It's probably no coincidence that Luke Mably, the skinny English actor in The Prince and Me playing an undercover royal with a roguish streak who falls in love with an all-American farm girl, bears a conspicuous resemblance to Prince William. As titled bachelors go nowadays, no one can top the elder son of Diana, Princess of Wales, in the dewy heartthrob department. And with the real prince unavailable to Hollywood for exploitation, why not create a facsimile and bring him to America to discover what truly fine folks we are?
So what if Mably's character, Edvard Valdemar Dangaard, is the crown prince of Denmark, not of England? What's the difference anyway between Copenhagen and London, given that the prince and his parents speak perfect upper-class English, without a trace of a Danish accent?
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
One day, the prince, or Eddie, as he renames himself, happens to watch a Girls Gone Wild! program set in Wisconsin and becomes so steamed up he decides to attend college there. Once ensconced in a dorm room at the University of Wisconsin with his obedient young secretary, Soren (Ben Miller), his first mistake is to make a pass at Paige Morgan (Julia Stiles), a student working as a barmaid. When she rebuffs him with a squirt of soda water in his face, she kicks into action the fighting spirit of a royal who has never heard the word no. Can true love be far behind?
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
As fate would have it, the lazy, spoiled prince is designated Paige's lab partner in an organic chemistry class and the two strike up an edgy friendship.
When she invites him home for Thanksgiving, love begins to blossom. Back at college, his true identity comes out when two nosy paparazzi track him to library stacks and snap shots of the sweethearts in an intimate clinch. The relationship hits a very brief glitch.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
The Prince and Me, which opens today, is a cream puff with a melted marshmallow inside it. As the temperature rises, the whole gooey thing starts to melt. Stiles' farm girl-turned-princess-in-waiting is a model of integrity and decency, so unpretentious she seems anachronistic in the age of Britney, Christina and J Lo. And Stiles, an actress with the intelligence to lend a semblance of reality to the dumbest dialogue, at least makes Paige likable.
The oddly shaped movie, directed by Martha Coolidge, doesn't have the backbone to sustain any conflict for more than a few minutes before collapsing into kisses and fashion modeling. Paige travels to Copenhagen, where she is
literally swept off the street by her Prince Charming onto a horse and carried to the palace. In no time at all she melts the icy heart of the queen. Meanwhile, the ailing king prepares to hand the prince the crown.
Although the overlong movie seems to come to an end two-thirds of the way through, it feels obliged to trot out one last fake conflict to unravel. The final question it asks is whether a college girl as good and nice as Paige can stand to be the queen of Denmark. Or must she renounce her love and her jewels to study medicine and work for Doctors Without Borders? How noble can one farm girl be?
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
RSS