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FRANCE, March 12, 2016 – Something unique happened more than 60 years ago in the south of France that changed the world of travel forever. The vision of two music-hall artists, Marcel and Nelly Tilloy, who owned Hotel La Cardinale in the Rhone Valley, inspired an exciting inn-keeping concept that captured the imagination of globe-trotters from every corner of the planet.
As with so many things that reach a pinnacle of success, the magic erupted from the simplicity of the idea. Combining the authenticity and history of eight entirely different off-the-beaten-path properties between Paris and Nice, the Tilloys organized a non-chain chain of hotels that provided diverse travel experiences in their own right.
United by the common values of the highest quality amenities, exquisite culinary adventures, the individual personalities of their owners and a love of life and living, the original octet merged to become the prestigious hotel Association of Relais & Chateaux.
Today with more than 530 properties in 65 countries on 5 continents, most Relais & Chateaux properties are historic landmarks that include castles, manor houses or townhouses nestled in idyllic surroundings featuring magnificent cuisine.
As President Philippe Gombert sums it up, Relais & Chateaux offers "a better world through cuisine and hospitality."
It's a difficult argument to dispute.
Membership is not awarded without strict adherence to the "Five C" method of evaluation; Caractère, Courtoisie, Calme et Cuisine. The words may be French but the meaning is universal. Though each property is distinctive with its own personality, all members must meet the same rigid standards:
The soul of the Innkeeper: – Each property owner must add his or her own personal touch within its environment. As Relais & Chateaux likes to say "each property beats to the innkeeper's heart."
The taste of the land: – Member inns must reflect the local surroundings including the environment, architecture, landscaping, leisure activities and, of course, the food.
The passport of friendship: – All Relais & Chateaux member share the same core values of making guests feel welcome by getting to know them personally.
The celebration of the senses: More than a just place to sleep and to eat, Relais & Chateaux properties immerse their guests into the local culture in ways that appeal to each of the senses.
An awakening to the "Art of Living": – There was a time when travel meant that "getting to" a destination was as much a part of the adventure as the destination itself. Relais & Chateaux renews that spirit by making each visit a journey of discovery.
La Cardinale Hotel/Restaurant was an authentic 17th century farmhouse overlooking the Rhone Valley and the mountains in the distance. With rich fields of fruit, lavender and sun-flowers plus vineyards, these were the seeds that evolved and grew into the Relais & Chateaux Association of today.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Relais & Chateaux in 2014, 60 chefs met in Ain, France for a luncheon at the Vonnas Georges Blanc along with historical members and journalists from around the world. Several gourmet festivals were organized throughout the year including 11 in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, 32 in Italy, 30 in the UK and 15 in Austria, Eastern Europe and Northern Europe.
There is no question that each of the chefs at a Relais & Chateaux property sets his personal standards as being a "virtuoso of taste."
With its distinctive fleur de lis-style vector logo designed to reflect the joy and happiness of a four-leaf clover, Relais & Chateaux has earned the distinction that travelers recognize as something truly special much in the way they understand that a UNESCO World Heritage Site is also a one-of-a-kind experience.
Way back in 1954 the eight original inns were linked as a culinary itinerary along the road that ran parallel to the tracks of the world famous Blue Train. The advertising slogan, much like the hotel concept itself, was simple; "La Route du Bonheur" or basically "the road to happiness."
Marcel and Nelly Tilloy were visionaries who created a new world of elegance and charm for travelers. You might say they developed their own personal "unchained melody."
Bob Taylor has been traveling the world for more than 30 years as a writer and award winning television producer focusing on international events, people and cultures around the globe.
Taylor is founder of The Magellan Travel Club (www.MagellanTravelClub.com)
Read more of What in the World and Bob Taylor at Communities Digital News
Follow Bob on Twitter @MrPeabodClick here for reuse options!
Copyright 2016 Communities Digital News
• The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or management of Communities Digital News.
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Thailand aims for rabies-free goal by 2020
BANGKOK, 10 January 2017 (NNT) The Department of Livestock Development (DLD) plans to make Thailand free of rabies by 2020, given a dog and cat population control campaign.
DLD Director General Apai Suttisunk said that fatalities from the disease have increased over the last two years, despite a general decline in the infection rate over the past decade.
Eighty-six percent of the rabies in Thailand was commonly found in dogs and was exacerbated by an increased number of stray dogs and cats. The department head said the most effective solution is to control the dog and cat populations through permanent sterilization which can reduce the rate of reproduction by 10 percent.
The DLD has launched the dog and cat population control campaign in risk areas, including the provinces of Samut Prakarn, Chonburi and Nakhon Ratchasima.
The director said the campaign has been carried out since December 2016 until February 2017 with the aim of containing stray dogs and cats, suppressing the smuggling of dogs to neighboring countries and supporting Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn's initiative to rid Thailand of animal diseases, and realizing the national goal of eliminating the rabies by 2020.
http://nwnt.prd.go.th/centerweb/news... iiD3USQ.dpuf
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Archive for the 'Directors: Kore-eda Hirokazu' Category
Dragons, tigers, and two programmers
Yellowing (Chan Tze Woon, 2016).
DB here:
It was Asian film that brought me to the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2006, when Tony Rayns asked me to serve on the Dragons and Tigers awards jury. Ever since, Kristin and I have been returning; Tony made VIFF North America's prime venue for cutting-edge Asian film. Name a major director from the region, and you'll find that Tony scouted his or her early work for Vancouver.
For some years now, Tony's co-programmer has been Chinese cinema expert Shelly Kraicer, who has been no less energetic in seeking out exciting new films. You can survey their track record by scanning our VIFF blog entries across the years.
Out of the many films in this year's D & T retrospective, here are five that I especially admire.
Genres redux
Across his career, Kore-eda Hirokazu has been a genre pluralist, but in recent years he seems to have settled into the shomin-geki, the bittersweet tale of lower-middle-class life. On the heels of Our Little Sister comes another family dramedy, After the Storm.
Once a prize-winning novelist, Ryota (the lanky, lantern-jawed Abe Hiroshi) is now a racetrack addict and a cheap detective not averse to shaking down high-school kids. After his father dies, and under the jaundiced eyes of his mother, he makes feeble efforts to reunite with his divorced wife and his baseball-playing son.
As usual with Kore-eda, everything flows in simple, unforced fashion, with every shot trimly composed and expertly timed. The emphasis falls on the actors, particularly as they're captured in mundane activities. Ryota's mother and sister are first seen writing thank-you notes to people who came to the funeral; he swills in fast food and throws away money on lottery tickets.
Ryota is one of Kore-eda's most objectionable protagonists. He uses his admittedly minimal surveillance skills to spy on his wife, and he tries to swipe a family scroll to pawn. In an American film, this unlikable loser would pass through an arc that makes him caring, sharing, and on the road to rehab. Instead, as in many Japanese films, the unhappy character relapses into childhood—here, curling up with his son inside a playground octopus during a typhoon. It's his effort to mimic a bonding moment with his father, but does it succeed now? Kore-eda isn't betting on it.
Altogether less tranquil is Godspeed, from the Taiwanese director Chung Mong-hung. Chung has given us the horror film Soul (2013), the well-received Fourth Portrait (2010), and the lively Parking (2008), which I reviewed at an earlier VIFF session.
Godspeed is a Tarantinoish excursion into the underworld. It alternates violent scenes of betrayal and reprisals with comic interludes involving a drug courier and the taxi driver he's hired to carry him to meet the bosses. The film is made with great panache, but for me what makes it noteworthy is that the driver is played by the great Michael Hui, dean of sour Hong Kong social satire.
Hui made his name as a television star before switching to films like The Private Eyes (1976), Security Unlimited (1981), and our favorite, Chicken and Duck Talk (1988). Godspeed revives Hui's comic persona, the tight-fisted, corner-cutting bargainer who isn't as clever as he thinks. As Old Xu, he reminisces about Hong Kong traffic and marital woes while trying to wangle a high fare from the phlegmatic, not overbright drug mule. Their misadventures—stumbling into a funeral, being stuffed into a car boot—serve as a counterpoint to the drug war escalating around them. No masterpiece, Godspeed is a beguiling exercise and a welcome return to a legendary and apparently ageless figure of Chinese cinema.
Mysterious, and fun
Another year, another stroll through Hong Sangsoo's garden of forking paths.
With compositions that are about as banal as they can be, the films don't aim to dazzle us pictorially. (Nice lighting, though.) The basics are really basic: Straight-on angles, fixed long take two-shots, simple come-and-go pans, an occasional and inexplicable zoom. These are his tools.
Dialogue and performance drive the action, which consists mostly of chance encounters and conversations in cafés, bars, restaurants, and bedrooms. His characters are students, artists, and film directors (usually fairly pretentious ones). Romantic hookups emerge, only to dissolve or play themselves out in parallel worlds, the whole presented in a "stacked" arrangement of modular scenes.
These scenic blocks display an obsessive, almost never mechanical, recourse to split viewpoints, recursive time schemes, mirror inversions, and whimsically varied replays. I've argued earlier that these permutations often test our faulty memory for exactly what transpired in a scene many minutes before, but it should be noted that sometimes, as in the last stretch of Oki's Movie (2010), he'll set the variations side by side.
Or maybe just side by side in your head. If the auteur theory didn't exist, it would have to be invented to account for the effect of Yourself and Yours. In any other movie, when a man recognizes a young woman in a café, and she says he's mistaken her for her twin, we might be inclined to take it as a brush-off. In a Hong movie, the scene makes us think back through all his other plots that have relied on doubling. So maybe this time he's found a new variation? Has he got an actual pair of twins who will circulate through the scenes, constantly being taken for one another?
Suffice it to say that the young woman (women?), repeatedly encountering three men who are attracted to her (them?), becomes (become?) the pretext for the usual Hong mockery of male vanity and insecurity. The lackadaisical painter Youngsoo is worried about his girlfriend Minjung, who drinks more than he'd like. Moreover, his friend reports that she's been seen with other men. Quickly enough, we spot her sharing drinks with an older man and a film director—who discover that they are old classmates. "This is mysterious," the director remarks, "and fun." None of the would-be Romeos notice that the lady in question is reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
Hong always has another card up his sleeve, and Yourself and Yours, while not as ingenious as his previous entry Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), is satisfyingly teasing. It also yields one of the most flagrantly self-indulgent trailers I know: faithful to the movie, but frustrating in just the right ways.
Taking it to the streets
When college students en masse join a movement for social change, their positions tend to be vindicated in the long run. In the United States, students were right to support movements against nuclear proliferation, against racial discrimination, against American involvement in Vietnam, for women's liberation and LGBT rights, against the invasion of Iraq, and, right here in Wisconsin, against Republican union-busting and voter suppression. The same pattern can be observed around the world, in student protests in Europe, South America, and Asia. Elders deride students as naïve, but more often than not, student activists critical of the status quo get principled politics right.
Why? I suspect several causes, including the fact that many (not all) students are reading, thinking, and learning while the general populace trudges through the dull compulsion of everyday labor. College flings together students from many backgrounds and may open eyes about how other people live. (Right-wingers worry too much about liberal professors indoctrinating students. In my experience, students are more influenced by their peers than by the likes of me.) And of course the flexible scheduling of college days allows motivated students the time to engage in political action.
Whatever the causes, it's no surprise that in Hong Kong, the street protests running from September through December of 2014 were launched by young people. In August the mainland's Communist Party decreed that instead of direct election of the territory's Chief Executive, candidates would be chosen by a nominating committee comprised of businessmen and politicians sympathetic to Beijing. In effect, this guaranteed a puppet leader of the type all too familiar in the territory. Students responded by organizing actions similar to the Occupy movement in America. With surprising speed, civil disobedience and sit-down occupation spread through downtown areas of Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula.
Hong Kongers were long considered indifferent to politics, only concerned with scrambling to get ahead and make money. But the world had to notice when tens of thousands of students and ordinary men and women built vast encampments in the streets in front of chic shops and noodle restaurants. Wearing yellow ribbons and hard-hats, and armed with umbrellas to protect them against sun, rain, and tear gas, they were apparently ready for a long stay.
This epochal event in Hong Kong history is documented in Yellowing, a new film by Chan Tse Woon. It was made under the auspices of Ying e chi, a filmmaking collective that has been working since the propitious year 1997, when the British turned the territory over to the People's Republic. Although framed as a diary, it's basically a cinéma vérité account of moments and vignettes of the Umbrella Revolution. The voice-over narration is keenly personal, beginning with home-movie footage of Chan's childhood and youth, interrupted by his memory of repeated promises that democracy would soon arrive.
Loosely organized, Yellowing offers no systematic chronology of events à la a PBS program. It's defiantly local, a snapshot album for Hong Kongers who will recognize each phase of the movement. At the start, some gorgeous nighttime cityscapes are shattered by confrontations with police ("Police, retreat," the students chant) and conversations with student organizers in their down time. In the two hours that follow, we spend a lot of that time with young people like the ceaselessly beaming Rachel, who's now considering becoming a civil rights lawyer. We see one boy passing out wristbands reading, They can't kill us all.
Students set up tents, squat in pounding rain, organize English classes, and run supply chains across the vast areas of occupation. There are clashes with police and civilians. ("Your flesh and blood belongs to your family," a man charges.) Chan's camera captures, helter-skelter, assaults from cops and street gangs. There are camera duels, with police filming demonstrators while demonstrators film police. Chan's voice-over says that he thought his camera would protect him, but he still gets punched in the face. The occupiers practice tactical evasion and passive resistance, but there's no effort to heroicize them. Many are crying as police lead them away.
Despite the almost casual presentation, you realize how much these kids are risking. Many are poor, some are trying to hang onto a job, and nearly all realize that this will change their lives. "Even if we lose this fight, we'll lose together." As for the angry citizens wearing blue ribbons declaring support for authorities, the students are sympathetic: "Don't you think they need democracy too?"
The film circles back to the opening, with Daddy-cam shots of children. We hear Rachel writing in reply to a professor who had urged the students to give way for the sake of "security," and to stop being tools of "foreign subversion." The film lingers on her cheerful, polite suggestion that Mainland domination has replaced British colonialism, and that the children of the future deserve better.
Most of our politicians and all of our plutocrats will never know the sort of courage that these young people displayed with modest, good-humored tenacity. Unarmed—unlike the Y'all Queda fraidycats who occupied our Oregon wildlife refuge—these unprepossessing kids stood a very good chance of being brutalized by a government not known for recognizing the niceties of due process. You feel proud of the young people of Hong Kong while watching this heartbreaking, hopeful film. As often happens, the students were both righteous and right.
Not hope, fear
Ying e chi has often worked with theatres to show independent films, but Yellowing has been denied a theatrical release. Instead, Variety reports, producer Vincent Chui has arranged for guerrilla screenings. Five ticketed shows were held at the Hong Kong Film Archive, in order to qualify for this year's Hong Kong Film Awards.
The resistance to Yellowing doubtless owes a lot to the controversy surrounding another film, Ten Years (2015). It won astonishing success in local theatres. According to Maggie Lee in Variety, it cost only US$65,000 but earned nearly $800,000 before Beijing realized how subversive it was and blasted it as a "thought virus." Ten Years was nominated for a Hong Kong Film Award, which made the PRC cancel television coverage of the ceremony. When the film won the Best Picture prize, shock waves went through the film community, and it was denounced by producers and executives. It was soon cast out of theatres, but screenings continued in community centers, churches, and outdoor venues. It's slated for a DVD release soon.
Ten Years consists of five shorts linked by the premise of local life in 2025. In its dystopian portrayal of Mainland domination of Hong Kong, it's a fairly direct outgrowth of the Umbrella Revolution. But if Yellowing documents the movement's hope, this film exposes, as many commentators have noted, fear.
One episode, "Extras," dramatizes behind-the-scenes scenes political machinations as a sort of noir comedy. Two hapless thugs are hired to stage an assassination attempt that will arouse public support for a new security law. While the men rehearse their gun choreography, the puppeteers debate whether killing or wounding the targets would play better in the media.
Other episodes are more concerned with the cultural impact of Beijing's dominance of local life. "Season of the End" presents scientists searching rubble for signs of now-vanished Hong Kong life, shot in ominously clinical detail. "Dialect" presumes that Mandarin is becoming the official language of the territory, and we see a taxi driver struggling to cast off his Cantonese. "Local Egg" also centers on language. Here a shopkeeper is forbidden to use the word "local" because it suggests those political factions struggling to keep Hong Kong distinct, or maybe pushing it to become independent. In an echo of the Cultural Revolution, this episode shows schoolkids in uniform arriving with iPads to check shops' compliance with the list of forbidden words and retail items.
The most emotionally wrenching episode, "Self-Immolator," is a pseudo-documentary. Startling scorch-marks on the sidewalk are the traces of someone who burned to death in protest of government oppression. Through talking heads, a collage of demonstration footage, and some investigation, the film traces how a young man's hunger strike led to the mysterious self-immolation. Several candidates for the self-sacrifice are canvassed before, in a break with the documentary frame, the protest suicide is shown. In the conclusion, an umbrella is seen aflame, perhaps forming a requiem for the 2014 protests.
Ten Years is a good example of how a film can have social importance because of the moment at which it emerges. Along with Yellowing, it will be a lasting memorial to the struggles of Hong Kong people to introduce democracy to China.
Thanks to Tony and Shelly for all their work in setting up these screenings. In addition, Kristin and I are grateful to Alan Franey, PoChu AuYeung, and Jennie Lee Craig and their colleagues for making our VIFF visit so enjoyable and enlightening. Special thanks to Tallulah for cheerfulness and Lillooet for the waffles.
Thanks to our regular attendance at VIFF, we've discussed many of Hong Sangsoo's films; see the director category.
The development of the Umbrella Revolution is traced in this long New York Times story. Last August, accused student leaders got surprisingly light sentences. Some of the "localists" and Occupiers won places in the Legco elections and are expected to make waves.
Tony Rayns and Shelly Kraicer.
Hou Hsiao-hsien: A new video lecture!
The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993).
DB here:
The Hou Hsiao-hsien seminar held in Antwerp at the end of May was an event I was sorry to miss. The title announced a focus on Hou's style of "just-noticeable differences," a phrase I used to describe his rich and nuanced staging. Coordinator Tom Paulus assembled a stellar lineup of scholars:
Cristina Álvarez López, critic and researcher, co-founder and co-editor of Transit and frequent contributor to mubi.
Adrian Martin, wide-ranging critic and scholar, whose recent book, Mise en scène and Film Style, made him a natural choice for this gathering.
Bérénice Reynaud, expert on Chinese cinema and author of the first book on Hou in English, a fine monograph on City of Sadness.
Richard Suchenski, coordinator of the major Hou retrospective now touring the world and editor of a vast anthology (discussed in an earlier post).
James Udden, author of the first career monograph on Hou in English (discussed hereabouts) and reporter for us on The Assassin (here and here).
A bout of bronchitis kept me home. Chris Fujiwara, author of books on Preminger, Jerry Lewis, and Jacques Tourneur, kindly filled in for me.
But I had prepared a talk, dammit, and I chafed at the prospect of junking it.
The talk was called "The Drawer, Two Women, and the Little Toy Fan." It centered on aspects of Hou's 1980s and 1990s work that seemed to me to have influenced works by other filmmakers in the region. The talk ended with some speculations on developments in Hou's own films over the last fifteen years.
Remembering that all redemption comes from the Web, I decided to put the thing up on our Vimeo channel. While fiddling with it, I realized that it was pretty narrowly addressed to Hou specialists. So I expanded it by offering more context and background, and gave it the unsexy title of "Hou Hsiao-hsien: Constraints, traditions, and trends."
The lecture is available here on my Vimeo channel.
It can serve as an introduction to some ideas about Hou I floated in Figures Traced in Light. I've added comments on Hou films after Flowers of Shanghai, and I consider other filmmakers (Kore-eda, Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang) as well. It has pretty pictures, many drawn from 35mm prints.
I regret to report, though, that my voice-over narration, the first I recorded at home rather in a studio, is a bit ragged. And, sorry to say, the talk runs nearly seventy minutes. I take consolation in Adorno's reply to someone who complained that The Authoritarian Personality was too long: "We didn't have time to make it short."
Thanks to Tom Paulus of the University of Antwerp and the Photogénie blog for sponsoring the seminar. Thanks as well to Bart Versteirt and Lisa Colpaert of the Vlaamse Dienst voor Filmcultuur vzw and to Nicola Mazzanti of the Cinematek. And of course I owe big thanks to Erik Gunneson of our department of Communication Arts who, as ever, helped me record and post the video lecture.
See our previous entry for more information about events related to Hou's visit to Belgium. Our site has other material on Hou here and especially here and here.
Here's a good place to acknowledge what Abé Markus Nornes and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh have done in making available their pioneering work on City of Sadness. Long ago they put up a fascinating website on the film, which they have now updated on several platforms. Staging Memories, the free interactive iBook for Mac and iPad, can be downloaded from the Apple Bookstore. You can buy a paperback edition from Michigan Publishing here, and the PDF version of that can be viewed for free here.
In the talk I mention how Hou's work has affinities for the "tableau" style developed in the 1910s. This isn't a question of direct influence, but an instance of convergence: Similar early choices in a process (long take, long shot, fixed camera) led to similar options and opportunities further down the line. (A case of path dependence in film style?) You can find more on the tableau style in On the History of Film Style, Figures Traced in Light, and some entries on this site, particularly this one and these. The tableau style is also discussed in another video lecture, "How Motion Pictures Became the Movies."
Olivier Assayas and Hou Hsiao-hsien at the Master Class held at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. Photo courtesy Nick Nguyen.
VIFF 2013 finale: The Bold and the Beautiful, sometimes together
Gebo and the Shadow (2012).
DB here:
I'm a little late catching up with our viewings at the Vancouver International Film Festival this year (it ended on the 11th), but I did want to signal some of the best things we didn't squeeze into earlier entries. Kristin and I also want to pay tribute to one of the biggest moving forces behind the event.
Safe but not sorry
Like Father, Like Son (2013).
Among other goals, film festivals aim to provide a safe space for nonconformist filmmaking. Programmers need to find the next new thing—art cinema is as driven by novelty as Hollywood is—and they encourage films that push boundaries. What isn't so often recognized is that sometimes festivals show filmmakers who were once quite artistically daring backing off a bit from their more radical impulses. Part of this is probably age and maturity; part of it reflects the fact that apart from daring novelties, festivals also showcase works that might cross over to wider audiences. And of course festivals will present recent works by the most distinguished filmmakers, almost regardless of the programmers' hunches about their quality. Some sectors of the audience want to see the latest Hou or Kiarostami or Assayas.
Koreeda Hirokazu was thirty-three when Mabarosi (1995) won a prize at Venice. It's an austerely beautiful work, presenting a disquieting family drama in very long, static takes. Once the action shifts to a seacoast village, distant shots render slowly-changing illumination playing over landscapes, while the tension between husband and wife is built out of small gestures. For example, we learn that the forlorn wife is waiting in the bus stop only when a little bit of her comes to light.
Lest this seem just fancy playing around, Koreeda occasionally used his long takes to build suspense. Yumiko's new husband has been drinking. While he's out of the room, she opens a drawer to retrieve the bike bell she keeps in memory of her first husband, killed in a traffic accident. The second husband returns unexpectedly, and drunkenly collapses on the table beside her. But when she lifts her hands out of her lap, she inadvertently lets the bell tinkle a little.
The sound rouses him and he asks what she's holding. She raises her head at last and they begin a quarrel about each one's motives in marrying the other.
Eventually he will shift woozily to the other side of the table and notice what has been sitting quietly in the frame all along: the still-open drawer on the far right.
In later films, from After Life (1998) to I Wish (2011), Koreeda's visual design became less reliant on just-noticeable changes within a placid shot. The images have become less demanding, and more extroverted narrative lines carry stronger sentiment. The films remain admirable in their ingenious plotting and mixture of humor and pathos—which is to say, they are committed to that "cinema of quality" that makes movies exportable.
That commitment is firmly in place in Like Father, Like Son. Koreeda, now fifty-one, dares almost nothing stylistically or narratively. Yet every scene leaves a discernible tang of emotion, and his light touch assures that things never lapse into histrionics. If Nobody Knows (2004) and I Wish (2011) are his "children films," this is, like Still Walking (2008), a movie about being a parent.
The plot has a fairy-tale premise: Babies switched at birth. Our viewpoint is aligned with the well-to-do parents and particularly the ambitious executive Ryota. When he finds that six-year-old Keita isn't his birth son, he insists on swapping the boy into the household of the happy-go-lucky working-class Saiki family. In exchange, Ryota and his wife take in the boy that Saikis have raised as their own.
As the film proceeds, our view widens to create a welter of comparisons—two ways of being six years old, tough discipline versus easygoing parenting, what rich people take for granted and what poor people can't, a solicitous mother versus one who can't spare time for coddling. Koreeda is faultless in measuring the reactions of all involved. Ryota's wife slips into quiet depression. Saiki is an affable father with a childish streak, but he also looks forward to suing the hospital. Saiki's wife, a no-nonsense woman with two other kids to care for, is a mixture of toughness and maternal affection. As in a Renoir film, everyone has his reasons, and the drama depends on a process of adjustment stretching across many months. Climaxes become muted, though no less powerful for that.
A smile and a tear: the Shochiku studio formula, enunciated by Kido Shiro back in the 1920s, remains in force here. Simple motifs, such as images stored on a camera's photo card, hark back to all those affectionate picture-taking scenes in Ozu's classics. The whole is shot with a conventional polish—coverage through long lenses, straightforward scene dissection—that's far from the strict, slightly chilly look of Maborosi.
It's impossible to dislike this warm, meticulously carpentered film. Koreeda has proven himself a master of humanistic filmmaking, and I admire what he's done (as these entries indicate). Those of us who've been following his career for nearly twenty years, however, may feel a little disappointed that he hasn't tried to stretch his horizons a bit more.
Like Father, Like Son was rewarded with the Jury Prize at this year's Cannes festival. Steven Spielberg, jury president, has acquired remake rights for DreamWorks.
Action, blunt or besotted
A Touch of Sin (2013).
Jia Zhang-ke's A Touch of Sin offers a comparable adjustment to broader tastes. It's far less forbidding than his early features Platform (2000), Unknown Pleasures (2002), and The World (2004). Somewhat like Koreeda, Jia's earliest fiction films embraced a long-take aesthetic that tended to keep the characters' situations framed in a broad context. (His documentaries, like the remarkable 2001 In Public, were somewhat different.) Jia proceeded to breach the boundary between documentary and fiction in Still Life (2007), Useless (2007), and 24 City (2008). With A Touch of Sin, Jia takes on a twisting, violent network narrative that is as shocking as Koreeda's duplex story is ingratiating.
We start with a villager who fumes at the corruption in his town and carries out a vendetta against its rulers. Another story centers on a receptionist who is taken for a prostitute and abused by massage-parlor customers. A third protagonist is an uneducated young man floating among factory jobs who turns his frustration inward. Threading through these is a drifter who shoots muggers from his motorcycle and later takes up purse-snatching.
The sense of inequity and exploitation that ripples through Still Life and 24 City now explodes into rage. Rich men (one played by Jia) puff cigars while strutting through a brothel, businessmen casually exploit their mistresses and buy off politicians, and injustices are settled with fists, knives, pistols and shotguns. "I was motivated by anger," Jia says. "These are people who feel they have no other option but violence."
Like Koreeda, Jia has had recourse to some of the casual long-lens coverage we find in many contemporary movies, but certain shots gather weight through his signature long takes–especially shots holding on brooding characters. In all, we get a dread-filled panorama, with bursts of violence staged and filmed with an impact that reminds you how sanitized contemporary action scenes are.
For more, see Manohla Dargis' rich Times review of the film.
After the painstaking (and pain-giving) dynamics of Drug War (our entry is here), one of Johnnie To Kei-fung's best recent films, it's wholly typical that he does something outrageous. His work with Wai Ka-fai at their Milkyway company has always alternated unforgiving crime films of rarefied tenor with sweet and wacko romantic comedies that assure solid returns. But seldom have they combined the two tendencies into something as screechingly peculiar as The Blind Detective.
Initially the investigator, inexplicably named Johnston, seems to be a brother to Bun, the mad detective of To and Wai's 2007 film. He insists on having the crime reenacted so as to intuit the perp's identity. But since Johnston is blind, somebody else must tumble down stairs, get whacked on the head, and generally suffer severe pain in the name of the law. Ready to sacrifice herself to Johnston's mission is officer Ho, a spry and game young woman with a crush on him.
Johnston and Ho are trying to find what happened to a schoolgirl who went missing ten years before. But this account makes the movie seem more linear than it is. Johnston makes his living from reward money, and he's also dedicated to finding a dancing teacher he fell in love with when he had sight. So the search for Minnie is constantly deflected. Yet the digressions end up, mostly through Johnston's inexplicable flashes of imagination, carrying them back to their main quest.
This episodic plot, or rather two plots, stretched to 130 minutes (making this the longest Milkyway release, I believe), yields something like a Hong Kong comedy of the 1980s, where slapstick, gore, and non-sequitur scenes are stitched together by the flimsiest of pretexts. The tone careens from farce (not often very funny to Westerners) to grim salaciousness. Johnston's intuitive leaps are represented by blue-tinted fantasies that show him gliding through a scene at the moment of the murder, or assembling a gaggle of victims to declaim their stories. Characters are ever on the verge of exploding in anger or aggression, and between the big scenes Ho and Johnston dance tangos and gnaw their way through steaks, fish, and other delicacies.
Once more, the congenitally fabulous Andy Lau Tak-wah is accompanied by Sammi Cheng as his love interest, and the two ham it up as gleefully as in Love on a Diet (2001). (They were more subdued in my favorite of the cycle, Needing You…, 1999.) This is, in short, a real Hong Kong popular movie. It brought in US $2.0 million in the territory, and $33 million on the Mainland, about the same as Monsters University. If it keeps Milkyway in business, how can I object?
For a discerning take on The Blind Detective, see Kozo's review at LoveHKFilm.
JLG in your lap
Kristin and I were keenly looking forward to 3 x 3D, the portmanteau film collecting stereoscopic shorts by Peter Greenaway, Edgar Pêra, and Jean-Luc Godard. Kristin found the Greenaway episode–sort of his version of Russian Ark, taking the camera through the labyrinth of a ducal palace and showing off elaborate digital effects–fairly appealing. But for us the Godard was the main attraction, and he didn't disappoint.
At one level, The Three Disasters reverts to his characteristic collage of found footage, film stills, scrawled overwriting, and insistent voice-over. (Is it my imagination or does the the 83-year-old filmmaker's croak sound increasingly like that of Alpha 60?) The montage is sometimes over-explicit, as when Charlie Chaplin is juxtaposed with Hitler. There's a funny passage of portraits of one-eyed directors (Lang, Ford, Ray), as if to reassert the primacy of classical monocular cinema. At other points, things get obscure, as when Eisenstein's plea for Jewish causes during World War II is followed by shots from The Lady from Shanghai. But this is the Godard of Histoire(s) du cinema, piling up impressions that beg for acolytes to identify the images and find associations among them.
Frankly, this side of Godard doesn't grab me as much as his pseudo-, quasi-, more-or-less-narrative features. But in 3D his dispersive poetic musings take on a new vitality. He doesn't retrofit old movie clips and still photos for 3D. Instead he superimposes them, making one cloudy plane drift over another. He can also, more forcefully, present his signature numerals and intertitles in a new way–by having them pound out of the screen and hang rigidly in front of the image.
There are also some 3D shots made specifically for the film, most consisting of handheld shots that shift around a park, a medical complex, and, of course, a media studio. The very title of Godard's film, punning on 3D as a technical disaster, as well as a throw of the dice (dés), suggests his ambivalence toward the technology. "The digital," his voice declares, "will be a dictatorship," but perhaps it will never abolish chance.
As usual, Godard has fun with simple equipment. He frankly shows us his camera rig, two Canon DSLRs lashed together side by side, one upside down. By shooting them in a mirror and shifting focus, he manages to make each lens pop and recede disconcertingly, as if Escher had gone 3D. This shot alone should inspire DIY filmmakers everywhere. So too should the one-slate credits. Whereas Greenaway's segment lists scores of names in its credit roll, Godard's lists only four, alphabetically. I can't wait for the feature, Farewell to Language. (Trailer here.)
Brian Clark has an informative review of The Three Disasters at twitchfilm.
Looking at the fourth wall
In nineteenth-century Portugal, the elderly Gebo ekes out a living as a company accountant. His wife Doroteia and his daughter-in-law Sofia wait with him for the return of João, a rebellious ne'er-do-well. Gebo feeds Doroteia's illusions about their son, who has likely become an outlaw. When João returns after eight years away, he throws the family into turmoil and becomes fixated on the cash that his father safeguards for the firm.
After World War II, André Bazin noticed that many filmmakers were starting to take a creative approach to adapting plays. Olivier's Henry IV, Welles' Macbeth and Othello, Dreyer's Day of Wrath, Cocteau's Les Parents terribles, Melville's Les Enfants terribles, Hitchcock's Rope, and Wyler's Little Foxes and Detective Story, are far from the "photographed theatre" that some critics feared would dominate talking pictures. For decades Manoel de Oliveira has explored avenues of theatrical adaptation that have led us to some daring destinations. Gebo and the Shadow, drawn from a 1923 play by the Portuguese Raúl Brandão, is a powerful recent example, and possibly the best film I saw at VIFF this year.
After the credits show João loitering on the docks, the film confines the action almost wholly to the parlor of Gebo's family home. Early on we see the street outside through a window, but most of the film concentrates on the characters gathered around the room's central table. On stage, we can imagine the table at the center and the major characters assembling around it but leaving one side clear, facing the audience–in effect, accepting the convention of the invisible fourth wall that gives us access to the space.
As the still above suggests, it seems initially that Oliveira is playing up this convention, putting us into the stage space and setting the fourth wall behind us. Very soon, though, we're inserted between the players, so that we see the other side of this lantern-lit playing space.
For the most part, the first stretch of conversations and soliloquys among Gebo, Doroteia, and Sofia are played out in this planimetric, clothesline layout. So is the late-night arrival of the vagrant João, coming to sit opposite his father and laughing wildly. This shot corresponds to the end of the play's first act.
On the next day, when Gebo and his family receive some friends, the table is sliced in half.
The effect is to redouble the sense of proscenium space, presenting two planimetric arrays that always keep one "behind" us.
Like other chamber-plays-on-film (Dreyer's Master of the House, Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder), Gebo varies its spatial premises slightly to incorporate other possibilities. In the stretch corresponding to the second act of the play, the angle on the table changes twice, once to present the split table-scene above, and later, to the climactic moment when João joins Sofia and contemplates breaking open the strongbox.
Sometimes we're shown the window and other walls, usually presented when characters leave one shot and enter another. The constructive editing helps us tie together zones of the room that aren't ever given in an all-encompassing master shot. And the camera never moves, not even to reframe characters' gestures.
In previous films, Oliveira has played with the ambiguities of who's looking where. (See, for instance, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Hair Girl and The Strange Case of Angelica.) After a mysterious prologue involving João, a ravishing image presents Sofia watching at the window, then moving aside to reveal Doroteia behind her (and behind us).
As often happens, the start of a film sets up an internal norm; it teaches us how to watch it. This movie starts with a lesson in optical geometry. Sofia watches the street, goes out to scan for Gebo's arrival, then watches Doroteia from outside the window before coming back in and resuming her position at the window. As the shot develops, we can see Doroteia lighting a lamp and reflected in the window against the distant doorway.
When Sofia walks out of the shot, Oliveira's camera lingers on the window, in which we can still see Doroteia turning her head to watch Sofia's coming to her. This is the shot, imperfectly reproduced, that's at the top of today's entry. The image isn't far from the gently insistent changes of Koreeda's Maborosi. This film about a shadow starts with an image of a spectre.
Constructive editing often relies on a glance offscreen, so here he can play with minute differences of eye direction. Occasionally the actors look directly out at us. But when the table is halved, as above, the eyelines get very oblique, with opposite characters looking in the same direction.
In the third act, the frontal and planimetric grouping around the table returns. Gebo has searched fruitlessly for João and has returned to take the consequences of his son's theft.
Oliveira's adaptation omits the play's fourth act, when the family is reunited three years later. His version leaves the family suspended in a freeze-frame, haunted by the ghostly son who has betrayed their trust. This dramatic climax is also a visual one, with sunlight for the first time spilling into the chilly, lamplit parlor and its inhabitants startled, as if they shared João's guilt.
Perhaps more than the other films in this entry, Jebo and the Shadow shows why we need film festivals. Oliveira's purified experiment demands a lot from the audience, but it repays our efforts. It's at once an engrossing story and an exciting exercise in what cinema can still do. Note as well that I have managed to get through a discussion of Oliveira's film without mentioning his age.
For more on the film, see Francisco Ferreira's very helpful essay in Cinema Scope.
Finally, Alan Franey has announced his departure from the job of Director of the Vancouver International Film Festival. He's going out on a high note. This year's edition was a solid success, and its spread to venues around town seems to have brought a wider audience. For twenty-six years Alan has led the process of making the festival one of the best in North America. He has helped give it a unique identity as home to Canadian cinema, documentaries on the arts and the environment, and outstanding current Asian cinema.
For Kristin and me, he has been a wonderful friend and good-humored company. Alan's deep commitment to great cinema has shown in his recruitment of colleagues, his skilful defusing of potential crises (most recently the shift to digital projection), and his genial, almost Zen, good nature. Fortunately for the festival, he will remain as a programmer. He deserves our lasting thanks.
Good news for US audiences on some of these titles: Sundance Selects will distribute Like Father, Like Son, while Kino Lorber has wisely acquired rights for A Touch of Sin. Gebo and the Shadow is available on an English-subtitled DVD from Fnac and Amazon.fr. It's a very dark movie, and in order to make the frames readable here, I've had to brighten them a bit. These images don't do justice to what I saw in the VIFF screening, or even to what the fairly decent DVD looks like.
For more on planimetric staging of the sort we find in Gebo and Maborosi, see entries here and here and here. It's a common resource of modern cinema, and directors utilize it in a variety of ways.
Les trois désastres (2013).
More VIFF vitality, fancy and plain
I Wish.
DB here:
Back from Vancouver Internatonal Film Festival, we're still assimilating. We just learned of the winners, but here are some more movies that won my admiration.
Three lives, four-plus hours
Art cinema has been attracted to mystery and intrigue plots since at least The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Antonioni needed an enigmatic disappearance to get L'Avventura going. Before and after there were Cronaca di un amore, La Commare Secca, Blow-Up, La Guerre est finie, and the works of Robbe-Grillet. Not to mention Vagabond and Toto les héros and, venturing to Asia, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels.
True to this tradition, in Dreileben (Three Lives, 2011), conventions of festival cinema—elliptical transitions, ambiguous dream sequences, retrospectively identified point-of-view shots, anecdotal realism, de-dramatization, open endings—punctuate, and puncture, a killer-on-the-loose scenario. The genre is respected to the extent of supplying teasing clues, some conveniently recorded on video and in an old photograph. (Shades of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.)
The murder-mystery element is, I think, part of the reason that this TV installment-story has been making the festival rounds. Yes, there's also its pedigree (three accomplished directors) and its use of the now-common strategy of network narrative. Each of the three episodes focuses on different characters whose paths cross. We get pieces of the whole story; scenes glimpsed in one episode are fleshed out in another.
The tryptych format recalls the Belgian Trilogy (Lucas Belvaux, 2002). But that exercise retold its story by centering on a core of characters, replaying events and switching point of view (and genre) from film to film. Dreileben's first two episodes focus on characters at some remove from the crime and the criminal, a strategy that redefines what counts as the central situation. Moreover, and unlike most network narratives, these plots show few points of contact. Characters connect very rarely across episodes, so that each tale gains a weight of its own. The mad-killer element comes to seem secondary for quite a while.
The first episode, Beats Being Dead, directed by Christian Petzold, is largely organized around the perspective of Johannes, a young medical student about to embark on a prestigious fellowship. He becomes attached to a moody immigrant girl working in a nearby hotel. Over the romance hovers not only a brutish biker club but also a mental patient, accused of murdering a girl, who escapes from Johannes' hospital and lurks around the forest. This episode is presented in a clean, almost enameled visual style sharpened by the abrupt scene shifts characteristic of modern cinema.
The second part, Don't Follow Me Around (Dominik Graf), seemed to me the strongest. Johanna, a female police psychologist, is brought to the town, apparently to profile the criminal, but actually to conduct a rather different investigation. She stays with an old friend and her husband, and Johanna's visit opens up a new psychodrama all its own. The rather narrow focus of the first, on a romantic triangle, here widens to consider frayed friendships, marital suspicions, and old passions. The character relationships get more complicated as things move along. The somewhat informal framings and jerky cutting (nearly three times as many shots as in the Petzold, in about the same running time) accentuate Johanna's discomfort and her eventual moments of confronting her past.
After two films hovering around the fringes of the crime, the third installment, One Minute of Darkness, signed by Christoph Hochhausler, seems to go to the heart of things. Now we follow the escaped lunatic Molesch pursued by Markus, a cop so flagrantly unhealthy that he seems to risk a coronary every time he rises from his sagging armchair. Yet this detective story turns out to be not quite as cut-and-dried as we expect. That's partly because of Molesch's encounter with a little girl and partly because the first episode is revealed in retrospect to unfold in a more indeterminate time frame than we might have thought. The film doesn't plug every gap, I think; I left thinking we needed a fourth or fifth installment. But that's probably part of the point.
Genre conventions permeate all three episodes, which seriatim present twentysomething romance, simmering melodrama, and classic sleuthing and pursuit, all spiced by stalker-in-the-shadows atmospherics. Dennis Lim's illuminating essay indicates that this trio of films is the product of a German debate about how filmmakers committed to "auteur cinema" can deal with matters of genre.
More broadly, works like Dreileben characterize much of today's festival moviemaking: an effort to graft modernist narrative strategies onto a genre-driven plot premise. (We see it in The Skin I Live in too.) A cynic could argue that a serial-killer investigation serves to attract audiences who might be put off by purely formal gymnastics. But actually mystery plots, based on hiding information and misdirecting our attention, mesh well with the narrational maneuvers of international art cinema. If crossover films like this bring in more viewers, that's a side benefit of merging two robust traditions—a storytelling mode that hides and then reveals secrets, and one that believes that even when revealed, secrets remain secretive.
POV = Perplexities of Vision
The barely-converging fates of Dreileben reminded me of the network knitting of Johnnie To's Life without Principle. In a similar way, two exercises in optical point-of-view echoed the last sequence of Panahi's This is Not a Film. In that non-film, the camera abandoned by a cameraman seems to be picked up by Panahi himself and carried beyond what we normally think of as "house arrest." But one of the resources of the POV shot is that it can coax us to ask who's seeing what we see. If we aren't given an identifying shot of the looker, we can start to wonder. Played upon in countless horror movies to hint at the eyes of the stalking monster/ killer, the unspecified POV in Panahi's hands (or perhaps not in his hands) becomes charged with political consequence.
Optical POV isn't as fully exploited as you might expect in Pan-ek Ratanaruang's Headshot. One of its premises is that Tul, a contract killer, is wounded in the cranium and as a result sees the world upside down. But the trauma takes place in the first few scenes, and what follows until the midpoint is a set of flashbacks explaining how he became a gun for hire. Present-time episodes showing him getting adjusted to his affliction alternate with past-tense scenes that supply him with motives for revenge.
So far, so noirish. Indeed, the iconography (crooked lawyers, not one but two femmes fatales, chiaroscuro scenes) and the plot (flashbacks, voice-overs, double- and triple-crosses) put us in familiar, quite enjoyable territory. Needless to say, like nearly all film noir heroes Tul has never seen a film noir, so he can't sense the walls closing in as quickly as we can. He remains idealistic—"I may kill people, but I'm not a crook"—and trusting to a fault.
The upside-down POV works okay as a general pointer to the film's Buddhist thematics, but the inverted shots are fairly few, introduced to defamiliarize a bit of action. They aren't exploited as a thoroughgoing formal device. For a while vision scientists believed, mistakenly, that when people wore inverting spectacles, they eventually learned to see the world rightside up. Is Ratanaruang suggesting that Tul adapted in this way?Early in the film the hero pins pictures on his wall upside down, but near the film's end I thought I saw a shot ostensibly through Tul's eyes showing us the inverted pictures on the wall, rather than the way they'd look if he saw upside down. In real life, as if it were relevant, it seems that wearing inverted spectacles doesn't make you see things right way round eventually. The world always looks flipped. But you can adapt to this upside-down array fairly quickly and execute normal activities like riding a bicycle and even reading. Presumably this explains why Tul's marksmanship remains lethally good in the gunplay finale.
Far more consistent–obsessive, actually–is the play with optical POV in the Romanian film Best Intentions by Adrian Sitaru. When Alex's mother has a stroke, he leaves Bucharest to visit her. She's recovering reasonably well, but Alex becomes so anxious about her care that he makes life miserable for her, his father, his girlfriend Lia, and the doctor, an old family friend. After the first scene, when Alex gets the call about her stroke, a drastically totalizing POV system kicks in. Whenever Alex is in the presence of anyone else—major character, minor character, onlooker—we see him through that person's eyes. If he's alone, usually on the phone, the shots of him are unassigned and objective, but when he's in public, he's only shown subjectively. Moreover, we never get a POV shot from his perspective.
A narrational game emerges. When Alex is interacting with only one other person, we quickly grasp who the Unseen Seer is. For instance, we understand that he's met at the train by his father, identified by his offscreen voice.
When Alex first visits his mother in the hospital, however, the POV floats momentarily. At first it might seem we're seeing Alex's entry through his mother's eyes,when he briefly acknowledges the camera's field of view.
But when he moves past, we realize we're seeing him from the viewpoint of the woman in the bed beside his mother's.
When he's with only one other character, the scene plays out without cuts. When cuts come within a scene, they're motivated as shifts from one character's POV to another's. Here we first see Alex and his mother through the eyes of the patient across the room, whom we glimpse in the background during his entrance above. When the mother's neighbor looks at them, that motivates a closer view of them.
This tag-team POV becomes quite engaging when several characters are present. In a dazzling scene of three couples drinking around a tavern table, the dialogue is fast-moving and the cuts come quickly. I found myself trying to chart exactly whose view we're getting. Sometimes the POV gets anchored retroactively: one of several characters we see in shot A becomes the POV vessel in shot B. For more fun, the system develops in unexpected ways as the movie proceeds.
The experiment is worthwhile, and not just as a formal game. Recall Erving Goffman's notion that social life is a stage in which we enact the roles that put us in a good light. Best Intentions shows Alex as not only a caring son but a guy earnestly playing a caring son. In the Theatre of Everyday Life, he's something of a drama queen. Of course he's partly right to be concerned about the health-care system (he's probably seen The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), but that concern also handily motivates his incessant performance of his part.
As a result of Sitaru's rigorous formal constraints, Alex is onscreen for nearly every instant of this 101-minute movie. (The very brief exception is itself of interest.) His narcissism, his urge to control others, and his inability to really listen to his family and friends—all are perfectly captured by a stylistic strategy that constantly gives him center stage. I haven't seen Sitaru's previous film Hooked (2007), but that too used an enveloping POV strategy. Interestingly, there he assigned all three major characters optical POV shots. In Best Intentions, denying Alex his own POV underscores his fretful obliviousness to what anyone else thinks. He makes a scene in every scene, becoming an object of fascination and frustration, for others and for us.
Calming down
All these films, as well as others we've discussed in this year's VIFF, might seem to support the idea that Form Is the New Content. It takes a film like Hirokazu Kore-eda's I Wish to remind you of the power of less convoluted storytelling. Like Still Walking, it's a family drama-comedy, but a little more somber and a little more comic. Devastatingly simple, too.
A family has split up. One brother, Koichi, stays with his mother and grandparents in Kagoshima, where the volcano splutters ashes into the air. The younger brother, toothily grinning Ryu, has gone off to Fukuoka with father, a scruffy rock guitarist. The boys communicate by phone, hoping to reunite the family.
They hatch a plan. They've convinced themselves that if they make a wish at the precise moment that two bullet trains pass one another, that wish will be granted. So Koichi and Ryu plan a pilgrimage that eventually encompasses their pals and that becomes a confrontation with the mundane realities of death and solitude, mitigated by comradeship and the hospitality of strangers.
The boys' situation ripples outward to encompass the grandparents' friends and the sons' schoolmates and their parents, all of whom earn quietly incisive vignettes. Routines—classroom encounters, swimming sessions, Koichi's run-ins with teachers, Ryu's nights out with dad's band—are recycled without fuss, building up a textured sense of each boy's world. Kore-eda presents everything so unemphatically that he makes film direction look very easy.
Despite lacking the fanciness of the modern network narrative and its disjunctive time schemes and viewpoint switches, Kore-eda's plot, like that of Ozu's Early Summer, effortlessly creates a ramifying world in which our boys feel at once comfortable and apprehensive. Come to think of it, some of the kid comedy recalls the two brothers' antics of I Was Born But, and the surprisingly sympathetic young teachers, reminiscent of the adults in Ohayo, become co-conspirators and, a little bit, surrogate parents. I Wish is a modest movie; it almost lowers its eyes in front of you. It's also the closest thing to perfection that I saw in Vancouver.
For a lively roundup of ideas on Dreileben, see David Hudson's Daily MUBI entry. An informative presskit is here. Headshot has been bought for US release by Kino Lorber. An informative interview with Adrian Sitaru is here. I discuss arthouse genre crossovers in an earlier year's entry from VIFF. For a more thorough study of network narratives, see "Mutual Friends and Chronologies of Chance" in my Poetics of Cinema.
23 October 2011: Thanks to Christoph Huber for correcting an error in the initial post. Although there is a town called Dreileben, the film doesn't take place there, as I had said.
I Wish.


text:
Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University
Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University
Shreiner R.T.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University |
Medvedev A.V.,Ural Federal University |
Polyakov V.N.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University
Russian Electrical Engineering | Year: 2016
The possibility of increasing overload capability and reducing power loss in a frequency-controlled synchronous electric drive operating in a continuous periodic mode is considered. A definition of a "continuous periodic mode" is given. A functional diagram of vector control system of synchronous electric drive is presented. The statement of a problem in the study of electric drives is formulated. A modeling method of a synchronous electric drive making it possible to recognize the maximum loads upon heating of a synchronous motor is described. Results of computer modeling of the continuous periodic operational mode of a salient pole motor with continuous and optimal regulation of armature magnetic flux are presented. The resource of synchronous motor is determined on the basis of the criterion of motor torque allowable upon heating. A comparative analysis of power loss of synchronous motor in the continuous periodic mode with continuous and optimal regulation of armature magnetic flux is carried out. The conclusion is drawn that the use of optimal regulation of armature magnetic flux in vector control systems of synchronous electric drives operating in continuous periodic mode is efficient. © 2016, Allerton Press, Inc.
Anoshina O.V.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University |
Zhukov V.P.,RAS Institute of Solid State Chemistry |
Borukhovich A.S.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University
Physics of the Solid State | Year: 2015
The electronic band structure of the solid solution Eu1–xFexO (x = 0.0625, 0.125) involved in the composition of the spintronic composite EuO: Fe has been calculated using the full-potential linearized augmented- plane-wave (FLAPW) method. The calculations have been performed with the correction of the exchange–correlation potential in the framework of the generalized gradient approximation (GGA + U). It has been shown that iron and europium cations have the oxidation state close to 2+. In this case, the iron cations are in the high-spin state with the magnetic moment close to 4 μB, which explains the significant increase in the Curie temperature of the composite upon doping of EuO with iron. It has been demonstrated that there is a small transfer of the electron density from Eu2+ cations to Fe2+ cations. It has been argued that the main factor providing a high concentration of Eu3+ cations in the composite is, probably, the presence of Eu2O3 nanoclusters in the structure. © 2015, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.
Ivliyev A.D.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University |
Glagoleva Y.V.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University
Physics of the Solid State | Year: 2011
The temperature and concentration dependences of the electrical resistivity π and thermal diffusivity a of Co-Cr alloys have been studied at temperatures of 400-1600 K. It has been shown that, as the temperature increases, the specific features of the electrical properties of the alloys are mainly determined by phonon scattering of carriers, and the character of the polytherms and concentration dependences is determined by the multiband scattering mechanism. © 2011 Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.
Fedorov V.A.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University |
Davydova N.N.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University
Naukovyi Visnyk Natsionalnoho Hirnychoho Universytetu | Year: 2014
Purpose. To study the possibility of the innovation activity of educational institutions development control based on the principles of network cooperation. Methodology. Theoretical methods: socio-historical analysis, and theoretical-methodological analysis, and modeling. Empirical methods: research and synthesis of experience of effective application of network-based approach, experiment, observation, surveys, and expert evaluation. Findings. The theoretical basis of the control of knowledge generation medium in the research and education network was synthesized from evolutionary economic theory, anthropological approach to the educational innovations management, an approach based on knowledge, synergistic and optimization approaches. Common resources, investments and processes of knowledge distribution were considered the main competitive advantages of the network. System cooperation of members of the network results into creation of collective intellectual property. The possibility of effective use of the "cloud" strategy for the research and education network development was shown. Originality. The notion of "research and education network" was specified and understood as a dynamic set of interrelated agents representing the scientific, educational, social, cultural institutions (their units, creative teams), as well as elements of the innovation infrastructure and industry stakeholders. Innovationactive network of educational institutions was considered a virtual organization performing innovative projects at a high level of coordination and integration of goals and all kinds of resources which can be achieved through the internal information space creation. Practical value. Introduction of the results obtained into educational practice can improve the effectiveness of innovative development of the organizations involved in the network cooperation.
Ivliev A.D.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University |
Kurichenko A.A.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University |
Vekshin I.M.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University
High Temperature | Year: 2016
The experimental results on the thermal diffusivity of solid phase Y–Ho alloys at high temperatures are presented. The mechanisms of the energy career dispersion in these substances are considered. © 2016, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.
Dorozhkin E.M.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University |
Kopnov V.A.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University |
Romantsev G.M.,Russian State Vocational Pedagogical University
Proceedings of 2015 International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning, ICL 2015 | Year: 2015
The purpose of the research presented in the article is to identify the phenomenon and necessity of the university graduates to be allocated with signs of corporate identity. The concept is useful to consider the features of transition of the Russian higher education institutions to market conditions according to the recommendation of the Bologna process and successfulness of university graduates. The concept of adornment of all graduates of RSVPU by psychological and pedagogical competences is described in the context of vocational pedagogy. Special purposes, subjects, objects and methods of vocational pedagogy as a science and in what it differs from general pedagogy are discussed in the report. It is shown that the vocational pedagogy is a universal pedagogical science of the laws of formation and development of competence-based personality within the vocational and educational relations. Multistage system of training and retraining in the field of engineering pedagogical education created in RSVPU is described as a special case. This system includes Bachelor degree, Master's degree, program of professional retraining, and IGIP training program. © 2015 IEEE.


text:
A Study of Tocilizumab as Monotherapy or in Combination With DMARDs in Patients With Moderate to Severe Active Rheumatoid Arthritis
This study has been completed.
Hoffmann-La Roche
Information provided by (Responsible Party):
Hoffmann-La Roche
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
First received: March 8, 2010
Last updated: June 23, 2014
Last verified: June 2014
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Results First Received: June 23, 2014
|Study Type:
|Study Design:
|Allocation: Non-Randomized; Intervention Model: Single Group Assignment; Masking: Open Label; Primary Purpose: Treatment
Rheumatoid Arthritis
Drug: tocilizumab [RoActemra/Actemra]
Participant Flow
Recruitment Details
|Key information relevant to the recruitment process for the overall study, such as dates of the recruitment period and locations
|No text entered.
Pre-Assignment Details
|Significant events and approaches for the overall study following participant enrollment, but prior to group assignment
|No text entered.
Reporting Groups
|Tocilizumab 8 Milligrams Per Kilogram (mg/kg)
|Participants received tocilizumab 8 mg/kg intravenous (IV) infusion, once every 4 weeks for a total of 6 infusions.
Participant Flow: Overall Study
|Tocilizumab 8 Milligrams Per Kilogram (mg/kg)
|Lost to Follow-up
|Adverse Event
|Withdrawal by Subject
|Protocol Violation
|Lack of Efficacy
Baseline Characteristics
Population Description
|Explanation of how the number of participants for analysis was determined. Includes whether analysis was per protocol, intention to treat, or another method. Also provides relevant details such as imputation technique, as appropriate.
|All the participants who were administered treatment at each visit were considered during the analysis.
Reporting Groups
|Tocilizumab 8 mg/kg
|Participants received tocilizumab 8 mg/kg IV infusion, once every 4 weeks for a total of 6 infusions.
Baseline Measures
|Tocilizumab 8 mg/kg
Overall Participants Analyzed
[Units: Participants]
[Units: Years]
Mean (Standard Deviation)
|44.89 (13.677)
[Units: Participants]
Outcome Measures
|1. Primary:
|Percentage of Participants Reporting Any Adverse Event - Overall Summary of Events [ Time Frame: Baseline and Weeks 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 ]
|2. Secondary:
|Percentage of Participants by Disease Activity Score Based on 28-Joint Count (DAS28) Category [ Time Frame: Baseline and Weeks 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 ]
|3. Secondary:
|Percentage of Participants Achieving a Clinically Meaningful Improvement as Measured by DAS28 [ Time Frame: Weeks 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 ]
|4. Secondary:
|Time to DAS28 Response by DAS28 Category [ Time Frame: Weeks 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 ]
|5. Secondary:
|Percentage of Participants With a Change From Baseline in Health Assessment Questionnaire - Disability Index (HAQ-DI) of at Least 0.22 Units [ Time Frame: Weeks 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 ]
|6. Secondary:
|Percentage of Participants With Improvement in Physical Function by HAQ-DI Category [ Time Frame: Baseline, Weeks 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 ]
|7. Secondary:
|HAQ-DI Score by Visit [ Time Frame: Baseline and Weeks 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 ]
|8. Secondary:
|C-Reactive Protein (CRP) Values by Study Visit [ Time Frame: Baseline and Weeks 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 ]
|9. Secondary:
|Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate [ Time Frame: Baseline and Weeks 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 ]
Serious Adverse Events
Other Adverse Events
Limitations and Caveats
|Limitations of the study, such as early termination leading to small numbers of participants analyzed and technical problems with measurement leading to unreliable or uninterpretable data
|Nonserious adverse events presented in this record include all adverse events reported during the study, not just nonserious events.
More Information
Certain Agreements:
Results Point of Contact:
|Principal Investigators are NOT employed by the organization sponsoring the study.
|There IS an agreement between Principal Investigators and the Sponsor (or its agents) that restricts the PI's rights to discuss or publish trial results after the trial is completed.
The agreement is:
Results Point of Contact:
Name/Title: Medical Communications
Organization: Hoffmann- LaRoche
phone: 800-821-8590
e-mail: email@example.com
Organization: Hoffmann- LaRoche
phone: 800-821-8590
e-mail: email@example.com
|Responsible Party:
|Hoffmann-La Roche
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
|NCT01089023 History of Changes
|Other Study ID Numbers:
|Study First Received:
|March 8, 2010
|Results First Received:
|June 23, 2014
|Last Updated:
|June 23, 2014


text:
Duncan joined Yes to Fairer Votes! campaigners on a very sunny day at the Church Street fair in Bradford on Avon at the weekend.
The campaign aims to raise awareness about the Alternative Voting system, which builds on the strengths of the current system while eliminating its weaknesses.
Instead of crossing just one box for one candidate on their ballot paper, voters will be able to rank the candidates by putting a '1′ next to their first choice and then '2′ by their second preference and so on if they wish. If a candidate receives a majority of first-preference votes then they get elected. If they don't, then the second preference votes of the candidate who finished last in the first round are redistributed and so on until a candidate receives at least 50%.
This means that in effect, all MPs will have the support of a majority of their voters. Tactical voting will be eliminated as voters can choose the candidate they really want without feeling that their vote will be wasted, while candidates are less likely to engage in negative campaigning as they will want to chase those second and third preference votes.
Duncan said:
"I believe this reform is vital for the health of our democracy: the Alternative Vote doesn't give anyone extra votes – it simply ensures that your vote can count to the very end, and so not be wasted."
Voters will get to have their say on whether or not they think the system should be changed during the referendum on 5th May 2011.


text:
Haven't joined yet? Join MYX |
More than a year after the disbanding of Cebuano rock band Urbandub, its former lead vocalist Gabby Alipe debuted his first single as a solo artist, "Visions", last September 23.
All about having positive mindset despite all the hardships, Visions is the first track in his upcoming EP A New Strain, which is set to be released in October.
Listen to his new song below!
Compared to the music of his former band, which Gabby said was 'grand, in-your-face and loud', his new music is simpler and more organic.
He admits that going solo is a big adjustment and a challenge as all the materials, from lyrics to song arrangements, has to come from him. But the biggest difference is having more creative freedom as a solo artist.
"I'm a storyteller. The new EP is basically a collection of stories and thoughts that I've accumulated through my experience in music and life. My goal is to share my stories with people who are willing to listen, and hopefully they'll be able to relate to my songs," he said.
For this EP, Gabby collaborated with different artists including Buddy Zabala, Raimund Marasigan for his songs Demons and Paalam; Gloc-9 and Cebuano rapper Pain-in-the-Neck for the remix of Ether.
A New Strain is the all around kind as it has a song about being lost and finding your way (Ether), setting aside negativity (Demons), love (Ocean) and letting go of the past (Paalam).
"I hope they take something positive away from this EP. I will always be grateful to all the Urbandub fans, but I hope they continue their journey with me. At the same time, I want to gain new listeners as well."
What do you think about Gabby Alipe's new track? Tell us in the comments!


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Appeals board upholds most Canary valuations
Members of the Haines Borough Assembly acting as the Board of Equalization (BOE) May 21 slogged through the second round of appeals for nearly four hours, tackling 14 cases of Haines residents unsatisfied with their 2013 property assessments.
The board struggled to come to consensus several times, as only four board members were present, the minimum number required to take action. Members Dave Berry and Joanne Waterman were absent.
The board largely voted to uphold contract assessor James Canary's assessments, but lowered assessments of three properties, including a Skyline Drive property owned by Paul Nelson, a Glacier View subdivision lot owned by Burl Sheldon, and a Mud Bay Road property owned by the Kochu Cove Trust.
Nelson, Sheldon's wife Nancy Berland, and Kochu Trust representatives were the only appellants to make their case in person. One appellant appeared telephonically.
Trustee Linn Asper and trust member Tim June spoke on behalf of the trust, claiming Canary's $557,600 valuation of the approximately 80-acre property was excessive, unequal to similar properties, and assessed improperly.
June said 50 to 60 percent of the 80 acres is undevelopable wetland, and sale of a similar property – the 64-acre Mulford parcel for $1 million – couldn't be used to establish a fair market value standard, as the Mulford parcel was an inter-family transaction.
June also pointed to a chart illustrating the price per acre for other large parcels in the borough; it showed the Kochu Trust land as the most expensive, at $7,002 an acre.
June requested the board value the property at $278,740.
Canary argued that he walked the Kochu Trust land and didn't see the large amount of wetlands June had cited, and that the chart provided by June was misleading, as large parcels in different areas aren't comparable.
"You're really not looking at true comparisons, because there's not another 80-acre site within this location. Other properties out at 33 Mile are run at a different rate, and they're not waterfront.... They might be similar in size, but they're not run under the same formula," Canary said.
Board member Steve Vick moved to value the property at $400,000, but the motion failed. The board eventually agreed to value the property at $4,900 an acre, or about $392,000.
Paul Nelson appealed four properties, three on Skyline Drive and one on the Haines Highway, but only got the board to budge on one of the Skyline properties. The board lowered the assessment from $77,800 to $74,530.
Nancy Berland, presenting on behalf of her husband Burl Sheldon, said access to the couple's undeveloped lot in the Glacier View subdivision was nearly impossible, and that the property was valued at a much higher rate than nearby lots. She requested the assessment be lowered from $42,100 to $32,000.
It took much discussion and three motions to come to a consensus on the Sheldon property: a motion to uphold the assessor's valuation made by board member Jerry Lapp failed, while a subsequent motion by Vick to set the value at $37,500 also failed.
Board member Debra Schnabel, in an attempt to get the board to agree, threw out a $40,000 figure, which finally stuck. "I'm trying to find a compromised place where we might all sit," Schnabel said.
In addition to Nelson's three unchanged properties, the board upheld Canary's original or revised assessments for properties belonging to Robert Harris, Edward Beitner, Neil Tierney, Jeff and Ann McEntire, Jack Smith Jr., Robert Reid, Todd Sherman and Coy Allen Taylor.
The board also eventually agreed, after two failed motions, to reject seven appeals filed after the deadline.
Of the 420 or so appeals filed this year, about 130 still need to be worked through and will necessitate a third BOE hearing in June, Canary said.
The third BOE hearing will be held 6 p.m. June 18.


text:
Recently, a special screening of 'Hamari Adhuri Kahani' was held which was attended by several celebrities.
Among them was director Mohit Suri's tiny tot, Devi who accompanied her papa for the screening. Mahesh Bhatt posted a picture on his Twitter handle where she is seen sitting on her father's lap while the proud father smiled from the back-
The Godess(Devi) journeyes out of her cradle to watch the screening of Papa Mohit's love tale #HamariAdhuriKahani pic.twitter.com/GlB9HpjjNV— Mahesh Bhatt (@MaheshNBhatt) June 1, 2015
Mohit tied the knot with actress Udita Goswami in 2013. The couple welcomed their first child earlier this year.
Meanwhile, 'Hamari Adhuri Kahani' starring Emraan Hashmi, Vidya Balan and Rajkumar Rao, is slated to hit the big screens on 12th June this year.
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text:
Toyota has taken the gaming world to the next level. In what looks like something out of "Pimp my Ride" Toyota has souped up their Matrix with Fender Guitars to put out a car with a massive stereo system and Rock Band! Seriously, that's just about enough to make me go out and buy one. […]
Archive for the 'Toyota Matrix' Category
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January 7th, 2009 admin


text:
Pecorino-Black Pepper Breadsticks
Be the first to review
READY IN: 30mins
Recipe by Abby Girl
These little breadsticks punch a lot of flavor. Perfect for appetizers or along side salads.
See Discussion:
Ingredients Nutrition
- 1⁄3 cup flour
- 1⁄4 cup whole wheat flour
- 1⁄4 cup pecorino romano cheese, freshly grated
- 3⁄4 teaspoon baking powder
- 1⁄2 teaspoon black pepper, freshly ground
- 5 tablespoons water
- 1 teaspoon olive oil
Directions See How It's Made
- Preheat oven to 450°.
- Lightly spoon flours into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flours, cheese, baking powder, and pepper in a medium bowl.
- Add 5 tablespoons water and oil; stir until dough forms. Turn dough out onto a floured surface; knead lightly 4 or 5 times.
- Divide dough into 10 - 12 equal portions, shaping each portion into an 8-inch rope. Place ropes on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray.
- Bake at 450° for 10 - 15 minutes or until bottoms are golden brown. Remove from oven; cool on a wire rack.