Rated G, directed by Sam Raimi, with Tobey Maguire Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Willem Dafoe (Green Goblin/Norman Osborne), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborne), running time: 120 minutes.
Peter Parker is an aged adolescent who still can't get the girl. When he's bitten by a genetically altered superspecies of spider, he's transformed with freakish powers not unlike those of the spider that bit him. What to do with your new ability to stick to walls and spin webs? If you're Peter Parker, you use them to get the girl of your dreams by entering a wrestling competition to win a sportscar. But when Peter's uncle is killed in a carjacking, a better use for his abilities surfaces and he turns to fighting crime. Spider-Man took more than a decade getting to the screen and word-of-mouth has been largely positive. Although many have grumbled about special effects that seem over-the-top, no one has complained about Tobey Maguire's more down-to-earth superhero who has some very human failings to balance his superhuman successes.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BUENA VISTA
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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