In the latest wowzer merging of the real and the fabricated, Arthur and the Invisibles takes actual human actors and, through a complex process involving Slim-Fast and a Maytag dryer, shrinks them to the size of bacteria so they can interact with the microscopic beings who live in your backyard along with Rick Moranis and his family.
Or something like that. The press packet for Arthur, a children's film directed by Luc Besson, includes lots of tidbits on the magic that enabled the merging of live actors and a computer-generated world, but who can really keep track of this technogoo anymore, or get excited about it? The real question isn't how these hybrid movies are made, but why. In this case, it's a tad unclear.
The film begins in the conventional human world of the early 1960s, where Arthur (Freddie Highmore) and his grandmother (Mia Farrow) have troubles galore: Grandpa went missing a few years ago, and developers are on the verge of taking over the family homestead. Arthur manages to shrink himself to near-invisibility so he can enter a secret world and search for some gems that will solve all the problems.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF CMC
At this point the film becomes computer-generated, and also resembles, at various times, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Sword in the Stone, Fraggle Rock and assorted others. The computer-generated world is visually rich, but short on the droll humor that makes good children's films bearable for adults. It's also too frenetically paced and confusing for adults or children. But many of the voices are familiar: Madonna, Jimmy Fallon, Snoop Dogg, David Bowie, Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro and other famous names provide them. There are so many famous names that the question arises: Would this movie have been more enjoyable with the real humans instead of just their voices? Yes. Although that would have required Madonna to have a budding romance with a 'tweenage boy. Hmm.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and