Word: boye
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...countryside to toil miserably as field hands during Mao Zedong's program to "reeducate" the intelligentsia. Not all who were targets of class warfare were destroyed by it, however. Mao's Last Dancer, the latest biography set in the Cultural Revolution, tells the story of a peasant boy from northern China who was propelled to international stardom by Mao's social engineering...
...Written by first-time author Li Cunxin, Dancer is a poor-boy-makes-good memoir populated by a strange cast of historical figures. Chief among them is the rabid Jiang Qing, Mao's infamous wife, who was a fierce proponent of the Great Helmsman's postulate that "There is in fact no such thing as art ... detached from or independent of politics." To Madame Mao, all presentation was propaganda; she drafted armies of performers to edify the masses through highly politicized operas and films, such as the epic revolutionary musical The East is Red. She also revived the once outlawed...
...Park Chan Wook's Old Boy. It took the Grand Prix du Jury, or second prize. (Only Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 finished higher, copping the Palme d'Or.) When Tarantino read out the Old Boy award, he proclaimed that the jury was "delighted" with its choice...
...Cannes regular described Old Boy as a Tarantino movie that Tarantino would be afraid to make. It surely has its quota of Quentinian quirks, including cool bad guys dressed in black, a revenge motif that won't quit, some acts of abuse that would have given de Sade appreciative shivers?and, most important, an expert's joy in expanding and subverting the rules of genre. The gnarled story line, also familiar to fans of Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, careers from 1988 (when the main character, Oh Dae Su, is kidnapped and confined without being told what his crime...
...Peter Kielland's "Fish" (Kim-Rehr Productions; 72pp.; $8.95) use pantomime and free-associative storylines, but to much sillier ends. "The Octopi" imagines the brainy encepholopods as being at constant war with the brawny sharks. In order to retrieve an important talisman from the sharks, the octopi kidnap a boy by substituting his school bus with an amphibious vehicle driven by a disguised octopus. After bringing back the talisman the boy gets folded into the shape of an envelope and returned via post to his parents. It goes on, but you get the idea. The nonsensical story exists only...