‘Excellent Cadavers’ Is Excellent

I just watched this 1999 docudrama last night.

From wikipedia:

Excellent Cadavers is a 1995 non-fiction book by American author Alexander Stille about the Sicilian Mafia, concentrating on magistrate Giovanni Falcone‘s fight against the Mafia and his 1992 assassination.

The name of the book comes from the phrase "excellent cadavers" (cadaveri eccellenti), used by the Italian police when referring to high-profile victims of the Mafia such as politicians, judges and police chiefs (as opposed to less public victims claimed by day-to-day Mafia business). In a more general sense, cadaveri eccellenti means an unsolved murder in a game of the same name.

Excellent Cadavers was made into a movie in 1999, starring Chazz Palminteri as Giovanni Falcone and F. Murray Abraham as informant Tommaso Buscetta.

An earlier fictional movie bearing the title Cadaveri Eccellenti was made in Italy in 1975, directed by Francesco Rosi and starring Lino Ventura.

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Reclaiming Your Reputation Online: A Dialogue With Rabbi Mordecai Gafni

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How To Defuse Anger

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Reclaim Your Reputation Online!

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Senator John Edwards Meets With His Mistress And Love Child At The Beverly Hilton

From the National Enquirer:

Vice Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child at 2:40 this morning in a Los Angeles hotel by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

The married ex-senator from North Carolina – whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer — met with his mistress, blonde divorcee Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night July 21 – and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn’t leave until early the next morning.

Rielle had driven to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara with a male friend for the rendezvous with Edwards. The former senator attended a press event Monday afternoon with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the topic of how to combat homelessness.

But a months-long NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation had yielded information that Rielle and Edwards, 54, had arranged to secretly meet afterward and for the ex-senator to spend some time with both his mistress and the love child who he refuses to publicly acknowledge as his own.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER broke the story of Edwards’ love child scandal last year, when Rielle was still pregnant and Edwards was still considered a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Both parties denied the NATIONAL ENQUIRER report and a close friend of Edwards’ came forward and said he was the father of Rielle’s baby. But sources told the NATIONAL ENQUIRER a far different story – they revealed that Edwards was engineering a massive cover up of his shocking infidelity.

Sources came forward after that story appeared and told The NATIONAL ENQUIRER that Edwards and Rielle had met secretly several times, so that he could see his baby and continue his relationship with Rielle.

The NATIONAL ENQUIRER learned that one such meeting was set for yesterday and observed the secret meeting.

At 9:45 p.m. (PST) Monday Edwards appeared at the hotel, and was dropped off at a side entrance. NATIONAL ENQUIRER reporter Alan Butterfield witnessed the ex-senator get out of a BMW driven by a male companion and stroll into the hotel.

Said Butterfield: "Edwards was not carrying anything. He walked in alone. He was wearing a blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was looking around nervously before he entered the hotel.

"Once inside, he interestingly bypassed the lobby and ducked down a side stairs to go to the bottom floor to catch the elevator up – rather than taking the elevator in the main lobby. He went out of his way not to be seen."

Meanwhile, Reille had reserved rooms 246 and 252 under the name of the friend who had accompanied her from Santa Barbara, Bob McGovern. Reille was in one room and McGovern was in another with her baby. This allowed her and Edwards to spend time alone, a source revealed.

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My Dialogue With Marc Gafni III

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My Dialogue With Marc Gafni II

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Brideshead Revisited – The Movie

I’ve got to see this — soon.

Who wants the privilege of buying my ticket?

Sarah Lyall writes for the New York Times:

THE images from the 11-episode mini-series are still vivid, 27 years later. Louche young Oxford students in crisp linen suits (and one teddy bear) drinking endless cocktails. A spectacular country estate, dripping with treasures and crackling with religious, sexual and dynastic tensions. A delicately beautiful Jeremy Irons.

It is those lingering memories, even more than Evelyn Waugh’s novel, that anyone attempting to turn “Brideshead Revisited” into a feature film for the first time naturally has to contend with. And so as not to contaminate his approach Julian Jarrold, the director, studiously avoided the mini-series — all that elegiac emotion, spread out over 659 languorous minutes — and returned to the book.

“It exposed some of the myths I’d had about ‘Brideshead,’ ” Mr. Jarrold said of his rereading. “I’d had the memory of it being a nostalgia trip about the passing of English life and a bygone era, a glorification of aristocracy — about people wearing odd clothes and poncing around Oxford.” That was part of it, he said. But there was also a bite and a sharpness that are as relevant now as they were in 1945, when the novel was published.

“One of the reasons for the book’s popularity is, it is an archetypal type of story of this young individual from a poorer, less interesting background who is welcomed into this beautiful, magical, alluring kingdom with wonderful, magical people,” Mr. Jarrold said. “And then he begins to realize that everything is not what it seems.”

The film, which is to be released on Friday, is set in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s and stars Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder, the unworldly student whose friendship with the aristocratic Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw) introduces him to a whole new world of money, class privilege, deep happiness and deep despair. Castle Howard, an estate in Yorkshire, stands in for Brideshead, home to Sebastian and his family, a symbol of a dying way of life and a character in itself.

The mini-series was written by John Mortimer and stars Anthony Andrews as the teddy-bear-carrying Sebastian. It opens and ends with Charles (Mr. Irons), now a British Army officer, unexpectedly encamped at Brideshead during World War II. He begins to replay in his mind the role Brideshead, with its dark sorrows and bewitching delights, played in his life some 20 years earlier.

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Luke Ford & Marc Gafni In Dialogue About Hate Speech Online

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Thanking God For The Beauty Of His Creation In Capitol Reef National Park

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