Word: forbidden
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that a Chinese film?even without fancy costumes or kung-fu kicks?will succeed overseas. "Modern China may have Starbucks, but it's still a fascinating place," says Sutherland, who plays a Western director coming to grips with the mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. Filmed in Beijing's august Forbidden City, Big Shot critiques the consumerism sweeping the capital today. "Xiaogang captures the hilarious and tragic contradictions of Chinese society," says his star, "like no one else...
Kerry and Kay Danes' small world is defined by heat and separation. At seven o'clock in the morning, guards rouse them from their stifling communal cells and lead them and their fellow inmates into the dusty exercise yard of a Lao prison. Forbidden to speak to each other, the Danes communicate in stolen glances and occasional whispered words. This is not the way their new life was supposed to work out. Moving from Australia to Vientiane with their three young children, aged seven to 15, was to be an exotic adventure in a city of decaying French colonial mansions...
...Walking the ancient Nakasendo highway from Kyoto to Tokyo is a trip into a nation's past. As the reproduction notices suggest, travel along the mountain route was highly regulated and checkpoints dotted the road. Only feudal lords and their aristocratic assistants, the samurai, could use it. Women were forbidden to journey independently, and travelers who looked even slightly androgynous had to unbutton sometimes for inspection. Travelers were also required to stamp on a Christian cross. Hesitation meant instant decapitation...
...squeeze began in January when President Jiang Zemin's propagandists tore a page from international football rule books and set up a "yellow card system." Publications must now gain permission from regional propaganda departments to cover seven forbidden topics, including the military, religion and the private lives of China's leaders. One violation means a yellow card. Two yellow cards means sacking editors; three, and the publication closes. It may sound childish, but the change is vast. In the recent past, newspapers have increasingly been publishing freely and risking the consequences. To enforce the new system, Beijing has let local...
...twinning in the Faust legend. In the Medieval reading of it, Faust is damned to hell for his pact to obtain supernatural powers of knowledge from the devil - an act of human encroachment upon divine prerogatives. But (as Roger Shattuck points out in his splendid book "Forbidden Knowledge"), the Enlightenment gave Faust an opposite reading. The German dramatist G.E. Lessing's Faust, in the mid-eighteenth century, was not damned for his pact with the devil, but, on the contrary, saved, because of his now admirable striving after knowledge...