Word: classical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...honest: the last time most people have seen a Muppet was in a TV commercial (and even then, it was Kobe and Lebron, not Kermit and Miss Piggy). That changed this week with an assist from Queen's songbook. The puppet ensemble released a cover of the classic Queen anthem "Bohemian Rhapsody" to commemorate the death of Freddie Mercury 18 years ago. Whether it's Muppet nostalgia or a love of rock ballads, the video clearly struck a chord: it's had some 7 million plays in just a week's time...
...these are songs of cynicism ("My midlife crisis was at its peak that Friday night"), urban ennui ("My dad's religious, my mum's a bore/ Can we talk about something else?") and modern manners ("Harry loves Betty .../ But daddy wants Betty to marry Eddy/ But Eddy loves Larry"). Classic jazz scoring - for piano, acoustic bass and drums - steeps the work in an atmosphere of late nights and darkened rooms. (See "Best of Asia: Best Alternative-Music Scene...
...more specialized fare, Wes Anderson's stop-motion-animation delight Fantastic Mr. Fox, with George Clooney contributing his voice to the Roald Dahl children's classic, purloined a so-so $7 million in its first weekend of wide release; it earned about the same per-screen average as the much feebler animated feature Planet 51. The Road, with Viggo Mortensen enduring many a hardship in the film version of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, took in a sturdy $1.5 million at 111 theaters, to finish a mere $10,000 behind Clooney's 10th-place The Men Who Stare...
Each year, too, we try to outdo ourselves with ever more ambitious offerings. Last year we produced a turducken - a southern classic consisting of a turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken stuffed with oysters. We couldn't find oysters so we substituted frozen shrimp miraculously procured from the local fishmonger. Two years ago we encased one of the turkeys in clay and roasted it over coals for several hours. The result was extraordinary - fall-off-the-bone tender, but with a crispy skin. This year, Turkey a la Istalif, so named after the pottery village where...
...block a chemical plant in the coastal city of Xiamen in 2007 and a demonstration against a proposed petrochemical facility near Chengdu in 2008. "They are generally directed more toward proposed projects that they think may have an impact to health or property values," he says. "These are classic 'not in my backyard' protests that you see happen in developed western countries." And with few effective avenues for people to voice their complaints about the ambitious industrial projects springing up around the country, McElwee says, they "will continue to happen, I think, with increasing frequency...