My Week With Marilyn
With a similar premise to the delightful Me and Orson Wells, My Week With Marilyn takes an everyday kind of guy and puts him together with a great cinematic icon, in this case Marilyn Monroe. For those who buy Michelle Williams’ performance, the film is a gem, but if you don’t, the movie becomes rather less effective, though with a supporting cast that includes contemporary acting royalty playing the roles of Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench), there is such a wealth of talent, all very astutely marshaled by director Simon Curtis, that the flick has charm, energy and beauty to spare. The film is based on the diary of Colin Clark (played in the film by Eddie Redmayne), a young man who found himself looking after Monroe for one week when she was in London for the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl in the 1950s. A nobody in a world of theatrical titans, he catches a glimpse of the Marilyn that her contemporaries were unable to see.
Sleeping Beauty
The debut feature by Australian Julia Leigh, who also wrote the screenplay, and made under the aegis of Jane Campion (The Piano, Bright Star), Sleeping Beauty tells the story of a young university student who becomes involved in erotic entertainments for older men. The film, which stars Emily Browning (Sucker Punch), fetishizes its lead, making her a kind of erotic object of desire, building its dramatic tension through the disconnect between her passive role as a provider of amatory fantasy and her own sexual desires. With a strong psychosexual theme and a languid pace, Sleeping Beauty is likely to divide audiences between those who can embrace its strangeness and those who simply find it pretentious. We get to see a very great deal of Browning, the camera lingering over her generally unclothed body, which may be enough of an attraction in itself, but there are also some interesting, if rather peculiar, reflections on sexuality as well.
Love Is Not Blind (失戀33天)
Romantic comedy that relies on a decent story and good chemistry between the two leads; the absence of either high artistic pretension or absurd slapstick also helps. The story revolves around the romantic life of Xiaoxian (played by Bai Baihe, 白百何), a wedding planner, who catches her fiance and her best friend kissing in a Beijing shopping mall. She gets lots of support from her gay colleague Xiaojian (played by Wen Zhang, 文章), and it is this friendship that holds the movie up. Within the genre conventions of the rom-com, Love Is Not Blind is not without insight into the lives of young Chinese urbanities trying to juggle sexual independence and old-fashioned romantic fantasy.
Sengoku Basara — The Last Party
A feature film installment that follows on from a popular anime series of the same name. The backstory is hugely complex and the film dives into the action, winning praise from fans for taking the whole production to a new level. But if you have not been a regular viewer of the TV series, which started in 2009, you are likely to get thoroughly lost in the intricacies of the plot. Set in the Warring States period of Japanese history just prior to the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate, various warlords battle and intrigue for supremacy. There is no aspiration to historical accuracy, though the film takes the story up to the Battle of Sekigahara, which determined the final winner of the conflict.
Mahler Symphony No. 2 in C Minor “Resurrection”
A classical music recording released on the big screen that presents Leonard Bernstein conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. The recording is part of a 20-year-long association between Bernstein and the Unitel label to release a complete cycle of Mahler recordings. The performance features soloists Sheila Armstrong and Janet Baker. The series of recordings, mostly made between 1971 and 1985, is credited with triggering a major re-appreciation of Mahler’s work.
When Yesterday Comes (昨日的記憶)
Following the success of The Long Goodbye (被遺忘的時光), the Taiwan Catholic Foundation of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia (財團法人天主教失智老人社會福利基金會) has embarked on a second documentary film dealing with the plight of elderly people suffering from conditions like Alzheimer’s and other degenerative disorders resulting in memory loss. When Yesterday Comes takes the route of a compendium of four shorts by different directors. The films are in different styles and reflect the sensibilities of directors Ho Wi-ding (何蔚庭), Shen Ko-shang (沈可尚), Chiang Hsiu-chiung (姜秀瓊) and Singing Chen (陳芯宜). The project has enlisted the participation of a number of well-known actors, particularly Chang Chen (張震) and Sonia Sui (隋棠) in the segment titled Healing.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
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