention from the leading lady!''' James Dean... behaving like a rebel? Some legends always endure". source: www.ew.com 

 

Cheeky Reese

Reese Witherspoon puffs up her cheeks as she drinks a gulp of water outside her friend’s house in Brentwood, Calif. on Monday.

A battle of past and future Mrs. Witherspoons will be going down at this year’s Teen Choice Awards. Current squeeze Jake Gyllenhaal and ex-husband Ryan Phillippe will be battling it out for male actor in a drama. Jake starred in Rendition while Ryan was in Stop-Loss.

WHO DO YOU THINK will win the Battle of Witherspoon — Jake or Ryan?
Source: justjared.buzznet.com
See more pictures of Reese: source: x17online.com

New version of Prince of Persia game

"According to GameDaily, Ubisoft is planning to release another Prince of Persia game next year, one that's not the cel-shaded "reboot" that has yet to be officially named. The game that's planning to ship alongside the Mike Newell directed, Jerry Bruckheimer produced film adaptation of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is "essentially" a video game adaptation of the film adaptation of the video game of the same name. Careful, your head may twist clean off if you succumb to the spinning.

It doesn't sound like anything is guaranteed at this point on the game that may feature a polygonal Jake Gyllenhaal and a phoned in voice over performance, but if we know Hollywood and games based on movie licenses, regardless of the source material, I think we're in for a fun ride. Not so much a good video game, but a fun ride".

Triple Play of New Prince Entertainment [GameDaily]
Source: kotaku.com
PRINCE OF PERSIA (THE SANDS OF TIME) PART 5:

In good company

"Justine (Aniston) is a despondent discount store employee in a tiny Texas town, her segregation and restlessness are overt and her discomfort very evident.

Justine works at the cosmetics counter, where the uniformity of long days under fluorescent lights is broken up only by insubordinate public address announcements from her co-worker, Cheryl (Zooey Deschanel).

Justine’s been married for seven years to the oafish Phil (John C.Reilly), but he doesn’t seem to cherish his time with wife anymore, instead rathering to veg out on the coach all day and smoke weed with pal, Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson).

Enter, Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal). New at the retail store, Justine takes an instant shine to the mysterious youngster and finds herself soon caught up in a swirling". Source: www.webwombat.com.au

The Tyranny of the Good Girl, the Good Boy
By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

"We learned to feel a degree of safety by being a good girl, a good boy.

The problem is that, while we may have had some success with this strategy in our childhood homes, this same strategy is now causing our problems in our relationships at work and at home. When we disconnect from our own feelings, we become invisible to ourselves. Others end up treating us the way we treat ourselves, so we become invisible to others as well. As adults, we end up bringing about the very rejection we are trying to avoid, because we are rejecting ourselves".
Source: www.bharatbhasha.com
"Paul Weitz's serio-comedy wants to have it both ways: a critique of the harsh and ruthless business world, where industrious but old people lose their jobs to young and inexperienced ones, and a heartwarming Capraesque fable about old-time professionals, America's last vestiges of moral characters and keepers of the old American way of doing business.

In Good Company is a movie that begins as a severe treatment of a generational strife, and ends up as a male bonding saga of an old pro (Dennis Quaid), who becomes a father figure and buddy of his young boss (Topher Grace), who happens to be dating his daughter (Scarlett Johansson).

Freudian critics will have a field day with the film, whose first half advocates the killing of the father-patriarch, only to negate it in the second half, and show not only the return and revenge of the father but the reassertion of his modus operandi as a desirable goal. I suspect that if the filmmakers (the Weisz brothers) were to remake The Graduate today, they would have found a way to reconcile between Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), his parents, and the Robinsons too.

Despite its thematic inconsistencies, In the Company of Men is a generous and enjoyable film that, unlike most Hollywood corporate movies, doesn't neglect the women either.

The amiable film invites the viewers to spend two hours in the good company of vet actor Quaid, emerging star and heartthrob Grace, and the talented Johansson, who's quickly becoming the busiest and most accomplished actress of her generation.

At 51, Dan Foreman (Quaid) is living a good life is good. He's the long-term head of an ads sales at the weekly Sports America, which has just celebrated the magazine's biggest year, thanks in large part to Dan's warm, honest, handshake deal style and the departmental esprit de corps he has fostered.

Carter's zeal to deliver to upper management doesn't win him many fans at Sports America. His bottom-line approach, lacking in the human side, is at odds with the more compassionate Dan and his devotion to his staff.
In Good Company then turns from a corporate picture to a romantic comedy, in which it's only a matter of time before the father finds out and explodes, in public, of course. This is one of the film's interesting points, for the corporate handbook has little to say about sleeping with your employee's collegiate daughter. There's also the danger that if word got out, news of the affair might threaten Carter's detente with Dan, Alex's intimate relationship with her father, and the progress the two salesmen have made at Sports America.

Rushing to resolve all the tensions in a crowd-pleasing manner, the last reel is formulaic, and viewers familiar with the conventions of romantic comedy will be able to guess how the film ends.
"In Good Company" is a nicer, kinder film, one that preaches for reconciliation between fathers and sons, and a business style that merges the good old ways with the not-so-good but necessary new ways of doing business". Source: emmanuellevy.com

"Business is not financial science, it's about trading.. buying and selling. It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it".
-Anita Roddick.

"You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart". -Thomas J. Watson

this is a kind of company modality: PEO, these modern stratege working solutions that are provided by the PEO Companies, such as Staff Leasing:

Elite Business Solutions (EBS), an Administrative Service Organization, provides as its core service an outsourced human resource solution for small to medium sized businesses The core administrative services include; payroll, human resource management, benefits, and loss control.

EBS can help implement the practices necessary to maximize the benefits of our service model, which can help take a growing business to newer levels.
What is Elite Business Solutions service model?
You are assigned a business advisor as your main contact. Your business advisor works with the service team to ensure your needs and expectations are being met.

What is the difference between Elite Business Solutions and a PEO?
A Professional Employer Organization (PEO) provides a standardized human resource management offering to small and medium size businesses through an employment relationship. EBS offers a highly customized human resource management solution for the prudent business owner. EBS takes the one stop-shop approach to the next level by not just working with our clients on the core HR services but on many of the issues businesses face everyday". Source: www.yourebs.com

Politics and Stock trading

"When Stone went meditative in Nixon, moviegoers stayed away as if they'd just heard popcorn was carcinogenic. And last spring, critics would have had to try bribery to get people to see Alexander Payne's dandy comedy Election, which gently suggests that our political mores aren't unrelated to our national character. Election, which has just come out on video and DVD, is indeed a small gem. If anything, it's too carefully made; some more recklessness wouldn't hurt. But that's a minor failing in a satire that inveigles its viewers into siding with Matthew Broderick's sad-sack but decent teacher against Reese Witherspoon's go-getting high school pol before turning into caustic, rueful proof of the old Pogo line, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Broderick's bitter final gesture vents the audience's own frustration with politics. But even he knows it's pathetic, and his disgust is also self-disgust--leaving no way out.

[...] Reducing all issues to a duel between Innocence (James Stewart's idealistic newcomer) and Corruption (government itself), Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is as expressive of our craving to transcend the whole sordid business as The Wizard of Oz is of our desire to escape to home instead of from it. Still, you can rely on Capra to churn up darker stuff about America than Oliver Stone dreams of, only to find it innocuous and celebrate it. Despite provoking patriotism the way green corn causes diarrhea, Mr. Smith is a peculiar civics lesson, since the hero isn't elected, casts no votes, and saves himself by an undemocratic filibuster. In fact, in what we can only hope is a blissfully unwitting way, this ostensible ode to democracy is a hairbreadth away from turning into a favorable account of the rise of a dictator.Sixty years after Mr. Smith, we're back at the crossroads of innocence and corruption; however, with (our) naivete personified by two clueless, giggly teenage girls and corruption incarnated by Dan Hedaya's comic-horrible Tricky Dick himself, the confrontation is not only apt but simply, unexpectedly moving. The final scene, with Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams holding up their gleefully obscene sign while a maddened Nixon gives them the finger, can choke you up even while you're grinning, because Hedaya's grimace hints at genuine pain, and the girls' exhilaration is also the dawn of cynicism. And while the coda, with Dunst and Williams roller-skating to "Dancing Queen" around an empty Oval Office, practically hollers "soundtrack video," it's also beautiful--a surreal distillation of the moment when, with Nixon gone, the seventies became "the seventies." Source: www.esquire.com
Michelle Williams was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role as Alma in the 2005 movie "Brokeback Mountain" (starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal). When Williams was a teenager she began getting small TV roles, and when she was 15 she appeared in the feature film Species (1995). She legally separated from her parents before she was 18 to pursue a career in acting, and it paid off. In 1998 she began the first of six seasons on the hit TV show Dawson's Creek as Jen Lindley. The show made her a star, alongside fellow Creeksters James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes. While working on the series she began a film career that has included the horror film Halloween H20 (1998)and the political comedy Dick (1999, opposite Kirsten Dunst). Williams and Ledger became a couple during the filming of the movie, and their daughter Matilda Rose was born in October of 2005. They separated in 2007, and Ledger died in 2008.
Extra credit: Willams is unrelated to Michelle Williams, the pop singer from the group Destiny's Child... Williams's father, Larry Williams, is a successful stock trader; in 1997 Williams herself won a stock-trading competition"
Source: www.who2.com

The art of stocks trading:
"By understanding the theoretical base first provides you with the building blocks for true trading success in selling stocks. The average student takes roughly two weeks to one month to actually learn the material, provided you are prepared to study a half hour a day. Trading is an individual thing, and so is the time it takes to learn how to trade. The main objective of this Stock Mentoring Program is to eliminate guesswork and simplify your trading into a series of uncomplicated, cohesive decision rules. How much jargon and technical language is used in your Mentoring Program? For most people, technical terms are among the most off-putting aspects of the markets. This systems works using a software charting and scanning package called the Pro Trader Software that finds the stocks that are setting up according to the trading strategies that you will learn. This software is web-based - which means there are no complicated downloads. There are Stock Watch Portfolio Lists that you can go through each night to see what stocks are setting up for a profitable trade. You can either do this manually or have our software scan these special stock lists for you. The SEC and FTC make it mandatory for all educators to place this on all written literature and financial websites. There are always risks associated with trading the markets, for everyone involved. This Stock Mentoring Program specifically teaches you how to minimize losses (but not against slippage)". Source: www.mentoringstocktraders.com

Cool Hand Paul

"For many years, wherever he went, Paul Newman was asked the same questions. Where did your blue eyes come from? Is Robert Redford your best friend? How have you stayed married so long? When the actor became fed up and stopped giving interviews, he was labelled a recluse.

Now, at least, there is a new line of inquiry. Last week the movie world was abuzz with reports - first denied, then confirmed, then denied again - that he was close to death. The story began with the emergence of pictures of the 83-year-old actor, his face gaunt and ghostly, attending a charity event near his home in Connecticut.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press quoted his close friend and business partner, A?E Hotchner, as confirming that cancer had been diagnosed. The following day Hotchner insisted he had been misunderstood, and to add to the clarity, Newman's own spokesman stated that the star was "doing nicely". This, as was widely observed, is the kind of thing doctors tell anxious relatives.

If the curiosity appears unseemly, it is also understandable. Perhaps even refreshing. Newman is one of the few surviving links to the golden age of American film and stage acting, but remains a strangely elusive presence.

The Apollonian features and faint air of hauteur smack of something in the psychological mix that Newman has never been inclined to explain, or, perhaps, even to think about. He exists in the public mind largely as the residue of the characters he has played - the disaffection of Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler, the incorrigibility of Cool Hand Luke, the elegant delinquency of Hud.

"People want to know about him," says his latest biographer, Shawn Levy, "while he's still here to tell them."

Not that Newman has ever said much. He distrusts almost everything in the star system, with its shallow vanities and colliding egos, and the distance he has kept from Hollywood is only partly down to a preference for living in New England.

"Once you start to believe in celebrity, it's impossible to take yourself seriously," he once said. "You're busted, when you take that road."

He modestly claims that he can no longer remember any of his best lines, but can still quote the worst ("Helena, is it really you? What a joy!" from a bizarre 1954 Old Testament toga-and-sandals epic, The Silver Chalice).

Newman's background is thoroughly documented, without being unduly revealing. He was born in 1925, in Shaker Heights, a well-to-do but otherwise nondescript suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a Jewish sporting goods shop owner.

His father, he says, was "funny, erudite, hard-working, extremely ethical - and distant". If, as many have deduced, the theme of stern masculine values lies at the core of Newman's work, the likelihood is that it stems from the emotionally-deficient relationship with his father. It was, nevertheless, a relatively secure and comfortable childhood.

His stage-struck mother, Theresa, nudged Paul and his brother Arthur (later a film producer) towards the theatre, and both acted in local productions as children. Paul attended university in Cleveland, but was thrown out after a brawl in a bar, and after working briefly in the family shop, where he was forced to come to terms with his shortcomings as a salesman, landed a small-time acting job in a theatre in Wisconsin.

"If it hadn't been for that fight," he mused many years later, "I probably wouldn't have become an actor."

He served in the US Navy during the Second World War, but his hopes of becoming a pilot ended when he learned that those trademark sapphire eyes were colour-blind. This blow, moreover, was only the start of the troubles those mesmeric peepers have caused him. All his life, complains Newman, he has been plagued by people demanding to gaze into his eyes.

"To work as hard as I have," he once said, "to accomplish what I've accomplished, and then have some yo-yo come up and say 'Take off those dark glasses, and let's have a look at those blue eyes'. It's really discouraging."

The eyes soon settled on Jacqueline Witte, a tall blonde actress who, in 1949, became his first wife, and the mother of his first three children.

They moved to New York, where Jacqueline modelled and Newman studied at Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio among a vintage collection of classmates including Marlon Brando, James Dean and Rod Steiger. Between them, these actors perfected the deadly art of cool, although Newman admits that it was a while before he came to grips with the concept of sexuality.

He broke through with a starring part in the 1953 Broadway production of William Inge's Picnic, and it was during the run that he met Joanne Woodward, a blonde, delicate-featured actress from Georgia, who was in the cast as an understudy and became his second wife. They have been married for 50 years - a feat almost unrivalled among major movie stars, albeit one that neither of them is much inclined to discuss. Newman once unwisely told Playboy magazine that "if you've got fillet steak at home, what's the point the point of going out for hamburger?" Mrs Newman took great exception to the imagery, and they now let the longevity of their union speak for itself.

The great movies that made his name as a working-class hero, with just the requisite touch of defiance, soon began to flow - The Hustler (1960), Sweet Bird of Youth (1961), Hud (1961), Cool Hand Luke (1967), and the most famous buddy film in history, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). This collaboration with Robert Redford - who only got the part when Steve McQueen refused it because of dispute over which actor would get top billing - gave Newman both a fresh lease of life and another headache.

Almost 40 years after the release of Butch and Sundance the two stars have never fully extricated themselves from each other.

"People think we're like brothers," says Redford, "that we're on the phone, and round each other's house all the time. It isn't like that." Nor is it: "polite familiarity", is how those who know the pair characterise the relationship.

His extra-movie life has been dominated by a lifelong attachment to liberal politics (he backed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination), motor racing, at which he has been wildly and improbably successful, and the running of Newman's Own, the salad dressing and pasta sauce business that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his Hole in the Wall Gang children's charity.

Last year, when he announced his retirement, he bluntly declared: "I can't work any more. You start to lose your memory, to lose your confidence, to lose your invention. I think that's a pretty closed book for me." The epilogue, however, remains to be written2. Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
See this previous post "Neman style"