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LIVING HEALTH DIVORCE ARTS BOOKS RELIGION IMPACT EDUCATION COLLEGE NY LA CHICAGO DENVER BLOGS
Michael Giltz
Freelance writer and raconteur
Posted: May 21, 2010 11:02 AM
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0Inspiring Funny Hot Scary Outrageous Amazing Weird CrazyCannes 2010 Day Eight and Nine:
Carlos Is Caught
What's Your Reaction:
Read More: Cannes Film Festival , Cannes Film Festival 2010 , Carlos The Jackal , Documentary , Exile On
Main Street , Frederick Wiseman , Joe Wilson , Mick Jagger , Movies , Naomi Watt , Rolling Stones , Sean
Penn , Thailand , Valerie Plame Wilson , Entertainment News
Carlos the Jackal loomed over Day Eight. For some,
the Olivier Assayas film was a daunting roadblock
they detoured around. A 5 1/2 hour miniseries smack
dab in the middle of the day from noon to 5:30 p.m.?How many stories could they file, how many movies
could they see if they didn't go to Carlos ? For me, that
was never an issue. Every year at Cannes, I scan the
running times of ALL the movies at the fest in onecategory or another, whether it's in Competition or the
Directors' Fortnight or wherever. I find the longest
movie of them all and commit to it right then andthere. I figure, if it's that long, there must be some
reason they said yes to it. This policy has stood me
well, most notably when I was one of the lucky few to be among the first to see the Italian masterpiece
The Best Of Youth back in 2003. Three hundred and thirty minutes with a fifteen minute break? Bring it
on!
DAY EIGHTCARLOS *** 1/2 out of **** -- I initially gave Carlos a more subdued three stars out of four. But it's
remained with me and the central performance by Edgar Ramirez is so subtly accomplished that it
deserves more. The life of the terrorist and self-styled revolutionary Carlos is shrouded in mystery. The
only biographies I could find focused mostly on the efforts to track him down. So it's no surprise that
director Olivier Assayas plunges right into the action. Within ten minutes, Carlos has passed a jobinterview with people fighting for the Palestinians and is quickly tossing bombs around with aplomb.
Convincing in period detail, the movie hurtles through his public career, from assassinations to
hijackings, from clumsy early efforts to more sustained operations. The film is broken into three partsand will benefit from being seen over two or three nights. I can't imagine watching the shorter, theatrical
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version and suggest you avoid it for the whole experience. If you don't, you'll miss Ramirez (this year's
Christoph Waltz) age from a callow youth to a paunchy middle-aged man with remarkable nuance. The
final half hour may slow down -- Carlos In Retirement isn't terribly thrilling. But the overall arc is
compelling. I love how the film shows so much without making a big fuss over it. Yes, Carlos savors themedia attention but it's never shoved in our face as a sign of him becoming too hubristic; it's merely analmost inevitable result of his highly public attacks. He wasn't exactly a shrinking wallflower even at the
start. Some objected to a "TV movie" being at Cannes, but they're foolishly narrow-minded. A compelling
story is a compelling story, no matter who funded it or where it will be seen.
STONES IN EXILE ** 1/2 out of **** -- I really just wanted to see this documentary about the Rolling
Stones recording their masterpiece, Exile On Main Street. But because Mick Jagger was there, the scene
at the Directors' Fortnight was a madhouse. Even worse, we were on rock and roll time, with the
screening beginning a good 50 minutes later than expected, which is highly unusual for this disciplined
fest. Oh well, it was fun to hear Mick read off some comments in quite good French and then serve as his
own translator in English. The film by Steven Kijak was fine if not revelatory, despite hours and hours of
footage from the time (much of it from the aborted Cocksucker Blues film project). Thankfully, the
talking heads (Martin Scorsese, Sheryl Crow, Benecio Del Toro (?) and Jack White) are kept to aminimum at the beginning and the end. It captures the crazy time of the early Seventies and to a degree
the recording process for the album, chaotic as it was. You're still better off buying the remastered album
but hardcore fans will enjoy seeing the band in all its Dionysian glory.
LA NOSTRA VITA ** 1/2 out of **** -- You just know something bad is going to happen. Life is too
idyllic for Claudio (Elio Germano): he's got a great wife, a job he's good at overseeing construction,
adorable kids he teases and loves enormously, friends, and another child on the way. But it's too nice, asany regular filmgoer will realize. The longer characters are seen coasting along happily the more we tense
up before the expected impact. Will it be the mafia? (Corruption is an inescapable fact of Italian life.)
Will it be blowback from the accidental death of a night watchman they hushed up? Will it be his kids?Suddenly his wife goes into labor and we fear the worst. The baby is healthy but the wife simply dies. For
the rest of the film, Claudio will try to cobble together some sort of new existence, first by pushing his
boss into giving him a building project of his own to fund and then by reaching out in desperation tofamily and friends as the project overwhelms him. I enjoyed this movie much more than most of thecritics here. If nothing else, I'll keep with me the haunting, searing funeral scene where Claudio howls out
the lyrics to his wife's favorite pop song. Germano is definitely one to watch.
DAY NINE
FAIR GAME ** out of **** -- Sometimes, events are so compelling in real life that trying to recapture
them in a fictional film is fruitless. That's certainly the case here. Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are good
as Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson, the couple raked over the coals by the Bush White House after
Wilson accurately called them out for lying in the State Of The Union when making its case for invading
Iraq. That State of the Union had two key points about Iraq: UK evidence that it had tried to purchaseenriched uranium in Niger and that it attempted to purchase aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear
weapons production. Both statements were demonstrably false, with overwhelming evidence from
multiple sources that the Niger purchase never took place and overwhelming scientific analysis thatdemonstrated the aluminum tubes were in no way suited for nuclear weapons production. The White
House knew this and included them anyway. When Joe Wilson wrote an op-ed calling them out on the
facts he knew to be untrue (about Niger), the White House immediately retracted the statement andadmitted it should not have been made. It then spent the next months and years attacking Wilson,
breaking the law by outing his wife as a CIA agent and did everything it could to change the topic from
why the White House included information it knew was a lie to who is Joe Wilson and did his wife gethim a "junket" to beautiful downtown Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world. This Doug Liman
film does a fine job of reminding us of the key facts and showing the pressure on the private lives of
these two. What it doesn't do is dramatize in any compelling new manner the story that we know so well.
POETRY ** 1/2 out of **** -- Director Lee Chang-dong has a penchant for female roles and he delivers
again for actress Yun Junghee. She gives a fluttery, sweet performance as a lonely grandmother raising
her sullen grandson, providing daily care for an elderly stroke victim and facing the onset of Alzheimer's.Overshadowing it all is an unidentified scandal involving her son, other boys at his school and the dead
body of a girl who committed suicide. Typically for the film, we never discover exactly what the boys did
but it's bad enough for the school to be eager to hush it up and the parents involved to offer a huge cashpayment to the girl's mother not to press charges. Throughout this muted drama, Yun is taking a poetry
writing class and occasionally attending poetry readings. She struggles to write one decent poem herself,
a tricky proposition when even simple words like "wallet" suddenly become slippery as eels to her. Whatlittle narrative drive there is fades when we realize most events will remain unexplained or off camera.
1 of 5
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'For The Rest...Still, Yun creates such a specific character, we stay with it all the way through the end. Yes, the ending
features a poem by the woman, though a promising start that asks questions of the girl who committed
suicide fades into vague nothingness. Much like the film.
BOXING GYM ** 1/2 out of **** -- I never want to take a filmmaker like Frederick Wiseman for
granted nor will I be confused into thinking what he does is easy simply because he's done it so many
times. I thought last year's La Danse -- The Paris Opera Ballet was solid and enjoyable, but far from
great. Boxing Gym -- at 90 minutes it practically constitutes a short film for Wiseman -- is not quite in
that class. He examines an institution -- in this case a boxing gym that includes men and women, young
and old, amateur and pro -- from his usual remove. But the workings of the gym aren't complex enough
to reward long-term observation, I think, and the result is indeed more like a light workout than his
usual intense engagement.
LUNG BOONMEE RAULEK CHAT/UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST
LIVES ** 1/2 out of **** -- I haven't been on the bandwagon for acclaimed Thai filmmaker Apichatpong
Weerasethakul. Sometimes you can relish being in the minority; other times you keep an open mind andgive someone a second and a third and a fourth try, hoping at some point you can either key into what
people love about a talent or decide for yourself that the emperor does indeed have no clothes.Nicknamed Joe (thanks, Apichatpong), his movies are typically so opaque and rooted in Thai culture thatreading the production notes beforehand is a must, just to get an idea of what the heck is going on.Imagine my surprise when Uncle Boonmee is so relatively bursting with identifiable plot and action that
by Joe's standards it felt like an action film. I enjoyed it on first watch far more than any of his others
and actually expected there might be a backlash from his fans about being too accessible. (Believe me,this is all relative; most people would find this fest fare utterly inpenetrable.) No fears on that count: his
passionate followers declared it brilliant. The story is simple: Uncle Boonmee is dying and his sister and
nephew show up...followed shortly by the ghost of his dead wife and the hairy, monkey-like visage of hisson. They say the house is surrounded by spirits and Joe begins to recall past lives, in a way, assuming
images of an ox in the fields and other animals reflect the past lives he might have lived. Joe feels
compelled to head to a cave, where apparently he was born in his first incarnation thousands of yearsago. Tossed in there somewhere is a flashback to an earlier life where we see a princess emotionally
drawn to a commoner but then seduced by a talking catfish which magically transmutes her into another
fish (though not before an unexpected and hitherto unimaginable moment of human-fish sexual congressas it flops between her leg). Whether Uncle Boonmee was the princess, the commoner or the catfish, I
can't say. But I did follow all of it, until a finale with more ghosts (I think) and a nod to Thailand's
current political woes that set me adrift for good. At this rate, Joe's next film will be a comedy and I'lllove it.
Thanks for reading. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of
celebrity interviews and his weekly music radio show at Popsurfing and enjoy the weekly pop culture
podcast he co-hosts at Showbiz Sandbox . Both available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and
gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews.
Follow Michael Giltz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelgiltz
More in Entertainment...
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troops in Afghanistan
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Comments are closed for this entry
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FRONT PAGE POLITICS BUSINESS MEDIA ENTERTAINMENT COMEDY SPORTS STYLE WORLD GREEN FOOD TRAVEL TECH
LIVING HEALTH DIVORCE ARTS BOOKS RELIGION IMPACT EDUCATION COLLEGE NY LA CHICAGO DENVER BLOGS
Michael Giltz
Freelance writer and raconteur
Posted: May 21, 2010 11:02 AM
BIO
Become a Fan
Get Email Alerts
Bloggers' Index
1
6
views
0
0Inspiring Funny Hot Scary Outrageous Amazing Weird CrazyCannes 2010 Day Eight and Nine:
Carlos Is Caught
What's Your Reaction:
Read More: Cannes Film Festival , Cannes Film Festival 2010 , Carlos The Jackal , Documentary , Exile On
Main Street , Frederick Wiseman , Joe Wilson , Mick Jagger , Movies , Naomi Watt , Rolling Stones , Sean
Penn , Thailand , Valerie Plame Wilson , Entertainment News
Carlos the Jackal loomed over Day Eight. For some,
the Olivier Assayas film was a daunting roadblock
they detoured around. A 5 1/2 hour miniseries smack
dab in the middle of the day from noon to 5:30 p.m.?How many stories could they file, how many movies
could they see if they didn't go to Carlos ? For me, that
was never an issue. Every year at Cannes, I scan the
running times of ALL the movies at the fest in onecategory or another, whether it's in Competition or the
Directors' Fortnight or wherever. I find the longest
movie of them all and commit to it right then andthere. I figure, if it's that long, there must be some
reason they said yes to it. This policy has stood me
well, most notably when I was one of the lucky few to be among the first to see the Italian masterpiece
The Best Of Youth back in 2003. Three hundred and thirty minutes with a fifteen minute break? Bring it
on!
DAY EIGHTCARLOS *** 1/2 out of **** -- I initially gave Carlos a more subdued three stars out of four. But it's
remained with me and the central performance by Edgar Ramirez is so subtly accomplished that it
deserves more. The life of the terrorist and self-styled revolutionary Carlos is shrouded in mystery. The
only biographies I could find focused mostly on the efforts to track him down. So it's no surprise that
director Olivier Assayas plunges right into the action. Within ten minutes, Carlos has passed a jobinterview with people fighting for the Palestinians and is quickly tossing bombs around with aplomb.
Convincing in period detail, the movie hurtles through his public career, from assassinations to
hijackings, from clumsy early efforts to more sustained operations. The film is broken into three partsand will benefit from being seen over two or three nights. I can't imagine watching the shorter, theatrical
MOST POPULAR ON HUFFPOST
1 of 2
BIG NEWS: Celebrity Skin | Jersey Shore | Ellen Degeneres | Celebrity Body | Energy Debates | More...
More Dead Birds, Fish
Found Across The World
Camille Grammer's Porn
Past Comes Back To Haunt
Her
Elizabeth Edwards' Will
Revealed
Intestinal Parasites May Be
Causing Your Energy
Slump
Rudeness Is A Neurotoxin
Should The Leader Of The
Free World Dress Like
THIS?
BECK IN TROUBLE?
Dropped From New York
Radio Station, TV Ratings
Fall
John Edwards Spokesman
Denies Rumored Proposal
To Rielle Hunter
Thousands Of Birds Found
Dead In Italy LOG IN | SIGN UP
SHARE THIS STORY
Get Entertainment Alerts
Email Comments
Recommend 66K
Like 704
Recommend 539
Like 521
Like 7K
Like 496
Like 6K
Like 4K
version and suggest you avoid it for the whole experience. If you don't, you'll miss Ramirez (this year's
Christoph Waltz) age from a callow youth to a paunchy middle-aged man with remarkable nuance. The
final half hour may slow down -- Carlos In Retirement isn't terribly thrilling. But the overall arc is
compelling. I love how the film shows so much without making a big fuss over it. Yes, Carlos savors themedia attention but it's never shoved in our face as a sign of him becoming too hubristic; it's merely analmost inevitable result of his highly public attacks. He wasn't exactly a shrinking wallflower even at the
start. Some objected to a "TV movie" being at Cannes, but they're foolishly narrow-minded. A compelling
story is a compelling story, no matter who funded it or where it will be seen.
STONES IN EXILE ** 1/2 out of **** -- I really just wanted to see this documentary about the Rolling
Stones recording their masterpiece, Exile On Main Street. But because Mick Jagger was there, the scene
at the Directors' Fortnight was a madhouse. Even worse, we were on rock and roll time, with the
screening beginning a good 50 minutes later than expected, which is highly unusual for this disciplined
fest. Oh well, it was fun to hear Mick read off some comments in quite good French and then serve as his
own translator in English. The film by Steven Kijak was fine if not revelatory, despite hours and hours of
footage from the time (much of it from the aborted Cocksucker Blues film project). Thankfully, the
talking heads (Martin Scorsese, Sheryl Crow, Benecio Del Toro (?) and Jack White) are kept to aminimum at the beginning and the end. It captures the crazy time of the early Seventies and to a degree
the recording process for the album, chaotic as it was. You're still better off buying the remastered album
but hardcore fans will enjoy seeing the band in all its Dionysian glory.
LA NOSTRA VITA ** 1/2 out of **** -- You just know something bad is going to happen. Life is too
idyllic for Claudio (Elio Germano): he's got a great wife, a job he's good at overseeing construction,
adorable kids he teases and loves enormously, friends, and another child on the way. But it's too nice, asany regular filmgoer will realize. The longer characters are seen coasting along happily the more we tense
up before the expected impact. Will it be the mafia? (Corruption is an inescapable fact of Italian life.)
Will it be blowback from the accidental death of a night watchman they hushed up? Will it be his kids?Suddenly his wife goes into labor and we fear the worst. The baby is healthy but the wife simply dies. For
the rest of the film, Claudio will try to cobble together some sort of new existence, first by pushing his
boss into giving him a building project of his own to fund and then by reaching out in desperation tofamily and friends as the project overwhelms him. I enjoyed this movie much more than most of thecritics here. If nothing else, I'll keep with me the haunting, searing funeral scene where Claudio howls out
the lyrics to his wife's favorite pop song. Germano is definitely one to watch.
DAY NINE
FAIR GAME ** out of **** -- Sometimes, events are so compelling in real life that trying to recapture
them in a fictional film is fruitless. That's certainly the case here. Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are good
as Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson, the couple raked over the coals by the Bush White House after
Wilson accurately called them out for lying in the State Of The Union when making its case for invading
Iraq. That State of the Union had two key points about Iraq: UK evidence that it had tried to purchaseenriched uranium in Niger and that it attempted to purchase aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear
weapons production. Both statements were demonstrably false, with overwhelming evidence from
multiple sources that the Niger purchase never took place and overwhelming scientific analysis thatdemonstrated the aluminum tubes were in no way suited for nuclear weapons production. The White
House knew this and included them anyway. When Joe Wilson wrote an op-ed calling them out on the
facts he knew to be untrue (about Niger), the White House immediately retracted the statement andadmitted it should not have been made. It then spent the next months and years attacking Wilson,
breaking the law by outing his wife as a CIA agent and did everything it could to change the topic from
why the White House included information it knew was a lie to who is Joe Wilson and did his wife gethim a "junket" to beautiful downtown Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world. This Doug Liman
film does a fine job of reminding us of the key facts and showing the pressure on the private lives of
these two. What it doesn't do is dramatize in any compelling new manner the story that we know so well.
POETRY ** 1/2 out of **** -- Director Lee Chang-dong has a penchant for female roles and he delivers
again for actress Yun Junghee. She gives a fluttery, sweet performance as a lonely grandmother raising
her sullen grandson, providing daily care for an elderly stroke victim and facing the onset of Alzheimer's.Overshadowing it all is an unidentified scandal involving her son, other boys at his school and the dead
body of a girl who committed suicide. Typically for the film, we never discover exactly what the boys did
but it's bad enough for the school to be eager to hush it up and the parents involved to offer a huge cashpayment to the girl's mother not to press charges. Throughout this muted drama, Yun is taking a poetry
writing class and occasionally attending poetry readings. She struggles to write one decent poem herself,
a tricky proposition when even simple words like "wallet" suddenly become slippery as eels to her. Whatlittle narrative drive there is fades when we realize most events will remain unexplained or off camera.
1 of 5
Dylan Ratigan
Free Market Fraud
Sen. Jon Tester
Tester Pushes to Reform Senate
Rules With Greater Transparency,
EfficiencyDON'T MISS HUFFPOST BLOGGERS
HOT TRENDS
TOP VIDEO PICKS
Lohan ticketed
1 of 7
camille grammer lady
gaga natalie portman
pregnant raven-
symone rebecca budig
More Celebrity News at People.com
More Celebrity News at Popeater.com
Recommend
History Channel Won't
Show Katie Holmes
Miniseries The Kennedys
READ MORE
Nick Lachey and Vanessa
Minnillo to Guest Star on
Hawaii Five-0
READ MORE
Lindsay Lohan's Post-
Rehab Gift: a $25,000
Necklace
READ MORE
Petra Nemcova Engaged to
British Actor
Stephanie Seymour Caught
Kissing Her Son?
Jessica Szohr Bares All in
Costa Rican Jungle
Comments 0 Pending Comments 0View FAQ
Andy Samberg,
Johnny Knoxville To
Star In...
HuffPost Review:
Season of the
Witch...
Camille Grammer's
Porn Past Comes
Back To...
Sean Penn: In Haiti
'For The Rest...Still, Yun creates such a specific character, we stay with it all the way through the end. Yes, the ending
features a poem by the woman, though a promising start that asks questions of the girl who committed
suicide fades into vague nothingness. Much like the film.
BOXING GYM ** 1/2 out of **** -- I never want to take a filmmaker like Frederick Wiseman for
granted nor will I be confused into thinking what he does is easy simply because he's done it so many
times. I thought last year's La Danse -- The Paris Opera Ballet was solid and enjoyable, but far from
great. Boxing Gym -- at 90 minutes it practically constitutes a short film for Wiseman -- is not quite in
that class. He examines an institution -- in this case a boxing gym that includes men and women, young
and old, amateur and pro -- from his usual remove. But the workings of the gym aren't complex enough
to reward long-term observation, I think, and the result is indeed more like a light workout than his
usual intense engagement.
LUNG BOONMEE RAULEK CHAT/UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST
LIVES ** 1/2 out of **** -- I haven't been on the bandwagon for acclaimed Thai filmmaker Apichatpong
Weerasethakul. Sometimes you can relish being in the minority; other times you keep an open mind andgive someone a second and a third and a fourth try, hoping at some point you can either key into what
people love about a talent or decide for yourself that the emperor does indeed have no clothes.Nicknamed Joe (thanks, Apichatpong), his movies are typically so opaque and rooted in Thai culture thatreading the production notes beforehand is a must, just to get an idea of what the heck is going on.Imagine my surprise when Uncle Boonmee is so relatively bursting with identifiable plot and action that
by Joe's standards it felt like an action film. I enjoyed it on first watch far more than any of his others
and actually expected there might be a backlash from his fans about being too accessible. (Believe me,this is all relative; most people would find this fest fare utterly inpenetrable.) No fears on that count: his
passionate followers declared it brilliant. The story is simple: Uncle Boonmee is dying and his sister and
nephew show up...followed shortly by the ghost of his dead wife and the hairy, monkey-like visage of hisson. They say the house is surrounded by spirits and Joe begins to recall past lives, in a way, assuming
images of an ox in the fields and other animals reflect the past lives he might have lived. Joe feels
compelled to head to a cave, where apparently he was born in his first incarnation thousands of yearsago. Tossed in there somewhere is a flashback to an earlier life where we see a princess emotionally
drawn to a commoner but then seduced by a talking catfish which magically transmutes her into another
fish (though not before an unexpected and hitherto unimaginable moment of human-fish sexual congressas it flops between her leg). Whether Uncle Boonmee was the princess, the commoner or the catfish, I
can't say. But I did follow all of it, until a finale with more ghosts (I think) and a nod to Thailand's
current political woes that set me adrift for good. At this rate, Joe's next film will be a comedy and I'lllove it.
Thanks for reading. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of
celebrity interviews and his weekly music radio show at Popsurfing and enjoy the weekly pop culture
podcast he co-hosts at Showbiz Sandbox . Both available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and
gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews.
Follow Michael Giltz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelgiltz
More in Entertainment...
Wahlberg visits U.S.
troops in Afghanistan
Kendra Wants AnotherBaby
MOST DISCUSSED RIGHT NOW
HOT ON FACEBOOK
HOT ON TWITTER
Death & Dying
CPAC
Katie Holmes
Harry Reid
Wikileaks
Pollster
LA Restaurants
LA Around
TownHUFFPOST'S BIG NEWS PAGES
MORE BIG NEWS PAGES »PHOTOS: Ellen DeGeneres
& Portia de Rossi's Exotic
Vacation
158 Comments
Camille Grammer's Porn
Past Comes Back To
Haunt Her
903 Comments
PHOTOS: Raven-
Symone's Dramatic
Weight Loss
474 Comments
PHOTOS: Olivia Wilde
Dons See-Through Bikini
92 Comments
Bill Murray Crashes
Stranger's Karaoke Party
62 Comments
Ashton Kutcher: Training,
Paranoid About Real Life
'End Of Days'
903 Comments
Comments are closed for this entry
FOLLOW HUFFINGTON POST
FRONT PAGE POLITICS BUSINESS MEDIA ENTERTAINMENT COMEDY SPORTS STYLE WORLD GREEN FOOD TRAVEL TECH
LIVING HEALTH DIVORCE ARTS BOOKS RELIGION IMPACT EDUCATION COLLEGE NY LA CHICAGO DENVER BLOGS
Advertise | Log In | Make HuffPost your Home Page | RSS | Careers | FAQ | Contact Us
User Agreement | Privacy | Comment Policy | About Us | Powered by Movable Type
Copyright © 2011 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. | "The Huffington Post" is a registered trademark of TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. All rights reserved.
Recency | PopularityView All