Gareth Cliff: Julius Malema is the Sarah Palin of the Black African youth

Lately he displayed the most incredibly insensitive behaviour by visiting the reprehensible Jub Jub in jail and taking him a helping of Nando's. Can anyone think of something more offensive for the victim's families?

SHOOT: So why don't the leaders of the ANC reign him in? For the same reason Mugabe isn't reigned in. If you spoil the party for Mugabe, he'll spoil it for you. In exchange for keeping his secrets, he'll keep yours - that's how corruption sustains itself. It is juxtaposed opposite the interests of the electorate, so there is no question where their interests lie.

clipped from www.garethcliff.com Julius Malema has alienated me this week. I never found him particularly offensive or annoying before. I sought to understand him. I had met a few times and thought that perhaps I needed to make an effort to find what it was about him that made him so interesting to the rest of the country. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and tried to remain open-minded to his point of view. I would defend him to friends of mine who said he was just an uneducated moron. Julius and I got on quite well - I was even about to join forces with the Youth League for a multi-racial, inclusive and meaningful Youth Day celebration on June 16th. I was very optimistic - and I was wrong. This man is brimming with an indefatigable and dangerous bravado. He is of the opinion that he owes nobody an explanation for anything. His defence is always that his accuser is racist, since he defines himself almost completely as black (and nothing else).

SHUTTER ISLAND: Scorsese has created a superior psychological thriller

The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, especially Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach in The Watchmen) as a disturbed fellow patient and Max Von Sydow as a sinister psychiatrist. Ben Kingsley does especially well as an ambiguous character, the apparently well-meaning head of the mental institution.

SHOOT: You had me at 'Scorcese' and again at 'Leonardo diCaprio'. Looking forward to seeing this.

clipped from www.techcentral.co.za Shutter Island demands that you concentrate. Though some reviewers found the film a hard slog, I found it engrossing every step of the way. Its major virtues lie in excellent performances from every member of the cast, a script that bristles with tension, and of course, Scorsese’s skilful direction. Scorsese was never as over-indebted to Hitchcock as his contemporary, Brian de Palma, but in Shutter Island he makes Hitchcock’s language his own. Many shots in the film directly reference Hitchcock in ways that lesser directors simply wouldn’t get away with. Scorsese occasionally lays the ominous music on a little too thickly. The island and its Ashecliff Hospital for the criminally insane take a starring role in the film. The hurricane-lashed, mist-shrouded Shutter Island, the dimly lit interiors of Ashecliffe, and the dramatic cliffs of the island are all conjured up with evocative cinematography.

James Cameron's AVATAR = Disney's POCAHONTAS

SHOOT: Intwisting...

clipped from complicationsensue.blogspot.com

Peter Traver reviews - The Hurt Locker

SHOOT: We're soon to find out whether the Academy consider this [or AVATAR] to be the best movie of 2009. I haven't seen The Hurt Locker, but I hope AVATAR wins for the sentiments it espouses, primary 'caring and being connected to the environment'.

clipped from www.rollingstone.com Here's the Iraq War movie for those who don't like Iraq War movies. The Hurt Locker doesn't preach. Director Kathryn Bigelow, working from a strong script by embedded journalist Mark Boal, gets right down to business (watch Peter Travers' video review of The Hurt Locker). She takes us deep into an elite U.S. bomb-disposal squad in Baghdad. The dazzling virtuosity of her ticking-bomb thriller includes staying alert to what's ticking inside the men. At the start, soldiers J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) watch in horror as their sarge (Guy Pearce) suits up to defuse a bomb that goes off in his face. Enter Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) as the new head of the unit. Sanborn thinks James is all kinds of reckless, and Renner and Mackie are outstanding at detailing the conflict. Bigelow builds a combustible drama that shakes you in ways you don't see coming.

Burton sees ‘Alice’ through dreary looking glass

Though Burton's film boasts some excellent performances, as the caterpillar says to our heroine, it's merely "almost Alice."

SHOOT: Peter Jackson should have made this...or Sam Raimi.

clipped from www.msnbc.msn.com In Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," Alice has grown — not by "drink me" potion or "eat me" cake — into a 19-year-old girl. Working from Linda Woolverton's very Hollywood screenplay adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic tale, Burton shifts the story from a child Alice to a near-adult Alice, viewing her journey through a drearier, more dangerous looking-glass. We glimpse the prim, Victorian child of Carroll's tale in the film's opening as she awakens from what sounds like her trip to Wonderland. Her father tells her that her deranged dreams do indeed mean she's bonkers, but he assures, "All the best people are." Alice doesn't remember her last trip to Wonderland. This time, the plot is similar, but slightly different. It's Underland, not Wonderland. The tea party is more faded and ramshackle. Alice is beset by questions that she's "the wrong Alice." "This is my dream. I make the path," she says.