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
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
A town in Japan is to urge all residents to restrict their smartphone use to two hours a day in an attempt to tackle online addiction and sleep deprivation. Officials in Toyoake, Aichi prefecture, said the measure would target not only children but also adults, amid growing concern about the physical and psychological toll excessive smartphone use is taking on people of all ages. The move aims “to prevent excessive use of devices causing physical and mental health issues … including sleep problems,” the mayor, Masafumi Koki said recently. The Toyoake municipal assembly began debating the non-binding ordinance this week ahead of a
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