Rated PG, directed by Randall Wallace, with Mel Gibson, (Lt. Colonel Hal Moore), Madeleine Stowe (Julia Moore), Greg Kinnear (Major Bruce "Snakeshit" Crandall), Sam Elliot Sgt. Major Basil Plumley), Chris Klein (2nd Lt. Jack Geoghegan), running time: 120 minutes.
Mel Gibson leads a crew of ``fathers, brothers, husbands and sons'' on the US' 1965 offensive in Vietnam's Ia Drang. Some 400 US troops are pitted against over 2000 Vietnamese in what is quickly recognized as a hopeless situation for the Americans. As in Black Hawk Down, the happy Hollywood ending here is not in winning the battle, but in ``getting all our boys out.'' Wallace, a veteran of lose-the-battle, win-the-war films after Pearl Harbor, tones down the melodrama in Soldiers, but genuine human emotion is lost to the whiz-bang of bullets. Equally emotionally-vacuous are the scenes that take place with the wives and kids back in an all-too-perfect America.
PHOTO: MATA
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
Each week, whenever she has time off from her marketing job, Ida Jia can be found at Shanghai Disneyland queuing for hours to spend a few minutes with Linabell, a fluffy pink fox with big blue eyes. The 29-year-old does not go empty handed, bringing pink fox soft toys dressed in ornate custom-made outfits to show the life-sized character, as well as handmade presents as gifts. Linabell, which made its debut in Shanghai in 2021, is helping Disney benefit from a rapidly growing market in China for merchandise related to toys, games, comics and anime, which remained popular with teenagers and young
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