Word: pagodaed
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...most of the developmental legwork for the performances, The Life Aquatic seems all too willing to use its actors as ottomans. Even within the mammoth ensemble in The Royal Tenenbaums, each character is given room to breathe, stretch and shake; heck, even the family’s butler Pagoda taps an emotional nerve as he stabs deceptive employer Royal Tenenbaum in the stomach, then loyally drags him to safety. But multi-dimensional characters are nowhere to be found aboard the cramped Life Aquatic, where the equivalent manservant role of Klaus Daimler is played with one-note efficiency by Willem Dafoe...
...heroid--is Batou, a cyborg detective with a face slashed out of marble and a platitude for every plot twist. "No matter how far a jackass travels," he muses, "it won't come back a horse." Batou encounters lots of fantastic creatures (like the crustaceous Crab Man), elegant vistas (pagoda skyscrapers) and bizarre machines (a plane that resembles both a dragon and Groucho Marx, with a cigar as his nose). It's smart, spectacular, luscious picturizing...
...want to eat the best pickled-tea-leaf salad in Rangoon, possibly in all of Burma, go to Mrs. Greedy's tea shop, a collection of plastic furniture occupying the pavement opposite Sule Pagoda. And if you want to talk without fear of being overheard, do what my Burmese friend Ko Myo did when I met him there one evening: lift up one of Mrs. Greedy's tables and set it down several feet from the nearest customers. Even then you talk in an undertone. It's a reminder that despite Burma's tourist-friendly veneer?how many dictatorships have...
...joke in a popular Burmese magazine in which three students are boasting about their uncles. The first says, "My uncle has no arms, but he has swum across the Irrawaddy River five times." The second says, "My uncle has no legs, but he has climbed the Golden Rock Pagoda 10 times." The third says: "So what? My uncle has no brain, and he runs the country." If that joke seems spiteful, consider this: diplomats report that Than Shwe firmly believes that Union Solidarity and Development Association rallies are genuine expressions of mass support...
...DIED. CHEA VICHEA, 40, leader of a Cambodian garment workers' union aligned with the country's political opposition; of gunshot wounds in an attack while he was reading a newspaper near a Buddhist pagoda; in Phnom Penh. Chea Vichea is the latest victim in a series of at least four killings in the past year of individuals linked to political parties opposing Prime Minister Hun Sen. "It's very difficult to say it was not politically motivated," said Prince Norodom Sirivudh, secretary-general of the royalist FUNCINPEC party...