Killers Kill, Dead Men Die

Like any private eye worth his money clip, Oscar Slade (Bruce Willis) is not a talkative man, especially when he's in the company of his junior partner, Dan O'Bannion (Ben Affleck), and their young protégé, Jimmy (Tobey Maguire). But this night is different. Oscar's got something on his mind.

Oscar: There's only two types of people in this town: the Killers and the Killed. If you're not the one, you're gonna end up the other.
Jimmy: What about the dames, chief? Where do they fit in?
Oscar: Have you seen the dames in this town? Warm beneath the sheets, hot under the collar, and ice-cold under the skin... That reminds me—I've got an appointment. Don't wait up, fellas. I might be a while

THE CRIME SCENE.

On a hard bed of wet L.A. pavement, Oscar (Bruce Willis) has begun his eternal rest. The doll with the .44 (Kirsten Dunst) appears to be none other than Laura Lydeker, an heiress whose father owns half the lemon trees in the state of California and whose mother owns the other half.

Laura says she has no idea how she ended up here with a pistol in her hand. "I've never been fond of guns," she tells the police. "They make an awful racket." She also says she's not sure she's Laura Lydeker. It seems she has suffered a light blow to the skull. Funny, the bullets in her pistol don't match the lead souvenirs in Oscar's back.

THE FUNERAL.

There are three types of funerals: celebratory, sad, and sad-sack. Tamiko Ohira (Rinko Kikuchi), "queenpin" of Japantown's numbers racket, is intent on making sure Oscar stays in the ground, while skid-row preacher Abelard (Bill Nighy), who engaged in petty heists with the deceased during their misspent youth, can't say he didn't see this coming. The guttersnipe orphan girl (Abigail Breslin) is the only one able to produce anything resembling real tears, but what's her angle? Just because she's a kid doesn't mean she's on the level. Mourning attire suits the lovely songbird Doña Perfecta (Penélope Cruz), but if that's how she dresses for a funeral, imagine what she puts on for the late show (and peels off for the later show). O'Bannion (Ben Affleck) takes notice. Beautiful girls need protection in this town.

THE LADIES OF L.A. IN POWDER ROOM.
Socialite Eve Greeley-Waddington (Anjelica Huston) finds it amusing, but not surprising, that the Lydeker name has arisen in connection with the murder of a low-life shamus. "Lemons grow on trees, reputations, decidedly, do not." Estelle Willisford (Sharon Stone), of the department-store Willisfords, could not agree more, once she's through applying lip paint. And if Ethel Barringsley (Diane Lane) seems less than enthralled by the topic at hand, she probably has her reasons—and damned interesting ones, at that.

THE INTERROGATION.
Detective James Archer (Alec Baldwin), of the L.A.P.D. homicide squad, hears out the soliloquy of surprise informant Muriel Slade (Jennifer Connelly), twin sister of the murdered man. Beat cop Mack Shaughnessy (Aaron Eckhart) keeps a grip on his stick, just in case her tale starts making even more sense.

Det. Archer: Murder is a savage affair, Miss Slade.

Muriel: And what kind of affairs do you prefer, Detective?

Det. Archer: That's my own business, Miss Slade.

Muriel: Your own business, huh? Any chance I could make partner?

Det. Archer: Lady, your partner is murder. And it's a silent partner.

Shaughnessy (thinking): If it's silent, why don't you two lovebirds shut it? This ain't the El Havana.

THE DRESSING ROOM.

The Cuban (Pedro Almodóvar) runs a nice, clean club. He doesn't want any trouble. He may have heard things, though. What kinds of things? Just things, that's all. Things that make a man whisper "murder" in the night. His number-one songbird, Doña Perfecta (Penélope Cruz), who'll be closing tonight's bill with her signature medley—a rousing patriotic number, a love ballad, and a socko rumba—elaborates: She says she may or may not have heard that Oscar, on the night he was killed, had placed a certain bet on a certain prizefight. Beyond that, she knows nada. Except that the fight in question may or may not be taking place at the Forum this very night, and that School Boy Simmons may or may not be planning to taste the canvas in Round Four of his bout with Sugar Foot Robinson.

THE RING. INT. THE FORUM—NIGHT
Champ turned trainer Mike "Tiny" Galento (Sylvester Stallone) has taught Sugar Foot Robinson (Djimon Hounsou) the true meaning of boxing: when they tell you to take out your opponent in the fourth, you take him out in the fourth, and you don't ask questions—got it? Bootlegger turned trainer Magic Pete (Forest Whitaker) has similarly instructed his fighter, School Boy Simmons (Robert Downey Jr.), that the only sweet thing about "the sweet science" is the wad of bills they hand you during the post-fight rubdown. Tonight's wad will be fat indeed. The lady in red (Jessica Biel) doesn't mind if you take a dive, so long as you can keep her neck in chinchilla. Private eye Jimmy (Tobey Maguire) has made the scene because he knows Oscar placed a not-so-friendly wager on tonight's entertainment. He knows something else too: dead men don't collect their winnings.Spin dissolve to …

LOBBY OF THE DAMNED. INT. HOTEL LA BREA—NIGHT
Making like lovebirds, undercover police detectives Sloan (Ed Norton) and Minsky (Kate Winslet) are working the Hotel La Brea on a tip. The place is a rattrap, but that's why they're here: to trap rats. And, with any luck, exterminate them. The owner, blind racketeer Marlon Doppel (Robert De Niro), knows who offed poor Oscar, but he's not saying. Neither is Muriel Slade (Jennifer Connelly), who has so deftly misled the law for reasons having to do with saving her own skin. The languid drink of water in the corner (Julianne Moore) is content to know not much of anything beyond which gentleman will take on the job of keeping her in silk. Tilda Lydeker (Helen Mirren) arrives in search of answers, unaware that she may be checking in one last time before checking out for good.

END OF THE PARTY.

For most of L.A., it's morning. For those here, it will always be last night. Jimmy (Tobey Maguire) searches the piano keys for a melody that will make sense of it all. The youngest Lydeker, Lydia (Jessica Alba), may be willing to carry his tune, but Ethel Barringsley (Diane Lane) listens without hearing a note. She hasn't been the same since Oscar died, and her husband, Robert Barringsley (James Franco), hasn't been the same since she hasn't been the same. Behind Daddy's bookshelves, Laura Lydeker (Kirsten Dunst) finds herself almost fully recovered from her amnesia, but the young lemon heiress wishes she could forget what she's seen all over again. School Boy Simmons (Robert Downey Jr.), now a wealthy ex-prizefighter, has helped her through her darkest hours. Speaking of which, what did happen last night? Shouldn't Aunt Tilda have slunk in by now, the usual cheap aftershave on her breath?Dissolve to …

THE SHOOT-OUT. EXT. HOTEL LA BREA, FIRE ESCAPE—NIGHT
Is this a flashback, or did the projectionist mix up the reels? Even the director can't be sure. Back at the Hotel La Brea, undercover cop Minsky (Kate Winslet) would like a word with Tilda (Helen Mirren), but if not, the flatfoot femme is more than happy to let her lady pistol do the talking for both of them. And when her pistol starts talking … well, like a lot of ladies, it's hard to shut up.Once the cartridges are emptied, we find two beauties taking the big sleep in the L.A. night. A sleep that won't be haunted by the secret Tilda is taking with her to the Lydeker-family mausoleum (a ways down Halcyon Lane from Oscar's sorry plot). A sleep that won't be disturbed by the visage of the man she may or may not have hired—for a cost beyond price—to plug poor Oscar. A mad face, leering and twisted. And the most devilish eyebrows. It is the face of …

THE BIG REVEAL. EXT. SOMEWHERE IN L.A.—DUSK
… the face of this man (Jack Nicholson), who kills for love, or money, or some combination of the two. Or maybe it's just for kicks. Wherever people try to make themselves into something good and decent, wherever a man tries to make that one last score, wherever a woman feels like yielding to a fellow, he is there. In a town where the law is kill or be killed, die or die later, he is always watching, always waiting for his chance, and revealing himself only in the final reel, with the City of So-Called Angels spreading below him like a still-warm bloodslick.Forget it, Oscar. It's … somewhere.Pull back to reveal: a wild, unpruned lemon grove.

THE END

::La niña Tere, I (heart) Vanity Fair::

English is not moralist

Morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution.

the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral rammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language.

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

Dr. de Waal’s views are based on years of observing nonhuman primates, starting with work on aggression in the 1960s. He noticed then that after fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser. But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject.

He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality.

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them.

These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality. Dr. de Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.

Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies, though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal’s view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. “I look at religions as recent additions,” he said. “Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do.”

As Dr. de Waal sees it, human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders. “The profound irony is that our noblest achievement — morality — has evolutionary ties to our basest behavior — warfare,” he writes. “The sense of community required by the former was provided by the latter.”

Dr. de Waal has faced down many critics in evolutionary biology and psychology in developing his views. The evolutionary biologist George Williams dismissed morality as merely an accidental byproduct of evolution, and psychologists objected to attributing any emotional state to animals. Dr. de Waal convinced his colleagues over many years that the ban on inferring emotional states was an unreasonable restriction, given the expected evolutionary continuity between humans and other primates.
His latest audience is moral philosophers, many of whom are interested in his work and that of other biologists. “In departments of philosophy, an increasing number of people are influenced by what they have to say,” said Gilbert Harman, a Princeton University philosopher.
Dr. Philip Kitcher, a philosopher at Columbia University, likes Dr. de Waal’s empirical approach. “I have no doubt there are patterns of behavior we share with our primate relatives that are relevant to our ethical decisions,” he said. “Philosophers have always been beguiled by the dream of a system of ethics which is complete and finished, like mathematics. I don’t think it’s like that at all.”
But human ethics are considerably more complicated than the sympathy Dr. de Waal has described in chimps. “Sympathy is the raw material out of which a more complicated set of ethics may get fashioned,” he said. “In the actual world, we are confronted with different people who might be targets of our sympathy. And the business of ethics is deciding who to help and why and when.”
Many philosophers believe that conscious reasoning plays a large part in governing human ethical behavior and are therefore unwilling to let everything proceed from emotions, like sympathy, which may be evident in chimpanzees. The impartial element of morality comes from a capacity to reason, writes Peter Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton, in “Primates and Philosophers.” He says, “Reason is like an escalator — once we step on it, we cannot get off until we have gone where it takes us.”
That was the view of Immanuel Kant, Dr. Singer noted, who believed morality must be based on reason, whereas the Scottish philosopher David Hume, followed by Dr. de Waal, argued that moral judgments proceed from the emotions.
But biologists like Dr. de Waal believe reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached. They argue that morality evolved at a time when people lived in small foraging societies and often had to make instant life-or-death decisions, with no time for conscious evaluation of moral choices. The reasoning came afterward as a post hoc justification. “Human behavior derives above all from fast, automated, emotional judgments, and only secondarily from slower conscious processes,” Dr. de Waal writes.
However much we may celebrate rationality, emotions are our compass, probably because they have been shaped by evolution, in Dr. de Waal’s view. For example, he says: “People object to moral solutions that involve hands-on harm to one another. This may be because hands-on violence has been subject to natural selection whereas utilitarian deliberations have not.”
Philosophers have another reason biologists cannot, in their view, reach to the heart of morality, and that is that biological analyses cannot cross the gap between “is” and “ought,” between the description of some behavior and the issue of why it is right or wrong. “You can identify some value we hold, and tell an evolutionary story about why we hold it, but there is always that radically different question of whether we ought to hold it,” said Sharon Street, a moral philosopher at New York University. “That’s not to discount the importance of what biologists are doing, but it does show why centuries of moral philosophy are incredibly relevant, too.”
Biologists are allowed an even smaller piece of the action by Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at the University of North Carolina. He believes morality developed after human evolution was finished and that moral sentiments are shaped by culture, not genetics. “It would be a fallacy to assume a single true morality could be identified by what we do instinctively, rather than by what we ought to do,” he said. “One of the principles that might guide a single true morality might be recognition of equal dignity for all human beings, and that seems to be unprecedented in the animal world.”
Dr. de Waal does not accept the philosophers’ view that biologists cannot step from “is” to “ought.” “I’m not sure how realistic the distinction is,” he said. “Animals do have ‘oughts.’ If a juvenile is in a fight, the mother must get up and defend her. Or in food sharing, animals do put pressure on each other, which is the first kind of ‘ought’ situation.”
Dr. de Waal’s definition of morality is more down to earth than Dr. Prinz’s. Morality, he writes, is “a sense of right and wrong that is born out of groupwide systems of conflict management based on shared values.” The building blocks of morality are not nice or good behaviors but rather mental and social capacities for constructing societies “in which shared values constrain individual behavior through a system of approval and disapproval.” By this definition chimpanzees in his view do possess some of the behavioral capacities built in our moral systems.
“Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are,” Dr. de Waal wrote in his 1996 book “Good Natured.” Biologists ignored this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities. But this is a fallacy, in Dr. de Waal’s view. Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in “Primates and Philosophers,” with “a compass for life’s choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality.”

como una chica

El concurso que sí es para mí.

Ya nada de andar quitando niños en las fiestas de chapultepec, nada de esperar la voz de Chabelo que nunca llegó -snif-, nada que el karaoke de MTV... hoy mismo empiezo a practicar mi risa *_*
- la de Cruela D'vil que evita las arrugas -ja...ja...ja
- cuando me enteré que el despachador de la ofi estaba pegado con un diurex -jejeje
- cuando me enteré que el despachador de la ofi estaba pegado con un diurex y se cayó -jajaja
- cuando me enteré que el despachador de la ofi estaba pegado con un diurex, y se cayó... sobre la cabezota de una tipa -jajAjAJAJjajA
- con los chistes de Noel -...... ejem... ejem

Yo quiero concursar porque soy bien fans del show... y mas de Kendra!! Pa quien no la conzca es la primera, la que tiene cara de -soy linda y soy fácil- ahora ya se en qué usar la grabadora de sonido de mi phone...

Ya tengo Hi5

Ya, ya, ya... ya se que tooooooodos deben tener un Hi5 y que soy una abuela en esto de la tecnología... no me importa: ya tengo uno!!

Jaaaar es tan divertido ver cuánta gente que creía perdida está ahi!! omaygad, el Tibu, el Scrappy, los de la anexa... como en esta fotito, que no están perdidos, pero son de la anexa jiji

Y bueno, el buen Armando me mandó un mensaje pa' ver si nos reuníamos en unos de estos días a pegarle al vidrio... yo digo que sí! además, ayer Aymara y Pavel (jajaja me acuerdo cuando unas escuinclas de 4° se despedazaban por todo el patio de la Prepa 9 pa' quedarse con su gorrito navideño -snif, me siento nostálgica-) se vieron por la tarde... yo quiero verlos cualquiera de estas!

Chale en una de esas encuentro a la niña que robó mi casita manzana en el kinder -Ilona Kadas Stavi-... si conocen a la susodicha díganle que mi duelo sigue... en especial en época de manzanas.

**La niña Tere, y ya**

pinche güero

Hatte meine mitstudentin recht als sie sagte, dass mexikanerviele versprechungen machen in sachen "ja, ich komme dann unddann nach deutschland" und sie in der regel nicht einhalten.