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Cars

Suzuki Swift sensation

“You are not special,” Chuck Palahniuk once spat onto a page. “You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”

Brutal, perhaps, but what else would you expect from a book as ragged as ‘Fight Club’? And he does have a point. If we’re all as unique as Oprah and Dr Phil tell us, why are our choices always the same: life or death, chicken or beef, Yaris or Polo?

With Toyota and VW’s littlest cars more common than potholes on the N1, it’s easy to forget there are other options. Like the Suzuki Swift, a car that gets the priorities right.

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Movies Reviews

‘Star Trek’ set to stun

They’ve split infinitives to boldly go where no man has gone before. They’ve battled aliens more plasticky than Michael Jackson. They’ve single-handedly kept the polyester industry in business. They’ve pranced about on worlds of paper mache and polystyrene. They’ve even saved the bloody whales.

But never before have the crew of USS Enterprise punched as hard, kicked as fast, warped as far, and blown up as much as they do now.

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Music Reviews

U2 look to the horizon

Larry Mullen pounds away like the Eveready Bunny on speed. Adam Clayton’s fingers stampede up and down his bass guitar’s fretboard. With his amp dialled up to 11, The Edge fires off savage riffs of mass destruction. U2’s misfiring ‘Get On Your Boots’ certainly relies on a shock and awe approach. And yet what hits hardest is an almost throwaway line from Bono: “I don’t want to talk about wars between nations.”

And, for most of the band’s 12th studio album, the man who never shuts up about poverty, Aids, third world debt and wars between nations actually keeps his word. The Big Themes are edged out by character studies of ordinary people, himself (“Napoleon in high heels”), and, clearly unable to ditch the political entirely, an Afghan man wounded in a bomb blast.

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Cars

The ugliest cars, ever!

Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. It goes a long way in explaining how our future president has amassed five wives. And also how cars like the SsangYong Stavic, Fiat Multipla, and Pontiac Aztek ever made it out of the design studio and onto the showroom floor.

“But cars are there just to get us from A to B,” you may argue. Fine point. But there’s no reason to look like an idiot on the way there.

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Music Reviews

Springsteen still ‘Working On A Dream’

Something’s wrong with Bruce Springsteen.

“Is there anybody alive out there?” he recently demanded on ‘Radio Nowhere’; now it’s a repeated “Can you hear me?” on ‘Outlaw Pete’.

The man must be going deaf, because it’s sure as hell not insecurity. Within two years of the chest-thumping ‘Magic’ he’s released the even ballsier ‘Working On A Dream’ which, despite its title, is no boring state of the nation address set to pomp and circumstance. Instead, The Boss’ 16th studio album is a muscular rock record that sidesteps politics to bask simply in the hope of the ‘yes we can’ generation.

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Movies Reviews

Benjamin Button breaks your heart

Don’t have the three hours to sit through an epic tale spanning eight decades, three continents, two world wars, and one enduring love? Here’s the gist: youth is wasted on the young.

Look beyond the larger-than-life presentation, get your head around the central premise – dude ages in reverse – and, yes, there’s not really much to ‘The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button’. But don’t let that put you off. This is compelling storytelling, plain and simple. Whimsical fantasy and genuine heartbreak collide in a delicate fairytale, lovingly and intimately told.

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Movies Reviews

Angelina Jolie is the real ‘Changeling’

Computer hacker, coke-head supermodel, cyborg, collector of bones, sociopathic mental patient, the world’s hottest archaeologist (with pout), mail-order bride, humanitarian aid worker, Colin Farrell’s mom, and professional assassin (twice) — her roles have been diverse but today none could be more appropriate for Angelina Jolie than that of mother.

In ‘Changeling’, the serial collector of children plays single mom Christine Collins. She dotes on her son, Walter, but the demands of her job mean the nine-year-old has developed quite an independent streak. So when she’s unexpectedly called in to work on a weekend, she thinks little of leaving him home alone. It is quiet, suburban Los Angeles in 1929, after all.

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Movies Reviews

‘The Wrestler’ gets real

Christian Bale lost 28kg in four months, dropping to 54kg by eating a can of tuna or an apple per day. Daniel Day Lewis studied Czech, broke two ribs by hunching over for weeks, learned to live off the land, and took lessons as an apprentice butcher. And Robert DeNiro worked as a New York taxi driver for three months, boxed competitively, and gained a third of his body weight.

Amateurs.

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Music Reviews

340ml are sorry for the delay

There’s something undeniably depressing about the bleak apartheid architecture – the tatty Regent’s Park Hotel; Triompf’s faceless flats; Parktown’s cold concrete constructions – that comprises the artwork of ‘Sorry For The Delay’. And yet, in Ross Garrett’s striking photographs, the gloomy buildings have a haunting beauty.

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Movies Reviews

‘Valkyrie’ soars

Tom Cruise has played dreamy barman, hotshot secret agent man, loveable fighter pilot, teen underwear model, money-showing sports agent, cop-of-the-future, multiple kind-hearted lawyers, saviour of the universe, p*ssy-obsessed motivational speaker, self-righteous hitman, wannabe Samurai warrior, lisping girly vampire, and a racing driver called Cole Trickle.

But (with the possible exception of that disgusting bald guy who shook his ass through ‘Tropic Thunder’), he’s really only ever played Tom Cruise. ‘Valkyrie’ is little different. No German accent. No Oscar-baiting attempt at genuine transformation into a real-life historical figure. Just Tom Cruise in an eye patch and Nazi uniform. This is clearly no biopic with the accompanying attention to detail, or even the truth.

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