Greece's powerful Orthodox Church called on its faithful Thursday to boycott the upcoming movie Da Vinci Code which will be released in Taiwan on May 18, newspaper reports said.
Greece's Holy Synod said it would issue pamphlets ahead of the movie's Greek premiere warning citizens not to go see the movie to "protect the Christian tradition."
The church, which represents about 97 percent of Greece's 11 million population, did not rule out the possibility of calling on Greeks to protest outside of theaters.
Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou star in Ron Howards's movie, taken from Dan Brown's controversial bestseller The Da Vinci Code.
Lost sales from pirated DVD movies and Internet downloads are higher than previously thought, a report in the Wall Street Journal said on Wednesday.
A study showed the industry was losing US$6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue, about 75 percent higher than earlier estimates, it said.
Losses came not only from fewer ticket sales, but also from fewer DVD sales, considered one of the industry's biggest profit centers, the report cited unnamed sources as saying.
The newspaper said some in the US movies industry sought to suppress the report.
According to the report, losses in the US alone totaled almost US$1.3 billion.
John Malkovich's new film has him playing an Englishman who pretends he is Stanley Kubrick in what is billed as a "true-ish" story about a conman who duped dozens of people into thinking he was the reclusive director.
Colour me Kubrick, showing at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, has already drawn comparisons to Being John Malkovich because of its cerebral approach to questions of identity and celebrity.
But it is essentially a comedy that gives Malkovich the chance to revel in outlandish accents, behavior and costumes, from stockings and stilettos to oversized pajamas and foppish suits and cravats. The soundtrack echoes Kubrick's own films, including the famous theme from 2001: Space Odyssey.
Alan Conway, an alcoholic and small-time swindler, managed to pass himself off as the famously publicity-shy Kubrick for years until he was unmasked by a newspaper. Even then he convinced psychiatrists he was mentally ill, escaping prosecution for duping dozens of gullible victims into parting with their cash and sometimes their virtue.
"Everybody believed it," said Michael Fitzgerald, who produced the film written by Kubrick's personal assistant Anthony Frewin.
"Stanley Kubrick's wife still gets letters from parents of young men who were, what's the word, `pleasured' by him, regretting his death, but saying he had done unspeakable things to their children," he said.
With his debonair look, eccentric outfits and gift of the gab, Conway takes in everyone from the local pharmacist, to the managers of a heavy metal band, to a comedian played by British star Jim Davidson.
The biologist in Randy Olson cringed at news reports of evangelical Christians challenging the teaching of evolution to schoolchildren in places such as Kansas on the grounds it was just a theory.
But the filmmaker in him feels just as strongly that scientists have done a lousy job explaining their side of the debate.
The result is Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus, a humorous and entertaining documentary that premiered at New York's Tribeca Film Festival this week.
The film shines a spotlight on "intelligent design," a school of thought that says many of the seemingly miraculous and complex elements of nature must be the work of an intelligent designer -- namely God.
The controversy is raging in the US as intelligent design proponents face off in court with scientists who say evolution is supported by fossils and other evidence. So far, courts have struck down teaching intelligent design in science classrooms as a violation of the wall between church and state.
Other films that premiered at the festival include Fat Girls by the youngest film director at this year's event, 21-year-old Ash Christian. Christian is living proof that being a chubby gay kid from Paris, Texas, doesn't mean you can't direct and star in a movie. Fat Girls is a semi-autobiographical comedy about awkward Texas teenager, Rodney, and his friend, Sabrina, who is so fat that in a moment of passion with her boyfriend in a car, her rear end gets stuck in the steering wheel.
Donald Sutherland has played plenty of bad guys in his time and in his new film Land of the Blind he gets to explore the roots of evil and how the victim can become the tyrant and torturer. The political satire, which had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, stars Sutherland as an imprisoned playwright who convinces a soldier, played by Ralph Fiennes, to help assassinate a tyrannical dictator in an unnamed country.
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated