Word: harks
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...network TLC, however, is out to bust up that long and happy marriage. On each episode of Honey We're Killing the Kids! (debuts April 10), nutritionist Dr. Lisa Hark visits a family with bad eating and exercise habits. The money scene comes when Dr. Hark leads the parents into a stage that looks like a medieval catacomb and shows them, on a giant TV screen, computer projections of what their kids will look like at age 40 if they keep gorging on sugar and fried food. In the pilot, the parents watch, horrified, as their three sons morph...
...Hark then puts the family through a radical three-week boot camp that makes for high drama. (Because really, what better motivation to eat well than watching a kid throw up rice and bok choy?) The beauty of Honey is that it wraps its voyeuristic fatsploitation in sanctimony. Dr. Hark is a classic media moralist in the tradition of Judge Judy and Dr. Laura--curt and no nonsense. (Could Dickens have come up with a better name for a TV scold than Dr. Hark?) After a few minutes of her lecturing--"They are on a downward spiral toward disaster...
...most dissonant, if not flat-out traitorous, aspect of the show is its attitude toward TV itself. "Rule No. 1," Dr. Hark declares: "Limit television! No more TV whenever you want!" Does she make a good point about the danger of too much sedentary time? Absolutely. And it would be easier to take seriously if Honey didn't use every manipulative TV trick in the book--sensationalistic special effects, trumped-up drama, Grand Guignol music--to keep you in planted front of the screen. In words that Homer Simpson once used to describe alcohol, this is TV anointing itself...
...disasters take us not just out of our routine but out of our time. The men?and they are still mostly men?risk explosion or asphyxiation, to say nothing of cancer and emphysema, not for a principle or a geopolitical end but to put food on the table. They hark back to Dickensian, even prehistoric times, when making a living meant chancing death...
...your worries to rest. Tsui Hark hasn't lost sight of the most important objective of any Hong Kong filmmaker: pleasing the audience. In his new movie, Seven Swords, he has dipped into the endless supply of old Chinese wuxia (martial arts) novels to come up with a gritty and extremely violent epic. Noble warriors literally descend from the mountaintop to protect an endangered village from an implacable evil?think Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in Qing-dynasty China. While the attempts at romantic subplots fizzle and the film is paced so strangely that it feels both too long...