It is 14 years since Neil Jordan had an enormous success with The Crying Game, in which one character's ambiguous sexual identity put a sensational twist in the tale of terrorism, the British military and Northern Ireland. Now Jordan revives these tropes in this adaptation of Patrick McCabe's 1998 picaresque novel Breakfast On Pluto — in which transvestism is a defiant rejection of bigotry, labels, and borders.
Cillian Murphy plays Patrick "Kitten" Brady, a drag queen with attitude from a small town in the Irish Republic, close to the border. He is the secret son of the local priest, played by Liam Neeson, who got his housekeeper pregnant and arranged for the resulting baby to be farmed out to an uncaring foster mother. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Kitten scandalizes everyone with his addiction to girls' clothes and precocious sense of glamour. But Kitten is obsessed with the idea of his mother — who is supposed to have made a new life in London — and, all but penniless, he heads off to the English capital with a romantic notion of tracking her down.
We are presumably supposed to be cheering for Kitten, as a lovably exuberant rebel who makes joyless priests, cruel Brits and stone-faced Provos look silly with his antics. Actually the character is bafflingly charmless: narcissistic and unsympathetic, and the shrill, twittering monotony of Murphy's performance becomes exasperating.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SWALLOW WINGS
His story begins with a couple of CGI robins swooping over the rooftops, commenting on the action and establishing the uncertain, sub-magic-realist sense that Kitten's self-narrated mythologizing is at some level unserious. Yet Kitten appears to get involved in deadly serious situations: he experiences first-hand the casual arrogance of the British border patrol and the icy ruthlessness of the IRA. Turning tricks in London, he is nearly murdered by a curb-crawler played by Bryan Ferry (a disconcerting piece of novelty casting) and even gets blown up in a pub bombing only then to be beaten up by the London police as a typical Paddy suspect. But all the time he airily waves away any suggestion that he should take any of this seriously: "Oh serious, serious, serious ... " But isn't it serious? Kitten actually flirts with a copper who just a few days previously had stood idly by while his colleague beat him up. His unending campness saves him from being half-killed on separate occasions by the Met and the Provos; it is miraculously disarming — the cross-dressing Christ in high-heels? — but it can only be disarming in this world tinged with black-comic fantasy.
Kitten's refusal to conform to sexual stereotypes is an apolitical plague-on-both-your-houses gesture, and certainly an effective way of showing how the warring sides have something in common: nauseating macho arrogance. But having detached himself from the political contest, where are Kitten's emotional commitments? His relationship with his mother, Eileen, has most power when it is yearning fantasy: when confronted with her in the flesh, Kitten becomes tongue-tied and it is all a bit of let-down — Eileen is played by Eva Birthistle, who recently gave such an excellent performance in Ken Loach's Ae Fond Kiss. Kitten's friendship with the pregnant Charlie (Ruth Negga) is also filtered through his incessant, brittle posturing.
Stephen Rea has a droll presence as a conjuror and hypnotist who becomes captivated with Kitten, using him as an assistant and mesmerizing him into thinking his mother is in the audience, for the benefit of a heartless, chortling crowd. Yet Kitten's hypnotized rapture doesn't seem that much different from the real thing. The only person in the film who really comes to life is Brendan Gleeson, playing John-Joe, an itinerant Irish actor who briefly gets Kitten a job in a horrific Wombles theme park. As Great Uncle Bulgaria, John-Joe has a certain authority that is displayed when, in full costume, he punches the haughty English manager for accusing him unjustly of breaking a mallet. Kitten's adventures rattle along divertingly enough, but it is difficult to make any emotional investment in a character who is interested chiefly in himself.
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
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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