Displaying more corn than is usually found in the North Pole, Arctic Tale documents the travails of a polar bear cub and a walrus pup as they struggle toward adulthood on diminishing quantities of ice.
Cute of face and name, fuzzy Nanu and sleek Seela (played by a variety of animals at different stages of life) dodge predators and heed their mommies while the filmmakers, Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson, spin a global-warming-for-tykes theme around their endangered bodies. This being an American family movie, the pop songs and unbridled flatulence are givens.
Assembled from more than 800 hours of film shot at the Arctic Circle over the last 15 years, this National Geographic production (written in part by Al Gore's daughter Kristin) uses its narrative artifice to serve the greater good. And if you can get past Sister Sledge belting We Are Family over a herd of frolicking walruses - whose mating calls sound a lot like Tom Waits after venturing to the heart of Saturday night and back - the movie's stunning underwater photography (fearlessly captured by Ravetch) effectively dilutes the saccharine tone.
PHOTO: AP
Still, adults may squirm at the film's persistent anthropomorphism and Queen Latifah's cloying narration. "Meanwhile, Seela's tusks have filled out nicely, and the boys are taking notice," she observes. And if "the boys" are anything like their human counterparts, I'll bet they have no idea what color her eyes are, either.
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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist