Elena Rainn

Zach P

Kyrsten Iris

Fede Bonino

_ eshago@uw.edu

Watashi Wa Jigabudesu

Karl Halmos-Westram

lonely loser

Ljsly Bernard

Miguel Barreto Carrillo

Leonel González

Tim M

* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* The Restaurant at the End of the Universe* Life, the Universe and Everything* So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish* Mostly HarmlessSuppose a good friend calmly told you over a round of drinks that the world was about to end? And suppose your friend went on to confess that he wasn't from around here at all, but rather from a small planet near Betelgeuse? And what if the world really did come to an end, but instead of being blown away, you found yourself hitching a ride on a spaceship with your buddy as a travelling companion?It happens to Arthur Dent.An ordinary guy from a small town in England, Arthur is one lucky sonofagun: his alien friend, Ford Prefect, is in fact a roving researcher for the universally bestselling Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ... and expert at seeing the cosmos on 30 Altairian dollars a day. Ford lives by the Guide's seminal bit of advice: Don't Panic. Which comes in handy when their first ride--on the very same vessel that demolished Earth to make way for a hyperspacial freeway--ends disastrously (they are booted out of an airlock). with 30 seconds of air in their lungs and the odd of being picked up by another ship 2^276,709 to 1 against, the pair are scooped up by the only ship in the universe powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive.But this (and the idea that Bogart movies and McDonald's hamburgers now exist only in his mind) is just the beginning of the weird things Arthur will have to get used to. For, on his travels, he'll encounter Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed ex-President of the Galaxy; Trillian, a sexy spacecadet he once tried to pick up at a cocktail party, now Zaphod's girlfriend; Marvin, a chronically depressed robot; and Slartibartfast, the award-winning engineer who built the Earth and travels in a spaceship disguised as a bistro.Arthur's crazed wanderings will take him from the restaurant at the end of the Universe (where the main dish of the day introduces itself and the floor show is doomsday), to the planet Krikkit (locked in Slo-Time to punish its inhabitants for trying to end the Universe), to Earth (huh? wait! wasn't it destroyed?!) to the very offices of The Hitchhiker's Guide itself as he and his friends quest for the answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything ... and search for a really good cup of tea.Ready or not, Arthur Dent is in for one hell of a ride!

About three things I was absolutely positive.First, Edward was a vampire.Second, there was a part of him—and I didn't know how dominant that part might be—that thirsted for my blood.And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.Deeply seductive and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight is a love story with bite.

Pre-Film ReviewI re-read this novel, before seeing David Cronenberg’s film (see Post 21).SPOILERSThis review reveals what I think about the fate of the protagonist at the end of the novel.My views are based on my interpretation of material that starts at page 55 of the 209 page novel.If this material or my interpretation is incorrect, then the novel leaves you hanging at the end.As my views on the novel as a whole depend on an interpretation of the protagonist’s fate, please don’t read my review if you want to form your own views in isolation.Mutual DedicationIn 1992, Paul Auster dediciated “Leviathan” to Don DeLillo.In 2003, DeLillo repaid the favour by dedicating “Cosmopolis” to Auster.Here is a photo of the two of them [on the left] taken at the baseball with two employees of the Gotham Book Mart by the store’s owner:The Name “Cosmopolis”We are all used to the word “cosmopolitan”, but “cosmopolis” is less commonly used.To the extent that the prefix “cosmo” suggests the world or the universe, it implies that the city is representative of the diversity of the world or the universe.We can probably infer that the city is sophisticated and worldly, has an international rather than provincial character, and is home to many cosmopolitan people.If so, the term would be a perfect description for New York City, where the novel is set.It also applies to ancient Athens and Rome, perhaps the original “world-cities”.Manhattan OdysseyThe novel is largely set in a long white limo that drives its protagonist, 28 year old billionaire and hedge-fund manager Eric Packer, across Manhattan.Most plot summaries describe the purpose of the journey as to enable Eric to get a haircut.However, this misses much of the narrative and metaphorical significance of the journey, not to mention the haircut.The journey is more or less the whole of the length of 47th Street, which runs one-way between 1st Ave and the West Side Highway (called the Joe DiMaggio Highway since just before the publication of the novel).Climbing Down from A Cosmopolitan Triplex in the Heavens...At the 1st Ave end, you’ll find the United Nations Headquarters, perhaps the centre of cosmopolitanism.Eric lives in a triplex close to 1st Ave. The building is not named, but the triplex supposedly cost Eric $104M.At the corner of 47th and 1st is the Trump World Tower, which was completed in 2001.The duplex penthouse in this building failed to sell for $58M, and was eventually split into four units. However, as at 2003, the highest price for an apartment in Manhattan was the $70M paid by hedge-fund manager Martin Zweig for a triplex at the Pierre Hotel owned by Lady Mary Fairfax (of the Australian family that published the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers).Eric’s purchase price represents a 50% increase on the highest price ever paid at the time. You can do that if you're a billionaire.As you drive along 47th Street, you pass the Diamond District, a number of Broadway Theatres and Times Square.Between 1963 and 1968, Andy Warhol’s Factory was on 47th Street between Second and Third Aves....and Descending into Hell’s KitchenOn the West Side, the Street passes into Hell’s Kitchen, also known as Clinton (not named after Bill) or Midtown West (not named after Mae), the original home of Damon Runyon’s stories, Marvel Comics' "Daredevil", gang wars between migrants, and the musical "West Side Story".The Wiki article on Hell’s Kitchen recounts a number of versions of the origin of the area’s name:“…the most common version traces it to the story of Dutch Fred The Cop, a veteran policeman, who with his rookie partner, was watching a small riot on West 39th Street near 10th Avenue. "The rookie is supposed to have said, ‘This place is hell itself,’ to which Fred replied, ‘Hell's a mild climate. This is Hell's Kitchen.’ " Gail Wynand, the newspaper proprietor in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, came from Hell’s Kitchen and in Rand’s novel is described as “Petronius from Hell’s Kitchen”, a description that might also apply to Eric Packer (except that he ends there, rather than originates from there).Interestingly, the original Petronius, believed to be the author of “The Satyricon”, was described as the “elegantiae arbiter” (or the “arbiter elegantiarum”), "the judge of elegance" in the court of the Roman Emperor Nero.West 47th Street has yet to be developed and still contains relatively disused and derelict buildings (including the building that features in the end of “Cosmopolis”), not to mention the homeless and mentally ill treated at “Fountain House” who featured in the documentary “West 47th Street”.Mapping Eric’s ProgressI have included all of this detail (thanks, Wiki), so that I can argue that this journey isn’t just some trip to the barber.It represents a journey along a street that defines the extremes of Manhattan, from the cosmopolitan East Side to the Hellish West Side.Just to help you map Eric’s progress, here are the pages at which his limo passes each Avenue crossing 47th:1st: 92nd: 133rd: 23Lexington: 34 (the hair salon Filles et Garcon actually seems to be at 51st)Park: 38Madison: 415th: 45 (The Presidential Cavalcade)6th: 757th/Broadway: 878th: 1299th: 130 (the Sufi rap artist Brutha Fez's Funeral)10th 158 (the barbershop) 11th: 17012th: 179 (the derelict tenement)This is no mere haircut, this is a low-key to subtle homage to James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, in which our hero leaves the Heaven of his triplex, heads west (young man) and confronts his destiny in a derelict building in Hell’s Kitchen.Perhaps, our hero even meets his anti-hero.Upstairs at Eric’sEric is 28 and has been married to Elise Schifrin for just 22 days.The marriage, so far, is loveless and apparently unconsummated. It represents a symbolic marriage of new American money and traditional European wealth and style, though Elise (“Swiss or something”) is worth a cool $730M herself.Eric has made his money gambling on movements in currencies. He takes immense risks with vast amounts of money and has generated commensurate profits.He is so rich, beyond normal moral or mortal contemplation, some would think it’s indecent and obscene. In the words of his nemesis, Eric is “foully and berserkly rich”.Yet, until recently, Eric has seen his ability as just an example of what the Greeks call “Chrimatistikos”, the art of money-making.He has had talent and drive, which he has "utilised... consistently put to good use." His reward is to live in "a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God", something that aspires to scraping the sky and meeting God, but now in a Godless era seems only to defy the very idea of God and moral virtue or goodness.He contemplates the word "skyscraper":"No recent structure ought to bear this word. It belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before he was born."Just as skyscrapers have lost their narrative drive, so too have money and the art of money-making:"...because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself."Money has turned in on itself, become introverted and meaningless. It no longer tells a story about something else, it does not relate to or measure some other achievement. [The novel echoes some of the concerns of William Gaddis' "The Recognitions", but then DeLillo has always mined similar veins.]There’s a point at which you can have so much money that it becomes senseless, there are just no more narratives or stories you can spin with it, without repeating yourself. [I haven’t reached this point yet.]Checking Eric’s BalanceEric’s life so far has been dictated by balance.He lives in a world “in which every force is balanced by another”. When there is another force, he is the equal and opposite reaction.He takes positions and then waits for corrections to occur. The balancing process improves his bank balance.It also dictates his aesthetic judgments.Two private elevators rise to his triplex: in one the music is Satie, in the other Brutha Fez.He gets artistic advice from 47-year old Didi Francher, an art consultant and one of his mistresses.She’s "taught him how to look, how to feel enchantment damp on his face, the melt of pleasure inside a brushstroke or band of color."In a way, she has created a balance to the crudeness and brutality of his occupation.She has taught him how to reckon outside the world of money.He now looks, he notices things, he gazes, he observes, he assesses, he judges.Like Petronius, he has become an "arbiter elegantiarum", a "judge of elegance".He is obsessed with acquiring a collection of 14 Rothko works housed in the Rothko Chapel:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothko_C...He genuinely appreciates Rothko's art, but his principal motivation for the purchase is the fact that he can afford to.Such is the power of money.Consciously or not, Didi has also taught Eric how to flirt in an intellectually informed way.In his limo, he metaphorically seduces his chief of finance, Jane Melman:"My mood shifts and bends. But when I'm alive and heightened, I'm super-acute. Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see a woman who wants to live shamelessly in her body. Tell me this is not the truth. You want to follow your body into idleness and fleshiness. That's why you have to run, to escape the drift of your basic nature. ...What do I see? Something lazy, sexy and insatiable."They "[reach] completion more or less together, touching neither each other nor themselves."When she leaves the limo, Jane tells Eric that she “is a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today."”Catching Eric Off BalanceDespite, possibly because of, this transformation, Didi has noticed doubt creeping into Eric’s worldview."You're beginning to think it's more interesting to doubt than to act. It takes more courage to doubt."When we meet Eric, he has gambled everything on the possibility that the Japanese Yen will fall.He has also just been told that he has an asymmetrical prostate.Without asking or knowing more about the medical significance of his diagnosis, he assumes the worst, that the cancer will soon take his life.Even if it isn’t fatal, his prostate’s asymmetry challenges his idealization of balance.He suffers pain. The pain undermines the foundations of his worldview. He starts to doubt both balance and himself. He starts to realise there is something in life apart from himself. He starts to recognise his own mortality.Jane addresses him in the third person:"He could think and speak of other things but only within the pain. He was living in the gland, in the scalding fact of his biology."Does he love himself or hate himself. I don’t think he knows. Or it changes minute by minute. Or the question is so implicit in everything he does that he can’t get outside it to answer."Eric’s nemesis (who also happens to have an asymmetrical prostate) has worked for him before and has some insight into his personality:"You should have listened to your prostate...You tried to predict movements in the yen by drawing on patterns from nature...You made this form of analysis horribly and sadistically precise. "But you forgot something along the way...The importance of the lopsided, the thing that's skewed a little. You were looking for balance, beautiful balance, equal parts, equal sides..."But you should have been tracking the yen in its tics and quirks. The little quirk. The mis-shape..."That's where the answer was, in your body, in your prostate."Living in the Shadow of a DoubtSo I argue that the purpose of Eric’s journey is to confront his own mortality, to deal with his doubt, not just to get a haircut. Until today, he’s pursued business and wealth as a vehicle for achieving immortality.Vija Kinski, his chief of theory, explains:"Men think about immortality. Never mind what women think. We're too small and real to matter here…Great men historically expected to live forever even as they supervised construction of their monumental tombs on the far bank of the river, the west bank, where the sun goes down."There you sit, of large visions and prideful acts. Why die when you can live on disk? A disk, not a tomb. An idea beyond the body. A mind that's everything you ever were and will be, but never weary or confused or impaired. "It's a mystery to me, how such a thing might happen. Will it happen someday? Sooner than we think because everything happens sooner than we think. Later today perhaps. Maybe today is the day when everything happens, for better or worse, ka-boom, like that."However, having achieved as much as one man could ever achieve in a lifetime, Eric is not interested in trying to create an immortal digital replica of himself.He is interested in his own death, because sooner or later, inevitably, we all have to accept our own mortality:"He was alert, eager for action, for resolution. Something had to happen soon, a dispelling of doubt and the emergence of some design, the subject's plan of action, visible and distinct."Ironically, on the way, Eric embraces the lopsided. When he finally gets his haircut, it is asymmetrical. However, it’s not the end of the journey. He resumes his trip before his haircut is finished. His goal is beyond the haircut. It’s somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen. On the west bank, where the sun goes down.The Threat of DeathEric knows that somewhere on his trip, sometime today, he will die.All along, he has been receiving death threats.His journey across Manhattan is the date of reckoning with his own death, the date when death achieves a balance with life or knocks it off its axis.He equips himself with a gun and abandons his security to deal with his nemesis Benno Levin single-handedly in a dilapidated building in Hell’s Kitchen.By the time he arrives, he’s realised that even business embraces death and destruction:"This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed…Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future...The urge to destroy is a creative urge…The logical extension of business is murder."Death is a natural part of life. He has to endure one last arm wrestle with fate, until he knows that he has died appropriately:"...it was the threat of death at the brink of night that spoke to him most surely about some principle of fate he'd always known would come clear in time. Now he could begin the business of living."He must know and embrace his fate. It does not matter that he might die on the same day. He has already lived life to the fullest:"This was the day, was it not, for influential men to come to sudden messy ends."There is also a sense in which his wealth might come to an end, that his investments will get their own haircut or at the very least, a trim.In his time of dying, the whole of Eric's empire might return, not home, but to nothing.Money might have resumed its narrative drive towards nothingness.Ironically, as the Global Financial Crisis has shown, even billionaires can die with nothing.Frames of Reference“Cosmopolis” is short and easy to read. It occupies a discrete time and space.Rather than being DeLillo-lite or a disappointment, it’s a precisely structured novel that lends itself to being filmed.As with much of DeLillo’s work, it’s concerned with ways of looking and seeing and understanding.If anything, I would call it a highly polished example of "abstracted realism".It is especially informed by Art and Film.Eric finds in Art a pathway into life’s mysteries, one of them being himself:"Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew."To the extent that a painting is one framed work, Film consists of multiple frames.It allows us to explore the situations that we might one day find ourselves in, it creates a frame of reference, it creates frames of reference within which to express ourselves:"I've seen a hundred situations like this. A man and a gun and a locked door. My mother used to take me to the movies.""Cosmopolis" is best construed as a gallery of images or a film.It is highly visual and filmic, even though it's effectively set within the confines of a limo.As Eric passes along 47th Street, he witnesses a gallery of events and images and women and must gaze at and judge and react to them, so that ultimately he can determine his own importance in the true scheme of things.My only concern with respect to the film is how the dialogue will come across.How will it convey the abstracted, conceptual precision of DeLillo's language?Will it sound natural?In My State of GraceThe result of Eric's movie-going is that, when he is confronted by the situation ("a man and a gun and a locked door", but also his mortality, his death), he knows how to deal with it.This comforts him. In his hour of need.While some of his apparent attempts at self-defence are clumsy, they seem to be designed to fail.Ultimately, what really matters is that he submits gracefully to the inevitability of his own death.It is perhaps the most graceful act of his life. And the last day of his life might equally be the most complete.There is something perfect and satisfying in this grace and completeness, even if it's a little perverse, even if it lacks symmetry, even if (unlike Leopold Bloom) Eric fails to return home to his triplex at the end of the day.P.S. Lapse or Claps, Chaps?While I love this novel, there are passages that I recognise will annoy or vindicate those who question DeLillo's talent or consistency.I choose to excuse them or to laugh instead.Here are a few examples for your reading pleasure:"Hoisting his genitals in his hand.""The minute you sat there in that whole tragic regalia of running. That whole sad business of Judeo-Christian jogging.""I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.""Her feet flew out from under her. She uttered a thing, a sound, herself, her soul in rapid rising inflection.""Eric decided to admire this.""The rain was fine. The rain was dramatically right.""The rain had stopped. This was good. This was clearly what it should have done.""It was the last techno-rave, the end of whatever it was the end of.""He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn't realized this could happen to him."Sceptics, laugh with me.Soundtrack:Jimi Hendrix - Crosstown Traffichttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUwjyr...

In Coney Island, Brooklyn, Sarah Goldfarb, a lonely widow, wants nothing more than to lose weight and appear on a television game show. She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend, Marion, and his best friend, Tyrone, have devised an illicit shortcut to wealth and leisure by scoring a pound of uncut heroin. Entranced by the gleaming visions of their futures, these four convince themselves that unexpected setbacks are only temporary. Even as their lives slowly deteriorate around them, they cling to their delusions and become utterly consumed in the spiral of drugs and addiction, refusing to see that they have instead created their own worst nightmares."Selby's place is in the front rank of American novelists. HIs work has the power, the intimacy with suffering and morality, the honesty and moral urgency of Doestoevsky's. To understand Selby's work is to understand the anguish of America." - The New York Times Book Review

Misty Wilmot has had it. Once a promising young artist, she’s now stuck on an island ruined by tourism, drinking too much and working as a waitress in a hotel. Her husband, a contractor, is in a coma after a suicide attempt, but that doesn’t stop his clients from threatening Misty with lawsuits over a series of vile messages they’ve found on the walls of houses he remodeled.Suddenly, though, Misty finds her artistic talent returning as she begins a period of compulsive painting. Inspired but confused by this burst of creativity, she soon finds herself a pawn in a larger conspiracy that threatens to cost hundreds of lives. What unfolds is a dark, hilarious story from America’s most inventive nihilist, and Palahniuk’s most impressive work to date.

In the last gasp of youth, Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson is back in Edinburgh. He taps into one last great scam: directing and producing a porn film. To make it work, he needs bedfellows: the lovely Nikki Fuller-Smith, a student with ambition, ego, and troubles to rival his own; old pal Mark Renton; and a motley crew that includes the neighborhood's favorite ex-beverage salesman, "Juice" Terry.In the world of Porno, however, even the cons are conned. Sick Boy and Renton jockey for top dog. The out-of-jail and in-for-revenge Begbie is on the loose. But it's the hapless, drug-addled Spud who may be spreading the most trouble.Porno is a novel about the Trainspotting crew ten years further down the line: still scheming, still scamming, still fighting for the first-class seats as the train careens at high velocity with derailment looming around the next corner.

The bestselling novel by Irvine Welsh that provided the inspiration for Danny Boyle’s hit film Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.

She's a catwalk model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden motor 'accident' leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful centre of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists.Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from being a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better, and that salvation hides in the last place you'll ever want to look.The narrator must exact revenge upon Evie, her best friend and fellow model; kidnap Manus, her two-timing ex-boyfriend; and hit the road with Brandy in search of a brand-new past, present and future.

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.

You do not talk about Fight Club, but...Upon winning the Oregon Book Award for best novel and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, Chuck Palahniuk’s visionary debut novel, Fight Club, was shot to the veins of mainstream fiction. Following the success of its 1999 film adaptation directed by David Fincher, Fight Club gained cult classic status and has become a disturbingly accurate interpretation of our modern world.The unnamed male narrator, suffering from a long streak of insomnia, finds cure by attending cancer support groups. But when Marla Singer—a sallow, heavy-smoking nihilist—enters the evening meetings and mirrors his own fraud, his insomnia returns, so he confronts Singer to split schedules with him.On the night when his condominium mysteriously blows up, he calls Tyler Durden, whom he had previously met—under strange circumstances—on a beach. They agree to meet at a bar, where, after drinking, Durden asks him a favor, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” The narrator swings the punch that cradled Fight Club into the world. Shortly, a multitude of men with white-collar jobs join them. Every weekend, in the parking lots and basements of bars, they hold these late-hour no-holds-barred-and-barefisted fights that “go on as long as they have to.”These one-on-one melees curiously evoke psychotherapeutic effects—resembling that of enlightenment—within the men: they are reborn from their entombed lives.Fight Club soon evolves into Project Mayhem, an anarchic army led by Durden, who seeks to fulfill his visions of global enlightenment through organized chaos, public unrest, and demolition.Fight Club is a social satire on the dehumanizing effects of consumerism: alienation brought by chronic materialism, illusory comforts, overindulgence, and career and lifestyle obsessions fueled by advertising. “The modern world is for business—not for the people,” as what the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung said.“It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.” Skillfully fusing Zen elements with Durden’s extremist ideologies, Palahniuk has written a provocative expression of metaphysical rebellion. The collective revolt against the existential vacuum is Durden’s nucleus and what draws men toward him.Fight Club’s noir ambience and the solid economy of its prose are reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, but with the sharp nonlinear narration executing its plot; inheriting Kurt Vonnegut’s dark humor, Chuck Palahniuk is among today’s distinct and intriguing voices.

A tropical paradise seethes with hidden evil in Far Cry, a cunningly detailed action shooter that pushes the boundaries of combat to shocking new levels. Freela...

Gran Turismo 4 features a truly authentic racing experience spanning 100 years of automotive history. Packed with more cars, courses, race modes and online game...

Unleash the power of the Gods and embark on a merciless quest as Kratos, an ex-Spartan warrior driven to destroy Ares, the God of War. Armed with lethal double...

Years ago, the success of planetary colonization resulted in the human settlement of several planets. The majority of these colonies have aligned to form the IS...

VVVVVV is a retro styled 2D platformer by Terry Cavanagh, creator of dozens of free games. You play as the fearless leader of a team of dimension exploring scie...

The game that incorporates RPG, action, adventure, and 1st-person shooter genres into a chaotic blend of real-world conspiracies, cliffhangers, and plot twists....

The Fall of Max Payne is a violent, film-noir love story for mature audiences. Dark, tragic and intense, the in-depth story is a thrill-ride of sho...

Sicily, St. Petersburg, Japan, Malaysia, and...

The next chapter in Final Fantasy takes the series to the next level. Final Fantasy VIII combines an epic storyline with dynamic role-playing elements, breatht...

[Metacritic's 2008 PS2 Game of the Year] Shortly after an urban youth begins a year-long stay in the countryside town of Inaba, the rural town's peace is shatt...

Mario is super in a whole new way! Combining the finest 3-D graphics ever developed for a video game and an explosive sound track, Super Mario 64 becomes a new...

A story-driven third-person shooter with a realistic weapon setup including over a dozen real-life guns, all fitting the crime-story setting like a bullet in th...

Players are put at the heart of their very own gangster movie, and let loose in a fully-realised 3 dimensional city with a cast of hundreds, 50 plus vehicles, r...

[Metacritic's 2002 PS2 Game of the Year ] Welcome to Vice City. Welcome to the 1980s. Having just made it back onto the streets of Liberty City after a long str...

[Metacritic's 2004 PS2 Game of the Year] Five years ago Carl Johnson escaped from the pressures of life in Los Santos, San Andreas... a city tearing itself apa...

From the legendary game developers at id Software, comes an explosive journey into the nightmare world of DOOM&trade;. Embark on a harrowing mission to rid of M...

During a secretive business trip away, Mark learns that his wife Anna is growing restless in what he believed was their happy marriage. Upon his return home, he learns from her that she wants a divorce. They both go through a series of different emotions related to their situation, Mark's which is generally obsessive about learning why Anna, who he still loves, wants the divorce, and Anna's which is generally increasingly histrionic in getting away from Mark. Caught in the middle is their infant son Bob, who Mark uses as a gage to Anna's mental state. Anna states that her want for the divorce is not because of another man, but Mark finds out that Anna has a lover named Heinrich. In the meantime, Mark also meets Bob's teacher Helen, who looks exactly like Anna, but is her polar opposite in temperament. Starting a relationship with Helen lessens his obsession with Anna. But as Mark and Anna's encounters together reach more emotional and violent levels, Mark, with help of a private investigative firm, learns that Anna's love life is not all that it appears. Anna's true obsession has a somewhat gruesome process and nothing will stop her from reaching her end goal.

French film (dir. Andrzej Żuławski; 1981)

In 1930s Italy, a carefree Jewish waiter named Guido starts a fairy tale life by courting and marrying a lovely woman from a nearby city. Guido and his wife have a son and live happily together until the occupation of Italy by German forces. In an attempt to hold his family together and help his son survive the horrors of a Jewish Concentration Camp, Guido imagines that the Holocaust is a game and that the grand prize for winning is a tank.

On the day that Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, elderly Daisy Williams (nee Fuller) is on her deathbed in a New Orleans hospital. At her side is her adult daughter, Caroline. Daisy asks Caroline to read to her aloud the diary of Daisy's lifelong friend, Benjamin Button. Benjamin's diary recounts his entire extraordinary life, the primary unusual aspect of which was his aging backwards, being diagnosed with several aging diseases at birth and thus given little chance of survival, but who does survive and gets younger with time. Abandoned by his biological father, Thomas Button, after Benjamin's biological mother died in childbirth, Benjamin was raised by Queenie, a black woman and caregiver at a seniors home. Daisy's grandmother was a resident at that home, which is where she first met Benjamin. Although separated through the years, Daisy and Benjamin remain in contact throughout their lives, reconnecting in their forties when in age they finally match up. Some of the revelations in Benjamin's diary are difficult for Caroline to read, especially as it relates to the time past this reconnection between Benjamin and Daisy, when Daisy gets older and Benjamin grows younger into his childhood years.

Thirty-seven year old Mavis Gary seems incapable of happiness. She has had one failed marriage with no romance in her immediate horizon. She ghosts writes a young adult series of books, which has just been canceled due to low sales. She is in the process of writing the last book, with which she is having a mental block. She lives vicariously through Kendall Strickland, the teenaged female heroine in her books, as like Kendall she believes her high school years were the best years of her life when she was the prom queen. When she receives news that her high school beau, Buddy Slade, and his wife, Beth Slade, have just had their first child, Mavis takes it as a sign that she and Buddy are meant to be together. As such, she devises a false pretense to travel from her Minneapolis home back her her old hometown of Mercury, Minnesota to reclaim Buddy from Beth. As Mavis slyly or not so slyly does whatever she can to hang out with Buddy, even in Beth's company if need be, she also runs into another old high school colleague named Matt Freehauf. She barely remembers Matt until she is reminded that he was the "hate crime" kid i.e. he was beaten almost to death by the school jocks who believed he was gay (which he is not), which has left him among other things needing to walk with a brace. Matt ends up being Mavis' drinking buddy and confidante, Matt, in turn, who tries to be Mavis' voice of reason to get her out of her delusional state about Buddy and get a grip on reclaiming her life as a functioning adult.

It's the last day of school at a high school in a small town in Texas in 1976. The upperclassmen are hazing the incoming freshmen, and everyone is trying to get stoned, drunk, or laid, even the football players that signed a pledge not to.

Jumanji, one of the most unique--and dangerous--board games ever, falls into the hands of the curious teen, Alan Parrish, in 1969. Mysterious and magical, the game strands the unsuspecting boy in the lush, savage forests of a mythical realm. Nearly three decades later, the game releases him before the awed eyes of the young orphaned siblings, Judy and Peter Shepherd. Now, the wild and incessant beat of the jungle's tribal drums is calling for the now-adult Alan and the other hesitant players, as the one who rolls the dice must never leave undone what the roll has started. Has anyone ever escaped from the game and Jumanji's formidable foes?

In this comedy, Lars Lindstrom is an awkwardly shy young man in a small northern town who finally brings home the girl of his dreams to his brother and sister-in-law's home. The only problem is that she's not real - she's a sex doll Lars ordered off the Internet. But sex is not what Lars has in mind, but rather a deep, meaningful relationship. His sister-in-law is worried for him, his brother thinks he's nuts, but eventually the entire town goes along with his delusion in support of this sweet natured boy that they've always loved.

Zack and Miri are two lifelong platonic friends who make an adult film to pay the rent of their apartment. With their friend Delaney, the couple set out for auditionees for their porn film, but in the process of filming, they realize they feel more for each other than they had before.

In the dystopian world of 2027 London, humans have been incapable of reproducing for 18 year for an unknown reason, meaning the imminent extinction of the species. Britain is the one remaining civilized society on the planet, which has resulted in people wanting to migrate there, so it has become a police state to handle the immigrants, who are placed into refugee camps. Lowly government bureaucrat Theo Faron, once an activist, is approached by the Fishes, deemed a terrorist group, led by his ex-wife Julian Taylor, whom he hasn't seen in almost 20 years, since their marriage disintegrated after their infant son Dylan's death during the 2008 flu pandemic. Although the Fishes did use terrorist means in their on-going revolution against the state in the fight for immigrant rights, Julian vows that they now garner support solely by speaking to the people, and she wants Theo to use his connections to get transit papers for a young immigrant woman named Kee who needs to get to the coast. Although initially reluctant to do it because of the difficulty, Theo is able to grant Julian this favor, however with the change that he now needs to accompany Kee on her journey. As Theo and Kee progress on that journey, Theo learns more and more about what's going on, including the reason that Kee needs to get to the coast, the fact that no one in the group knows if their end destination even exists, and that his and Kee's lives are in greater danger than he believed when they started the journey. But Theo's sole mission becomes to help Kee at any cost for the survival of the species.

Six different people, each from a very different walk of life, awaken to find themselves inside a giant cube with thousands of possible rooms. Each has a skill that becomes clear when they must band together to get out: a cop, a math whiz, a building designer, a doctor, an escape master, and a disabled man. Each plays a part in their thrilling quest to find answers as to why they've been imprisoned.

Fletcher Reede, a fast talking attorney, habitual liar, and divorced father is an incredibly successful lawyer who has built his career by lying. He has a habit of giving precedence to his job and always breaking promises to be with his young son Max, but Fletcher lets Max down once too often, for missing his own son's birthday party. But until then at 8:15 Max has decided to make an honest man out of him as he wishes for one whole day his dad couldn't tell a lie. When the wish comes true all Fletcher can do is tell the truth and cannot tell one lie. Uh-oh for Fletcher Reede.

This experimental film looks at the world and more specifically the effect man has had on the landscape and the environment. Without narration, the film shows the world in a pristine condition and untouched: blue skies, beautiful landscapes and endless vistas. The man-made world is much less appealing. Essentially a montage using a variety of film techniques to provide a visually stunning montage of images.

Protagonist Alex DeLarge is an "ultraviolent" youth in futuristic Britain. As with all luck, his eventually runs out and he's arrested and convicted of murder. While in prison, Alex learns of an experimental program in which convicts are programmed to detest violence. If he goes through the program, his sentence will be reduced and he will be back on the streets sooner than expected. But Alex's ordeals are far from over once he hits the streets of Britain..

Megan is an all-American girl. She's a cheerleader and has a boyfriend, but she doesn't like kissing him very much, and she's pretty tactile with her cheerleader friends, and she only has pictures of girls up in her locker. Her parents and friends conclude that she *must* be gay and send her off to "sexual redirection" school, full of admittedly homosexual misfits, where she can learn how to be straight. Will Megan be turned around to successful heterosexuality, or will she succumb to her love for the beautiful Graham?

Presents a day in the life in Austin, Texas among its social outcasts and misfits, predominantly the twenty-something set, using a series of linear vignettes. These characters, who in some manner just don't fit into the establishment norms, move seamlessly from one scene to the next, randomly coming and going into one another's lives. Highlights include a UFO buff who adamantly insists that the U.S. has been on the moon since the 1950s, a woman who produces a glass slide purportedly of Madonna's pap smear, and an old anarchist who sympathetically shares his philosophy of life with a robber.

Precocious Oliver struggles with being popular in school but when a dark-haired beauty takes interest in him, he's determined to become the best boyfriend in the world. Meanwhile, his parents' already rocky relationship is threatened when his mother's ex-boyfriend moves in next door. Oliver makes some unorthodox plans to ensure that his parents stay together and that Jordana still likes him.

Despondent over his breakup with Desiree, Zia slashes his wrists and goes to an afterlife peopled by suicides, a high-desert landscape dotted by old tires, burned-out cars, and abandoned sofas. He gets a job in a pizza joint. By chance, Zia learns that Desiree offed herself a few months after he did, and she's looking for him. He sets off with Eugene (an electrocuted Russian rocker) to find her, and they pick up a hitchhiker, Mikal, who's looking for the People in Charge, believing she's there by mistake. They're soon at the camp of Kneller, where casual miracles proliferate. They hear rumors of a miraculous king. Can Zia find Desiree? Then what? Where there's death there's hope.

A man about forty years of age tells the story from when he was a teenager in upscale suburban Detroit of his and three of his friends' fascination with the mysterious and doomed Lisbon sisters. In 1974, the sisters were seventeen year old Therese, sixteen year old Mary, fifteen year old Bonnie, fourteen year old Lux, and thirteen year old Cecilia. Their fascination still remains as they try to piece together the entire story. The sisters were mysteries if only because of having a strict and overprotective upbringing by their father, who taught math at the girls' private co-ed school, and overly devout Catholic mother, who largely dictated the household rules. The story focuses primarily on two incidents and the resulting situations on the girls' lives. The first was an action by Cecilia to deal with her emotions over her life. And the second was the relationship between Lux - the sister who pushed the boundaries of the household rules most overtly in doing what most teenagers want to do - and Trip Fontaine, he who could have any girl he wanted but wanting solely Lux.

1999 American film directed by Sofia Coppola

Adam and Barbara are a normal couple...who happen to be dead. They have given their precious time to decorate their house and make it their own, but unfortunately a family is moving in, and not quietly. Adam and Barbara try to scare them out, but end up becoming the main attraction to the money making family. They call upon Beetlejuice to help, but Beetlejuice has more in mind than just helping.

Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger as Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings and a malicious vampire continues her quest for revenge. In the midst of it all, she is forced to choose between her love for Edward and her friendship with Jacob -- knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite the struggle between vampire and werewolf. With her graduation quickly approaching, Bella is confronted with the most important decision of her life.

American singer, songwriter, and actress (born 1986)

The character-driven cartoon chronicles the nautical and often nonsensical adventures of SpongeBob, an incurably optimistic and earnest sea sponge, and his underwater friends. Dwelling a few fathoms beneath the tropical isle of Bikini Atoll in the sub-surface city of Bikini Bottom, SpongeBob lives in a two-story pineapple. Instead of taking the logical approach to everyday challenges, SpongeBob approaches life in a wayward and unconventional way. Whether searching for the ultimate spatula to perfect his burger flipping technique at the Krusty Krab or just hanging out with his best friend Patrick (an amiable starfish), SpongeBob's good intentions and overzealous approach to life usually create chaos in his underwater world.

"In every generation there is a chosen one... she alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer." Buffy Summers knows this tale by heart, and no matter how hard she tries to be just a "normal girl", she can not escape from her destiny... Thankfully, she is not alone in her quest to save the world, as she has the help of her friends, the hilarious (and surprisingly quite effective) evil-fighting team called "The Scooby Gang". Together, Buffy & co. will slay their demons, survive one apocalypse after another, attend high school and college... and above all, understand that growing up can truly be Hell sometimes... literally.

1997 American supernatural drama TV series

The offbeat adventures of Courage, a cowardly dog who must overcome his own fears to heroically defend his unknowing farmer owners from all kinds of dangers, paranormal events and menaces that appear around their land.

American horror animated television series

A former lawyer attends a community college when it is discovered he faked his Bachelor's degree. In an attempt to get with a student in his Spanish class, he forms a Spanish study group. To his surprise, more people attend the study group and the group of misfits form an unlikely community.

American comedy television series created by Dan Harmon

This is an animated sitcom about the antics of a dysfunctional family. Homer is the oafish unhealthy beer loving father, Marge is the hardworking homemaker wife, Bart is the perpetual ten-year-old underachiever (and proud of it), Lisa is the unappreciated eight-year-old genius, and Maggie is the cute, pacifier loving silent infant.

American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening

A scrawny, 11-year-old chicken named Chicken reluctantly watches out for his beefy "little" sister, a 7-year-old cow named Cow. The unconventional offspring of two human parents, the two young animals navigate their way through suburbia, encountering problems not only at school, but with the devilish schemes of the Red Guy, a crimson-colored antagonist of many guises whose singular intent is to make the siblings' lives miserable. If the character design and offbeat humor of "Cow and Chicken" cause viewers to recall "

The assorted humiliations, disasters and rare triumphs of four very different twenty-something girls: Hannah, an aspiring writer; Marnie, an art gallery assistant and cousins Jessa and Shoshanna.

An offbeat, laugh track-lacking sitcom about a bizarrely dysfunctional family, the center of which is Malcolm, the middle of the two brothers who still live at home. His eldest (and favorite) sibling, Francis, boards at military school because his parents believe it will reform him and keep him out of trouble. Malcolm often has a hard time coping with his family life, but he has more troubles to contend with when he starts receiving special treatment at school after being diagnosed as an intellectually advanced genius.

An all-cynical, all-evil absurdist variety show that parodies the classic educational PBS shows of the 1970s, made up of old cartoons and educational films, children, and puppets from one's worst nightmares.

Louie is a stand-up comedian and divorced father of two girls. This series follows him through his everyday life, as he meets various characters, struggles with his love life and pursues humor.

A working class family and their oddball friends.

Rugrats is a show about 4 babies, Tommy Pickles, Chuckie Finster, and Phil and Lil Deville. As we see their lives unravel, we get to hear them talk. On the sidelines are Tommy's mean cousin Angelica, their friend Susie Carmichael (same age as Angelica), and everybody's parents.

Dexter is a Boy Genius Who has a secret lab in his room his Mom and Dad don't know about it, but his older sister Dee Dee Does and they go on wacky (yet Sci-fi) Capers

American comic science fiction animated television series

Misadventures of college freshman Steven Karp, his fellow freshman and first ever girlfriend Lizzie Exley, Steven's self-confidant sophisticated womanizing British college roommate Lloyd Haythe, Lizzie's endearing college roommate with a wild side Rachel Lindquist, Steven's chubby happy-go-lucky college roommate Ron Garner, Steven's weird college roommate Marshall Nesbitt, Lizzie's loving but obsessive ex boyfriend Eric, and Steven's sympathetic geeky dad, who's just been dumped by Steven's mom which triggered his midlife crisis.

The Addams Family is not your typical family: it takes delight in most of the things of which normal people would be terrified. Gomez Addams is an extremely wealthy man and is able to indulge his wife Morticia's every desire, whether it's cultivation of poisonous plants or a candlelit dinner in a graveyard. People visiting the Addams Family just don't seem to appreciate the 7-foot-tall butler named Lurch or the helping hand (which is just a disembodied hand named Thing).

Ensemble cast of off-the-wall Warner Brothers characters, appearing in a wide variety of roles. Mainly staring the Warner Siblings Wakko, Yakko, and Dot, who were created by the WB Studios but found they were just too "zany" to be of any use to the studio. Other popular characters in the series include: Pinky and the Brain, two lab mice bent on world domination. Rita and Runt, a cat and dog team who get into perilous situations every episode but always seem to find time to sing a song, Bobby, Pesto, and Squit, the Goodfeathers, part of a New York City mob of pigeons, who take orders from The Godpigeon and worship

A genetically engineered mouse (who sounds like Orson Welles) and his insane cohort make nightly attempts to take over the world.

What happens when the biggest stars in the world get too high on the Hollywood hog? When their bank accounts start swelling bigger than their heads? Master prankster Ashton Kutcher is there to PUNK 'em down to earth. It's a reality show with a twist as Asthon makes superstars suffer for your viewing pleasure. To misquote the acclaimed thespian Steven Seagal: "You guys think you're above the law...but you ain't above ours."

Joseph Simmons, best known for as a member of Run-DMC, offers a glimpse into his present-day life, where the minister and his wife raise a family of five kids.