Word: ben
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Back in September, V.V. Chari, an economist at the University of Minnesota and an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, got a call from a Congressman. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were arguing that they needed $700 billion to save the nation's financial system, and the Congressman wanted to know what to make of it all. Chari said he didn't know - he hadn't looked at the data. Policymakers kept talking about how banks weren't lending to businesses or to individuals or even to each other, so Chari pulled numbers...
...emerged from the same screenwriting class. Premise: An ordinary man who's lost his wife has become remote from his family and friends. To resolve his ennui, he determines to become a do-gooder - Carrey's Carl Allen by answering in the affirmative to every vagrant request, Smith's Ben Thomas by choosing seven strangers whose lives he can drastically improve - and in the process he finds a new woman to give him hope or assuage his guilt...
...Everybody in Yes Man, including Carrey in his depressive phase, is pretty darned perky - a mood that applies to no one in Seven Pounds. And whereas Carl is using his personal epiphany to make himself happy, Ben Thomas does good only for others; he's paying it forward, not inward. A child undergoing cancer treatment, a mother whose boyfriend abuses her, a blind pianist (Woody Harrelson), a young woman suffering from congenital heart failure (Rosario Dawson) - each of these, and three others, he showers with rejuvenating gifts. His motive is the movie's secret...
...charismatic smile for a whole movie. Here he speaks to people with a precise courtesy that seems learned rather than felt. Pain pulses just behind his fretted eyebrows; he carries himself like a hero too gentlemanly to show his grief, too weighed down to hide it. Those whom Ben touches see that he's on a mission beyond making their lives more bearable. The same may be true of Smith: rashly or bravely, he's using his immense celebrity to lure audiences into an alternate movie world where kindness and desperation feed off each other...
...have her mind on other concerns. “A hell of a ticket and a hell of a campaign,” Biggers said before the results came in. Other supporters, gathered in the Democracy Center on Mt. Auburn Street, shared similar ideas. “We love Ben and that’s all that matters,” said current UC Representative Alyssa M. Aguilera ’09, an inactive Crimson editor. At 9:47pm Schwartz got a phone call. He and Biggers left the room together soon after, returning to tell the crowd that they...