“A maturely written drama… marbled with both touching and funny moments.” — Derik Elley, Variety

“A powerful and emotionally rewarding gay romance…assuring direction and intense performances help make “No Regret” one of the best gay dramas to come out of Asia.” — LMFDean9, Love HK Film.com

Grade: A- “A true breakthrough in Korean cinema.” — Padraic Maroney, EDGE Philadelphia

Set in Seoul, South Korea, “No Regret” centers on Sumin (Lee Young-Hoon), who leaves the orphanage where he grew up and heads to the city to study art design. After losing his job at a factory due to layoffs, he finds himself working as a prostitute in a gay bar. Initially Sumin resists the advances of Jaemin (Lee Han), who comes from a rich and conservative family that doesn’t accept his sexual identity. Eventually Sumin succumbs to Jaemin’s advances, after they briefly experience happiness as passionate lovers, Sumin and Jaemin’s relationship falls into heartache and tragedy. The film opens tonight here in San Francisco at the Landmark Lumiere Theater, 1572 California Street at Polk. Please call (415) 267-4893 for showtimes.

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Tonight in Cardiff, Wales, Madonna, age 50, kicked off her “Hard Candy” world tour. At one point during her show, she ran slides first of Adolf Hilter followed by Robert Mugagbe and then John McCain. Subtle. And idiotic. That’s only going to antagonize McCain’s base and hardly galvanize Obama’s.

From the International Herald Tribune:

It should come as no surprise that the queen of pop is again courting controversy. The first show of Madonna’s world tour made a foray into U.S. politics with a none-too-subtle dig at U.S. presidential hopeful John McCain Saturday night.

Images of destruction and global warming flashed on to a screen during a video interlude. Those were followed by pictures of Adolf Hitler, Zimbabwe’s authoritarian ruler Robert Mugabe — and McCain.

A later sequence showed slain Beatle John Lennon, climate activist Al Gore, Mahatma Gandhi and finally McCain’s democratic rival, Barack Obama.

Once the interlude was over, Madonna threw herself into a rave-inflected rendition of “Like a Prayer.” She finished off the concert with her thumping “Give it 2 Me” from her new album “Hard Candy.”

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By The Fault wishes Madonna the Happiest of Birthdays. The pop icon turns 50 today , though I read somewhere that in Kabbalah years, she’s only 36. No wonder she converted. I can’t say that I am a Madonna fan though certainly I have enjoyed many of her songs and more of her remixes on the dance floor. Still, Madonna has been a strong supporter of gay causes and there’s is no denying that she is incredible marketing machine. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention her work in Africa. Still sexy at 50, Happy Birthday.

The above video is a parody from the British comedy team of French & Saunders.

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The Spy Who Cooked

I had the pleasure of cooking for Julia Child once and more importantly the honour of being fed by Julia Child on two other occasions. Her influence on me was immeasureable. Other children watch the Saturday morning cartoons, I watched the cooking shows on PBS. I remember I made a Salmon & Scallop Mousse followed by a Chicken Tarragon with a Wild Mushroom Risotto. My mother, as always, made dessert, a Floating Island that as always stole the show. Julia did rave about my hors d’oeuvres my Stuffed Prunes with Bacon (recipe below the fold) and my Asparagus Rolls (you’ll have to buy my cookbook). Her story-telling abilities rank second to none and now I know why, she was a spy for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. Julia Child, the spy who cooked.

From the Associated Press:

Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world.

They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The full secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the names found in the records, will make available for the first time all 750,000 pages identifying the vast spy network of military and civilian operatives.

They were soldiers, actors, historians, lawyers, athletes, professors, reporters. But for several years during World War II, they were known simply as the OSS. They studied military plans, created propaganda, infiltrated enemy ranks and stirred resistance among foreign troops.

(more…)

Best wishes to Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman who is in a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee on Monday after being seriously injured in a car accident near his home in Mississippi.

Regional Medical Center spokeswoman Kathy Stringer said Freeman, 71, is in serious condition. The hospital is about 90 miles north of the accident scene in rural Tallahatchie County in the Mississippi Delta. Mississippi Highway Patrol spokesman Sgt. Ben Williams said Freeman was driving a 1997 Nissan Maxima belonging to Demaris Meyer of Memphis when the car left a rural highway and flipped several times shortly before midnight Sunday.

Those under 35 not under may not recall that Morgan Freeman starred in the PBS educational series The Electric Company. For many of my generation, we grew up watching the antics and listening to the elegant diction of Morgan Freeman on The Electric Company.

Of course, his talents as an actor extended far beyond children’s television. Freeman won an Oscar for his role in ”Million Dollar Baby.” His screen credits also include ”The Shawshank Redemption,” ”Driving Miss Daisy” and ”The Dark Knight,” now in theaters.

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In this trailer for the upcoming Disney movie, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, our canine hero recounts his past as a descendent of Aztec warriors while the imaginery cuts to Peru’s Incan ruins of Machu Picchu. No wonder by the time these Disney-trained youngsters show up in my classroom half of them cannot place Mexico, much less Peru, on a map.

Honestly, is it too much to ask of a global Fortune 500 media conglomerate to get world geography and history correct? It is time to bring back geography lessons and civics classes in American secondary school education. I’d start them at Disney.

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It is with sadness and fond remembrance that I mark the passing of Estelle Scher who performed as Estelle Getty and best known for her role as Sophia Petrillo on the US sit-com The Golden Girls. She was 84.

Getty won an Emmy Award in 1988 for her portrayal of the feisty octogenarian. For her role as Sophia, Getty also notched a Golden Globe Award in 1986. She also received an American Comedy Award. She was a vocal supporter of gay rights and active in fund-raising for AIDS research.

Getty co-starred on Golden Girls from 1985-92 and reprised the tart-tongued Sophia on four other TV series: The Golden Palace, Nurses, Empty Nest and Blossom. Getty was two months younger than Bea Arthur, who played her daughter, but the illusion of her age was maintained through makeup, costume and her deportment.

I have always wondered why the Golden Girls has such a gay following. No doubt, there is a high camp factor and priceless comedy but there is, I believe, a deeper more personal reason for the gay attachment. Dorothy, Blanche and Rose plus Sophia were all cast-offs from their families and forced to make their own familial arrangements. Not just roommates, they became a family going through thick and thin together. That mirrors the lives of many gay men. For years, my gay roommates were my support network and we could relate to the antics and love shared. For the record, in my 30s I was Blanche Devereaux without the accent. Now, I am more like Dorothy Zbornak.

Thank you Estelle.

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Liberties, so say the Hollywood producers at Miramax, is what they took with the upcoming film version of Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece Brideshead Revisited. And how could Emma Thompson lend herself and her talents to the trashing of one of Britain’s greatest novels is beyond belief. The book covers many themes but it is largely about being Catholic in a changing world. There are love stories throughout but again they center on moral values and choices some made by genetics, others all too human.

Here is the trailer to the upcoming Miramax release which paints the story as a love triangle:

A love triangle? Notwithstanding the fact that Charles’ and Julia’s torrid affair took place long after the opening salvos of Charles’ and Sebastian’s platonic romance, the book is about religion and how it destroys everything though certainly Waugh didn’t quite intend it that way. Waugh was a convert to Catholicism and Waugh wrote that the novel “deals with what is theologically termed ‘the operation of Grace’, that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself.” I daresay many of his readers took the opposite view or at very least, I did. It is hard not to when the Marchmain family, apart from the innocence of Cordelia, finds itself so ripped apart. I can understand Waugh’s romantic notions of nostalgia but the faith he attempts to convey is so simple-minded that in truth from my perspective it does little but destroy. Either you believe it wholesale and hope to soldier through it or its overwhelming hypocrisy destroys everything in its path. Asking questions is not very Catholic. There are many reasons I left the Church, but Brideshead Revisited was one of those that gave me the courage to do so. The book and the series gave me an insight in what not being a Catholic might be like. I have never regretted become an apostate.

I fell in love with the series back in the early 1980s and it was pivotal to my own life in ways I can’t even begin to fully describe. My own struggles reconciling Catholicism with my own homosexuality seemed so real when seen through the lens of Sebastian’s own conflict as told by Charles Ryder. Not knowing any homosexuals well at the time, I came to know Sebastian as well as myself. You might say Sebastian was my first boyfriend. In him, I could find solace if intemperate. Before the series was over, I had read the novel twice. I still read it in parts from the time. I made my partner read it so that he might better understand the influence of Catholicism on my life. The lines drop out of the novel as if from my own live. “We must make a Catholic out of you.” “I have six black Cordelias.” Sebastian had Aloysius, I had Mono. We were both in love with our childhoods and not so much with adulthood despite the “naughtiness high on the catalogue of grave sins.” I came of age wondering if Sebastian’s flaws were my own. Oh, to have Charles’ secular temperament. Undoing Catholicism, I have found is my life’s work.

The First Luncheon

Sunbathing

Venice

Charles Reminisces

The Making of Brideshead Revisited by Granada Television

There are things that can never be improved upon. Brideshead Revisited is one of them.

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The great Scottish comic Stanley Baxter gives us his take on take away (take out in the US).

It’s pure gay camp full of sexual double entendres. “Ice Cream, All it takes is a lick,” he is determined to lose his cherry in the ice cream skit. Just for the record, Baxter is not gay but he sure can pull it off.

This choice of tonight’s camp is, of course, tied to today’s report on obesity in the United States.

Despite wide-ranging efforts to encourage Americans to lose weight, the number of U.S. adults who are obese increased almost 2 percent between 2005 and 2007, a new report found.

In 2007, 25.6 percent of adults reported being obese, compared to 23.9 percent in 2005, according to the finding in the July 18 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’sMorbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

“The epidemic of adult obesity continues to rise in the United States, indicating that we need to step up our efforts at the national, state and local levels,” Dr. William Dietz, director of CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, said in a news release. “We need to encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables, engage in more physical activity and reduce the consumption of high-calorie foods and sugar-sweetened beverages in order to maintain a healthy weight.”
The percentage of adults who are obese varies by state and region, according to the report. For example, in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, 30 percent of the residents reported being obese, compared with 18.7 percent in Colorado, which had the lowest prevalence of obesity.

Obesity was most prevalent in the South, with 27 percent of residents classified as obese. In the Midwest, the number was 25.3 percent; in the Northeast, 23.3 percent; and in the West, 22.1 percent, according to the report.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

The cave paintings, that is. Via the Independent,

“Unesco, the world cultural body, has threatened to humiliate France by placing the Lascaux caves – known as the “Sistine Chapel of prehistory” – on its list of endangered sites of universal importance.

The Unesco world heritage committee, meeting this week in Quebec, has given the French government six months to report on the success of its efforts to save the Lascaux cave paintings in Dordogne from an ugly, and potentially destructive, invasion of grey and black fungi.

At the same time, a scientific committee appointed by the French government has conceded that an elaborate treatment with a new fungicide in January failed to stop the mould advancing through one part of the caves.

An independent pressure group of scientists and historians claims that up to half of the startlingly beautiful, 17,000-year-old images of bison, horses, wild cattle and ibex are now threatened by the fungal invasion – the second of its kind in eight years.”

The caves have been closed since 1963. One only visits a replica of the real thing, precisely to avoid decay and damaging of the paintings.

Why is that particularly embarrassing? Because, of course, France is very proud of its cultural heritage and Lascaux is an incredible monument of human (pre)history. More than that, it would be that the UNESCO does not consider the French authorities competent enough to take care of the site and therefore, would take over.

“Officials from the French government’s department of historic monuments and experts from all over the world have been quarrelling for years over the best way to preserve the Lascaux paintings. Some experts have accused the French authorities of a series of blunders, including a change in the air-conditioning system in 2000, the use of high-powered lights in the caves and allowing too many “special” visits.

An independent body, the International Committee for the Protection of Lascaux, infuriated Paris by asking Unesco to intervene last September. Laurence Léauté-Beasley, president of the committee, was jubilant yesterday. “The requirements placed upon France [by Unesco] are significant and strong,” she said. “France will now have to answer to the world community for actions they have taken in the past and will take in the future. Lascaux’s management must now operate in a spirit of transparency.”"

Maintaining the caves is a complex business: the air quality and the amount of light have to be carefully controlled and any variation is liable to damage the paintings. However, one can only hope that environment control technology has improved enough to be able to preserve the 600 or so paintings.

The caves were discovered by chance in 1940 and are thought to have been painted by hunters and gatherers by crushing minerals to create red, ochre, brown and black paints, around 17,000 to 15,000 years ago.

“After a visit to the caves, the Cubist artist Pablo Picasso declared: “We have invented nothing.”"

All the more reason to preserve this incredible heritage.

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