Max Mara: Laughably Mundane
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Fashion Wire Daily - Typically in Milan, the true acid test of what women will be wearing six months from now is a Max Mara show, which is a genuine worry given the lackluster and mundane Spring/Summer 2007 collection presentation in Milan on Thursday, September 28th.
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Gandana Mane lacks freshness and has a cinematic narration seen in the seventies. Shivaraj Kumar tries to salvage the film, but it is of no avail. V Manohar's music composition is a saving grace.
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Tycho:  The news that Mass Effect would feature an uncompromising, high-res simulation of alien lesbian sex was sweet, and hot, like spun sugar.  For Gabriel, at any rate.  Some of the community reaction is dedicated to demanding gay parity for the male persuasion of this sexual equation, lengthy treatises by oiled men who crave starborne sodomy.  The rest of the dialogue is just boring.  Boring, terrestrial, and (quite frankly) myopic.         Where are the bipedal crustaceans in this calculation?  The swirling, aroused gasses?  The lonely, sentient space station whose hermetic bulkheads hold secret clusters of erotic delights, provided your character has both the skills and equipment?  Carpe astrum, you Goddamned backwater clowns.  There must be an entire universe of thrilling, dangerous, sometimes razor sharp genitalia that slavers beyond the Horsehead Nebula.      You might have noticed that we're advertising an Everquest game, an act that I'm aware places us in significant rhetorical peril.  If I had not found the game completely electrifying, I would have turned down the buy.  Of course, what I find electrifying has somewhat strange parameters.    I used to enjoy a deeply indie online CCG called Star Chamber, which was eventually purchased by an online CCG company called Worlds Apart (which did, among other things, the Lord of the Rings online CCG).  As does happen from time to time, World Apart was eventually purchased by Sony Online Entertainment, becoming SOE Denver.  Since then, they also delivered a Stargate CCG that we liked enough to advertise.  Legends of Norrath: Oathbound is a game within a game, similar to Final Fantasy's Triple Triad, that you can play against other players directly in the client.  It's tied into the loot systems for both EQ games, so that cards you get in packs are actually equipment and so forth - I find that interesting, but as a person with no investment in those systems it doesn't motivate me.  What motivates me is a rock solid, deeply tactical card game, which Oathbound absolutely is.  It plays in a stand-alone client which you can download, and comes with a fairly elaborate tutorial that is worth playing all the way through.  I had no interest in it, I felt confident dismissing it out of hand, and it won me over.  You may find yourself similarly surprised.    I have a very high opinion of Eurogamer, but I don't know how a person could possibly have reviewed Team Fortress 2 already.  We put time in both at work and at night, and I don't feel like I'm any smarter about the sometimes extraordinary interplay between the game's nine Goddamned classes, which mesh in real time to create some kind of shuddering Chaos Engine.  I have a lot of fun playing it, though the Medic brings me the most joy, so I've focused on it almost to the exclusion of all others.  A healing "gun" - like the repair module present in Tribes, almost a decade ago - is an immensely satisfying way to model that relationship.  Anytime your medical gun is attached to a player, your "Overcharge" ability is building up.  When unleashed, both you and your target become invulnerable to enemy attacks.  It's an incredible siege breaking technique, and it's earned simply by embodying the virtues of your class.  But where to use it, when to use it, I'm still learning this - and what's more, other players are still learning that I can do it.  I always love the early period in these multiplayer offerings, before the hard limits are known, when players seem to be magicians and anything is possible.
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Composers Nadeem-Shravan are at their uninspiring best.
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In Tom Stoppardâs âCoast of Utopiaâ there are plenty of theses tossed about but no real syntheses.
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There is nothing stimulating about this album.
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The Brooklyn Museum's show of Marilyn Monroe photographs is like a walk-in special issue of People magazine: diverting, but superficial and ultimately enervating.
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Animation in the âSimpsonsâ era demands a breathless pace, varied characters and whirlwind visual invention. Nickelodeonâs âTakâ falls short in all three categories.
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Kid Nation premiered last Wednesday, and the show was, for lack of  a better term, fascinating. It was formulaic and, well, just plain bad. But it was also fascinating. In case you missed it, the premise revolves around sending 40 children to a ghost town in New Mexico for 40 days. The ages of the children range from 8-15, with the majority lying somewhere in the 10-12 range. Once there, the kids will have no supervision beyond that of a couple of camera crew and the host, Jonathan Karsh, who comes and goes randomly, but always to help the kids on their path.    There's all kinds of hullabaloo about whether or not it's ethical to take kids and simply drop them off in the middle of nowhere. Though they immediately showed the largest factor in the parents' decision to let these kids on to a TV show that could do a mind job on them for years: A gold star (cute) worth $20,000. A star is handed out by the "town council" at every meeting, so presumably about 5 kids will go home with prize money. My guess is that at least one of them will also win some ridiculous prize at the end of the show...say a million bucks.    I'd like to say that's where the show gets "better", but it doesn't. On this show no one gets voted off, and everyone's going home a winner.
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Ram Gopal Varma's latest film is watchable, but not scary enough.
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The third installment of the "Blade" series is a choppy, forgetful, suspense-free romp that substitutes campy humor for chills.
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The music of I am Sam remake Main Aisa Hi Hoon is very ordinary.
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Maxim Pharmaceutical's Ceplene produces disappointing results.
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Though occasionally successful as an animated wonder, the film is a mundane seasonal tale.
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Like a porn star with too many memoirs, Victoriaâs secrets are pretty much overexposed at this point.
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Interview VR inventor on memes, and the blandness of digital culture
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Periodic bursts of cleverness and eye-popping imagery canÂt disguise that this is just another movie full of jive-talking computer-generated animals with little new to say.