Wading through this junky sequel to her genial goofball hit Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock looks as if she would rather be shoveling pig waste -- though of course in some respects that is exactly what she's doing. Set a mere three weeks after the first film, which was released in 2000, Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous finds Bullock as the charmingly clumsy FBI agent, Gracie Hart, vainly fending off unwanted celebrity.
On her last assignment, Gracie infiltrated a beauty pageant by metamorphosing from duckling to swan, a mission that earned her legions of female fans across the country.
After Gracie's cover is blown during a bank heist, endangering her and every other undercover agent on her team, the powers that be decide that she should become "the face of the FBI." Gracie, hurt after being dumped by a romantic prospect (the agent played in the first go around by Benjamin Bratt, wisely nowhere to be seen or heard here), agrees to the reassignment on the tenuous grounds that flouncing about in designer threads is better for her soul and career than pushing pencils.
PHOTO: AP
And so, after a consult with the obligatory swishy style guru, Joel (Diedrich Bader), Gracie undergoes yet another transformation, one designed to strip every gram of charm and integrity from her character. Clarice Starling, meet Paris Hilton.
Usually an effervescent screen presence, Bullock turns in a performance as flat as day-old champagne. It's hard not to blame her, particularly given the shoddy work by both the screenwriter Marc Lawrence, who helped write the first Miss Congeniality, and the director John Pasquin, whose previous crimes against cinema include the Tim Allen vehicle The Santa Clause. It isn't just that Miss Congeniality 2 is nearly absent a single genuine laugh; it's that instead of a screenplay and a story we now have stereotypes and sketch comedy. In place of screwball heroics and wish-fulfillment the filmmakers give us jokes about tampons and some curious gender unease, particularly between Gracie and an angry female agent with the abominably cutesy name of Sam Fuller.
Played by the talented actress Regina King, Agent Fuller spends much of the movie smacking Gracie around really, really hard, a peculiar tic that only becomes more peculiar as the movie dribbles along. In between the feeble glimmerings of a plot and a hailstorm of body blows, the two women develop a grudging admiration for each other that should by the logic of the cliches both women have assumed -- Sam's all man, Gracie's all girl -- led into an intimate clinch. Alas, this particular wish is not to be fulfilled. Instead, the sub rosa romance between Gracie and Sam is quashed in favor of way too many uneasy, unfunny jokes pegged to gay men. As it turns out, being fabulous is far more dangerous for a woman (and a movie star) than being armed.
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.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
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