Open to ridicule ... The Hills Have Eyes 2. They've also got one hell of a cheek, forcing this nonsense on us again: a sequel to last year's remake of the 1978 Wes Craven original. Once again, we are out in the middle of nowhere. It's an eerie, isolated stretch of New Mexico desert where nuclear testing half a century ago created a feral gang of mutant hillbillies hiding out in their own underground network of tunnels, killing innocent incomers and raping the womenfolk to perpetuate their deplorable race.
Now a group of US National Guardspersons, an elite group of the very best looking young men and women, are sent out there to accompany some civilian scientists: they arrive to find the brainiacs all dead and soon they too are being picked off, one by one. One of the group is pigheaded; another is a total babe; another has a temper; another is a bit of an anti-war pinko who thinks the president "lied" — leaving us to wonder who will turn out to have the most gutsy resourcefulness and military grit. The satirical content is more or less forgotten. Pure genre-pic boredom.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF FOX
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
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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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