“Lincoln” Reviews: Is Steven Spielberg’s biopic Oscar-worthy?

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Lincoln,” with a cast of acting titans like Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones, arrives in theaters Friday with many predicting big things come Oscar night. But does Steven Spielberg‘s biopic of the Great Emancipator live up to the early hype?

Based on initial reviews, it seems like Spielberg and company have delivered. Critics are raving about Day-Lewis’ performance and crediting the film with taking a historical figure who is cloaked in myth and making him relatable and sympathetically human. Instead of uncoiling a birth-through-death chronology of Father Abraham, “Lincoln” narrows its gaze to a few key months in 1865 when the president was trying to simultaneously end the Civil War and pass an amendment abolishing slavery.

The film, which will expand nationally next week after opening in limited release this weekend, scored a bullish 92 percent “fresh” rating on critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

In TheWrap, Alonso Duralde lavished praise on the film and its literate script from Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner for finding the man behind the monument. His one bone of contention was not with the film itself but with its gauzy ad campaign.

“The dreadful trailer makes ‘Lincoln‘ look like an awful collection of Spielbergian excesses, including swelling John Williams moments (admittedly, there are one or two) and Janusz Kaminski’s honey-baked lighting (OK, granted, it appears, but not too often), not to mention Tommy Lee Jones‘ terrible wig (which actually winds up being organic in his memorable turn as Thaddeus Stevens),” Duralde writes. “Don’t let the marketing campaign keep you from seeing one of the best American movies this year, and Spielberg’s finest work in decades.”

Perhaps no critical enthusiasm could match that of A.O. Scott. In a glowing review in The New York Times, Scott sounds the trumpets for Spielberg’s epic, urging parents to bundle their children into the local multiplex to see history unfurl across the screen.

“Some of the ambition of ‘Lincoln‘ seems to be to answer the omissions and distortions of the cinematic past, represented by great films like D. W. Griffith‘s ‘Birth of a Nation,’ which glorified the violent disenfranchisement of African-Americans as a heroic second founding, and ‘Gone With the Wind,’ with its romantic view of the old South,” Scott writes. “To paraphrase what Woodrow Wilson said of Griffith, Mr. Spielberg writes history with lightning.”

For Kenneth Turan, the greatness of the film lies in its understatedness. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he lauded Spielberg for abandoning his more bombastic impulses to focus on the interior life of an American president.

“There is nothing bravura or overly emotional about Spielberg’s direction here, but the impeccable filmmaking is no less impressive for being quiet and to the point,” Turan writes. “The director delivers selfless, pulled-back satisfactions: he’s there in service of the script and the acting, to enhance the spoken word rather than burnish his reputation.”

It’s an “A,” declares Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, who hails the film for getting its hands dirty while depicting the sausage-making of politics.

“The Lincoln we see here is that rare movie creature, a heroic thinker,” he writes. “He has the serpentine intellect of a master lawyer, infused with a poet’s passion. ‘Lincoln’ brilliantly dramatizes the delicacy of politics, along with the raw brutality of it.”

In New York magazine, David Edelstein savored the film, but admitted that a few moments could have gone down more smoothly. In particular, he said the film’s initial scenes suffered from musty dialogue and some of the political wrangling it depicted was difficult to follow. Ultimately, however, he credited the picture with finding a fresh take on a president whose legacy has been dissected and debated for generations.

“By the time the movie ends, you don’t feel as if you know Lincoln – few, in his own time, claimed to know him,” Edelstein writes. “But you feel as if you know what it was like to be in his presence. And so an icon (it’s a measure of how promiscuously that word is thrown around that it seems inadequate for one of history’s truly iconic figures) has become a man – and, startlingly, within reach.”

There were a few critics, of course, who were not ready to endorse “Lincoln.” In the Newark Star-Ledger, Stephen Whitty slammed the movie for choking on its own self-serious and mocked it for too many scenes of intense debates held by men with copious facial hair.

“So if you’ve been sitting around wondering, ‘Gee, when is Spielberg ever going to make another ‘Amistad?’ ’ here’s your answer,” Whitty writes.

Apparently, Whitty would prefer another “Jaws.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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California teen steps into rattlesnake nest, survives

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – A teenage California girl searching for a cell phone signal to call her mother in a rural area outside San Diego inadvertently stepped into a nest of rattlesnakes and was bitten six times, but survived.

The 16-year-old, Vera Oliphant, spent four days in the intensive care unit of Sharp Grossmont Hospital, and doctors gave her 24 vials of antivenom after she was bitten by an adult rattlesnake and five young rattlers outside her uncle’s home.

“I was trying to find a signal to call my mom and text my boyfriend,” Oliphant said on Friday, a day after she was released from the hospital following the October 27 incident.

“I didn’t see them until I already stepped on their nest and I felt them biting me.”

“My vision started to go right away. First it looked like the snakes blended into the leaves and then I started seeing black spots around the edges and I started blacking out.”

She returned to her uncle’s home in Jamul, outside San Diego, and he immediately packed her into the car and rushed her to the emergency room, she said.

On the way, she talked to her mom and her boyfriend, who told her to stay calm so the venom wouldn’t spread.

“I told my mom and my boyfriend I love them in case I don’t get to see them again,” she said.

Doctors there administered 24 vials of antivenom to quash the dangerous toxins, according to a hospital spokesman. Snakebites usually aren’t fatal, although a handful of people die in the United States each year from snake bites, including bites from rattlesnakes.

Oliphant has recovered and will be returning to classes at Chaparral High School in El Cajon on Monday. She said the next time she can’t get a signal, she will handle it differently.

“Be careful where you step,” she said. “If you don’t need to, just wait until you are somewhere that you can call people.”

(Editing By Cynthia Johnston and Todd Eastham)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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How 'poor judgment' felled military star Petraeus

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - David Petraeus was a star on the battlefield, commanding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but was undone by "poor judgment" in engaging in an extramarital affair that led to his downfall as CIA director.

Just two days after his 60th birthday, Petraeus stepped down from the spy agency where he had held the top office since September 6, 2011.

"After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation," Petraeus told the shadow warriors he commanded at CIA.

It was a stunning downfall for a revered military man who was seen as one of the top American leaders of his generation and was once considered a potential contender for the White House.

Petraeus was credited with pulling Iraq from the brink of all-out civil war and for battlefield successes in Afghanistan after overseeing a surge of 30,000 troops ordered by President Barack Obama in late 2009. He became known for counter-insurgency strategies that were seen as gaining ground against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"I don't think he was professionally overrated. His were genuine accomplishments," said James Carafano, a war historian with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

At the time of his nomination to the CIA post, some Washington insiders had said the White House wanted to find a prominent position for Petraeus to ensure he would not be recruited by Republicans as a challenger to the 2012 Obama-Biden ticket.

When he was nominated to lead the CIA there were some concerns in intelligence circles that the high-profile four-star Army general might not be able to lead from the shadows as appropriate for a spy chief.

But once he took over the head office at the U.S. spy agency, Petraeus kept a decidedly low public profile.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, expressed regret about the resignation of "one of America's best and brightest" and said it was an "enormous loss" for the country.

"At CIA, Director Petraeus gave the agency leadership, stature, prestige and credibility both at home and abroad. On a personal level, I found his command of intelligence issues second to none," she said.

RESIGNATION ACCEPTED

After accepting his resignation about a year-and-a-half after nominating Petraeus to the CIA post, Obama said: "By any measure, he was one of the outstanding General officers of his generation, helping our military adapt to new challenges, and leading our men and women in uniform through a remarkable period of service in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he helped our nation put those wars on a path to a responsible end."

Earlier this week, in a Newsweek article entitled "General David Petraeus's Rules for Living," he listed 12 lessons for leadership. Number 5 was: "We all will make mistakes. The key is to recognize them and admit them, to learn from them, and to take off the rear­ view mirrors - drive on and avoid making them again."

In 2010 Petraeus stepped into the breach as the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to replace General Stanley McChrystal who was fired by Obama in a scandal over an article in which McChrystal and his aides made mocking comments about the president and some of his top advisers.

In 2009 Petraeus was diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer and underwent radiation treatment. The media-friendly general joked at that time at a Washington event that reporters were only gathered "to see if the guy is still alive."

Petraeus, born in Cornwall, New York, lives in Virginia with his wife Holly. They have two grown children, a son who was an Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, and a daughter.

Petraeus's wife, Holly, is an activist and volunteer who champions military families, and she continued that work after her husband retired from the military and moved to the CIA.

She currently is assistant director of the office of servicemember affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she tries to keep unscrupulous lenders from taking advantage of military personnel. The bureau was championed by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts this week.

Holly Petraeus is the daughter of four-star General William Knowlton, who was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when Petraeus was a cadet.

She briefed the press at the Pentagon on her efforts recently and was introduced by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who called her "a true friend of the Department of Defense and a dedicated member of our military family."

Petraeus has four Defense Distinguished Service Medal awards, three Distinguished Service Medal awards, the Bronze Star Medal for valor, and the State Department Distinguished Service Award.

He has a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University.

(Additional reporting by David Alexander, Matt Spetalnick and Diane Bartz; Editing by Warren Strobel and Jackie Frank)

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US video game sales drop 25 percent in October

NEW YORK (AP) — A research firm says U.S. retail sales of new video game hardware, software and accessories fell 25 percent in October.

The drop marks the 11th straight month of declining sales for physical game products. Many gamers are waiting for big holiday releases such as Activision Blizzard Inc.‘s “Call of Duty: Black Ops II.”

The NPD Group said Thursday that sales fell to $ 755.5 million from $ 1 billion a year earlier.

Sales of video games themselves, excluding PC titles, fell 25 percent to $ 432.6 million. Sales of hardware such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 fell 37 percent to $ 187.3 million. Sales of accessories, meanwhile, grew 5 percent to $ 135.6 million.

NPD estimates that retail sales account for about half of all video game spending. The rest is downloads, apps and the like.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Myanmar says Obama to visit later this month

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — President Barack Obama will make a groundbreaking visit later this month to Myanmar, an official said Thursday, following through with his policy of rapprochement to encourage democracy in the Southeast Asian nation.

The Myanmar official speaking from the capital, Naypyitaw, said Thursday that security for a visit on Nov. 18 or 19 had been prepared, but the schedule was not final. He asked not to be named because he was not authorized to give information to the media.

The official said Obama would meet with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as well as government officials including reformist President Thein Sein.

It would be the first-ever visit to Myanmar by an American president. U.S. officials have not yet announced any plans for a visit, which would come less than two weeks after Obama’s election to a second term.

Obama’s administration has sought to encourage the recent democratic progress under Thein Sein by easing sanctions applied against Myanmar’s previous military regime.

Officials in nearby Thailand and Cambodia have already informally announced plans for visits by Obama that same week. Cambodia is hosting a summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Thailand is a longtime close U.S. ally.

The visit to Myanmar, also known as Burma, would be the culmination of a dramatic turnaround in relations with Washington as the country has shifted from five decades of ruinous military rule and shaken off the pariah status it had earned through its bloody suppression of democracy.

Obama’s ending of the long-standing U.S. isolation of Myanmar’s generals has played a part in coaxing them into political reforms that have unfolded with surprising speed in the past year. The U.S. has appointed a full ambassador and suspended sanctions to reward Myanmar for political prisoner releases and the election of Nobel laureate Suu Kyi to parliament.

From Myanmar’s point of view, the lifting of sanctions is essential for boosting a lagging economy that was hurt not only by sanctions that curbed exports and foreign investment, but also by what had been a protectionist, centralized approach. Thein Sein’s government has initiated major economic reforms in addition to political ones.

A procession of senior diplomats and world leaders have traveled to Myanmar, stopping both in the remote, opulent capital city, which was built by the former ruling junta, and at Suu Kyi’s dilapidated lakeside villa in the main city of Yangon, where she spent 15 years under house arrest. New Zealand announced Thursday that Prime Minister John Key would visit Myanmar after attending the regional meetings in Cambodia.

The most senior U.S. official to visit was Hillary Rodham Clinton, who last December became the first U.S. secretary of state to travel to Myanmar in 56 years.

The Obama administration regards the political changes in Myanmar as a marquee achievement in its foreign policy, and one that could dilute the influence of China in a country that has a strategic location between South and Southeast Asia, regions of growing economic importance.

But exiled Myanmar activists and human rights groups are likely to criticize an Obama visit as premature, rewarding Thein Sein before his political and economic reforms have truly taken root. The military — still dominant and implicated in rights abuses — has failed to prevent vicious outbreaks of communal violence in the west of the country that have left scores dead.

Asia News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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“Twilight” fans camp out days ahead of “Breaking Dawn-Part 2″

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Dozens of excited “Twilight” fans set up tents in Los Angeles on Thursday ahead of next week’s world premiere of the last film in the vampire romance franchise.

Some 2,200 people from all over the world have registered to camp on a concrete plaza outside a downtown Los Angeles movie theater, movie studio Summit Entertainment said.

The fans – most of them young women – will get guaranteed spots to see stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner walk the red carpet for the November 12 premiere of “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2.”

Summit has laid on special activities during the five day wait, including a marathon screening of the four other films in the blockbuster franchise, surprise appearances from some cast members, and a “Twilight”-themed workout.

“We figured it was a once in a lifetime opportunity for some of us. This is the last movie. We’re never going to get to do it again and we wanted to hang out with some of our friends for the last one,” Bri-Anne Glover told Reuters Television as she settled in at the camp on Thursday.

“I love ‘Breaking Dawn’ because that’s kind of where I am in my life. I’ve got the husband, I’ve got my children, and we’re getting on with our lives and having a happy life and the same with Edward and Jacob and Bella,” said fan Eryka Bradford.

The “Twilight” books by author Stephenie Meyer have been a publishing sensation and the four movies have made more than $ 2.5 billion combined at box offices worldwide.

The final film sees the bliss of newlyweds Bella (Stewart) and Edward (Pattinson) and their daughter threatened by an ancient vampire coven.

“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2″ opens in several European countries on November 14 and arrives in U.S. movie theaters on November 16.

(Reporting by Lindsay Claiborn, editing by Jill Serjeant)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Hospital guidelines not linked to readmissions: study

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Procedural guidelines designed to ensure patients get quality care while in the hospital are also thought to reduce the chances a patient will need to be readmitted down the line, but a new study suggests there’s little connection between the two.

“The idea was, increasing the quality of care provided by these hospitals would improve the outcomes,” said the report’s lead author Dr. Michaela S. Stefan, an academic hospitalist at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass.

In an effort to control costs, both hospitals and the federal government have been trying for some time to lower the number of patients who are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged.

Starting in October, a hospital’s readmission rates are one factor the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) take into account when deciding what to pay for patient treatment.

Right now, about one in four patients will be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, according to Stefan and her colleagues. And it’s estimated that those unplanned rehospitalizations cost Medicare $ 17.6 billion in 2004.

One approach to lowering readmissions has been the creation of quality care guidelines for specific conditions, such as heart attack or pneumonia.

CMS also reports readmission numbers for hospitals on the website Hospital Compare: http://1.usa.gov/Z7TeXy.

Still, researchers have been asking whether these approaches make a difference in readmission rates.

Another recent study suggested that many factors outside a hospital’s control can cause a patient to need rehospitalization. For example, the person’s ability to keep up with their medications at home, or to make follow-up visits to a personal physician (see Reuters Health article of October 19, 2012, here: http://reut.rs/Z7uCy9).

For the new study, Stefan and her colleagues looked at whether the degree to which a hospital followed guidelines to the letter predicted how many Medicare patients came back within 30 days of their first discharge.

Using a 2007 database of patients on the government insurance program for seniors, the researchers analyzed patient outcomes for a number of ailments and surgical procedures, including heart attacks, heart failure, pneumonia and stomach, heart and orthopedic surgeries.

Overall, the study included information on patients from thousands of hospitals across the U.S.

For instance, 2,773 hospitals treated 322,668 people for heart failure during the study period while 2,940 hospitals treated 328,830 people with pneumonia.

The researchers gave each hospital a score between zero and 100 percent, based on the percentage of patients who received all the recommended treatments for their condition.

For heart attack patients, these could include receiving an aspirin when they arrived at the hospital or, if appropriate, smoking cessation counseling before discharge. For pneumonia patients, prescribing the correct antibiotics and checking on a patient’s flu vaccine status are among procedures on the checklist.

Of the 117,514 heart attack patients, about 96 percent received some of the recommended treatments. However, only about 88 percent got all of them.

And about 80 percent of stomach surgery patients got some of the recommended treatments, but only about 46 percent received them all.

The researchers then looked at how many of those patients returned to the hospital within 30 days after being discharged.

Overall, they found that hospitals with the best scores for following guidelines did not have “meaningfully” lower readmissions than hospitals with the worst scores.

“Even when the associations were statistically significant, the differences in the readmission rates of high and low-performing hospitals were small,” the team writes in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

The researchers add that some possible reasons for the lack of association between the two measures could be that these guidelines have “little impact on the risk of readmission” or that the guidelines are too broadly defined.

The study itself did have limitations too, they acknowledge.

For example, it only looked at Medicare patients over 66 years old, so the findings may not apply to younger people. Also, the data are only from a single year and were based on what was reported to Medicare from the hospital records, so the information may not be complete.

Nevertheless, the researchers conclude that encouraging hospitals to report these guideline data to the public, such as on Hospital Compare, will do little to lower readmission rates.

Still, it’s good information to provide to patients, Stefan said.

“It’s important to know that the Hospital Compare site exists. Unfortunately, the public accesses Hospital Compare very little,” she added.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/SxsNpQ Journal of General Internal Medicine, online October 16, 2012.

Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Obama breaks down while speaking to staff, volunteers

The morning after he won re-election, an emotional President Barack Obama credited his youthful staff of several hundred with running a campaign that will "go on in the annals of history."

"What you guys have accomplished will go on in the annals of history and they will read about it and they'll marvel about it," said Obama told his team Wednesday morning inside the Chicago campaign headquarters, tears streaming down his face.

"The most important thing you need to know is that your journey's just beginning. You're just starting. And whatever good we do over the next four years will pale in comparison to whatever you guys end up accomplishing in the years and years to come," he said.

The moment, captured by the Obama campaign's cameras and posted online, offers a rare glimpse at the president unplugged and emotional. During the first four years of his presidency, Obama has never been seen publicly crying.

He first came to Chicago, he told the campaign staff, "knowing that somehow I wanted to make sure that my life attached itself to helping kids get a great education or helping people living in poverty to get decent jobs and be able to work and have dignity. And to make sure that people didn't have to go to the emergency room to get health care."

"The work that I did in those communities changed me much more than I changed those communities because it taught me the hopes and aspirations and the grit and resilience of ordinary people," he said, as senior strategist David Axelrod and campaign manager Jim Messina looked on. "And it taught me the fact that under the surface differences, we all have common hopes and we all have common dreams. And it taught me something about how I handle disappointment and what it meant to work hard on a common endeavor, and I grew up."

"So when I come here and I look at all of you, what comes to mind is, it's not that you guys remind me of myself, it's the fact that you are so much better than I was in so many ways. You're smarter, you're so better organized, you're more effective," he said.

Obama said he expected many of those who helped to re-elect him will assume new roles in progressive politics, calling that prospect a "source of my strength and inspiration."

Senior campaign officials said Thursday that the Obama campaign infrastructure - the field offices and network of hundreds of thousands of volunteers - would undergo a period of transition in the coming weeks to determine how to remain sustainable and influential.

"We have remarkable staff, and the campaign that Jim [Messina] put together, you know, is the best in history," said senior Obama adviser David Plouffe. "But the reason those people got involved was because they believed in Barack Obama. It was the relationship between them and our candidate."

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Siemens aims to save 6 billion euros by 2014

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Merkel says Germany, Britain must work together on EU

LONDON (Reuters) – Germany and Britain must cooperate to work round their differences on the European Union‘s long-term spending plans, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday.

“Despite differences that we have it is very important for me that the UK and Germany work together,” Merkel said through a translator before a meeting in London with Prime Minister David Cameron to discuss the EU‘s 2014-2020 budget.

“We always have to do something that will stand up to public opinion back home. Not all of the expenditure that has been earmarked has been used with great efficiency … We need to address that,” she said.

EU leaders meet in Brussels on November 22-23 to try to secure a seven-year budget for the 27-nation bloc amid signs of differences of opinion over what action should be taken.

(Reporting by Peter Griffiths; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

Europe News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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