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Jay's Movie Blog
I see a lot of movies, and have an opinion on most of 'em.
En français: Fanfan la Tulipe et La Moustache
The past week was a slow one for watching movies; I went without on the weekend because Matt got us tickets to the Red Sox "Futures at Fenway" double header, and I spent time that could well have gone to seeing films spending more money than I'd like on a couple things that often seem of limited utility: A suit to wear to Kent's wedding on Saturday and a TV stand for the HDTV that should arrive tomorrow.
I don't get the suit thing. I understand wanting to look nice, but suit jackets are annoying to get into and out of, and it's not like a $100 pair of pants does anything that a $20 pair doesn't. I certainly don't feel better-looking wearing it. As to the TV stand, well, even if I'd bought a plasma or LCD, I wouldn't be allowed to hang it on the wall. The joys of renting. So I spent money on something which just sits there. It will let me tidy the living room up a little, but it was a pain to get home - it didn't quite fit in the cab properly, and then it was a good thing Matt was home to help me unload it. Since he's working tomorrow, I may have to devise an elaborate system of ropes, pulleys, and ramps to get the actual television in the house.
So, anyway, just the two movies in the past weeks, coincidentally French films from the opposite ends of the spectrum - Fanfan la Tulipe is old and light, straightforward period adventure; La Moustache is contemporary and arty. They're both pretty good at what they do, but I liked Fanfan a bit more - it's nonsense, but it's nonsense with a clear goal in mind, which it achieves. Moustache's nonsense probably achieves its goal, too, but I'm not sure that goal has merit. It's the sort of movie where I half-suspect the filmmaker is playing a practical joke on the audience - that the film has no greater purpose than to contradict itself, and the director is highly amused every time someone claims to find a theme or an explanation.
Also, one of these wasn't what I expected - Google's movie page pegged Fanfan as a 2003 remake with Vincent Perez and Penelope Cruz, rather than the early-50s monochrome version. I'm not complaining at all, though.
Ah, well. They're both short, under ninety minutes.
Fanfan la Tulipe
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 August 2006 at Landmark Kendall Square #9 (Special Engagement)
This is sort of a fun, French Adventures of Robin Hood. Fanfan isn't out to rob the rich and give to the poor, though - he's a rogue who joins the army looking to avoid marrying the country girl he's defloured, and suckered in by a gypsy girl's claim that he'll marry the King's daughter. Gerard Philipe is a charmer as the title character, full of joie de vivre, impatient with things that might negatively impact his carefree lifestyle, but willing to jump headlong into danger. Gina Lollabrigida brings the sex appeal as the fake gypsy who falls for him, and a brace of supporting characters are memorable.
Fanfan reminds me of the Erroll Flynn Robin Hood, although it's shot in black and white rather than Robin Hood's bright colors. It's full of light-hearted derring-do, swordfighting, and athletic action pieces that may not be as polished as a latter-day Hong Kong picture, but are still exuberant. It features sly gallic wit, gently mocking kings who treat war as a game and deriving much more overt joy from Lollabrigida's pulchritude than an American family adventure of the time might.
Overall, a fun, frothy little morsel that fans of the swashbuckler should find delightful.
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagement)
It's not often you actually feel yourself going back-and-forth during a movie. The opening of this one is playful and kind of sexy, though it quickly seems to become a sort of melodrama about how the need to be right can poison a relationship. That drags on for a bit, though, and I find myself starting to get impatient. Then things get interesting as Marc (Vincent London), who shaved the mustache he has always worn off only to have people claim he never had one, starts to suspect that he's losing his mind, and then something more sinister.
And then, things go off the rails. The segment where he flies to Hong Kong, and then repeatedly rides the ferry back and forth between Hong Kong and Kowloon is just repetitive and mind-numbing. I stopped trying to make any sense of it here, because you just can't. It gets strange, and pretty much anything you might have thought the film was about is just rendered moot.
In the end, I'm not sure whether the first two thirds intrigued me more than the last frustrated me. That's not an uncommon reaction for me; I lost patience with Mulholland Drive the same way. It's not so much that a mystery requires a solution, but just wandering into other territory drives me nuts.
Posted by Jason at 7:52 PM No comments: Links to this post
Fantasia Screeners: Synesthesia
The plan for this Red Sox road trip was going to be watching a movie at eight and reviewing it during the game, thus knocking off my four remaining screeners in rapid succession. That'll teach me to make plans.
The screener was the first anamorphic VHS tape I've ever had. Messed me up as I tried to get started - first I've got the TV in zoomed-in "TheaterWide" mode, but it's clearly cutting off picture along with the subtitles, then in 4:3 mode, which doesn't look quite right. Fortunately, in an early scene one of the characters pulls out what looks like a box of Lucky Strikes, and I figure out that the circular logo is distorted. I bet that this thing must annoy critics who don't have a 16:9 display, but if you like movies enough to be a critic, you've probably got one.
Synesthesia (aka Gimmy Heaven, Synesthesia Divine Thriller)
Seen 25 August 2006 in Jay's Living Room (Fantasia Screeners 2006)
Synesthesia is a neurological condition that can be described as sensory cross-chatter. A synesthete may see the letter "A" and process it as the color red; scrambled eggs may taste like triangles. If you did not know this before seeing Toru Matsuura's first movie, don't worry - you'll have it explained to you twice before the opening credits.
Even before that, though, we join Detective Shibata (Hiriji Kojima) at a murder investigation. Mari (Aoi Miyazaki), the adopted daughter of an electronics company's founder and chairman, finds him next to a peculiar stain on his floor with a knife in his back, and the police note that it's the third time her foster parent has been killed, though the police captured the previous killers. This crime scene isn't the only place where the symbol appears; while investigating something peculiar at one of the webcams he manages, Shinsuke Hayama (Yosuke Eguchi) spots it on on a bed and recognizes it as the mark of "Picasso", a mysterious internet figure who deals in snuff feeds and supposedly is able to induce murder and suicide with a hypnotic video game. A synesthete himself, Shin thinks the symbol is a message from one person with the disorder to another. It leads him to find Mari in an unlikely place, and while his best friend and business partner Takashi (Masanobu Ando) immediately falls for her, she has flashbacks that reveal a traumatic life even before her first foster parent was murdered.
Synesthesia is built from several intriguing premises, but is frequently frustrating in how it tells its story. We're told that Shin has synesthesia, and that the way synesthetes perceive the world makes them terribly lonely, but Shin seems far too well-adjusted most of the time. He's functional, lives with his understanding girlfriend, and doesn't even seem particularly eccentric. Matsuura opts not to show us anything obviously from Shin's perspective until the very end - at least, it seems that way on first viewing - so the concept remains very abstract. Making the disorder something we normal folks can't grasp may have been the intent, but if so, shouldn't it appear to have a more obvious effect on him; shouldn't he appear different?
There are also certain standard thriller deficiencies; the villain who seems omniscient, the storyline that seems to fall apart under a little bit of scrutiny, the unlikely master plan. The idea of a video game that drives people to murder is an old one, but it's probably implemented better here than in many other instances: The game itself looks kind of boring, the sort of repetitive thing that at least looks like it could induce a trance state. The use of web cameras starts out as an interesting hook, but the film goes a little too far with it after a certain point - why does the killer know to put cameras at a certain site?
And yet, the cast does a pretty fair job of winning us over. Yosuke Eguchi doesn't necessarily make his character's syndrome obvious, but his performance is at once human enough and generic enough to interpret as a veritable wall of coping mechanisms. He's got a nice, easy chemistry with Ando; they rag on each other like real best friends. Aoi Miyazaki's dialogue over the course of the film probably runs one or two pages max, but she manages to convey plenty of hurt and fear. We see her attraction to Shin even though she's not able to state anything directly. And when she does finally have some reason to smile, it's briefly uplifting, even if everything is going straight to hell around her. In smaller roles, Ryuhei Matsuda manages to be creepy as "Picasso", in part because he makes the audience wonder how much of his off-center behavior is legitimate and how much is affected, while Hiriji Kojima is a small pleasure as the investigating detective: her Shibata is attractive and has a distinct personality without being the tough chick or stuck in a romantic subplot. It doesn't sound like much, but it certainly seems rare enough to be worth noting. I think Konno, the yakuza investor in Shin & Takashi's business, is played by Minoru Torihada; whoever it is, it's an amusing performance that still implies danger.
Matsuura makes what seem like some questionable decisions, but the ones he gets right, he gets a hundred percent right. For example, there's a cut toward the end that tells a great deal of story in very little time.I like the way he has "Picasso"'s face quickly dip into view in one scene, eliminating the idea that he might be someone we've already seen, but still preserving the unease of not being able to look directly at him. And while he doesn't spend much time showing a synesthete's perceptions directly, he does find ways to play with our senses; for instance, he and cinematograper Kenji Takama find spots in the otherwise very busy Tokyo where large swaths of the landscape are a single color to unbalance the picture, or cut to a cityscape with lots of motion and images projected onto the sides of buildings after an explanation of synesthesia to suggest unrelated sensory input coming together.
When it comes right to it, though, I think the concept of synesthesia got away from Matsuura and writer Yuji Sakamoto. It seems like it should be a slam-dunk way to mess with the audience's mind, but the story winds up being rather ordinary, even as the cast and crew gives it their all.
Posted by Jason at 11:53 PM No comments: Links to this post
Black & White @ The Brattle- Overlord and The Window
Doing the alpha-and-omega thing a little here, finishing up my reviews of the first night of the Brattle's "Rare Film Noir" program just after seeing the last in the series this Tuesday. For the most part, it's been a fun series, although it's a bit bummer for me as a fan of the theater to see attendence drop off between the start of the series and the end. Of course, part of that is likely becaues the last two weeks were single bills compared to the double features that started the series, so there could very well have been the same number of tickets sold, just distributed between multiple showtimes.
I think it was a pretty successful series; some of the movies weren't quite as good as others, but only one or two were really worth avoiding. Even those probably merit a video release just on the basis of their casts. There's got to be some way for the studios to step up their releases of old films on DVD (or the next-generation formats) and still make a profit.
Anyway, it's kind of fun in a perverse way to write reviews for HBS of movies that most people reading will have a hard time tracking down for themselves. So here's Pushover and Nightfall, which I saw back here. Enjoy.
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 August 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagements)
This one is kind of an oddity. It was produced in 1975, but shot in black and white in a style reminiscent of the 1940s; this allows the filmmakers to integrate documentary footage rather than try to recreate battle scenes with special effects. The result is a film that blends the line between reality and fiction as well as many before and since. This is due in part to the astonishingly clean footage from the Imperial War Museum - it's footage filmed under very difficult circumstances that looks nice enough to have been shot on a soundstage.
The actual film may not be for everybody; it's more than a little arty, spending a lot of time on the monotony of training as it follows far-from-worldly young Tommy from sign-up to the invasion of the title. A lot of the archive footage is presented as connected to Tommy's story through his dreams, and maybe not even that. There's two converging things going on, Tommy's life and the war, and when they connect, it's initially unsatisfying, but also the kind of kick in the pants the audience might need.
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 22 August 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)
The film opens with a quote from Aesop's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", and that's what you're getting with this movie. Bobby Driscoll gives a very nice performance as nine-year-old Tommy Woodry, a kid with a penchant for tall tales who witnesses a real murder. The film then gives us a totally believable look at how nobody believes him.
One thing I really liked here is how Driscoll looks and acts like a real kid, or at least, how I tend to think of kids looking and acting. He's not a little adult, or precocious in any way. He's small and skinny and has his limbs flying all over the place when he runs. There's also some very nice effects at the end, as the killers chase Tommy through a condemned building, with multi-story drops and collapsing staircases looking a lot more convincing than they do in many films with this provenance.
Posted by Jason at 8:38 AM No comments: Links to this post
The week in movies: Between Midnight and Dawn, The Illusionist, Snakes on a Plane
I meant to see more at the Brattle this past week, catching all three repatory series that are running down the calendar, but it didn't quite work out that way. I wound up hanging around the comic shop long enough to miss the beginning of The Phantom Tollbooth on Wednesday, and then stuck at work long enough that I would have been seeing Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion on an empty stomach, and it looked just long enough that I figured I would rather not. Weak, I know, especially when I planned my Saturday around Snakes on a Plane.
I did stop in to get the new Brattle schedule on Saturday, though, and I like it. It's got Schwarzeneggar midnight shows, a week of Terry Gilliam, Mutual Appreciation, Azumi, Yellowbeard to celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and Bruce Campbell introducing Bubba Ho-Tep. That last one may have to substitute for the traditional Halloween showing of Evil Dead 2, since at the end of the month, they're doing an almost-unheard of four-week series of new prints from the Janus Films library (Janus, remember, got its start at the Brattle).
The Boston Fantastic Film Festival is also back for its fourth year, and its six-week run may (I think) be its longest yet. The really good news is that a preview screening of Tideland has already been booked for it. I'm really hoping that it's six days because Ned & company feel momentum as opposed to a six-day hole in the schedule; I'd like this festival to get within an order of magnitude of Fantasia.
So, I've been a bit of a movie-viewing slacker this week, but to tell the truth, it's been a weak summer anyway. I had to toss one of my AMC reward tickets because I didn't find something I wanted to use it on before it expired.
Between Midnight and Dawn (aka Prowl Car)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)
The film opens by almost fetishizing cops in their prowl cars, delighting in the code numbers that the dispatchers read to the various patrolling units. We follow one that gets involved in a shoot-out and then has trouble getting a store-owner to testify against a tough running a protection racket. It's the latter that sets off the chain of events that consumes most of the movie, as Edmond O'Brien's Dan Purvis becomes obsessed with taking down this gangster, even as a new guy moves in from the East Coast and sets of a gang war. Mark Stevens's Rocky Barnes has a more benign obsession; he's smitten with the dispatcher's sexy voice and sets out to woo her.
Between Midnight and Dawn would be considered a set-up for a TV series rather than a movie now; it spends a lot of time setting up situations that might seem more fitting playing out over the course of a season rather than in a film. It also seems to lose focus a little, as it starts out as a thing about the front-line cops responding to 911 calls, and then becomes a higher-level story, about two patrol copsversus the mob. It's decent at that, and the cutesy romance isn't bad, either, but it would almost be better if Purvis and Barnes weren't so personally involved - make it truly about the beat cops.
* ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2006 at AMC Boston Common #4 (First-run)
You'll have a hard time finding somebody less snotty about the use of CGI in films than me, but even I've got a line to draw, and that line is at a story of a stage magician. It's one thing to show things disappearing into thin air when Paul Giamatti's character is recounting the semi-legendary story of the origins of Edward Norton's character, but when he's actually performing on-stage? If you can't do it in-camera, you shouldn't be doing it. Peiod, end of story, because otherwise there's no real limits on what can be done with the inevitable rest of the movie.
Also, everyone is doing a silly-sounding Austrian accent - although, as seems typical, pretty young girls have accents that are less thick than the rest. I say, let them use their real accents as in The Grey Zone - after all, the characters are not speaking accented English, they're speaking (relatively) unaccented German, so the logical translation is to have them speak clearly. Edward Norton sounded very silly. So did Paul Giamatti, but he sold it better.
Seen 19 July 2006 at AMC Fenway #13 (First-run)
It's been a tremendously disappointing summer, but this little movie about snakes on a plane delivers the goods. It's a bunch of generic characters stitched together in something that would go direct to video without Samuel L. Jackson, but it's handled with wit and aplomb. And even if the vaunted marketing didn't put a whole lot of butts in seats, they were some of the most enthusiastic folks I've seen at a regular movie in a while.
Posted by Jason at 4:31 PM 2 comments: Links to this post
Pre-Fantasia: À Double Tour, Lifeboat, and The Break-Up
It'd be tempting just to punt these three movies I saw before Fantasia and my new, more purely bloggish plan of making this a journal while HBS/EFC gets the full reviews. But, there's stuff that interests me here, even if I won't be writing about it directly - I noticed that À Double Tour was based on a novel by someone whose work was also adapted into a movie in the Brattle's Rare Noir series, I spotted that HBS does not have a review of Lifeboat... So I figured I'd try to catch up with these. Why not, right?
À Double Tour (aka Web of Passion)
Seen 28 June 2006 at the Harvard Film Archive (Eight weeks of Film History)
As À Double Tour opens, the beauty coming from the Marcoux house is enough to make men trip over their own feet, so drawn are their eyes to the half-dressed girl in the window. Of course, as most have by now come to expect, it is just the trappings of their prosperous life that shine so brightly - Julie is not a member of the family, but the maid. So, in a way, the beautiful servant is just another extension of the beautiful garden outside the beautiful house; a trapping of Henri Marcoux's success that doesn't reflect the strain and dissatisfaction within.
Henri (Jacques Dacqmine), of course, has a mistress - a fabulous red-haired Italian girl named Léda (Antonella Lualdi) whose nearby home is filled with souvenirs from her life in the Orient. He's barely doing anything to conceal it, and his wife Thérèse (Madeline Robinson) is unwilling to divorce. Husband and wife both disapprove of Laszlo Kovacs (Jean-Paul Belmondo), the Czechoslovakian man their daughter Elisabeth (Jeanne Valérie) has taken up with, especially since he has brought a friend (László Szabó) with him to their house - the friend is polite and seems uninterested in participating in Laszlo's freeloading, but it's the principle of the thing. Son Richard (André Jocelyn), meanwhile, is the kind of unfailingly polite young man that has to be hiding something, and his awkward attempts to flirt with Julie (Bernadette Lafont), the maid, might give the audience a good idea what it is.
This being a film by Claude Chabrol, there will be a murder, and a detective (André Dino) come to solve it. The detective, of course, will be largely irrelevant; this murder is a family matter, and the Marcoux family figures it doesn't have a whole lot of reason to be forthcoming. The prime suspect appears to be Julie's boyfriend, and for her sake they would like it to be someone else - especially if that someone else was Laszlo. Not that Thérèse and Henri plan to offer their daughter's fiancé up to the police on a silver platter - no, they must be more subtle.
Read the rest at HBS.
* * * ¾ (out of four)
As I write this in August of 2006, there don't seem to be many Gulf War II movies being made aside from documentaries, which strikes me as a bit odd, considering that films like Lifeboat sprung from World War II in real time. Is it because the country is currently too divided for a film to appeal to everybody, or because of something more practical (films take longer to create and change potentially coming much quicker)? Whatever the reason, it's a shame that the present conflict doesn't seem to be spawning any films as topical, intelligent, and gripping as this.
The film starts with a Liberty Ship sunk, and one survivor, award-winning photographer Constance Porter (Tallulah Bankhead) in the lifeboat of the title. Soon, others are fished out of the wreckage - sailors John (John Hodiak), Gus (William Bendix), who is wounded, "Sparks" (Hume Cronyn) and George (Canada Lee), the only black man in the boat; industrialist Charles "Ritt" Rittenhouse (Henry Hull); nurse Alice McKenzie (Mary Anderson), and pregnant Mrs. Higley (Heather Angel). Also saved from the sea is Willy (Walter Slezak), part of the crew of the German sub which was also sunk in the battle. Many think he should be thrown out of the boat, but Constance plays the "we'd be no better than them" card. Which initially seems fortunate, because he seems to be one of the most capable people on the boat.
Hitchcock made several films which took place in relatively confined spaces - consider Rear Window, The Lady Vanishes and Rope, but Lifeboat is easily the most constrained. The lifeboat doesn't give people a lot of room to move around, but it's not quite so tight as you might initially think. As factions form among the survivors, there's just enough room for them to separate a little, and maybe even hide things from the others. There's not enough room for the camera to go anywhere, though, and there's no easy way to remove a character from a scene for convenience's sake. It's quite a challenge Hitchcock and screenwriter Jo Swerling (working from a story by John Steinbeck) have set for themselves, but it's one they meet with alacrity. There's a bizarre combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia at play here, as the characters have neither room to move nor bounds to their world. Hitchcock is free to move his camera around, but the irony is that even if we're not locked into one view, we're still seeing much the same thing.
The Break-Up
Seen 4 July 2006 at AMC Boston Common #19 (First-run)
The Break-Up feels genuine because it is comfortable with a basic truth: Well-meaning people can be complete jerks. People being ugly is not necessarily the most enjoyable thing to watch in terms of being entertaining in a straightforward manner, but every once in a while it's nice to see a romantic comedy's wacky hijinks exposed as not being particularly wacky.
The film opens with Gary Grobowski (Vince Vaughn) and Brooke Meyers (Jennifer Aniston) meeting at a Cubs game. Brooke's there with someone else, but Gary's aggressive, making the point that if she's not really enjoying the date, why see it through to the end when she has the chance to do something that really makes her happy? The credits roll, a photo montage of the next three years of their lives as they go out and move in together. On the other end of the credits, though, things aren't so rosy, as Brooke's preparing for a dinner with her family and Gary's not helping the cause. The dinner is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and they're soon splitting, but unable to come to a decision over who should keep the condominium they purchased together.
At this point, we probably expect The Break-Up to go in the general direction of The Awful Truth, and certainly the advertising points in that direction. Indeed, at certain points it seems reasonable to assume that The Awful Truth is Brooke's plan, but as we all soon learn, part of the fun of screwball comedy is in just how divorced from reality it frequently is. Being broken up and in the same condo makes it almost impossible to see what they loved about each other; their interactions are a long series of finding new and familiar ways to irritate each other. Indeed, as the film goes on, we find ourselves more and more having to strain to remember that photo montage, as it gets harder and harder to visualize these two not just in love, but even liking each other.
Posted by Jason at 11:20 PM 1 comment: Links to this post
Classic adventure: Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Adventures of Brisco County Junior
After heading north to Maine to celebrate the imminent birth of our first niece (if seven weeks is imminent) on Sunday, Matt and I threw the pilot episode to The Adventures to Brisco County Junior into the DVD player. It is, as the couple million of us who watched the show in its first run will tell you, kind of brilliant, and a nice companion to seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen at the Coolidge the next day, and not just because the man who wrote Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would rather co-create Brisco.
Both works are very deliberate throwbacks to the Saturday serial style of adventure, with one crazy escape after another. Both involve a search for a magical artifact of great power - one from a religious past, and one (as we later learn) from the distant future. Both give us iconic action/adventure stars - Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, Bruce Campbell as Brisco County Jr. - playing educated, intelligent men but more comfortable with a day's growth of beard, searching for something amazing away from the city. Both feature sly, self-deprecating wit.
Both also look really good. Sure, you expect it from Raiders, which has Spielberg and Lucas backing it and works hard to create its untamed 1938 aesthetic. It still looks great 25 years later. But Brisco was a production for what was still an upstart Fox network in 1993 - and back then, not only was Fox not a major TV player, but television in general didn't have a lot of money spent on it. As Matt commented, it doesn't look nearly as good as today's big-time adventure series like 24 or Prison Break. It does, however, look a lot like old Westerns; John Wayne or Randolph Scott wouldn't look out of place on its sets. Heck, much of it was shot on the studios' remaining "Old West Town" standing sets; Campbell and company may have been following in the footsteps of those legends in a very literal sense.
Indeed, it's one of the things I love most about both - the filmmakers are very aware of the genres they're working in, and throw winks to the audience (occasionally for Raiders, frequently for Brisco), but they work hard at recreating the pulp adventure environments they love, throwing a new coat of paint on it to keep things from getting too kitschy. These films aren't genuine recreations of 1930s/1940s serials - they're better, with more talented writers and directors than most of those ever could have had.
One more thing they've got in common - I would drop serious money if either were to get a six-inch toy line. I realize neither is exactly current, but maybe something Diamond Exclusive? It would seriously rock.
The Adventures of Brisco County Junior (Pilot Episode)
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 13 August 2006 in Jay's Living Room (Brisco!)
My college friends and I loved this show, and to this day we regret missing the pilot episode because we went out to see Demolition Man on opening night (which I also love, of course, but it could have waited another day). It's amazing how fully-formed the show is right from the start - favorite recurring characters Albert Wickwire, Pete Hutter, John Bly, Big Smith, Lee Pow, and, of course, Dixie Cousins, are all there. We're given a taste of anachronism and the paranormal to show us that this won't be a typical western, but enough to assure us that it will still feel like one. And the characters and their relationships are gently set on the paths they'll follow without it ever feeling coercive.
This show is a big deal to me - I discovered Bruce Campbell here, which led to Army of Darkness and Sam Raimi, which warped my taste in film in ways that have gone unrepaired to this day. It's also one of the few shows that managed to hit the sweet spot between grand serialization and entertaining done-in-one episodes; as good as television is today (there's a serious argument to be made that it's never been better), few series seem to have a premise that is flexible enough for a new story on a weekly basis while also being able to build up a larger narrative.
As much as I loved this show, I don't mind that it lasted just one year. It left no major dangling storylines or cliffhangers, and never suffered a quality drop as its writers ran out of ideas. It's twenty-eight great hours of television.
(That said, if I were a producer at Warner Brothers, I would absolutely reunite the cast for Brisco County Junior in the Valley of Gwangi.)
Seen 14 August 2006 at the Coolidge Corner #1 (Big-screen Classics)
I've got this movie on DVD, but I might as well not, since I'm lucky enough to live in Boston, where both the Brattle Theater and the Coolidge Corner Theater run it roughly once a year. I may not make every showing, but I can see it on the big screen just often enough to sate my desire and for each viewing to be better than I remembered it.
Was Paul Freeman always that good as Indy's opposite number? Does Spielberg always have such good fight choreography in his action movies? How many other movies can slip from action/adventure to horror with such minimal effort? And Harrison Ford. Man, Harrison Ford; not even Bruce Willis can take a beating and still keep at it like Ford does in this movie.
Steven Spielberg is one of the world's great filmmakers because of movies like this, where he's able to get a thousand little details planned out and right while still having room to discover and improvise things on set. He's not always perfect, but his instincts never seem to lead him astray here. Oh, and he's got one of the greatest John Williams scores, too.
Fantasia Screeners: Junk
I'm doing something odd here, re-watching the film as I write the review. I watched it at eleven o'clock Friday night, went to bed right after, and didn't retain it that well. I remember the basic structure, but some of the details fled my mind. So, as I start to write this, it's eleven o'clock again, but Sunday night, and I've thrown it back in the DVD player to re-watch while writing the review. I figure I've got enough sugar in me to keep me up and get something movie-related done this weekend.
I kind of wonder if the Russian film industry could become an international powerhouse, like Hollywood. There's a population large enough that big-budget extravaganzas could potentially break even domestically, neighboring countries that speak either Russian or slavic languages close enough for subtitles to be a minor nuisance, and maybe an economy that is edging ever-closer to being robust enough to fund blockbusters without partnering with an American studio. Not today, but maybe in five or ten years. On the other hand, I imagine Hollywood may be enough of a juggernaut that it's not possible for Russia (or India or China) to even displace it a little.
Junk (Zhest)
There's something great to be said for misleading trailers. A subtitled preview for Junk must have played in front of at least ten movies that I saw in the festival's main theater over the first week, highlighting a bunch of characters and their roles - The Reporter, The Editor, The Cop, The Psychologist - implying that they'll have the same relative importance, even if they have different agendas. I got so thoroughly conditioned to expect that sort of movie that the turn it takes about half an hour in caught me completely flat-footed, which is a nice place to be in when watching a suspense film.
After an opening sequence with the incident that caused Pravda crime reporter Marina (Yelena Babenko) to quit the job, her former editor (and lover) Sasha (Anatoli Belyj) asks her to cover one last story - interview a high-school teacher who abused and killed several of his students. The mental hospital's head doctor (Sergei Shakurov) says to come back tomorrow, but when she does, the man has escaped. A Moscow cop by the name of Pavel Petrovich (Vyacheslav Razbegayev) leads the pursuit, with Marina tagging along. The fugitive flees into a dacha village, eighty square kilometers of mostly-abandoned houses on quarter-acre locks, filled with squatters and other dangerous men. Marina and Pavel wind up stranded there when Pavel crashes the car, and capturing the fugitive soon takes a back seat to just getting out.
It's a good basic adventure storyline, and the inevitable intersection of the various folks on the run - the killer from the police and the reporter from the criminal elements is reasonably smooth. Director and co-writer Denis Neimand occasionally gets a little too arty for his own good, though. Take the trailer's money-shot, for instance, with Marina jumping into a lake from an exploding house, with a flaming car landing behind her. Great shot, and then later it runs in reverse, and a pair of thugs we'd seen in the house (Yusup Bakshiyev and Igor Lifanov) show up alive and apparently unscathed to harass Monica. So, what is this - a director trying to have it both ways, a drug-induced hallucination, a comment that we can't know the whole truth from just one side of the story? Maybe all three, and it kind of works that way, but it also kind of confuses. The last act feels a bit sloppy to me, too, and not just because of some dodgy effects work in the final scene. Part of the idea, I know, is that Marina's seldom in control, but she becomes just a little too peripheral to the final action.
Posted by Jason at 10:14 AM No comments: Links to this post
Rare Film Noir: The Big Night and The Burglar
I didn't get to as many movies as I expected this week, just the Brattle's "Rare Film Noir" series. I worked late Monday and Thursday, so what I had planned didn't come off, and I wound up watching accumulated TV and soul-crushing baseball games. I'd really like to see the Sox go on a winning streak soon, since Arroyo's recent struggles and Wily Mo Pena's recent gigantic home runs are vindicating my claims that this was a darn good trade.
(Actually, I probably could have made La Dolce Vita last night, but it would have been close and I was kind of hungry when I got home, which meant I would have been really hungry by the time the three-hour movie ended)
I would have really liked if the Brattle had switched the movies' order (or I'd been able to bolt work in time to start two hours earlier); The Big Night is the shorter movie, and finishing at 10.45 rather than 11.00 with a half hour intermission rather than a forty-five minute one can seem like a world of difference. Still, this at least let me end the night on a better movie, as The Burglar is a whole lot more entertaining than The Big Night.
Just when I thought I'd finished Fantasia with Samurai Commando Mission 1549 and Train Man, they go and send me five screeners, two and a half weeks after the festival ended! But, hey, why not - filmmakers and studios get their films booked at festivals to get exposure, so if the festival does this, it's helping them, it repeats the Fantasia Festival name in the media a little more, and it gives me something to write about. Not quite as good for all of us as having reviews ready by the time they'll show at the festival, but we're all still washing each other's backs, even if I don't particularly like a movie.
Aaanyway, to get back to the reviews: See Train Man if you can. It's really good. As of right now, 0 Fantasia reviews to do, 23 others.
The Big Night
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2006 at Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)
Somewhat below average noir with John Barrymore Jr. playing a teenager whose birthday party is interrupted by a sportswriter beating the crap out of his father. He wanders through the city looking for revenge and an explanation. Even at a short seventy-five minutes, though, the movie seems kind of flaccid - the stops between the initial beating and the confrontation with Al Judge just string the movie out; they don't really seem to build to anything. After that, it's cheap melodrama.
This, on the other hand, is a fun caper with Dan Duryea as a thief who pulls his crime off iwthout a hitch but has a little trouble with the getaway. It's got a ton of sex appeal from Jayne Mansfield and Martha Vickers, and a potboiler story that chugs along nicely. It's also got a neat opening, with a faux newsreel newsreel that the camera eventually pulls back from to reveal Duryea's character in the theater. I don't know that I've seen an earlier example of that kind of false start (the film was released in 1957), and it caught my eye.
It's really not that much deeper than The Big Night, but it's got a better cast, and you can start to see the start of later decade's more naturalistic styles here, even if it is still rather theatrical, too.
Weekend update: Pirates, Streets of Fire, The Night Listener
Low-key movie weekend for me. The films were good, of course, but I was kind of in a place where there were few things that I really wanted to see. Taking myself out of the new-release loop for a couple of weekends with Fantasia put me "behind", in a way, but also gives me a chance to examine just how much I'm really interested in certain movies, and how much I'm just sort of riding along. I just got around to Pirates of the Caribbean II, and it was just the one that fit my schedule that day better than Lady in the Water, divorced from "every website on earth is leading with this and you're seeing dozens of trailers and and and and..."
So I saw some decent movies, with the most fun winding up being the midnight movie at the Brattle.
Only a couple more Fantasia reviews despite the time between the recent posts, because they're the type of decent-but-not-exceptional movies that are hard to speak passionately about: Shinobi and Vampire Cop Ricky. The count now stands at 2 Fantasia reviews left, 21 others.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Seen 5 August 2006 at AMC Fenway #7 (first-run)
A fun sequel to a fun movie. I thought the first Pirates was an above-average time at the summer multiplex, and the team returns mostly intact, doing the quality work I'd expect. In a way, that's an issue - the same Johnny Depp performance that was fresh and full of surprises a coupe years ago became, well, the same Johnny Depp performance this time around, and still manages to wipe Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley off the screen. The first was an exciting blend of swashbuckling and the supernatural; this one amps up the supernatural but the characters are no longer shocked by it. And Bill Nighy is almost completely squandered.
But, it's got great set pieces - I loved the sheer exuberance of the hanging cage sequence, for instance. I dug the cynical black comedy as Sparrow tries to recruit a crew whose sole purpose is to be given over to Davy Jones. And the kraken is a cool effect. I must admit, I can't wait until next summer, when we get Chow Yun-Fat.
Seen 5 August 2006 at Brattle Theater (The Late Show)
I'm a big fan of films that bring the crazy, and Streets of Fire has all kinds of crazy - its environment is a strange mix of eighties urban paranoia and fifties style; it's got Michael Paré, Amy Madigan, and Rick freakin' Moranis mouthing off to each other while on their mission to rescue Diane Lane; it's got Willem Defoe leather overalls being completely insane. People fight a formal duel with sledgehammers. And it's one of those "would like to be a muical but doesn't quite go there" deals - you know, where no-one breaks into song but there are a succession of stages where people can sing.
It's all in good fun. I dig it.
Seen 6 August 2006 at AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run)
A nifty little low-key thriller with the toned-down, serious Robin Williams. He makes an interesting amateur sleuth, a writer and high-end radio personality trying to figure out if the precocious, dying child he's been speaking to on the phone actually exists. There's nifty ideas to it about the nature of truth versus fiction, and how we can blur the line between the two with enough massaging and repetition. It is not, however, a particularly exciting story, and once we've got the idea that Williams's character looks like the dangerous creep from certain perspectives, it kind of gets into a rut.
Posted by Jason at 3:39 PM 1 comment: Links to this post
One chance: Talladega Nights, Nobody Lives Forever, Russian Dolls
A few one-night stands this week. Well, just one, really - Talladega Nights was a preview, and Russian Dolls was on its last night. But since I wouldn't be able to see Talladega free the next night or Russian Dolls at all, so I'll count that.
I also saw A Scanner Darkly on its last night at the Coolidge, but that thing knocked me out. I don't know if it's just an example of how incredibly hit-and-miss Linklater can be for me, or something about that movie that night. I'd found the style torturous during Waking Life, too, and while it had not bee a particularly hard or long day at work, Russian Dolls had sort of softened me up. Man, that movie needled me.
I am liking the Coolidge's new arrangement, with handicapped folks able to get upstairs and a larger concession stand and ticket bureau. I do kind of wonder how it works on nights when it's a busy show in the main theater - it seems like you'll have people trying to buy tickets and going in and out crowding past each other. There's a little more room in the lobby, but I I don't know if it's come at the expense of seats in the main theater.
More Fantasia is up: God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand; Meatball Machine; 3 Mighty Men; All-Out Nine
Seen 31 July 2006 at AMC Fenway #7 (Preview)
I'm still not sure about Will Ferrell. Matt suggests that Ferrell isn't really funny, but is good at surrounding himself with funny people. I don't think that's quite it. I think he's just not terribly good at playing a character who is simply stupid, and when the joke is that Ricky is a moron, the movie feels generic. When he does something weird, crazy, or surreal, the movie is about twice as good.
Nobody Lives Forever
Seen 1 July 2006 at the Brattle Theater (Rare Film Noir)
I honestly thought this was going to hit Dirty Rotten Scoundrels territory at one point. It kind of lives in the area between film noir and a caper film. It's a nifty combination, with the romantic fun of a con job along with a dark reminder that the characters aren't getting any younger. It's got a nice cast, with John Garfield, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Waltern Brennan, and Faye Emerson. Hopefully, Warner Brothers pulls it out of the vaults for their next film noir box set.
Seen 3 July 2006 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (First-run)
Honestly, I'm not sure why I was interested in seeing this - I remember not being particularly fond of L'Auberge Espagnole, so why did I feel some sort of need to catch the follow-up. Maybe it's just the more indie than you thing: Sure, you may have seen that when it was being pushed as a big thing in the boutique houses, but have you seen the sequel? No? Well, then you're just a poser.
It's not a bad movie, but it could have about forty-five minutes cut out of it. Like, everything with Audrey Tautou, who had a miniscule role in the first one, but sucks up a whole bunch of the movie's first act only to disappear once the main story starts. Then comes another episode with Xavier's lesbian friend Isabelle pretending to be his fiancée. And then, just as in the first movie, things kick into gear when Kevin Bishop shows up as the boorish William, only here he's very likable as he romances a Russian ballet dancer, which kicks an actual story into gear. And from there forward, it's a pretty enjoyable movie. But, lord, you've got to wade through an awful lot of unnecessary stuff to get there.
Perfect Suspense: Body Double and Rear Window
Reminder for the future: Leave two hours before trying to see a movie at the furniture store. Getting there from Cambridge involves at least two of the commuter rail, subway, and bus... And at some point, the T will screw it up, even if you're catching every train really quickly.
So... No Ant Bully in IMAX 3-D last weekend. I wound up not going to the Birds/Jaws double feature because futility is kind of draining, and by the time I finished the ballgame, I knew I wasn't going to make it to eleven o'clock in a darkened theater.
But, nothing keeps me from Rear Window. Matt and I wound up staggering how we hit the double feature - I did Body Double at 4:00, he showed up for Rear Window at 6:30, and then I left him to watch the 9:00 Body Double. Because I just had to watch the ugly ballgame on ESPN.
Great stuff, though - Rear Window is one of Hitchcock's very best, and Body Double is a great example of Brian De Palma stealing all the right things from his idols and adding his own twisted sensibility to it. It's not often you get a four-star double feature, but when you do it's delightful.
More Fantasia is up: Necromancer and Frostbite
Body Double
Seen 30 July 2006 at the Brattle (Hitchcock & Friends Thriller Weekend)
Brian De Palma will steal anything that isn't nailed down, and this delightful thriller borrows liberally from its double feature partner, and Vertigo, and probably a ton of others that I couldn't immediately identify. What he comes up with is a tightly constructed thriller that doesn't cheat the audience and reveals all its cards in good time. De Palma has a great pulp-like thing going on with the gleeful sexuality and violence, and isn't afraid to indulge in a little darkly comic winking at the camera when he has the chance to go over the top.
What De Palma does with the camera in this movie reminds us of why his new films are worth looking out for, even when he hasn't had a major success that was really his in around twenty years. No-one does a long, continuous shot like he does; someone really should give him a couple million to use today's digital equipment to make a film that's one continuous shot.
It's also fun to see what's happened with the cast over the years - two of the leads have more or less disappeared, Melanie Griffith probably never had another role as good (and has fallen off the map as women over 35 are sadly wont to do), and Gregg Henry has become a dependable character actor. Probably the most famous now is Dennis Franz, billed low as the director of the movie the main character is acting in.
When this was restored and rereleased a few years ago, I got to know that trailer by heart. It's one of the best trailers of the past ten years, and the movie itself isn't chopped liver, either. Rear Window truly merits being called multileveled - it's enjoyable as an amateur-sleuth adventure, but it's also a delightful romance as James Stewart and Grace Kelly discover that they're not nearly so mismatched as they initially thought. You can also get all intellectual about what Hitchcock and company are saying about voyeurism and our acceptance of it, or all analytical about how he keeps the camera within Stewart's apartment at almost all times. It's rare to see a film so satisfying in so many ways.
And it's got James Stewart and Grace Kelly. Matt asked afterwards who the modern day Grace Kelly would be, and I really couldn't think of anyone. Scarlet Johansson came to mind as an impeccably constructed blonde beauty, but her flat voice doesn't just drizzle melted class over you the way Kelly's does. Maybe Naomi Watts or Olivia Williams, but, honestly, there probably won't ever be another one like her.
Jason Seaver | Create Your Badge
Places I Hang Out (on- and off-line)
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Black & White @ The Brattle- Overlord and The Wind...
The week in movies: Between Midnight and Dawn, Th...
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Classic adventure: Raiders of the Lost Ark and The...
Weekend update: Pirates, Streets of Fire, The Nigh...
One chance: Talladega Nights, Nobody Lives Foreve...
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States


Velocity Auto Sales currently features on-line "Quick Quotes". Please supply us with your relevant information in the fields below, include a brief description of the any special requirements, and simply click "Submit." An Internet Representative will contact you shortly.
How much do you estimate the value of your vehicle is?
© Velocity Auto Sales, 2019. All Rights Reserved.


text:
Q: Prohibit certain string of characters My contact form has been getting a ton of spam messages. My contact form has several fields. I have noticed the email address field from the spam messages always contains the strong Staceyrow and the message field always contains one or more of the following: payday, loan, loans, lender, lenders. The location field always contains the word Darussalam.
I am using a php contact form and on the back end, I am able to enter a regex for each field.
What regex do I have to enter for the email field so that if the user enters anything containing "Staceyrow" (not case sensitive) in that field, the form doesn't submit?
What regex do I have to enter for the message field so that if the user enters anything containing "payday" or "loan" or "loans" or "lender" or "lenders", (not case sensitive) in that field, the form doesn't submit?
What regex do I have to enter for the location field so if the user enters anything containing "Darussalam" (not case sensitive) the form doesn't submit?

A: Match "Staceyrow" with /staceyrow/i
Match "payday", "loan", "loans", "lender", or "lenders" with /(?:loans?|payday|lenders?)/i  (*just be careful about matching innocent message field values)
Match "Darussalam" with /darussalam/i
If you use these criteria to deny form submission and/or provide specific feedback about the denial, the bot designers will be able to easily adjust their spamming values without submitting.
Perhaps make some kind of rule where the form always "seems" to submit, but there is either a generalized "something went wrong" error message, or no error message at all and the submission gets dumped in an inactive database table, where you can scan it manually to make sure that no innocent users have been caught in your screen.
Or perhaps you could allow the suspicious users to submit, but just have an extra column in your database table that marks the user as "suspicious".  The suspicious users can have very limited privileges until human eyes make some sort of decision.
As asterisked earlier, "slender" will raise a flag in the message field because.  For this reason, the message field is the least reliable for identifying the bad apples.  Oh, and if you plan to expand your message pattern, put the shortest strings in the earlier alternatives and longer strings toward the back for performance reasons.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


The classic Italian Braided Leather is the hallmark of this best selling bracelet. Get it three styles.
Classic Black with either the Royal Fleur de Lis or the Italian Charm.
For every Italian Style bracelet purchased, get a free Silicone Wedding Ring. In the "Special instructions for seller", type FREE RING and put your ring color (Black, Blue, Grey, or Green) and your ring size from 7 to 13. No discount code needed. This special runs through 4/30/2019. If you forget to put FREE RING and color / size in the instruction box, email us before we ship. We will not ship the free ring separately.


text:
L'abbazia Notre-Dame d'Igny, situata poco a ovest di Reims, nel comune di Arcis-le-Ponsart, è un'abbazia cistercense fondata nel 1128 su richiesta del vescovo di Reims.

Storia
L'abbazia conobbe un periodo iniziale di grande floridità, grazie anche alla protezione di nobili e sovrani. Nel Trecento, però, subentrò un periodo di estrema miseria, in concomitanza con la Guerra dei Cento Anni. Nel Cinquecento e nel Seicento fu addirittura saccheggiata, prima dagli Ugonotti nel corso delle guerre di religione, poi dagli Spagnoli durante la Guerra dei Trent'Anni. Il numero di monaci si ridusse vistosamente: 9 nel 1653, solo 5 nel 1741.

Infine, nel 1791, con la Rivoluzione francese, l'abbazia fu soppressa e i suoi possedimenti dispersi.

Solo nel 1875 l'arcivescovo di Reims riuscì a ricomprare buona parte degli edifici rimasti; l'anno seguente la chiesa fu riconsacrata e avvenne il ritorno di un gruppo di monaci, ma trascorsero altri dieci anni prima che il complesso riprendesse il titolo ufficiale di abbazia.
Le vicissitudini del complesso non erano però finite. Nel 1918, quasi al termine della prima guerra mondiale, i tedeschi in ritirata fecero saltare l'abbazia.
Questa fu ricostruita nel 1929 e da allora è occupata da un gruppo di suore cistercensi.

Altri progetti

Collegamenti esterni

Arcis-le-Ponsart
Abbazie cistercensi della Francia
Igny

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


"Catering rice for fishermen" seafood bowl specialty store.You can eat it only here.
"Fresh seafood" of Otaru, a strong stickiness (Koshi) "Hokkaido rice", "special barb soy sauce" that was made over a period of time and effort.
I am thoroughly stuck in this three.
The most recommended menu is "Catering rice for fisherman".
This is a luxurious bowl.First you eat as it is. Finally you put the "special soup" in it.You can get a little bit different fun from the way of eating.


In November 2016 we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first Internet international line in Slovenia. The anniversary will be celebrated with an event being part of the Information Society multiconference. The event will be held on October 10 2016 at Jožef Stefan Institute in the Main lecture hall.
From 1991 onward Internet and its services spread up in almost all households and institutions in Slovenia. Today it is considered as the most important infrastructure for functioning of the Slovenian economy and society.


Adidas is a German sports equipment manufacturer and was founded in 1949. The company has it´s headquarter in Herzogenaurach and has currently about 53.700 employees.
Since 1995 Adidas is listed in the DAX on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and currently the corporation has a market capitalization of 14,7 billion euros. With a weight of just 1,58% the company is one of the smaller companies that are listed in the DAX. Right now Adidas is behind Nike the world largest sportswear manufacturer.
In this fundamental analysis we will first look at the key financial ratios and will analyze how the company has developed over the last years. Then we will compare Adidas with Nike and we will also look at the different regions where Adidas is generating most of it´s revenue.
Finally we will summarize the main points of this analysis with the help of a SWOT-Analysis and we are also going to give a medium- and long-term outlook for the stock.
Over the last 8 years Adidas improved it´s revenue from 10.3 billion euro up to 14.5 billion euro, which represents a growth of 40%. But over the last 3 years the sales clearly stagnated and the company generated last year 2% less revenue than in 2012.
In the picture above we can see that the revenue of Adidas not only stagnated over the last 3 years but also during the years 2007-2009.
The net profit is stagnating over the last 8 years and only in 2013, Adidas was able to convince with a significant higher profit of almost 800 million euro. During the presentation of the latest earnings, the CEO of Adidas, Herbert Hainer, said that revenues are stagnating due to currency fluctuation in key international markets such as Russia and Argentina. At the same time the Golf division and the US sales are showing some weakness. In 2014 the sales in the US decreased by 7%.
Currently Adidas has a price-earnings-ratio of 24, which is quit high, because the average price-earnings-ratio of all DAX companies is currently 16.
When it comes to work out how profitable a company is, investors are always looking at the return on equity, because at the end all investors want to invest only in profitable companies. In 2014 Adidas had a return on equity of 8.7% and this ratio is also not very convincing, because the average return on equity of all DAX companies was over 10% in 2014. At the same time the ROE of Adidas decreased 30% over the last 5 years.
Even more badly is the developing over the last 8 years because in 2007 Adidas was able to generate a very strong ROE of 18%.
If you look at the ROE you should also look at the equity ratio to find out how stable the financial situation of the company is and how large the leverage is. Right now Adidas has an equity ratio of 45% which is quit high, because the average equity ratio of all DAX companies is just 29%. The corporation was able to maintain this high equity ratio between 43%-47% over the last 5 years.
The equity ratio is a very important key figure, but investors have usually different opinions on it. One the one hand a company needs a very solid equity ratio to maintain a good financial stability during a recession, but one the other hand the equity ratio should not be to high, because it ́s not so easy for a company to generate a good return on equity with a high equity ratio.
Currently shareholders of Adidas are looking forward to get a dividend yield of 2,1% which is exactly the average of all DAX companies. It is positive that the corporation increased the dividend from 0.5 € to 1.5 € per share over the last 8 years, but it is very doubtful whether this trend is going to continue because we have already seen that both sales and profits are stagnating.
The Adidas stock has improved by 80% over the last 5 years, which is a little bit weaker than the DAX, which increased over 90% during that time. However the development of the stock during this time should be a clear alert signal, because until summer 2014 Adidas was a outperformer in the DAX and increased twice as high as the DAX from the year 2010.
Investors had very high expectations on the stock because of the soccer World Cup in 2014, but Adidas was not able to met those expectations and was sold off by the market during the second half of 2014.
The key financial figures of Adidas are showing some weakness. On the one hand the sales and profits are stagnating at the moment and on the other hand the company also has a higher price-earnings-ratio (24) than the market (16).
Adidas has a very high equity ratio, which gives the company a good financial stability but at the same time the return on equity has been in a down-trend over recent years. The dividend yield is only average and due to stagnating profits the company will not be able to increase the dividend.
Adidas is the second largest sports-equipment manufacturer in the world behind Nike, but we have already seen, that Adidas is right now not able to grow. At the same time Nike was able to increase it´s revenue from $18.3 billion up to $27.8 billion over the last 5 years, which represents a growth of 52%.
The net profit of Nike also increased by 42% during this period, which makes the view on the financial ratios of Adidas even more worse.
Thereby it was Adidas, which had very ambitious goals, because over 5 years ago, the company announced the "Route 2015" where Adidas wanted to increased it´s net profit by 15% every year and wanted to generate revenue of 17 billion euro in 2015. The company missed these goals, instead it´s Nike, which is constantly growing year by year.
A significant different between those two companies is the sponsoring: Since many years Nike is able to get the top athletes under contract and is willing to spent a lot of money. Currently Nike has for example athletes like Michael Jordan (Nike Air Jordan), Lebron James, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Tiger Woods and Cristiano Ronaldo under contract.
Roger Federer is getting e.g. $130 million for 10 years from Nike.
These sponsoring contracts pay off for Nike, due to those very special and famous personalities people are willing to buy the products from Nike. Only with the shoes of Michael Jordan (Nike Air Jordan) Nike generated between $2 and $2.5 billion every year over the last 5 years.
When Nike presented a new pair of shoes from Air Jordan last year, the company sold over 480,000 units in just 3 hours and generated $80 million in such a short time.
The picture above shows that Europe and the US are the most important markets for Adidas in which the company is generating 50% of it´s revenue.
In Europe the company made 29% of it ́s revenue last year. Right now the Eurozone has a lot of problems and the economy has still not recovered from the last recession and the unemployment rate is over 10% At the same time Greece is also a large uncertainty.
Therefore and because of the risk of deflation the European Central Bank decided to start with a large quantitative easing program whereby the EZB will buy private and public bonds for more than 1.000 billion euro to bring the European economy back on track. But this is no guarantee that the European economy will get stronger.
Currently the economic situation in the US is quit good and can convince in contrast to Europe or Asia. Right now the US economy is growing very strong due to the very good labor market conditions. The US is depending very much on the labor market because it ́s primarily a consumer society and because of that it is very important that a lot of Americans have a constant income.
However the US might see the very first rate hike by the Federal Reserve in 7 years and there is legitimate concern that the economy could grow more slowly over the next years.
Although China is not the most important market for Adidas, however, still need to get mentioned in a global analysis, as the Chinese economy is probably the most important factor for the global economy. China is growing as slow as over the last 25 years and a lot of investors expect that the Chinese Central Bank will cut interest rates over the next months.
Currently the situation on the stock market is not so easy to evaluate, because although there are some question mark in the global economy, a lot of indices are at their all time high and a correction is more than ever likely to happen.
However this correction might get happen a little later at some point in the future due to the ECB QE-Program. If the stock market would do a correction, almost every stock would also decrease. That ́s why it is important to find out how much a stock is depending on the market movements.
A good financial ratio to find out this is the beta-factor, which indicates the systematic risk of a stock. This ratio shows how volatile a certain stock behaves in comparison to the overall market. If the market makes a movement of 20% and one certain stock also moves 20%, this stock has a beta-factor of 1. If this stock would have made a 30% movement, the beta-factor would be 1,5.
Over the last 5 years Adidas had a beta of 1,24, which is quit high and even if we look at a shorter time horizon we still get the same result, because over the last 6 months the company had a beta of 1,25.
This means that the Adidas stock is reacting quit high on market movements and that means the stock is more risky than other stocks.
Our analysis is not showing a good picture of Adidas. The stagnation in sales and net profit is already an alert sign for many investors because investors want to invest their money in companies that are able to grow in the future. Besides that Adidas also has a very high price-earnings-ratio (24) which shows that the stock might be a little overbought at the moment.
We also saw that the main rival Nike is showing some strong growth over the recent years and at the same time Nike as managed to take all top athletes under contract, which is one important difference between Adidas and Nike.
The high beta of 1.25 also shows that the stock is more risky for investors because in the case of a stock market correction the Adidas stock could fall even stronger.
Due to the current monetary policy of the ECB the European stock market could continue to rise and that means Adidas shares might also continue to go up. However if this happens it is hard to think about a fair stock valuation, as Adidas is already a little overpriced and that means right now Adidas is not a good investment for long-term investors.
Of course some corporate news, like quarterly earnings can change the picture again, but right now Adidas is not a lucrative investment.


text:
John Montgomery Crebs (April 9, 1830 – June 26, 1890) was a U.S. Representative from Illinois, as well as an officer and brigade commander in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

Biography
Born in Middleburg, Virginia, Crebs moved to Illinois in 1837 with his parents, who settled in White County. He attended the public schools and subsequently studied law. He was admitted to the bar in 1852 and commenced practice in White County.

Following the outbreak of the Civil War, Crebs was commissioned as the lieutenant colonel of the 87th Illinois Infantry in 1862. He took part in several leading campaigns and battles in the Western Theater, including the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi, in early 1862 and the Vicksburg Campaign the following year. He was also a part of the Union effort to take control of Arkansas late in 1864. He subsequently commanded a brigade of cavalry in the Department of the Gulf until the end of the war.

After the close of the war, Crebs resigned his commission and returned to White County, where he resumed the practice of law. He was elected as a Democrat to the Forty-first and Forty-second Congresses (March 4, 1869 – March 3, 1873), defeating incumbent and fellow former Civil War officer Green Raum in the 1868 election. He was an unsuccessful candidate for renomination in 1872.

Crebs engaged in the practice of his profession until his death in Carmi, Illinois, on June 26, 1890. He was interred in Maple Ridge Cemetery.

References
 Retrieved on 2008-02-14

1830 births
1890 deaths
Illinois lawyers
Union Army officers
People of Illinois in the American Civil War
People from Middleburg, Virginia
People from White County, Illinois
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from Illinois
19th-century American politicians
19th-century American lawyers


For a change, I have collected eight building mistakes that are found on the web. There must be a good reason for how these happened but I just can't think of it. I have photographed my own collection of construction errors from around the country, but thats for another day, and they aren't half as funny as these. Enjoy, and relax in the knowledge that these are someone else's problem.


text:
Q: Code Signing in Xcode 5 I am having issues validating my app in Xcode 5. I submitted an update 2 weeks ago with Xcode 4 fine. I hadn't touched any of my certificates or provisioning profiles.
When I try to validate, I get:

When I try to download an identity, Xcode crashes on me.
I went into prefrence -> accounts and refeshed my Signing Identities and Provision Profiles:

So I have the identies and profiles. What does it need in the Build Settings under Code Signing nows?

EDIT:
changed the code signing:

A: Two things:

*

*The signing identities under "Release" should really be iOS Distribution, not Developer.  Also true of the AdHoc signing identities.

*I would check in the keychain to see what signing identities it has.  If you have any expired certificates, delete them.  They can confuse XCode.
EDIT:
On further reflection, it is odd that you have multiple Team Provisioning Profiles, you may want to remove all of those and download them again.


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JEAN SHAFIROFF IS RESIDENTS 'BRIGHTEST STAR'
Jean Shafiroff In Resident Magazine
Philanthropist Jean Shafiroff's Resident Magazine June 2018 cover party hosted by Editor-in-Chief Hillary Latos and Publisher Christopher Pape will be held at the contemporary art gallery, Georges Bergés Gallery at 462 West Broadway in New York City. The Resident Magazine June 2018 cover story highlights Jean Shafiroff's philanthropic successes and humanitarian efforts serving marginalized communities, women's rights and animal welfare.
Shafiroff's philanthropic impact has benefited the New York City Mission Society, a Harlem-based organization serving underprivileged children. On the board of the New York Women's Foundation, Jean Shafiroff lends her voice to empowering women to rise out of poverty and unfortunate circumstances. Shafiroff recieves high praise for her dedication to animals from Jonathan W. McCann, former board president of the Southampton Animal Society.
Author Jean Shafiroff's powerful voice and keen knowledge places her at the pinnacle of philanthropic society in New York and as a widely respected resource to others. In 2016, she wrote Successful Philanthropy: How to Make A Life by What You Give as a guide promoting the importance of making the world a better place by giving back despite one's financial status.
"We are thrilled to feature Jean on our June 2018 cover. From her good works, impeccable taste, exquisite hosting skills and passion for helping those in need, she makes the perfect cover choice for our latest issue, " says recently appointed Publisher and Creative Director, Christopher Pape.
The Resident Magazine cover, similar to the paintings on display at the Georges Berges Gallery, features an artistic Victorian inspired portrait of Mrs. Shafiroff in a modern green-gold metallic ensemble. Classic Jean Shafiroff is featured inside the Resident Magazine June 2018 issue, where she dons the majestic floor-length gala gowns her cohorts, supporters and readers love.
Guests will enjoy hors d'oeuvres provided by rustic Latin restaurant La Pulperia, and Vivanco Winery will be serving their best wine to match.
Sponsored By: La Pulperia Restaurants, Vivanco Winery and the Georges Bergés Gallery
GEORGE BERGES GALLERY JEAN SHAFIROFF COVER NYC NEWS RESIDENT MAGAZINE

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Children in Armed Conflict
CAC Accountability Framework
18 Resources Found
Recommendations and lessons learned
Supporting reconciliation in post-conflict situations
Iffat Idris, GSDRC
Download full PDF from gsdrc.org
This report covers several approaches to supporting reconciliation in post-conflict contexts. Designed as an e-learning document, the report provides general information about a variety of approaches, pros and cons of said approaches, indications of what roles donors can play, and covers Islamic reconciliation modalities available.
Accountability and Reconciliation in Peace Processes
Democratic Progress Institute
Download full PDF from democraticprogress.org
Through international case studies and analysis of different methods, this paper examines the range of measures that may help societies to achieve accountability and reconciliation, and explores the challenges faced in this field. Successful accountability measures draw on a critical understanding of experience from elsewhere, carefully adapted to the social, political and cultural context and questions of feasibility. This Handbook includes recommendations on making provisions for accountability and reconciliation in peace negotiations and methods for accountability and reconciliation, with case studies from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, and Rwanda.
Education and Transitional Justice: Opportunities and Challenges for Peacebuilding
Clara Ramírez-Barat and Roger Duthie
Download full PDF from ictj.org
This report, part of a joint research project by ICTJ and UNICEF on the intersections of education, transitional justice, and peacebuilding, explores how a transitional justice framework can help to identify educational deficits relating to the logic of past conflict and/or repression and inform the reconstruction of the education sector. Drawing on comparative experiences from around the world, it looks at how formal and informal education can help facilitate the work of transitional justice measures and vice versa. Page 35 begins practical recommendations for Transitional Justice practitioners, policymakers, civil society actors, education practitioners, policymakers, and donors. For more on the project, visit the project webpage: https://www.ictj.org/our-work/research/education-peacebuilding
Education and the Law of Reparations in Insecurity and Armed Conflict
Francesca Capone, Kristin Hausler, Duncan Fairgrieve, Conor McCarthy, Protect Education in Insecurity and Conflict (PEIC); British Institute of International and Comparative Law
Download full PDF from educationandconflict.org
With a focus on reparations, this resource examines how attacks against education during insecurity and armed conflict have previously been redressed and how they may be redressed in the future. It considers education as a form of reparation and explores how education may minimize the risk of future conflict. The appendix includes international and regional treaties, as well as relevant cases.
Submission on the principles to be applied, and the procedure to be followed by the chamber with regard to reparations
UNICEF; International Criminal Court (ICC)
Download full PDF from icc-cpi.int
This resource contains UNICEF's submission to the International Criminal Court in the prosecution against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The document contains UNICEF's recommendations for the principles and criteria that should guide the ICC's decisions to awarding reparations.
Summary of ICTJ's Recommendations to the ICC on Reparations in the Lubanga Case
Ruben Carranza, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
This resource summarizes the ICTJ's submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC) giving recommendations on reparations to victims in the Lubanga case. Recommendations included: ensuring information and access to justice for victims; holding reparations hearings within the Democratic Republic of the Congo; designing a combination of compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and symbolic reparations depending on the category of victim; conducting needs assessment and gender analysis; involving communities; and ensuring perpetrators pay reparations.
Children and Justice During and in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict
UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (OSRSG-CAAC)
Download full PDF from childrenandarmedconflict.un.org
This resource supports advocacy initiatives aimed at strengthening States' protection of children's rights and best interests during and after armed conflict. It examines children as victims and witnesses in judicial processes such as courts and tribunals, and in non-judicial processes such as truth and reconciliation commissions and traditional and restorative justice mechanisms. This report also looks at the concepts of reparations and reintegration. It uses the international legal framework and case studies to create recommendations for States, UN agencies, civil society organizations, and child protection actors.
Through a New Lens: A Child-Sensitive Approach to Transitional Justice
Cécile Aptel and Virginie Ladisch, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
Based on assessments of Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and Nepal, this resource examines the ways in which transitional justice can engage children and consider their needs. It assesses the extent to which truth-seeking mechanisms, criminal justice, reparations, and institutional reform have raised awareness about the victimization of children.
Bridging the Accountability Gap: New Approaches to Addressing Violations Against Children in Armed Conflict
Julia Freedson, Conflict Dynamics International
Download full PDF from cdint.org
This resource examines the accountability gap for violations committed against children in situations of armed conflict. It evaluates actions to attain accountability through efforts at the national level, UN Security Council, and international level. The report provides several policy options to address the accountability gap and features case studies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Colombia.
Children and Security Sector Reform in Post-conflict Peace-building
David Nosworthy, UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre
Download full PDF from unicef-irc.org
This resource considers children and youth in the post-conflict peacebuilding phase of restoring justice and security. It discusses national structures and mechanisms, such as hybrid courts, domestic prosecution, and truth commissions, and articulates their relevance to children and young people. This report also explores the role of civil society organizations in building accountability and good governance within the security sector.
DDR, Transitional Justice, and the Reintegration of Former Child Combatants
Roger Duthie and Irma Specht, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
This resource explores how transitional justice measures may positively affect former child combatants by reducing social exclusion from their communities. It considers several issues in relation to reintegration of children; such issues include truth-telling, reparations, local justice, and prosecutions.
Report and Proposals for the Implementation of Reparations in Sierra Leone
Mohamad Suma and Cristián Correa, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
This resource evaluates a one-year project by the UN and the Government of Sierra Leone to implement the recommendations for reparations found the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Final Report. The report summarizes the findings of the evaluation and provides recommendations to improve the Sierra Leone reparations program.
Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional Societies
Alexander Mayer-Rieckh and Pablo de Grieff, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ); Social Science Research Council (SSRC)
See full resource on ssrc.org
The second volume in the ICTJ's Advancing Transitional Justice Series, this resource is comprised of a collection of essays that explores the issue of vetting in a variety of countries and contexts. Chapter 13 examines vetting and transitional justice. The appendix includes operational guidelines for vetting public employees in post-conflict settings.
Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Reports
Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission
See full resource on sierraleonetrc.org
This resource is the final report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, held from 2002 to 2004. Volume Two, Chapter 3 contains recommendations concerning legal, political, and administrative reforms and measures, and includes a specific category for children. Volume Two, Chapter 4 provides the legal basis for reparations, lists categories for eligible beneficiaries, including children, and makes recommendations on according the benefits and effectively implementing the reparation program.
Truth and Reconciliation Report for the Children of Sierra Leone, Child-friendly version
Download full PDF from unicef.org
This resource provides an example of a child-friendly version of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report. Sierra Leone's TRC was the first truth commission to produce a child-friendly report to engage children and document children's experiences during the civil war.
International Criminal Justice and Children
No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ); UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre
This resource introduces the international framework for children and justice, including international legal protection standards and judicial and non-judicial accountability mechanisms. It takes a particular look at protection of children in times of war and use of child soldiers, as well as protection of children as victims and witnesses. In particular, it outlines the role of the International Criminal Court (ICC), as well as its relation to national justice systems. Finally, it gives some concrete recommendations on the role of children in non-judicial mechanisms like truth commissions and traditional accountability mechanisms.
Children and The Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone: Recommendations for policies and procedures for addressing and involving children in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
UNICEF; National Forum for Human Rights; UNAMSIL
This resource contains recommendations from a technical meeting on children for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Sierra Leone held in 2001. The report outlines guiding principles for the truth and reconciliation commission, which include psycho-social support for children and child friendly environments. The resource concludes with participating children's views and expectations of the TRC.
Justice in Matters involving child victims and witnesses of crime: Online training
UN Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC); UNICEF
See full resource on unodc.org
This free online self-learning tool is intended for practitioners working in an area related to child victims and witnesses of crime. Registration is required.
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Born November 9, 1867, at Timaru, New Zealand.
Died September 25, 1902, at Timaru, New Zealand, of pneumonia.
James worked as a tinsmith for Priest and Hogate, hardware merchants, at the corner of The Arcade and Stafford Street, Timaru.


Jonnie Hughes writes this week about his time spent with the Sepik tribes of Papua New Guinea (tipped off by Michael Pleyer). As part of a documentary series, Hughes visited them and then arranged for some of the tribe elders to visit Britain. Of all the different technologies they encountered in Britain, the one that had the biggest impact was the idea of putting feathers on arrows to make them fly straight. The Sepik tribes used to achieve straight flight by using very heavy arrows, but a five minute tutorial at an archery range in a local community centre gave them the technology to use lighter arrows. This meant that a hunter could carry more arrows and catch more prey.
Fletching technology is thought to date from as early as 25,000 years ago (Ötzi the Iceman had some 5,000 years ago), so seems like an unlikely candidate for a horizontally transmitted cultural artefact. Yet, with the world becoming more globalised, isolated communities are now exposed to not only modern technology, but the whole history of development that they can adopt. Indeed, as Hughes relates, the Sepik tribes are now on Facebook and have access to Wikipedia articles on archery.
This is, of course, a nightmare for people trying to study the transmission of cultural artefacts. What is the descent of fletching in the Sepik tribes? Is it horizontal transmission from modern-day British archers? Or, since the transmitter in question was re-creating traditional techniques, was it horizontal transmission from 15th century Britain (when archery was last widespread), or is it horizontal transmission from the original developers of fletching thousands of years ago? If they continue to borrow technology from wikipedia articles, which are written by dozens of people from all over the world, what is the transmission trajectroy of these ideas?
Along with stories like the hunger-suppressing properties of Hoodia plant being transmitted from hunter-gatherers from the Kalahari to industrialised western cultures, the descent of technologies does not seem to respect cultural or historical boundaries.
An evolutionary approach to cultural transmission? What a great idea.
I may be too harsh here, it actually looks like quite a fun and interesting book. Perhaps there are already orders paced on Amazon by members of the Sepik tribes.
Excellent! I hope the Sepik tribesmen succeed in transmitting these cultural artifacts horizontally at great velocity to their local tasty fauna.


The mineralogy of the dense, dusty superwind of OH/IR stars can provide important constraints for understanding the dust formation process as well as the acceleration of the wind. We aim to model the ISO-SWS spectrum of the OH/IR star OH 30.1-0.7 in detail by reproducing the slope of the spectral energy distribution in the continuum regions between 3 and 8 μm and 12 and 15 μm. In addition to metallic Fe, we find that larger amorphous olivine grains of size on the order of 1 μm may also contribute to the continuum emission. We report here on the preliminary model results and discuss their validity given the important assumption of a 1D spherically symmetric stellar wind.


text:
Ashley Johnson Bavery
701T Pray-Harrold
Ph.D., Northwestern University
BA, Mount Holyoke College
Interests and Expertise
Ashley Johnson Bavery is a historian of American immigration and ethnicity, urban space and foreign policy in twentieth-century America. Her book Bootlegged Immigrants: Politics and Policy on America's Northern Border explores how undocumented immigration in Detroit, America's epicenter for illegal immigration before World War II, created the framework for America's contemporary immigration system. In the first half of the twentieth century, the border separating the world's automobile capital, Detroit, Michigan, from Windsor, Ontario marked North America's number one site for undocumented immigration, and the migrants in question were European, not Latino or Asian. By bringing the U.S.-Canada border to the larger history of North American immigration, her manuscript uncovers the roots of America's impetus to close its borders while simultaneously keeping them open to free trade and commerce. Nearly a century before President Donald Trump called for a border wall with Mexico, businesses, politicians, and immigrants on the U.S.-Canada border pushed certain Europeans toward illegal labor in America's automobile industry, helping build a system of policing and deportation that continues on the U.S.-Mexico border today. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Labour/Le Travail, and Reviews in American History. She has started work on a second project that investigates early Muslim immigration to the Midwest.
HIST 124 The United States 1877 to Present
HIST 205: American Immigration and Ethnic History
HIST 300W: Researching and Writing History
HIST 426 U.S. History 1963-present
HIST 440/540: The History of Detroit
HIST 585 Studies in Twentieth Century United States History
HIST 592: U.S. Foreign Policy / The United States and the World
Bootlegged Immigrants: Politics and Policy on America's Northern Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, September 2020).
"Crashing America's Back Gate: Illegal Europeans, Policing, and Welfare in Detroit, 1921–1939," Journal of Urban History, June 23, 2016.


text:
Updated 4 December, 2016 - 14:52 Natalia Klimczak
Miracles and a Thief: Lifting the Lid on the Legendary Chest of Saint Simeon
There is an elaborate silver sarcophagus overlaid with silver plaques in a church in Croatia. Legends say that the remains of Saint Simeon are inside it. The chest is protected by UNESCO and it is one of the most important Christian treasures in the Balkans.
The church holding this religious relic is in the city of Zadar, where the Benedictine order arrived centuries ago. The chest is dated back to between 1377 and 1380. It was designed by Italian artists and made by local goldsmiths. It is one of the most remarkable examples of medieval art in the Balkans. A translation of the inscription on the chest says "Simeon the Righteous, holding Jesus, born of a virgin, in his arms, rests in peace in this chest, commissioned by the Queen of Hungary, mighty, glorious and majestic Elizabeth the Younger, in the year 1380. This is the work of Francis of Milan."
Painting of 'Simeon the Righteous' by Alexey Yegorov (1830-1840s). ( Public Domain )
A Thieving Queen
It is unknown exactly when St Simeon lived, but he appears in the gospels. Legends say that when the Eastern Roman Empire had its capital in Constantinople the remains of St Simeon were taken there from the region of Syria. St. Simeon was buried in the city for over six centuries, when in 1203 his remains were transported to Venice.
His cult in Zadar started when a Venetian merchant who traveled with the saint's remains was caught by a horrible storm near the Dalmatian coast. The merchant escaped the danger by going straight to the harbor of Zadar. When people realized what the man had in his cargo, they helped him protect the saint's body by hiding the coffin in a cemetery. The ship was damaged and needed some time to be fixed.
The Vucedol Culture: The Rise of an Iconic Copper Age Culture in Croatia
The Immortal Count of Saint Germaine: Ascended Master of Ancient Wisdom
The Palace of Diocletian: Roman Retirement Home and Palace Fortress of Croatia
Moreover, the merchant was ill, so he also needed time to recover. The man was afraid he may die, so the monks who tried to heal him took all the documentation he received in Constantinople and started to read it. When they realized that the saint had miraculous powers, they decided that they needed to find the remains of St Simeon. They all had the same visions in their dreams: to find the body, and they were also informed about the miracles performed by the saint. The remains we relocated in the Velika Gospa monastery's cemetery at the Church of the Virgin. Later it was transferred to the female monastery in this area.
Chest of Saint Simeon from year 1380 in Zadar, Croatia. ( Public Domain )
When Queen Elizabeth of Bosnia, Hungary, and Croatia arrived in Zadar in 1371, she went to join the religious mass and she cracked off a piece of the saint's finger. She put in in her bra, which was visible because of her dress' style. People soon discovered what she had done and they wanted to punish her. For a while her life was in danger, but help came from the noblemen who protected her. In the end, Queen Elizabeth had to give the relic back and recompense the church and the people of Zadar for harming their precious relic.
She ordered the design of the elaborate chest from the famous artist Francisco of Milan. The detailed case was made by artists from Zagreb, Reca, and other places in Croatia. She filled the church with many precious gifts, but this was the most expensive one. The chest is rectangular and measures 1.92 meters (6.30 ft.) long and 62.5 cm (24.61 inches) wide. It weighs about 240 kg. (529.11 lbs.) because it is made of silver and some gold. The decoration is detailed and sophisticated.
Viva La Muerte! Santa Muerte, Folk Saint and Holy Personification of Death, Healer and Protector
Jure Grando and The First Documented Case of Vampirism in Europe
Saint Augustine of Hippo and His Detours on the Long and Winding Path to Christianity
Relief from the chest showing Queen Elizabeth presenting a chest to St. Simeon, with her daughters praying. (SpeedyGonsales/ CC BY 3.0 )
Later History
The story of the chest is also fascinating after the medieval period. According to a brochure from Laudo Gallery in Croatia:
"The chest of St. Simeon rests in the hands of large bronze Baroque statues of angels, cast from bronze received from seized Turkish cannons in 1648. Before the altar, in the middle of the sanctuary, is the stone sarcophagus with the image of St. Simeon from the 13th century, in which the saint's body was kept until the completion of the chest. Just how dedicated Queen Elizabeth was to the saint is seen in the fact that she laid her travel crown into the chest with the body of St. Simeon. Only recently was the crown removed from the chest and can be viewed in the art collection of the Zadar Benedictine order. Worshiping of St. Simeon, the patron saint of Zadar, is very strong even today. Visitors to Zadar can see this on October 8 when the city celebrates its patron saint. Many of the faithful from the city and surrounding areas fill the Church of St. Simeon and give testimony to their deep faith and piety towards St. Simeon the Righteous."
The legend about the chest is also very popular due to its symbolism. In Croatia, people still remember the difficult times when this land belonged to the Ottoman Empire or was attacked by Turks.
A replica of the chest as seen in the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. (SpeedyGonsales/CC BY 3.0 )
The Saint for the Croatians
The cult of St Simeon is still very popular in the Balkans. One of the reasons for this is the magnificent chest that stirs the imagination and makes this place even more special. The remains of the saint are still in the chest and the local people say he takes care of them by creating miracles. Now, the Chest of Saint Simeon is protected by UNESCO, which has given enough money for it to be restored and made a local tourist attraction.
St. Simeon's casket in the Church of St. Simeon the Elder, Zadar, Croatia. (Silverije/ CC BY SA 3.0 )
Top image: 'Simeon's Song of Praise (1631) by Rembrandt. ( Public Domain ) The chest of St. Simeon in Zadar, Croatia. (Silverije/ CC BY SA 3.0 )
By Natalia Klimczak
The Chest of Saint Simeon, available at:
http://laudato.hr/pdf-s/skrinjica/brosura_ENG.aspx
Part of Relics of St. Simeon the Godbearer handed over by the Archbishop of Zadar to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem
www.byzcath.org/index.php/news-mainmenu-49/3060-part-of-relics-of-st-simeon-the-godbearer-handed-over-by-the-archbishop-of-zadar-to-the-greek-orthodox-patriarchate-of-jerusalem
Lorenzo Fondra, Istoria della insigne reliquia di San Simeone profeta che si venera in Zara, 2010.
St Simeon of Zadar, available at:
https://secretcroatia.blog/2009/10/09/sv-simeon-of-zadar-sv-sime-patron-of-zadar/
St. Simeon
Natalia Klimczak is an historian, journalist and writer and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Faculty of Languages, University of Gdansk. Natalia does research in Narratology, Historiography, History of Galicia (Spain) and Ancient History of Egypt, Rome and Celts. She... Read More
8 November, 2022 - 13:53 Sahir
Full Shell of 2,000-Year-Old Roman Ship Discovered on Croatian Riverbed
Archaeologists working on the banks of the Zadar River at the Barbir site have stumbled upon a remarkable discovery that has come after 6 concerted years of research and labor – a 1st century Roman...
Read more about Full Shell of 2,000-Year-Old Roman Ship Discovered on Croatian Riverbed
22 February, 2022 - 13:57 Nathan Falde
Luxury Roman Villa and Mosaic Found on Croatian Island of Hvar
Archaeology on the Croatian island of Hvar in the Adriatic Sea is proceeding at a pace likely not exceeded anywhere else in the world. Just within the past two weeks, researchers affiliated with a...
Read more about Luxury Roman Villa and Mosaic Found on Croatian Island of Hvar
4 February, 2022 - 22:00 Sahir
4th Century BC Tomb Yields Sword and Classic Greek Artifacts At Hvar
An archaeological team digging at Hvar, Croatia, once home to the ancient Greek island settlement of Pharos, have unearthed a mass Greek communal grave from the fourth century BC. The find is a...
Read more about 4th Century BC Tomb Yields Sword and Classic Greek Artifacts At Hvar
20 June, 2021 - 18:41 ashley cowie
Ancient Necropolis Found Hidden in 17th Century Croatian Palace Garden
An ancient necropolis dating to the 4th and 5th centuries AD has been discovered at a 17th-century palace on the idyllic Croatian island of Hvar. This Hvar necropolis is being called "the most...
Read more about Ancient Necropolis Found Hidden in 17th Century Croatian Palace Garden
11 March, 2021 - 18:00 Nathan Falde
6,200-Year-Old Croatian Massacre Solved With Genetic DNA Study
Archaeologists called to a home construction site in the village of Potočani in eastern Croatia in 2007 made a gruesome discovery . They found evidence of a massacre site that included the scattered...
Read more about 6,200-Year-Old Croatian Massacre Solved With Genetic DNA Study
9 February, 2021 - 17:32 Aleksa Vučković
The Shock Discovery of the Nakovane Zodiac
The history of Dalmatia in Croatia is very important for the entire region of the Adriatic, tying in directly with the events that were crucial for both the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Sadly, the...
Read more about The Shock Discovery of the Nakovane Zodiac


Walnut, IL, population 1,390, is located in Illinois's Bureau county, about 55.7 miles from Rockford and 59.7 miles from Peoria.
It is estimated that in the first 5 years of the past decade the population of Walnut has declined by about 3%. Since 2005 Walnut's population has declined by about 1%.