The latest research say using sugar substitutes and drinking diet sodas still keeps the body craving sweets, and in an ideal world the best thing would be to cut them from your diet altogether and eventually lose the craving. Well, one thing at a time...

Good luck Harry. I'm workin' it to. Down from 294 to 269 so far on the year. The joys of seeing my penis knows no bounds!

was it?

I'm sure we all sympathise with ANYONE who has medical issues - but then we ALL have medical issues at one time or another; we ALL have family members who suffer in one way or another. But we protect their DIGNITY and our own by not broadcasting private medical details all over the net.

Are Harry's relatives - the ones he claims to care about - are they aware that he is sharing such sensitive information with thousands of strangers? I sincerely doubt whether they appreciate it.

And what the fuck does any of this have to do with movies? We come here for movie news - not to be subjected to the bizarrely inappropriate confidences of the site writers. Keep your personal lives out of it please!

Thats what killed my grandfather. He had Type 2 as well, but it's was the drinking that did him in. The insulin shots can be just as damaging but add a little liquor intake every so often and you got a guaranteed death sentence.

Dialysis ain't no fun.

Only peeing out a few drops of urine each day never feeling like your emptying your bladder.

Getting a esophageal pump put in so you can manually remove fluid from around the heart by reebok pumping this thing that lies just under your left chest area.

Having both your legs chopped off cause of poor circulation- any and most injuries and bruises not healing or going gangrene.

None of that shit is fun man!

I wouldn't say it if I didn't care. I watched a wonderful man die in a very cruel manner. I wish more than anything that someone called him on his bullshit ages ago. No one should die like that!

I know your good people. And I've always felt bad that your big thing was eating. We all have bad habits. I wish my addiction was food.

Anyways on a more positive note. Just give your self to some psychical exercise 20 minutes a day, always try something new so it doesn't get boring, and you'll be ok- soon you'll be all buff and shit, and you wont have any body image shame.

No stomach vice, none of that easy way out shit. Be a warrior man. You can do it!!!

That being said, I didn't like the movie, but the lack of explanation of the plants origin is NOT one of the reasons why.

Stay with the weight-bearing exercise. The change in diet is going to start incinerating the pounds in about three months. So prepare for...

1. Your knees are going to be in rough shape once you are ambulatory. Hence the weight training now.

2. Check with your provider about skin-reduction surgery. Eventually, probably a year, you're going to need it.

I'd like to say better late than never, but understand, if you balk on it this time, you're dead. No bullshit. Just dead. So I hope those around beat your ass if you being to slip, but I have a feeling your wife gives you something more important to live for, especially if you want children. Just as Mori. Be strong.

So, when I saw that Harry reviewed The Ruins, which is a movie that has picqued my interest, I was screaming in my head: "Please, OH PLEASE, Harry, PLEASE do not compare this in ANY way to Cabin Fever."

But you did, and now I don't know what to do.

Well, I know what NOT to do - bring my dad to see it. No way am I taking that chance again. Not now, anyway.

Thanks a lot, Harry. I suppose this may be a good thing, since my expectations have been lowered down to a level that should avoid disappointment now.

Plus, Jena Malone anyone? I love her too.

Lastly, Harry, sorry to hear you got type II diabetes. But I tell you, I've had type I diabetes for fifteen years and the disease's benefits far outweigh its drawbacks. Your dental bills are reduced to nothing, your fitness increases, your diet skyrockets into healthyland... for the price of only needles, humalog, and a low blood sugar once in a while. It ain't so bad. Good luck working out!

Our health insurance industry is faulty not for costs but for deniability of claims. Health is not a fucking meritocracy, everyone has the right to good health, even the poorest among us. Why in the fuck are we still debating this fucking puritanical nonsense 'work = ethic' bullshit that keeps us in the bottom half of the civilized world in regards to health care? Because a frightened populace is a malleable populace. Fuck people who say that the 'poor should just get jobs'...And don't go out of their way to fucking help the poor find jobs. NIMBY is alive and well, you elitist fucks.

However, the advantage of a book over a movie is that you can spend more time explaining things. So, to that end, can someone who read the book answer the biggest plot hole in the movie?

For crying out loud, if the villagers didn't want the vines to spread...if they were SO concerned about quarantining them in the ruins...I mean so much so that they were even willing to kill anyone who stepped on to the grounds...then WHY the fuck didn't the villagers just burn down the Ruins at some point? Just set fire to it all and torch the vegetation and destroy everything once and for all?

Seriously, the movie doesn't establish that the natives are PRAYING to the Ruins (as Mayan descendants or something), nor does it show that they revere the vines as god-like entities or nonsense like that. They clearly KNOW the vines are dangerous, which is why they've even cleared a wide dirt perimeter around the pyramid -- laying salt down and all that so the vines can't spread. Which ALSO means that they clearly know that the vines CAN be killed, which should likewise make them less fearful of them. They may be mutant plants, but they're still fucking plants all the same.

Not to mention, the village leader -- chunky pistol guy who shoots the first kid -- IS using a gun. And he and the other villagers (as they all show up) are clearly shown dressed in modern world clothes, which means they clearly have had ongoing contact with the nearby town that is only 10 miles away. I mean, it's not like they're portrayed as half-naked APOCALYPTO natives running around in war paint with only leotards on. So clearly they have contact with the outside world, with that town, which we ALSO know has access to modern things like FUCKING CARS AND GAS since we SEE that in the film.

So why the fuck wouldn't the jungle villagers just band together with the town and clear out a bit more space...widen the dirt path, chop down more trees, whatever...and then just use gasoline or burnings logs or shoot flaming arrows with balloons attached to them (that contain gasoline or lighter fluid or whatever) into the Ruins to destroy the vines once and for all?

I mean the logic lapses like that -- where you sit back either during the movie or immediately afterwards and find yourself saying, "Hey, wait a minute! Why didn't they just..." is what killed this movie for me. Frankly, I just thought the plot...and the way the characters acted...from start to finish was just dumb. I mean, going back to the whole notion of burning or killing the vines, for that matter, when the teens were atop the Ruins -- and this is about midway through the movie where we SEE the teens realize that the vines ARE alive because they WATCH the vines swiping the German Guy's cut-off legs -- why the hell did they never make ANY attempt to even cut some of the brush back? For crying out loud, in a scene only a few minutes later, you see that all four of them are sleeping in the tent spooned up together, but no one stays on watch? Even stupider, in an exterior shot that we see during that scene (the camera pointed on the tent), you can clearly see that the vines are right up against the tent itself. What, no one thought to push the vines back then either? "Hey, I got an idea. Let's ALL go to sleep with the killer vines pushing up against our tent and NOT worry about it." Why not toss some of the booze onto the vines and torch them? And even if you didn't want to TOUCH the vines, why not take the metal frame that they used to lift German guy out of the pit to create a make-shift RAKE to just reach out at the vines and rip at them apart or out of the dirt and then toss them over the side? What, none of these kids has ever done yard work in their lives?

But going back to my core point...and maybe this is something that was explained in the book, but didn't make it to the film...but why the fuck didn't the villagers and nearby town just burn the ruins down? It's was shown to be just ONE pyramid...not a sprawling archeological site spreading out miles on end...so just burn the fucker down and be done with it.

One of the changes is pretty obvious--in the book, it's one of the guys who spends the whole time thinking the vine is in him, and tries to cut it out. Obviously someone involved in the adaptation for the screen decided it would be a good idea to switch this to one of the girls who would be more pleasant to look at pulling her shirt up and her pants down more. No big mystery there, but it's kinda funny.

There are also lots of little bits cut out from the time they are trapped up there on the pyramid with the vines. Clearly they did this for time, but the result to me is that it doesn't FEEL like they're up there for a long time. One of the things that made the book so spooky is that they didn't spend most of their time up there terrified, they spent it sitting there, running out of water, waiting to die, going over their limited options again and again. It's much darker and much bleaker, while the movie is quicker and more focused on the action. Maybe they didn't want to bore people? I'll bet we'll see some of these as deleted scenes on the DVD.

But the biggest and most obvious change--and again, SPOILERS

is that in the book, everybody dies, nobody survives. At the end of the movie, Jeff and Amy make a plan where he distracts the natives, who think that she is dead, and she makes a run for it. He dies, but she makes it out alive, runs to the Jeep, and drives away (presumably spreading the bits of the vine on her clothes to the rest of civilization). But, again, in the book, they all die up there on the hill, and nobody makes it out alive. Since this is the ending, it doesn't affect the way the plot unfolds for most of the movie, but the two endings leave you with a very different feeling--the book ending on a darker and more hopeless tone than the movie (and making the very final scene in both, when the Greeks show up and presumably get trapped with the vines all over again, even crueler and bleaker in the book, since we've seen that it's truly impossible to escape, and so there is no hope for them either). I wonder why they chose to change it? Maybe they have an idea for a sequel? Or maybe they filmed the original ending, but it didn't test well with audiences? I wouldn't be surprised if we see the book's ending on the DVD too, but I felt like they kind of wimped out by letting Amy survive in the movie.

So I thought it was as inconsequential as any horror movie--I'm in no hurry to ever see it again--but it was by no means horrible, and probably better than the average throwaway dead teen movie. The book too, while no great literature, was effective, and stayed with me for a while after I finished it. But I get the feeling that a lot of punch would be gone from the book if you've already seen the movie, since it really does follow it pretty closely, and a lot of what makes it work is the surprises, and your gradual realization that their situation really is hopeless.

As for why the main characters don't make more of an effort to fight the plants, as Node mentioned, the book does go into that more, but it's a lot easier to look at the situation in hindsight and see how it could be managed in an organized way than for them to stumble in, get injured one by one just figuring out the deal with the plants in the first place, and then try to come up with a plan. The book does more with the plant's efforts to divide them too--by playing back their voices and noises to make them suspicious of each other (which the movie does show a bit of), which keeps them from getting organized. I'm not sure if this is a good change or not. Having the plant be intelligent on a human level could come off as sort of goofy; I kind of liked how, in the movie, its actions could be explained as sort of an unconscious reflex, like a Venus' Fly Trap.

I did wonder when I was reading the book if they were going to try dousing it with alcohol and lighting it on fire (which seemed like an obvious setup, given that it was established that they had the matches and the bottles of tequila to work with), but on seeing the movie, I guess it is clear that it would have been impossible to completely burn away all the plants on and in the pyramid this way--there were just too many of them, spread out over too great a space.

But I do agree that the movie would have been better if it had spent more time going through the details of their situation, and exhausting all the possibilities for escape or defense. I liked that about the book, that it presented their scenario as sort of a "man trapped in a locked room" logic puzzle, with the catch being that there is, in the end, no possibility for escape. By focusing more on the gory, thrilling, or titillating parts, I think the movie did suffer a little in comparison.

But thanks again!

Some folks call you a media whore, etc but if that were true, we'd know about yer health outside of this site. I remember prayin' after hearing about you bein' wheelchair bound that ya'd get out of the wheelchair and eventually get into a healthier lifestyle. I believe folks call this a blessing in disguise...
Anyway man, I really happy to hear you are out of the chair and working on making your time with your new bride last as long as possible. Take is slow but steady and I'll be prayin' fitness becomes a new source of joy for you. :o)

All they would need to do was throw the vines towards the villagers until they finally backed the fuck off. The Mayans obviously didn't WANT to shoot them, so I doubt they would retaliate with gunfire or arrows. Even if they did, however, they wouldn't get close enough to the pyramid to fight the vine-wrapped rock bombs anyways. Plus, the kids could have escaped at night, too. And why didn't they ever show any of the other 3 sides of the pyramid? Why were they always coming down to the same fucking side?

So when Jeff carried Amy down to set-up her escape, once he placed her on the ground, I thought the same thing: once he had walked off to the side...and lured the few men away...why didn't he pick up some vines and just start tossing them as well? Even if he hit only one or two of them, think of the added yelling and confusion it would have created, thus buying her more time.

Of course, for that matter, that leads to my other gripe -- why the hell would Jeff and Amy stage the escape in broad daylight anyway? Why wouldn't they wait till it was at least early nightfall to give her some additional cover?

Plus, they clearly SAY in the movie repeatedly (and also quickly establish this with a camera shot, when they show some bonfires burning) that the villagers have surrounded the pyramid. So if an entire GROUP of villagers have set-up camp around the ruins...now determined to wait it out until all of the teens were dead...then tell me this: How the hell does NO ONE notice that Amy gets up and starts to run instantly? Come on, she shouldn't have gotten more than 2 feet before being nailed. In the movie, they play it out with this ridiculous notion that tubby Pistol Guy and 2 or 3 Archers are focused on Jeff...that Jeff talks and lures them off to the side...but you're telling me that NO ONE -- I mean no other villagers -- were sitting off to the side with their eyes still watching her body? I mean what happened to all the other people guarding all the other sides? And if you're telling me that only Pistol guy and his 2 or 3 archer friends were guarding the temple at that point -- that the other villagers had gone back to the village to take care of things -- we're right back to your idea (and the one that I had as well sitting there) which is why wouldn't you just start tossing vines at them fast and furious so they turn on each other, thus helping your odds for escape?

I would agree with others that the overall production standards on the film (it's look, cinematography, general direction, effects work, etc) was fairly nice for a horror film. But all things being equal, I still just found the story lacking. Yes, perhaps because it IS longer the book does address more of these questions -- but it's the MOVIE we're supposed to judge. Sorry, but the movie should be able to stand on it's own internal logic that it presents to the audience...