-
Playing both sides against the other, the gunman escalates the war to his own benefit, going all Yojimbo on everybody’s asses.
Set up in a brief, bizarre introduction by Quentin Tarantino in cowpoke garb, Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django is the story of an introverted gunslinger (Hideaki Ito) who arrives in a remote village where two colour-coded gangs, the Genji Whites and the Heike Reds, are locked in an endless feud.
This is Miike’s weird homage to the Italian spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly Sergio Corbucci’s moody, violent Django series. While it has Miike’s customary moments of whacked-out brilliance, they’re spaced out between a lot of really dull dialogue scenes. (The film is in English, but the actors have learned their lines phonetically; thus, it’s also subtitled so we can better understand their exchanges.)
Miike plays with genres like a small child playing with Lego. You get the sense that he could build something really great if he only knew what he was doing.
The version being released in North America is 25 minutes shorter than the print screened at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. This cut does move the action along considerably faster, but it’s still rough going. I’m inclined to suggest you wait for the DVD and watch it with a roomful of friends in the altered state of your choosing. -
Kia plans to sell 18,000 units of the new model, called Soul, by the end of the year, and will boost annual sales to 136,000 units from next year, the Seoul-based automaker said in a statement. Exports to Europe and the U.S. will begin in the first half of 2009, it said.
Chairman Chung Mong Koo is betting on new small autos to improve profitability at Kia after operating losses in the past two years. Kia this year began selling a revamped Morning minicar and Forte small car as consumers demand more fuel-efficient vehicles to cope with a 5.2 percent increase in South Korea's gasoline prices since December.
The Soul is fitted with a 1.6-liter or 2-liter engine, both on petrol and diesel variants. It will sell for between 14 million won ($12,300) and 20.8 million won, the statement said.
Kia spent 190 billion won in the past two-and-a-half years to develop the model, it said. The automaker hired former Volkswagen's head designer Peter Schreyer as Chief Design Officer in 2006 to overhaul its lineup.
"Kia's strength in small cars would help it weather a setback in global auto demand,'' said Cho Soo Hong, a Seoul- based analyst at Hyundai Securities Co., which isn't related to Hyundai Motor Co., Kia's parent company.
With the introduction of four new or revamped models this year, Kia's local market share rose to 25.4 percent in the first eight months of this year, compared with 22 percent a year earlier, according to Korea Automobile Manufacturers Association.
Kia's domestic sales rose 16 percent from a year earlier in that period, the most among South Korea's five carmakers. Overall sales including exports gained 6.6 percent. -
BEN STILLER’S latest comedy is funny – but not always in a “ha-ha” way.
Written and directed by him, Tropic Thunder tells the story of a bunch of self-absorbed actors caught up in a real conflict while making a war movie in Vietnam.
It opens up the chance for leads Stiller, as action-movie star Tugg Speedman, Jack Black as heroin-addicted comic Jeff Portnoy and Robert Downey Jnr as method actor Kirk Lazarus, to mock the behaviour of pampered thespians.
What is amusing is how desperate Stiller and Co seem to distance themselves from their own breed. The sub-conscious cry is “We are not like this lot — it’s those other stars. We can laugh at ourselves. Look!”
Which misses the fact that you would have to be absorbed by your own fame in order to make a film about fame.
And in the process of examining his Hollywood obsession, Stiller often forgets about the audience.
There are too many spoofs of other movies, including Apocalypse Now, which deserves better, while the “retard” gags that caused uproar in America just aren’t funny.
It’s tempting to describe Stiller and Black as a shower but they’re too lacklustre for that. A light drizzle is more apt.
Tropic Thunder also suffers from being released just a week after Pineapple Express.
Two goofball action comedies in two weeks is one too many. Downey deserves credit, though, for pulling off the potentially offensive act of playing a white actor playing a black man.
It works because Lazarus’s stereotyping is amusingly punctured by genuine black actor Alpa Chino (played by Brandon T Jackson).
And there are other memorable moments, too. The opening spoof movie trailers are great, Steve Coogan’s death is a blast and Tom Cruise blows them all away with a cracking cameo.
All Cruise has to do to outwit Stiller is go bald and fat and swear like a “mother******”. Now that is funny.
BEST LINE: Tugg’s action-film trailer voiceover, saying “The man who made a difference five times before is about to make a difference again, except this time it’s different.”
BEST CHARACTER: Cruise as ruthless film studio boss Les Grossman.
FAMILY RATING: Adult language and comic violence.
BUM NUMBNESS: Worth sitting through the credits.
RATING OUT OF FIVE: 3
RELEASE DATE: September 19 2008
www.thesun.co.uk -
We enjoy making new posters. If you look carefully, you’ll find our barcode logo on each one of them. We love it so much, we can’t help seeing it all around us.
Use them as your desktop background, send them to your friends, or put them up on the wall!
-
Problem: Turn computer buttons into thumbtacks.
The set consists of ten thumbtacks. We have transformed “Cancel”, “Play”, “Save”, “Yes” and other commands into real objects. They are packed in a box and serve up a gift idea for you.
It’s irresistible—you’ll want to push the real OK button with your own thumb!Design of Orbiculus buttons doesn’t attribute them to a certain operating system—it’s a little bit of Aqua and a little bit of Windows. The thumbtacks are suitable for any surface they can be stuck into.
Art. Lebedev Studio
Mega Menu
-
Anything
These are widget areas. You can put anything you want in here.
