The Good Dinosaur
Peter Sohn, the long-time Pixar story artist, voice actor and short film director whom the protagonist for Up was based upon, has finally made it to the top of the ladder by directing his first full-length feature, The Good Dinosaur. It took a while though, as the film changed directors and almost all of its cast mid-production with even the plot completely reimagined. The story is set in a world where dinosaurs never went extinct, and features Arlo, the young son of Apatosaurus farmers (yes, really) who loses his family and meets a human boy. It’s a cool concept (the pair later encounter T-Rex buffalo ranchers fighting Velociraptor rustlers), but the ensuing synopsis doesn’t seem to do it justice, seemingly morphing into a pretty standard tear-jerking coming-of-age adventure flick.
Youth
The second English film by Italian director Peter Sorrentino, Youth features Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as two septuagenarian creatives (a filmmaker and a composer) hanging out at a luxurious resort in the Swiss Alps and contemplating on the twilight of their lives. One retired, one still working, the two are also in-laws as their children are married to each other. Joined by Jane Fonda and Rachel Weisz, this seems to be dialogue-driven stuff, covering topics such as creative satisfaction in old age, fading memories and lost loves, all topped with a healthy dose of cynicism. The resort is populated with a bunch of quirky characters to provide some humor to the melancholy. The film received a mix of boos and cheers when it premiered at Cannes, and you can decide what you want to do after watching it. Oh, and it’s said to have an amazing score.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
With titles like Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, Quirk Books is known for its bestselling mashup novels. Its 2009 masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame Smith, remained on the New York Times bestselling list for more than 50 weeks and is just something that has been screaming for a movie version — and here we are. Directed and written by Burr Steers of Igby Goes Down fame, the plot is quite simple: this version of Elizabeth Bennett is a martial arts master who teams up with Mr. Darcy to save England from a zombie plague. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like pure entertainment to me.
Marry Me
German-born actress and director Neleesha Barthel, of both German and Indian ancestry, uses her personal experience to create this tale of cultural and lifestyle clashes and in her debut film, Marry Me! Spending six years working on the film, Barthel says like many people of mixed ethnicity, she’s been looking for her origins, and that the film is released in a time when ethnic tensions are high in Germany. The film features a young woman living a Westernized lifestyle in Berlin whose Indian grandmother suddenly appears and threatens to sell the house if she doesn’t marry the father of her child in a pompous wedding, Indian-style. But the woman later finds out that there’s more behind her grandma’s intentions.
Like Life (人生按個讚)
If you don’t know who old school Taiwanese entertainers Hu Gua (胡瓜) and Pai Ping-ping (白冰冰) are, you probably don’t need to watch this movie. It’s a trademark Taiwanese “smiling-and-crying inspirational comedy” that features ordinary working people — the kind of stuff local directors have been gravitating towards to resonate with the masses. Anyway, the movie follows four characters — a taxi driver, a neighborhood-level official, a bar woman past her prime and a rookie cop, who somehow all cross paths and embark on a life-changing adventure, or something like that. Anyhow, it has all the ingredients to be a Lunar New Year commercial blockbuster, but again, if you’re not very familiar with Taiwanese pop culture or humor, just skip this one.
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
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
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