Word: tsunami
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While Hurricane Gustav was chewing up Cuba and storming toward Louisiana, the screen of the Venice Film Festival's Sala Grande was showing a very sweet tsunami. In the animated movie Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, the swelling waves take the form of dolphins, and when a Japanese coastal village gets submerged no one is killed or hurt - just amusingly displaced. The rising up of the marine world is not insurrection against humanity but gently cautionary instruction for it. Treat the oceans with respect, the movie says, and they will provide you with food and wonder...
...That thesis might not be embraced by the tens of thousands swept away by the Indonesian tsunami, or the like number displaced by Katrina. But Ponyo, which the Disney Company will release in the States next year, is a parable for children, and they're entitled to the gift of hope. Besides, it's the genius of anime deity Hayao Miyazaki, the movie's writer-director, to create elemental images more wondrous than alarming - whether they're the forest demons of Princess Mononoke or the the bathhouse ghosts who transform the heroine's parents into pigs in Spirited Away...
...forgets about him - perhaps because he's doing a bit of illegal whaling. Fujimoto's wife, Gran Mamare, is a magnificent sea goddess, with the perfect posture and forehead jewel of a Bollywood queen, but she doesn't show up till late in the film. Miyazaki also creates a tsunami that, however fantastical and benign he portrays it, can't help recall the fatal force of nature. By American animation standards, these are plot holes, which the guys at Pixar, Disney or DreamWorks would caulk in an afternoon's brainstorming session. But Miyazaki, though highly esteemed by those bright folks...
...university system has for years been a challenge. Last year, about one-third of college grads went jobless for at least six months after graduation, according to government estimates. This year's crop of 5.6 million grads - 740,000 more than last year - is the largest ever, and the tsunami of able bodies is washing into the market just as China's economy is faltering...
...Yard" after the location of its original HQ. It's the world's most famous brand name in policing and - despite mounting travails - the most respected. Met detectives are the global go-to guys for anyone wanting assistance with politically charged investigations (Benazir Bhutto's assassination), forensics (the Asian tsunami's aftermath), or sensitive operations such as kidnappings. There are now Met liaison officers stationed in 16 countries...