Ternyata ketawa terbahak2 itu sangat penting lho… sbnrnya dr dlu uda tau jga kalau tertawa itu sehat… cuma kmrn ini nton kotbah joel osteen soal tertawa…
ternyata tertawa itu adalah obat yang sangat ampuh…
1. bsa menyembuhkan insomnia dan segala penyakit lainnya
2. membuat kulit kita awet muda meskipun usia terus bertambah
3. membuat banyak orang senang berada didekat kita
dan masih banyak lagi…
dianjurkan sebelum mau tidur paling tidak kita nonton film lucu sampai kita bisa tertawa lepas… dijamin tidur kita akan nyenyak seperti bayi…

sudah banyak bukti orang yang sakit selama bertahun-tahun dan sudah mencoba berbagai macam pengobatan tp tidak ada hasilnya… dokter yang menanganinyapun memberikan solusi yang sangat tidak diduga. dokter itu bilang coba anda luangkan waktu setiap hari untuk menonton hal-hal yang lucu… dan setelah 3 bulan dia melakukan hal itu.. penyakitnya berangsur2 hilang total dari tubuhnya…
ternyata Tuhan sudah memberikan obat langsung didalam tubuh kita… yaitu tertawa…
Walaupun kita sudah dewasa harus bekerja dan melakukan sesuatu dengan serius tapi kita tetap harus mempunyai jiwa sebagai seorang anak kecil… jangan sampai kedewasaan kita membuat kita lupa untuk bersenang-senang… tertawa lepas…

ini terapi murah yang sangat bagus untuk kita smua… ayo sama2 coba untuk lebih sring tertawa!!

Lucu yaaa… tapi ini gak beneran…cuma seekor anjing warna putih yang diwarnain sama kaya warna panda…

katanya sih diwarnain pake cat warna yang ramah lingkungan dan sama sekali gk berbahaya buat hewan… warnanya cuma tahan selama 1 bulan…

totally cute XD

“Dead Ringers” meets “The Reader”

Europe, early 17th century. Hungarian Countess Erzebet Bathory (Julie Delpy) is a virago, strong-willed and vain, the most powerful and also the most feared in her country. She is beautiful, intelligent and unwilling to accept that men make and break the rules as they please. She meets the much younger Istvan (Daniel Brühl) and they immediately fall for each other and start a passionate affair. But their bliss is short-lived. Istvan’s father Count Thurzo (deliciously cold: William Hurt) forces his son to marry another woman and initiates a scheme to bring down the commanding Countess. Erzebet however is convinced that Istvan left her because of her fading beauty. Slowly going mad, she starts to believe that the blood of virgins, extracted by an iron maiden (the torture device, not the aptly named band) will preserve her youthful visage. She embarks on a murderous undertaking, risking everything: her reputation, her wealth, her standing, her life.

Disturbingly, the movie is based on an actual person and actor/writer/director Delpy meshes legend and fact: The real Countess Barthory (1560-1614) is possibly the most prolific female serial killer in history, convicted on 80 counts, with one witness attributing more than 600 deaths to her and her myrmidons. In actuality she was never tried in court and the legendary bloodbaths were never verified. Yet she is remembered as the “Blood Countess” or “Countess Dracula”.

All of this being said, this is definitely not a splatter movie! It is disturbing, but not on a “slasher” level. There is structure and unruliness. Lesbians and S&M. Bloodthirst and romance. Vanity and power struggles. It’s a feast for the hobby shrink.

The movie starts off with a structured stab at a behavioral explanation. I think that Delpy tried to explore the main character in a very honest and exploratory fashion without excusing anything. Little Erzebet is conditioned to cruelty from childhood. Delpy employs two crucial childhood experiences and a merciless disposition to round out the character profile. Mix in unrequited love, madness and high social ranking and power and what do you get? Bloodbaths galore.

I have got to applaud writer/director Julie Delpy for a cunning psychogram of a very complex woman that was part victim and part perpetrator simultaneously. Like Stephen Daldry in “The Reader” she is trying to explore the facets of an inherently cruel, sangfroid and narcissistic character that falls for a much younger man. It is immensely difficult to chronicle the demise of a lover turning into a quenchless murderess, much less portray it. Although Delpy does a great job with the acting, the poetic license and the visual effects take away from the serious attempt at a character study. The combination of power and indefeasibility in this character is what makes it intriguing. The question arises how cruel anyone could become if they had the freedom to be. The Countess viewed herself as a devout Protestant and hardship and cruelty were a sign of the times then. But the quote “Time has no respect for beauty” is one that could be uttered by anyone in Hollywood today. Still – it is a long way to dead virgins lining the woods.

I like the psychology behind “The Countess” and that Delpy isn’t afraid to explore the wrath of a woman scorned in all its splendor. She isn’t afraid to portray herself as ugly or “old” (though I am sure 39 looked different in 1610). However, combining fact and fiction, the movie is crippled by the Cronenberg style of presentation. Which results in, sadly, the movie sometimes bordering on the comical.

A large portion of the movie was filmed in Germany and there are a number of German faces, spearheading is Daniel Brühl (who might be familiar as Jason Bourne’s girlfriend’s brother) and Anna Maria Mühe as Erzebet’s first victim, Sebastian Blomberg as her masochistic playmate Dominic Vizakna and a short appearance of Nikolai Kinski (son of the late Klaus Kinski).

I am a fan of Delpy’s work. I liked her directorial debut “2 days in Paris” and I think that “Before Sunset” is a nearly perfect sequel to the magical “Before Sunrise”. This movie has a distinct, dark style. And it is truly European: a French director shooting an English movie in Germany about a Hungarian tale. Still, it demands an acquired taste for the genre and human contradictions.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Release Date:

June 25th (Germany)

berhubung avatar hko aku temanya geisha… nie sedikit bagi2 info soal geisha XD

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The word Geisha is derived from ‘Gei’, which in Japanese means performance or entertainer, and ‘sha’, which means person, and dates back 400 years ago to the ‘Edo’ period. During this time the Geisha entertained at banquets and social gatherings by playing a Japanese guitar (called a Shamisen), and singing and giving dance performances.

There is often a misconception by some that Geisha’s are prostitutes, but nothing could be further from the truth. Geisha are refined and cultured girls and women who are highly trained in a variety of traditional skills. Besides playing the Shamisen, singing and dancing, the Geisha perform the Japanese tea ceremony, and are well versed in the art of conversation. Many learn to speak English in order to entertain Western guests.

The training involved in becoming a Geisha is very rigorous, and because of this the numbers of Geisha are declining. Few young women in today’s society are willing to devote themselves to such demanding training. To become a Geisha, if accepted, a young girl must go through an apprenticeship that involves living with a head Geisha. This training period takes five to six years. During this time, the Geisha trainee must help with the chores and the running of the house, learn customs and social skills, and take music and dance lessons. After about six months, the trainee Geisha is called a maiko girl, and accompanies a Geisha on her appointments in order to become acquainted with customers. At about age 20, the maiko must make the decision to become a full-fledged Geisha or not. If a girl wishes to marry she cannot become a Geisha.

Geishas often live near temples and shrines, in areas are called hana-machi. Geishas entertain visitors at teahouses called o-chaya that are located near these areas. The o-chaya is not a shop that serves only tea or coffee, but rather a sort of banquet hall where rooms can be rented for dinner parties. It is usually a small Japanese style house with tatami (wooden) floors and Japanese style gardens. O-chayas are often where young Geishas live and work.

Today in Japanese hotels and restaurants Geisha entertain at banquets and socialize with guests. If you are staying at a hotel in Japan, you can arrange for a Geisha to attend a dinner party through the reservation desk. When you request a Geisha, it is important to be specific about what type of performance you want, because there are two different types of Geisha. One called ‘tchikata’ is usually a maiko girl and performs the traditional Japanese dance, and the other; usually an older Geisha is called ‘jikata’ and sings and plays an instrument. The costs for the services of a Geisha vary depending on the number the food, beverages, and the entertainment. The role of the Geisha in Japanese society is a source of much curiosity for tourists. To tap into that curiosity, visitors can go to shops where they can dress in traditional Geisha Kimonos, have Geisha make up applied and then have a souvenir photo taken.

Source: Marie Claire, 5/2001

A morning in the Chinese province of Hunan brings an unimaginable sight of cruelty and horror. Lying in the gutter of a bustling main road is the tiny, twisted body of a dead baby girl. She is naked, surrounded by only dirty pieces of hospital gauze. Buses and bicycles speed past the corpse, spraying it with mud.

Nameless and unwanted, the newborn’s been dumped by the roadside during winter. Few of the locals hurrying by give her a second glance. To them, she is just one of thousands of baby girls abandoned each year as a result of China’s ruthless one-child policy. “I think the baby had just died,” says a woman who was the only person to attempt to rescue the infant. “I touched her skin, and it was warm. Blood was still coming out of her nose.”

Under China’s strict family-planning laws, couples in urban areas are allowed only one child; couples in most rural regions can try for a second if their first-born is a girl. Those who have an illegal baby are subject to crippling fines, sterilization, and other severe penalties. To avoid punishment, many parents go to the desperate measure of deserting their illegal offspring. If their child is a girl–considered less valuable than boys in rural, traditional parts of China, like Hunan–the chances of this heartbreaking fate are immeasurably higher.

To the Chinese authorities, abandoned girls are merely worthless trash. “I called the emergency services, but nobody came,” says the woman who found this latest little victim. (For fear of official reprisal, she wishes to remain anonymous.) “The baby was lying right near the government tax office, so many people in government just walked past.” Eventually, an old man picked up the child, put her in a box, and dropped her in a garbage bin. When the police finally arrived, they showed no interest in investigating her death. They instead arrested the woman who’d tried to save her. “I took some photographs, because it was so terrible; the police were more worried about my pictures than the baby,” she says. The police only released the woman once she handed over her film.

The world’s most populous country with 1.3 billion people, China introduced the policy in 1979 in response to a rapid increase in the birth rate under former leader Mao Tse-tung, and a fear that the exploding population couldn’t be fed. Today, China’s leaders claim that the policy has been a great success, preventing an extra 300 million births.

Most Chinese recognize the need to keep the birth rate down, but the government’s methods continue to cause untold misery. “What’s happening since the one-child policy was introduced as a national catastrophe,” says Wu Hongli a woman’s aid worker in Shanghai who does outreach work in rural communities. “So many families have lost their children and had their lives destroyed.” While abandonment is shockingly common, say Wu, some parents who give birth “outside the plan” are so terrified of being caught, they even kill their child. “One father dropped his daughter down an old well so no one would ever know she existed.”

Each region in China has a target “birth quota” for the number of babies allowed to be born per year. Local government offices and state-owned factories appoint female staff to monitor every woman’s menstrual cycle. Before conceiving a baby, women must have a “birth permit”; those who don’t, or who’ve already given birth have their contraceptive usage monitored. Though condoms and the Pill are available, the most common form of birth control is the metal IUD; it’s inserted at government clinics and detectable by X-ray to ensure it hasn’t been removed without authorization.

Gao Xio Duan, a former population-control official who fled to America three years ago, spoke out about the methods used to terminate illegal pregnancies. Describing herself as a “monster”, she told a U.S. Congressional committee how she had helped doctors inject lethal formaldehyde into babies’ skulls during forced abortions. “I saw how the baby’s lips were sucking and how its limbs were stretching,” she said of one such instance. “Then the doctor injected the poison into its head, and the child died and was thrown in the trash.”

Some pregnant women try to avoid capture by going into hiding. But often, they return after the birth to find their homes burned to the ground and their other family members beaten or persecuted. In an extreme case last year, a man in Changsha, a Hunan province, died after being tortured for refusing to reveal the whereabouts of his pregnant wife. If couple successfully give birth to an illegal baby, the face further punishment, including fines of around 10,000 yuan ($1500)–seven times more than the average peasant’s annual income–compulsory sterilization, forced confiscations of property. Children born this way are denied schooling, medical care, and other social benefits.

Many peasants believe only sons can carry on the family line. “They think it greatly dishonors their ancestors if they don’t produce a male heir,” says outreach worker Wu Hongli. Also, daughters usually live with their husband’s family after marriage and are, therefore, considered a wasted investment. “Although the one-child policy allows many rural couples to have another baby if their first is a girl, it spells disaster if their second child is also female,” says Wu. Such unwanted girls are often dubbed “maggots in the rice”. In northeast China, one man was so distraught when his second-born was a girl that he smothered bother her and his other healthy daughter. “It is a sin not to have a boy. I will try again for a son when I get out of prison,” he told police.

In China’s modern cities, the traditional desire for boys has all but disappeared. But coupled with the one-child policy, its endurance in the country side is having devastating social consequences. An estimated 17 million girls are “missing” from the population nationwide. Infanticide and abandonment account for some of these lost females, with those who survive ending up in bleak state orphanages–if they’re lucky. Other factors include sex-selective abortion, which are technically outlawed, but are still readily available through the use of ultrasound for a small bribe. According to official figures, 97.5 percent of all aborted fetuses in China are female. Failure to register the birth of girl babies is another factor; it’s believed many parents hide their daughters, or sell them to infertile couples, thereby making them invisible to authorities.

The result is a chronic imbalance in the male and female populations. Already, millions of rural Chinese men are unable to find a wife. To overcome this, young girls who leave their villages to look for work are often tricked and drugged by traffickers and then sold to older single men in distant provinces, where they don’t even speak the same dialect. This imbalance is set to worsen, too. A decade ago, the birth records of boys versus girls in some countryside areas where two to one. Today, the ratio is often as high as an alarming six to one.

Still, the Chinese government remains committed to its one-child policy. Wu Hongli despairs over this situation. “Of course, population is a serious issue,” she says, “but so are human rights. The authorities are making no attempt to implement more humane family planning.” She also laments official apathy toward teaching the population about the equal value of baby girls. “Educational programs have had a lot of success in rural areas, but there is still a vast amount to be done. So many tragedies are ignored every day that it makes me want to cry.”

Between December 1937 and March 1938 one of the worst massacres in modern times took place. Japanese troops captured the Chinese city of Nanjing and embarked on a campaign of murder, rape and looting.

Based on estimates made by historians and charity organisations in the city at the time, between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed, many of them women and children.

The number of women raped was said by Westerners who were there to be 20,000, and there were widespread accounts of civilians being hacked to death.

Yet many Japanese officials and historians deny there was a massacre on such a scale.

They admit that deaths and rapes did occur, but say they were on a much smaller scale than reported. And in any case, they argue, these things happen in times of war.

The Sino-Japanese Wars

In 1931, Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria following a bombing incident at a railway controlled by Japanese interests.

The Chinese troops were no match for their opponents and Japan ended up in control of great swathes of Chinese territory.

The following years saw Japan consolidate its hold, while China suffered civil war between communists and the nationalists of the Kuomintang. The latter were led by General Chiang Kai-shek, whose capital was at Nanjing.

Many Japanese, particularly some elements of the army, wanted to increase their influence and in July 1937, a skirmish between Chinese and Japanese troops escalated into full-scale war.

The Japanese again had initial success, but then there was a period of successful Chinese defence before the Japanese broke through at Shanghai and swiftly moved on to Nanjing.

Chiang Kai-shek’s troops had already left the city and the Japanese army occupied it without difficulty.

‘One of the great atrocities of modern times’

At the time, the Japanese army did not have a reputation for brutality.

In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the Japanese commanders had behaved with great courtesy towards their defeated opponents, but this was very different.

Japanese papers reported competitions among junior officers to kill the most Chinese.

One Japanese newspaper correspondent saw lines of Chinese being taken for execution on the banks of the Yangtze River, where he saw piles of burned corpses.

Photographs from the time, now part of an exhibition in the city, show Japanese soldiers standing, smiling, among heaps of dead bodies.

Tillman Durdin of the New York Times reported the early stages of the massacre before being forced to leave.

He later wrote: “I was 29 and it was my first big story for the New York Times. So I drove down to the waterfront in my car. And to get to the gate I had to just climb over masses of bodies accumulated there.”

“The car just had to drive over these dead bodies. And the scene on the river front, as I waited for the launch… was of a group of smoking, chattering Japanese officers overseeing the massacring of a battalion of Chinese captured troops.”

“They were marching about in groups of about 15, machine-gunning them.”

As he departed, he saw 200 men being executed in 10 minutes to the apparent enjoyment of Japanese military spectators.

He concluded that the rape of Nanjing was “one of the great atrocities of modern times”.

‘The memories cannot be erased’

A Christian missionary, John Magee, described Japanese soldiers as killing not only “every prisoner they could find but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages”.

“Many of them were shot down like the hunting of rabbits in the streets,” he said.

After what he described as a week of murder and rape, the Rev Magee joined other Westerners in trying to set up an international safety zone.

Another who tried to help was an American woman, Minnie Vautrin, who kept a diary which has been likened to that of Anne Frank.

Her entry for 16 December reads: “There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from the language school [where she worked] last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night - one of the girls was but 12 years old.”

Later, she wrote: “How many thousands were mowed down by guns or bayoneted we shall probably never know. For in many cases oil was thrown over their bodies and then they were burned.”

“Charred bodies tell the tales of some of these tragedies. The events of the following ten days are growing dim. But there are certain of them that lifetime will not erase from my memory and the memories of those who have been in Nanjing through this period.”

Minnie Vautrin suffered a nervous breakdown in 1940 and returned to the US. She committed suicide in 1941.

Also horrified at what he saw was John Rabe, a German who was head of the local Nazi party.

He became leader of the international safety zone and recorded what he saw, some of it on film, but this was banned by the Nazis when he returned to Germany.

He wrote about rape and other brutalities which occurred even in the middle of the supposedly protected area.

Confession and denial

After the Second World War was over, one of the Japanese soldiers who was in Nanjing spoke about what he had seen.

Azuma Shiro recalled one episode: “There were about 37 old men, old women and children. We captured them and gathered them in a square.”

“There was a woman holding a child on her right arm… and another one on her left.”

“We stabbed and killed them, all three - like potatoes in a skewer. I thought then, it’s been only one month since I left home… and 30 days later I was killing people without remorse.”

Mr Shiro suffered for his confession: “When there was a war exhibition in Kyoto, I testified. The first person who criticized me was a lady in Tokyo. She said I was damaging those who died in the war.”

“She called me incessantly for three or four days. More and more letters came and the attack became so severe… that the police had to provide me with protection.”

Such testimony, however, has been discounted at the highest levels in Japan.

Former Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano denied that the massacre had occurred, claiming it was a Chinese fabrication.

Professor Ienaga Saburo spent many years fighting the Japanese government in the courts with only limited success for not allowing true accounts of Japanese war atrocities to be given in school textbooks.

There is also opposition to the idea among ordinary Japanese people. A film called Don’t Cry Nanjing was made by Chinese and Hong Kong film-makers in 1995 but it was several years before it was shown in Japan.

Pies and murder – two perennials of London life. It‘s no wonder, then, that we have a long-standing fascination with the legend of Sweeney Todd, the serial-killing hairdresser with a sideline in baked goods. As Tim Burton‘s take on the bloody tale hits the cinema, Lee Jackson looks at the truth behind the legend

‘All that blood!’ exclaims the pie-maker Mrs Lovett in Stephen Sondheim’s musical ‘Sweeney Todd’, as she spies the murderous barber’s first victim. Tim Burton’s film adaptation, featuring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, certainly delivers that: bloody raindrops dripping over the opening credits; a carmine tide in the city’s sewers; blood gushing (and how!) from the throats of Depp’s victims, choreographed to Sondheim’s soaring score.

In the unlikely event you’re unfamiliar with the Sweeney Todd story, the plot can be summarised succinctly. Todd, a Fleet Street barber, surreptitiously murders his clients and their corpses are profitably made into delicious meat pies by his obliging neighbour, Mrs Lovett. ‘We’ll serve anyone… to anyone’ as the lyric artfully puts it.

Todd is, of course, a Victorian serial killer, though his exploits predate that very modern label. He is, moreover, probably one of London’s most enduring villains. In recent years, Sondheim’s portrayal of Todd has done much to keep his name alive. An unlikely Broadway hit in 1979, blending elements of comedy and horror, it introduced the character to the United States, garnered legions of fans and ultimately made a relatively obscure piece of London folklore world famous. Yet, in the UK, we have always enjoyed the antics of this particular monster in film, television and theatre – Ray Winstone took the title role in a BBC version as recently as 2006 – and discerning visitors to our metropolis can even enjoy a Sweeney Todd ‘attraction’ at the London Dungeon. But where does the tale of the butchering barber originate? It has long been assumed that Todd’s fictional exploits were based on a true story. Many people are still convinced that Todd’s crimes were as real as those of Jack the Ripper. The facts, however, are somewhat different.

 The story begins in the 1830s with one Edward Lloyd, an enterprising publisher of ‘penny dreadfuls’ who aimed his cheap weekly serials squarely at the working poor. Titles like ‘The Calendar of Horrors’ and ‘Varney the Vampire’ (a famous blood-sucking fiend, 50 years before Dracula) give some idea of his subject matter. He also specialised in pirated versions of Dickens’ works at a time when copyright law counted for little. Thus poorer readers could buy a budget copy of his ‘Oliver Twiss’ or ‘Nikelas Nickelbery’. Lloyd would later found a radical/liberal newspaper and become quite respectable.

Nonetheless, his main legacy to modern culture was a story called ‘The String of Pearls’ published in a weekly magazine during the winter of 1846/47, written by an anonymous penny-a-word hack. Set in 1785, it features as principal villain a certain Sweeney Todd (‘a long, low-jointed, ill-put-together sort of fellow’), and includes all the plot elements that have been used by Sondheim and others ever since. There is the barber’s shop, from which a remarkable number of customers never return (courtesy of a chair that flips them upside down, plunging them to their deaths in the stone-floored cellar), an ill-used apprentice boy (who is consigned to a lunatic asylum, a pair of deeply uninteresting star-crossed lovers (obligatory in any Victorian popular fiction) and the enterprising Mrs Lovett, whose pies are finally discovered to contain something rather more exotic than mince.
‘The String of Pearls’ isn’t great literature, but Lloyd was on to something. The psychopathic barber’s story proved instantly popular: it was turned into a play before the ending had even been revealed in print. An expanded edition appeared in 1850, an American version in 1852, a new play in 1865. By the 1870s, Sweeney Todd was a familiar character to most Victorians. Nothing so strange in that, perhaps; except that, according to contemporary accounts, most of them seem to have believed that Todd was real.

Lloyd himself is largely to blame for a confusion that’s lasted for more than 150 years. He was a genius at marketing and knew the value of a so-called true story, not least one conveniently just beyond living memory. In a preface to an expanded edition, he stated that ‘there certainly was such a man; and the record of his crimes is still to be found in the chronicles of criminality of this country’. And it was this assertion, now easily disproved by records from the period, that stuck. So much so, in fact, that the recently deceased connoisseur of pulp fiction, Peter Haining, once published a book claiming to have found ‘proof’ of Todd’s existence. Unfortunately, all of Haining’s proof is – let’s be generous – rather difficult to verify; indeed, the book is a carefully planned hoax.

It seems much more likely that the story originated in urban myth. Dickens himself in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’ (1843/44) mentions facetiously ‘preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many standard country legends as doing a lively retail business in the Metropolis’. Even today, most of us have heard scare stories of various bits of anatomy appearing in fast food. Imagine, then, how it must have been in mid-Victorian London, when food was frequently coloured and doctored to make it more saleable and few legal restrictions were in place. Indeed, in the 1840s and 1850s, many Londoners feared – with good reason – that their sausages and pies were being filled with cheap horsemeat (normally hawked round the streets as cat food); it didn’t require much imagination to take that scam one stage further.

In fairness, Lloyd’s artful co-opting of history has probably served Sweeney Todd quite well, leaving it usefully open to different interpretations. A 1926 silent movie (now lost) reportedly played it for laughs. The 1936 film (‘Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street’) features the great Tod Slaughter, wringing his hands and cackling ‘I’ll polish him off’, although bizarrely, the victims’ final destination is never explicitly mentioned: perhaps the filmmakers feared that Mrs Lovett’s pies would give the censors indigestion. A musical version first appeared in London in 1959, a ballet in 1960. And the London Dungeon wasn’t the first to provide a ‘Sweeney Todd Experience’; in the 1920s a wine merchant in Johnson’s Court, off Fleet Street, purported to be the site of Todd’s shop. Not content with infamy by association, the shop proudly displayed the ‘original’ barber’s chair, complete with mechanism for dropping customers into the basement.

Sondheim’s musical is, in fact, based on Christopher Bond’s 1973 play, which introduced a psychological background to Todd’s crimes (he was the victim of a ruthless judge who raped his young wife and transported him to Australia). With Burton’s movie likely to garner worldwide attention, this may now become the accepted story; it is certainly already better known than the Victorian original. But, whatever the details, it seems likely that Sweeney Todd and his gruesome dinners will be with us for many years to come.

King of Japanese Grotesque Movie

With all the surrounding hype and it’s UK banning by the BBFC, extreme horror fan’s expectations have been set quite high for Kôji Shiraishi’s Japanese exploitation flick Grotesque (Gurotesuku). It is a travesty that the movie was banned for trivial reasons such as being “an unrelenting and escalating scenario of humiliation, brutality and sadism” and suggestions that the dialog was insufficient to make it any more than a snuff movie. Grotesque is not an unnecessary exploitation flick, there is a story and there are reasons and passions (although somewhat twisted) behind the motivations for making a movie such as this. The movie will be compared to Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood (which is definitely a pure and extreme exploitation slash snuff flick), but it should also be compared to Martyrs (although Grotesque is nowhere as good) as the terror instigator in this scenario is simply taking his own little journey into his understanding of the deepest emotions. Yes, there are graphic sexual goings on and yes, there are some quite tremendous and sickening gore scenes but without these the movie would be completely pointless, this is a horror movie which is designed to shock and perturb so why dumb it down so that the DVD would feel most at home in the erotic thriller shelf in blockbuster with all the other movies that never get rented.

The story itself is quite simple, an unloved son-of-a-whore with a genetic tendency to extrude bodily stench (and who has no sense of smell so doesn’t realise he stinks) wants to understand love. Most androids facing similar situations would probably use an emotions chip and play the violin or something whereas this son-of-a-whore prefers to kidnap and terrorize young and in love couples and being a bit of a medical whiz he can provide quite an effective regime of torture.

The unfortunate couple in this episode of Dr. Stinky’s life have only just met and one half has already fallen in love (stupid men). After a brief hammer to the head the couple find themselves in a dirty makeshift surgery, chewing a cat toy and chained to some rather funky revolving operating tables in an undisclosed location. After proving he means business by inflicting a few minor wounds, the non-contemporary doctor decides to deliver some loving to the couple. After giving Miss Young-Love the fingerbang of her life, the deranged doc has no qualms about sharing his love with the other male in this love triangle and gives a handjob worthy of a career as a happy-ending provider in a seedy massage parlour should his medical vocation fail.

Having not got his buzz from delivering hand shandy cocktails, our careerly-confused maniac decides to determine if butchery and haberdashery can be combined into a third vocation and gets busy with his chainsaw and scissors to fashion some jewellery out of fingers and nipples. After some castration practise and some nut-sack carpentry our friendly jewellery-butcher gets that love buzz he’s been striving for and makes the couple comfortable as he nurses them back to health, promising to free them when they are recovered.

After a few days exploring work option four as a nurse, our psychotic job-hopper starts to feel the trouser twitches again and decides to break his promise of freedom and takes the lovers back into surgery for the ultimate gut wrenching demonstration of unconditional love. The male kidnapee doesn’t have the guts to impress (as they are folded tidily on a hook behind him) but the surviving victim of the ordeal seems to reach enlightenment. In France this would be a success but in Japan this is a disappointment. The only theory left is to prove if a head can really survive for a few minutes when detached from a torso.

Grotesque does not deserve to be banned; it is a repulsive piece of horror but it also inspires an emotional attachment and provokes thought about the inner workings of a human mind subjected to a nature and nurture different from the norm. The tortures are quite disturbing due to the way that they are executed, the gore is also quite extreme in places but nothing more than that in “mainstream” horrors, and once again it is probably the execution of the gore rather than the graphic representation. Banning this movie will only drive it underground and probably make it the most downloaded horror of the year escalating it to cult status in no time at all.

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Hue kacooo sumpah nie film… mang kadang jepang kalo bikin film pada gaje yah… mau bikin sadis2 tapi malah buat orang males ntnnya… wkakwkakwka… anjir de ni film unsensor… semua adegannya dikasi liat ampe PiiiP nya jga… gile deee… ampe cowo g bilang ini mau buat film sadis apa film PiiiP, ni film isinya cuma penyiksaan diobatin disiksa lagi… mpe akirnya mokad…yah buat yg demen sadis2 n piiip bole lha nonton ini… tp ati2 ngilu ya ntonnya… soalnya ada bagian2 piiip yg dipotong dipaku digunting dlll… wkakwkakwa… kalo mau pinjem filmnya bole..

 Fairy tale style

with gold hair accessory

milkmaid braids

Sexy style

style for long hair ^^

Would you ever wear a wedding dress made out of toilet paper? I would, but only if the toilet paper were unused and only if the wedding dress looked this stunning! This toilet paper wedding dress was designed and made by Katrina Chalifoux for a US toilet paper wedding dress contest. Contestants can only use toilet paper, tape, or glue to create whole bridal gowns complete with faux embroidery, ruffles, lace effects, and pleats. The grand prize of one thousand dollars went to Miss Chalifoux, who spent seven rolls of toilet paper and two weeks to create the winning wedding dress.

I’m not a big fan of the layered ruffles – that kind of cut makes me look fat – but I love the dress’ texture and embossed floral design. Who’d have thought that toilet paper would make such sweet and delicate material for a wedding dress? I wonder if you can achieve this effect by using traditional fabrics. I also wonder how comfortable it is, and if you have to be really careful when you move around. Toilet paper isn’t exactly the most sturdy material in the world.