VIEW THIS PAGE Tricked out in leather and heavy metal hair, the British actor Michael Sheen takes a lively break from his usual high-crust duties to bring wit, actual acting and some unexpected musculature to the goth-horror flick Underworld: Rise of the Lycans The film, a prehistory to the first two Underworld movies, rewinds time to when the werewolves, or Lycans, led by Lucian (Sheen), began rattling the chains clamped on them by their vampire masters, a louche crowd that answers to Viktor (the British actor Bill Nighy).
Set primarily in the lair of the vampires, a dark castle bathed in moon-blue light and dappled with pools of black shadow, the film offers few surprises other than Sheen’s vigorous, physical performance. Although the presence of Sheen — who can be seen twinkling as David Frost in Frost/Nixon and is probably best known for playing Prime Minister Tony Blair in The Queen — is initially distracting, it soon becomes the movie’s greatest asset. There is, as it turns out, some benefit to having a real performance even in a formulaic entertainment like this, as shown by Sheen’s commitment here and by the lackluster star turn of Kate Beckinsale in the previous movies.
Unlike Nighy, who puts an amusing camp spin on his every line and gesture, Sheen appears to have taken his monster duties seriously: his eyes pop with menace, and he howls up a mighty storm. Though the director, Patrick Tatopoulos, clearly likes the looks of the female lead, Rhona Mitra as Sonja, Viktor’s daughter and Lucian’s lover, he gives Sheen plenty of face time. The actor’s value is particularly evident during the various fight sequences, which — because they are underlighted and, as is too often the case in contemporary genre cinema, overedited — come across as needlessly chaotic. It’s at moments like these that Sheen’s bright eyes become beacons, two points of light in the murky dark. VIEW THIS PAGE
Crop damage from Typhoon Danas “had covered 9,822 hectares of farmland, more than 1.5 percent of Taiwan’s arable land, with an average loss rate of 30 percent, equivalent to 2,977 hectares of total crop failure,” this paper reported on Thursday last week. Costs were expected to exceed NT$1 billion. The disaster triggered clashes in the legislature last week between members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and China-aligned lawmakers from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). DPP caucus chief executive Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) argued that opposition lawmakers should take responsibility for slashing the Ministry of Agriculture’s (MOA)
July 14 to July 20 When Lin Tzu-tzeng (林資曾) arrived in Sansia (三峽) in 1830, he found the local conditions ideal for indigo dyeing. Settlers had already planted indigo across the nearby hills, the area’s water was clean and low in minerals and the river offered direct transport to the bustling port of Bangka (艋舺, modern-day Wanhua District in Taipei). Lin hailed from Anxi (安溪) in Fujian Province, which was known for its dyeing traditions. He was well-versed in the craft, and became wealthy after opening the first dyeing workshop in town. Today, the sign for the Lin Mao Hsing (林茂興) Dye
Asked to define sex, most people will say it means penetration and anything else is just “foreplay,” says Kate Moyle, a psychosexual and relationship therapist, and author of The Science of Sex. “This pedestals intercourse as ‘real sex’ and other sexual acts as something done before penetration rather than as deserving credit in their own right,” she says. Lesbian, bisexual and gay people tend to have a broader definition. Sex education historically revolved around reproduction (therefore penetration), which is just one of hundreds of reasons people have sex. If you think of penetration as the sex you “should” be having, you might
As the world has raced to understand how Taiwan can be both the world’s most important producer of semiconductors while also the pin in the grenade of World War III, a reasonable shelf of “Taiwan books” has been published in the last few years. Most describe Taiwan according to a power triangle dominated by the US and China. But what of the actual Taiwanese themselves? Who are they? And should they have any say in the matter? Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival is perhaps the first general history of Taiwan to answer
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