Funniest mindless movie of the last few years. McLovin is the best, and the other guys grew on me. 
In his job he needs to undervalue the suffering of others in order to make more money. Then there’s the smell, the ass and the eye. The degree of objectification of desire is in direct proportion to the self-debasement of the indulger. By degrading the other, he nullifies himself. The very indifference to the overjealous ones, the suppressed recalcitrant losers of the world, is what causes their victims to exist. Great disturbing movie.
A lost science fiction PBS movie with Taoist undertones is a real find, right? A guy discovers his dreams change reality—when he wakes up he finds himself in a world where the content of his dreams have actually happened. He of course gets scared after a couple of nightmares, seeks relief in drugs, and then, because of them, is lead to a psychiatrist. 
Here's for all the sissy Apple lovers out there... This is the ultimate design for my old Duron, which faithfully downloaded well over one terabyte (mostly movies, 1300+) always on 24/7/365 over the last four years. It also runs Apache and is a file and printer server, as well as a router for my home network (with four, also damn old and beautiful computers). Sometimes I dust it off with a vacuum cleaner.
I really enjoyed 
I have read the article on 
In imdb a user commented: "Annoying little transition into some sort of regurgitated independent film values finds this shallow project from Brad Silberling offering little and providing less in this embarrassingly exploitive work." I agree, yet it is still watchable — even more so if you understand how clichê is the fabricated spontaneity in it. It is as if independent movie has aquired its own hollywood-like formulaicism. So it kind of becomes an interestingly consumated aesthetic portrail of so many cult-status fabricated stylishness examples we see around. Many people liked 
2007.03.08 • 06:07 • 3 com
Babel Tower of Metropolis, the older version of the Twin Towers. Classes can’t communicate, and we have all become alienated from what we produce. The interlingua is the language of the capitalist hubris.Portuguese, as many other minor languages, is being phagocytated by English. Our language is slowly becoming a pidgin. If we believe some of the hardest forms of Sapir-Whorf, we can see we are slowly becoming pseudo-Yankees — our way of looking at the world still not being completely Yankee, yet not completely Brazilian either.
In some sense people get scared of losing something they call “cultural identity”, but the fact is we are becoming uncertain particles of a cosmopolite world, for better or worse.
Is it so bad to be a low-class cititizen of the empire? Stupidity is the same everywhere, as is brilliance. We must not fear losing something, as we should not expect to gain something.
We here in Brazil sometimes see desperate attempts to maintain our identity. Some people even think there should be laws against us using English in advertisement, stuff like that. But why do we want to use English in advertisement? The issue is: English looks cool, Portuguese doesn’t. Yet we shouldn’t take a conspiracy theory approach on this one. English looks cool because it sells itself better: English has better memes. Our mindsets are becoming Yankee, that’s why we like the language — not the opposite.
Of course the Yankee mindset is not better than the Brazilian mindset. Well, at least not in an absolute way. Brazilian mentality sure has many features that are wonderful, yet it seems inevitable: now it is more useful to focus more on the bad facets of Yankee mentality. Portuguese is dead. From now on we must deal with the English conundrum.
“Loser” that’s a difficult word to translate to Portuguese. We as a culture still don’t have the mentality of thinking someone, worse as it may lead his life, a “perdedor”. But now it seems we need to start worrying about such Protestant-Yankee mindset endeavors. The WASP mentality has won, its of no use to cry about it — deal with it.
We must realize this new cool language is mostly business oriented. Advertisement is so prevalent in the Empire that our minds are being and will be increasingly constantly bombarded by calls to negotiate. “Engage me”. We become sellers and buyers of YOUR time, which is money. Slogans, fast. Just do it. Enjoy.
Soon we will start to find it hard to believe other kinds of relationship are possible besides the rhetorical advertisement and the bargain. Actually, we already find if hard. We mostly read something while trying to agree or disagree with it, or as a way to learn some skill in order to better ourselves. Maybe this is not Yankee per se, but, oh boy, do Yankee language proves adequate for this… and Portuguese for the soap operas and carnivals of those outside the cool world of enterprise...
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I finally saw the entire The Century of Self series this weekend... it's really amazing the way Freud's ideas forged the way we relate to things today. It's actually frightening to see it was sometimes done with some good intentions: Edward Bernays believed repression and consumerism would build a better society. Amazing also to notice that the biggest business opportunity in history happened because of the need for self-expression.
Are they?
Who is “us”, in “our mindset”?
Middle and high classes?
High classes?
We live in a poor country.
The soap operas are the most viewed shows on TV and Silvio Santos is still there!
We still have big families and cousins, padrinhos (how can I write ‘padrinho’ in English?) and an afro-christian way to see reality.
Our middle class would like to see a smaller State, but out hinterland never saw the State and still need a Quinquenial Plan of development.
So, the WASP mentality would be (is) a strange body in our land. Afforded only by those who see themselves as WASP. Don’t you think so?
And we can’t forget domination issues on the spread of English. There is a “soft power” of cultural influence (or influenza?), but it is a ‘Power’, and we can’t forget that. There is an Empire out there, and we can’t forget this. Empires always have an attraction power, that seems to be natural way of life, but is the consequence of its power and weight – that’s a need to maintain its power and weight.
Think that one language is good for advertisements and another one to soap operas seems to me the incapacity of seeing the “soft power” behind the curtains.
We need protect our language with laws against abusive use of foreign words or expressions in advertisements. Cultures change over time. It’s life, but cultures have the right to protect themselves. It’s the dialectics of change.
Beto
I watched the first one only, on The Century of Self. It was quite good.
Beto, the global citizen is becoming yankeenized. Every class. In Brazil we even have this weird phenomena of people giving hollywoodian names to their children (mostly misspelled) that everybody knows and talks about.
The poor imitate the average yankee Joe. See the phenomenon of “sertanejo” wearing the same outfits of country music (and even opening “steak houses”). Soap operas, which are truly the bastion of Brazilian modern culture, are also slowly taking a hollywoodian shape (specially in the beginning and end chapters, since it is expensive). And Brazilian humor on TV is too taking the sitcom approach, with such series as “A Diarista” and that other one with Fernando Guimarães. And don’t let me start on Silvio Santos, who from the very beginning only copies yankee TV formulas, and his public persona is pretty much like Eddie Sullivan! So it seems you made the argument for me!
Of course we still have some big families, and this is a trend that is slow in changing, but we already started the culture of eating out, for example. I feel in my family that the older the people are, more they stay and eat with the family, the younger ones see family as another obligation besides study and work. Padrinho, by the way, is “godfather”, which we know mostly from the movie title. This is another thing, my family has some Italian heritage, and is a bit anti-americanized actually, and yet I see, in the last 20 years or so, slowly yankee little things creeping all over the place, even in the family.
Of course the wasp mentality I was talking about is for those who are reading me. Those who can’t read this are the global poor, like the ones victimized by Katrina. Not much difference either. But this is a process, it is not done. Nonetheless, our culture is being slowly fagocitated in the last 70 years, sure it is — even more than colonized for the last 500.
I agree this fagocitation is a power issure. And in fact, the English word “power” doesn’t sound a lot more powerful to you than “poder”? I’m not saying this is good, in fact I can see the tragedy in this, but the wave is way bigger than our feeble attempts to try to equalize those trends. The place who names all the buttons on all these gadgets we have around, whose names sound from that place, whose appearance reminds of that place, is the place which dominates. And, tragically or not, we are becoming this place also. If only we had the power to retain (and know) what is good in our culture, that would be fantastic. But few things will remain. Also, we don’t have lots of history. Sadder and more tragical still is the westernization of Japan or China, places who actually have a thousand or more years of tradition. We have maybe 200 years of Brazilian culture — on the other hand, it’s like a baby killed in the cradle.
So it is not incapacity to see the soft power, in fact, I am saying it is neither soft nor tacit. It is here, we can deny it, we have to work with it. Yes, I see people who still try to fight this as a little quixotesque. Yes, I'm pledging surrendering!
That's why I don’t think new laws for “protection” of the language would do any good. If you want Portuguese to live, you write something good in Portuguese. Something English-speaking people and people all over the world would crave to read in the original language. We have maybe a dozen such works. It is not enough to save a language in the long run. I don’t see hope for the Portuguese language. It is doomed to become, as many other languages such as Polish, Dutch, Serbian, Tibetan, an exotic curiosity in a few hundred years.