Queens (Reinas) tells the story of a bevy of gay men who are about to be married in a group wedding to celebrate the legalization of homosexual unions in Spain. But though there is no shortage of petulant drama queen behavior from this group of stylish young men, the real queens of this movie are the mothers.
Superficially a gay-themed movie — outside of Spain, it has played mostly in gay and lesbian film festivals since it opened in 2005 — its best roles are played by Veronica Forque, Marisa Paredes, Mercedes Sampietro and Carmen Maura (the best-known of the ladies to English-speaking audiences, having featured in many of Pedro Almodovar’s films). These women are the royalty of Spanish cinema, and though none of them could be considered young, director Manuel Gomez Pereira delights in making these “women of a certain age” even more attractive than his eligible male actors.
Pereira nails his colors to the mast in a scene early on in which Marisa Paredes, who was 59 when the film was made, walks down the stairs of a luxury apartment. She’s wearing a flowing evening gown that falls low off the shoulders, and walks to the torrid strains of Michael Buble doing a cover of Peggy Lee’s Fever. Pereira’s camera lingers, caressing every line, both the curves and the wrinkles. It is utterly gratuitous, and totally lovely, managing to be both touching, funny, camp and enormously sexy. For anyone with a mother complex, or a grandmother complex for that matter, this is essential viewing.
Much else in the film is equally gratuitous and absurd, but Pereira clearly couldn’t care less. His film is a farce, with all kinds of complications as workers at the hotel where many of the wedding participants are staying go on strike, an old English sheepdog goes walkabout, infidelities are revealed, the presiding judge has a heart attack and the queens — both male and female — generally act out. Pereira manages to draw all the improbable strands together, forming a framework for his real objective, which is to charm the audience. He has a light touch, and is aided by a brisk script with lots of amusing moments and a good command of comic pacing (the story is revealed through a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards that adds a frenetic energy and complexity), but the story itself is really just a piece of fluff.
What makes Queens more than just a pastiche of stylish images and amusing jokes is the director’s very touching admiration for his leading ladies. There is Paredes, who plays a well-known actress, Veronica Forque, an aging nymphomaniac (“It is a weakness, I always have sex with the most inappropriate people.”), Carmen Maura, the owner of a hotel catering to a gay clientele, Mercedes Sampietro, the judge who will preside over the wedding, and Argentine actress Betiana Blum, who causes havoc with her sticky-beaking. Their faults range from homophobia to nymphomania, bossiness, arrogance, appalling ignorance of those supposedly closest to them, greed, selfishness and on and on. Pereira delights in every petty-minded, self-seeking moment, so that he can, at the right moment, highlight the gorgeousness within. They are awful, but we can’t help loving them to bits.
The men, with the exception of Lluis Homar who plays a gardener who has a fling with the wealthy Paredes, are nothing more than comic ciphers. That’s really all they are expected to be, and anyone looking for any exploration of gay relationships or gay marriage will not find it here.
Queens is an homage to the older woman (though fortunately there is plenty of tongue in cheek) and the young men about to be married can be seen as far more innocent than their gorgeously, gloriously scheming mothers.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
Taiwan’s drone exports are taking off, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, as Taiwanese companies seek a stake in the fast-growing global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Low-cost drones used for reconnaissance and strikes are in high demand as governments around the world boost defense spending in the face of intensifying conflicts. A relative new player in the increasingly competitive industry, Taiwan’s pitch is to be an “Asian hub” for the production of UAVs and components free of Chinese materials, or “non-red.” That means its UAVs can be up to three times more expensive than their Chinese competitors, like the world’s biggest
RSS