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July 2008
What do Batman, the War on Terror, Heath Ledger and Guantanamo have in common?
No wonder Heath Ledger’s Joker stands out. The Dark Knight is a weird, incoherent phantasmagoria on the U.S. War on Terror, says an editorial in today’s London Guardian newspaper. (Warning: The following contains some film spoilers.)
Columnist Emily Hill outlines the popular film’s 9/11 subtext. She said the film opens with smoke billing from a steel and glass building in a Gotham City — which might as well be New York. The Joker is a terrorist who seeks only to destroy civil society. Batman is a sort of one-man U.S. war on terror.
“Batman’s anti-terror tactics are like a publicity puff in defense of American techniques at Guantanamo — especially as the Joker likes it. ‘Hit me again! I like it,’ he screams, during forcible interrogation.”
Hill said the film is a hopelessly confused mishmash - which climaxes with two boats both being rigged with explosives. One is packed with convicts, the other innocent refugees fleeing Gotham. Each boat has a detonator and can blow the other boat up at the flick of a switch. Both will blow up at midnight. The innocent citizens demand a vote and elect to blow up the other boat, but chicken out at two minutes to the hour. On the other boat, a nervous prison guard hands a big bad detainee the trigger who does “what you should have done an hour ago” - and throws it out of the window. “How perplexing,” Hill said. “Democracy won here - but it was the wrong decision, and luckily for all concerned, the results were ignored.”
In the end, the Joker’s terror is ended by Batman using mobile phone technology and sonar waves to gain God-like knowledge of the movements of the city’s 30 million or so inhabitants. “How prescient, in the age of ID cards and the surveillance society,” Hill said.
She added that: “Then, having saved Gotham from itself by enacting a Bat-focused form of one-man martial law, our hero draws down all the opprobrium — which should be rained down on the terrorists — on himself. And he is last seen running off a hounded man — rather like the soon-to-depart President Bush, whose pre-emptive strikes against Islamic targets now make him the supreme hate figure of the western world.”
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Chinese told to muzzle their questions
It’s not unusual for Beijing residents to ask newly arrived foreigners how much they weigh and what their salaries are. Sometimes even those questions are dispensed with as well-meaning Chinese tell strangers that they are too fat or too poor.
One Beijing district government is trying to stamp out such potentially embarrassing exchanges ahead of the Summer Olympics, which begin on Aug 8.
An “Eight don’t asks” campaign instructs city residents not to ask foreigners personal questions about their age, salary, love life, health, income, political views, religious beliefs or personal experiences, the Associated Press reported.
Another poster campaign in the city instructs locals not to give blind foreigners directions like, “It’s over there.”
Instead they are encouraged to say things like, “You are really great” or “You are wonderful,” according to the news agency.
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Now is the time in McDonald’s when we dance …
McDonald’s — as American as apple pie and baseball — is now a bigger hit in Europe than in the United States.
Europe is now the fast-food chain’s largest region by revenues, despite having roughly one-quarter the number of outlets as the United States. Last year revenues topped $8.9 billion in Europe, compared with $7.9 billion in the states.
In the face of European disdain for fast food, how does McDonald’s attract so many European customers? With a major makeover that would make even Madonna proud.
According to Germany’s Der Spiegel, the transformation has been dramatic. “The bold red-and-yellow plastic signage has been replaced by muted facades in dark olive and yellow, and the 1970s-style interiors have given way to more elegant spaces. Retro plastic and Formica fittings are gone, supplanted by wood, leather, and stainless steel. Many outlets are even kitted out with wireless Internet connections and ‘egg’ chairs designed by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen.”
Even the old Ronald McDonald play areas have gotten a serious redesign. Relabeled as Ronald Gym Clubs, the focus is on getting kids fit. Set up in a separate building adjacent to the restaurant, these mini-gyms offer everything from stationary bicycles on which kids can race one another to climbing walls and basketball hoops.
The redesigns have proved so successful that McDonald’s is considering importing them to the United States.
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Curacao a Hotbed for American Baseball
A Dutch colony for 300 years before gaining independence as part of the Netherlands Antilles in 1954, Curacao still has close links to Holland. While many islanders feel strong ties to the U.S., American influences are not as pervasive on Curacao as on other Caribbean islands, especially those where English is the native language.
But when it comes to sports, Curacao is firmly in the U.S. camp. While soccer is very popular, baseball diamonds filled with kids are as numerous as in nearby Venezuela and other Caribbean hotbeds of the sport like Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
In recent years, several top Curacao prospects have signed with Major League teams in the States, a trend that has grown since Andruw Jones played for the Atlanta Braves starting in the 1990s.
Jones was traded over the winter to the Los Angeles Dodgers, but now a hot new Braves pitcher from Curacao, Jair Jurrjens, is pitching well for the Atlanta team and stoking the baseball dreams of youngsters across the island.
“We’re all really excited about Jair and baseball,” said Junius Isenia, a tailor and clothing designer in Willemstad, the island’s capital. “He’s showing a kid from the islands can get the job done.”
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What would Jesse say? The Obama race debate spreads to Britain.
Britain’s Conservative Party leader David Cameron joined the bitterly contested argument over family breakdown and race today by praising Barack Obama’s warning that too many black fathers have abandoned their responsibilities to their children.
In a wide-ranging interview with London’s Guardian newspaper, Cameron says that many black church leaders have expressed the same anxiety to him, and that it is time for a “responsibility revolution” to change patterns of behavior.
Referring to Obama’s speech, in which the presidential candidate warned that absent black fathers were behaving like teenagers and shirking their responsibilities to their children, Cameron said: “I think he’s absolutely right. I mean I think it’s a very brave thing to do. And it will have a huge influence that he has said it. I’ve had a number of meetings with black church leaders who make the same point. They are concerned about family breakdown and social breakdown, and want to see what I call a responsibility revolution take place.”
Cameron insists the appalling discrimination and economic disadvantage black people experience have to be recognized and changed, but at “the same time we will never solve the long term problems unless people also take responsibility for their own lives.”
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Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, the twins … Europe’s new obsession.
All of Europe is going crazy over the Brangelina babies.
The twins born to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Knox and Vivienne weighed almost exactly 5 lbs., said Dr Michel Sussmann, the obstetrician who delivered them by C-section Saturday night in southern France.
A crowd of photographers and camera crews have been hovering outside the hospital in hopes of catching a glimpse of family and friends arriving to congratulate the parents.
A bidding war is already under way for the first pictures of the Brangelina twins, with reports that the eventual price could top $20 million.
But Nice Martin, a French newspaper, reported that the couple had already sold those rights to an unnamed U.S. magazine for $11 million. The money would then go to charity as happened in 2006 when the couple’s daughter, Shiloh, was born, the report said.
London-based celebrity publicist Max Clifford told reporters that the first baby photos could fetch as much as $20 million, ”which would make it the biggest baby deal ever.”
Jolie and Pitt moved to the south of France several months ago and have made their home in the hamlet of Correns, in the Provence region.
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Chinese cheerleaders learn from American pros.
Hundreds of Chinese women are learning the fine arts of professional cheerleading from the New England Patriots dancers.
The women are learning “how to jump, flip and cheer for the tens of thousands of spectators who will attend this summer’s Games,” the China Daily reported on Wednesday.
One New England Patriot dancer expressed confidence that the Chinese women would master the trade: “They’re a lot like Americans - they use pompoms, they do flips,” 20-year-old Corie Mae Callaluca told the Chinese newspaper.
The paper editorialized that Mae Callaluca “is every bit the stereotypical cheerleader with long blonde hair and blue eyes.”
“Cheerleading is a quintessentially American tradition but has become more and more popular in China, thanks in large part to the phenomenal success of US basketball among China’s youth, who are not shocked by scantily clad dancers,” the paper added.
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Spoiler alert: Carrie’s No. 1!
Is it E.T. leaving in a spaceship or Butch and Sundance going down in a hail of bullets? The London Times has come up with its list of the top 20 movie endings of all time. The critics’ favorite actually isn’t E.T. or Butch and Sundance … but the ending of Carrie.
1) Carrie, Brian De Palma, 1976 “At the end of this Stephen King adaptation, Carrie (Sissy Spacek), who begins the film doused in the blood of her first period, has ended it drenched in the blood of pigs at a high-school prom. Unfortunately for her classmates, Carrie’s womanhood brought with it telekinetic powers, which she then uses to wipe out most of them - and herself - in a blaze of purifying flame. Sue (Amy Irving), one of the few survivors, visits Carrie’s freshly dug grave. She lays flowers. Carrie’s arm thrusts out of the soil and grabs her. A million stomachs leap. Sue wakes up. It was just a nightmare, but one that will never end.”
2) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 3) Casablanca 4) E.T. 5) Chinatown 6) Breakfast at Tiffany’s 7) Some Like It Hot 8) The Italian Job 9) The Usual Suspects 10) The Sixth Sense
Incidentally, readers had their own ideas when it comes to favorite movie endings. Many thought it a crime that the newspaper failed to mention Silence of the Lambs or Halloween.
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Sex and the (Chinese) city
Traditional Chinese society is as tight-laced as a chastity belt: In some parts of China, families still arrange marriages and casual dating is frowned on or forbidden outright.
But the success of Sex and the City - both the HBO television series and the recent movie - in China show that “a new generation of women has emerged”, according to the China Daily newspaper.
“Many women in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are choosing to lead lifestyles different from those of Chinese women in the past,” the newspaper, a mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, stated this month.
“These young urbanites say they highly prize independence, gender equality and personal expression.”
That freedom is a sharp contrast to China’s traditional mores: According to Confucian teachings - China’s chief philosophy until well into the 20th century - women were expected to bow to the wishes of their fathers and husbands.
The shift has also given women more sexual freedoms, the newspaper reported.
“If you ask sex-related questions to your parents, the probably will think you are a bad or strange kid, or, probably they even do not have enough sex education to explain anyway,” Xu Bingyu, a 29-year-old project manager told the China Daily.
“But now the once highly provocative idea of one-night stands, a frequent plot twist of the TV show, is no longer as shocking,” the paper said.
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Do people in Britain really need to know about Tom Cruise?
The London Times celebrated Tom Cruise’s 25 years of movie-making this week with a list of “25 things you may not know” about the Hollywood actor.
Here are a few of the paper’s Tomfacts:
Each of Cruise’s three wives (Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes) has been 11 years younger than the last.
TomKat were married by a Scientology minister at Odescalchi Castle in Italy in front of friends including Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, and David and Victoria Beckham. The Scientology leader David Miscavige was the best man.
With his Oscar-nominated turn as a sports agent in Jerry Maguire (1996), Cruise became the first actor to star in five consecutive films that grossed $100 million in the United States.
Cruise briefly attended a Franciscan seminary intending to become a Catholic priest, but left after a year.
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV was born on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, New York, but the family moved around and he attended 15 different schools in 12 years. “I had no close friend,” he told The Sunday Times in 2006. “I was always the new kid with the wrong shoes, the wrong accent.”
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Is Hollywood making smoking cool again?
Hollywood films of the 1940s were packed full of people smoking. But portrayals of people smoking in film decreased between 1950 and 1990, coinciding with the decline of smoking among the general population.
But since 1990 the trend has gone in the other direction again, with positive images of smoking increasing in frequency, especially in films aimed at young people. A poster of Uma Thurman smoking in Pulp Fiction and a picture of actor Billy Bob Thornton drawing deeply on a cigarette on the cover of a 2005 edition of Life magazine illustrate the trend.
Now the British Medical Association is calling on Hollywood to cut smoking scenes from films and in the media, according to today’s London Times.
A report called “Forever Cool” says that film censors should take into account pro-smoking elements in films when issuing a license, and films portraying smoking in a “positive” light should be preceded by anti-smoking advertisements.
Vivienne Nathanson, the British Medical Association’s head of science and ethics, singled out the film Independence Day, in which she said actor Will Smith lit a cigar every time he dispatched an alien.
Nathanson said that last year’s smoking ban in public places in England had cut the number of smokers. “Tens of thousands have given up, but smoking is still at high levels and we still have children starting to smoke. The decline in smoking was very fast 20 years ago, but it has slowed. And experience in Ireland, which introduced the smoking ban earlier, shows that people can begin to slip back into smoking.”
And that’s why, she said, it’s so important for Hollywood to act now to cut smoking scenes.
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World of Warcraft invades Paris
Eleven million people can’t be wrong! It’s another gorgeous summer day in Paris, but inside the Porte de Versailles Exposition Center it is dark, cool, and a bit gloomy. This is where thousands and thousands of fans have gathered at the 2008 Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational to celebrate perhaps the greatest phenomenon of all time: World of Warcraft.
According to today’s London Times, fans from 50 countries, including thousands from across Europe, have gathered to buy trading cards, posters, statuettes and anything else World of Warcraft-related.
Created by the California game developer Blizzard Entertainment, the World of Warcraft allows players to adopt the persona of a hero and fight alongside thousands of others against an assortment of monsters and villains.
Launched three years ago, World of Warcraft is anticipating signing up its 11 millionth customer today. The game enjoys vast audiences not only in North America, but also in Asia and Europe.
For example, according to the Times article, Lisa Young, 26, from London, has traveled to Paris for the event, bringing with her an extraordinary costume based on the attire of her own in-game character. “With flowing robes and intricately modeled armor pieces, the outfit is stunning. It represents about three months of work. Like the many other costumes on display, it demonstrates creativity, skill and patience — driven and inspired by enthusiasts’ love for the fantasy world that they have embraced,” the article said.
