Jim, a.k.a. Reprobate, was a friend to many members of SuicideGirls, especially those from Los Angeles, where he once lived, and, more recently, New Orleans, where he relocated a few years ago. Around 4AM on the morning of March 22nd, Jim was sitting with a friend on a dock overlooking the Mississippi River when it collapsed, dumping both of them into the deep and swift-moving water. His friend made it safely back to shore. Jim never did. This morning it appears that his body has been located among the wreckage of the dock, and authorities have begun recovery efforts. He was 42.
Directed by Joe Wright (whose previous credits include Atonement and The Soloist), Hanna is a boldly original suspense thriller which stars Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan (Atonement and The Lovely Bones), Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth: The Golden Age and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and Eric Bana (Star Trek and The Time Traveler’s Wife).
Hanna (Ronan) is a teenage girl who has the strength, the stamina, and the smarts of a soldier; these come from being raised by her father (Bana), an ex-CIA man, in the wilds of Finland. Living a life unlike any other teenager, her upbringing and training have been one and the same, all geared to making her the perfect assassin. The turning point in her adolescence is a sharp one; sent into the world by her father on a mission, Hanna journeys stealthily across Europe while eluding agents dispatched after her by a ruthless intelligence operative with secrets of her own (Blanchett). As she nears her ultimate target, Hanna faces startling revelations about her existence and unexpected questions about her humanity.
To mark the release of the film, which will be in theaters on April 8, SG has teamed up with Focus Features and is giving away 25 pairs of tickets to advanced screenings of Hanna in each of 7 cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and New York) + 1 month’s free membership to SuicideGirls.
To enter send an email to: Hanna@suicidegirls.com Put the city in which you’d like to see the film in the subject header, and include the following info in the body of the email:
Full Name
Email Address
Date of Birth
City
(Entrants must be 18 & over and a US resident. Entries must be received by 5PM PDT on 3/30/11)
Let’s get one thing clear: the “Official Nintendo Seal of Quality” is about as meaningful as a degree from Columbus University. In the Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System days the Seal meant simply that a game’s developer had paid their dues to Nintendo to manufacture their cartridges. As a distinction, it did not improve with time.
Plenty of studios didn’t even bother with that formality, most notably Atari Games spin-off Tengen, who actually obtained the blueprints for the Famicom’s 10NES lock-out chip from the US Copyright Office under the pretext of preparing for a lawsuit and used it to reverse-engineer a workaround that would allow their unlicensed games to work on the NES. Christian developers Wisdom Tree also released several notoriously awful unlicensed games for the Famicom.
The Nintendo Seal of Quality was even worse than a licensing formality. It was a dirty lie, because not only did it not mean that Nintendo had vetted a game’s, y’know, “quality” – Nintendo actively made games bearing that sticker worse by censoring them for US release, limiting their production runs, and forcing third-party developers into exclusive deals, thus crippling competition from the Sega Master System and others.
All of which brings us to this week’s Emulation Nation Random Game of the Week, a new feature in which I fire up my MAME cabinet (which actually also includes just about every pre-CD-ROM era console game) and talk about the first turd whose stench reaches my nose.
“I can get it to a point where I know I could probably do it better, but…”
-Mike Cooley
Georgia-by-way-of-Alabama’s Drive-By Truckers are by nature what so many bands today aspire to be by artifice: authentic, American, rootsy rock’n’roll. They first hit the national radar with their third album, Southern Rock Opera, an ambitious double-album which used the story of Lynyrd Skynyrd as a metaphor for the decline of the South as a whole.
Ever since, even while weathering lineup and label changes, they’ve cranked out a great new record on a near-yearly basis in a decade-long winning streak that few bands have equaled.
