In Babylon AD Vin Diesel, the slowest-moving action hero in movies, travels over land and under water from somewhere in the former Soviet Union to New York City in the company of a nun (Michelle Yeoh, 楊紫瓊) and a young woman named Aurora (Melanie Thierry). Aurora is either some kind of biological weapon or some kind of messianic figure.
I won’t say which, though this odd, solemn disaster has made itself spoiler-proof by refusing to make any sense at all. The only explicable thing about Babylon AD is that it was not screened in advance for critics. Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as “pure violence and stupidity.”
He did not mean that in a good way, and while I hate to contradict an artist’s assessment of his own work — Kassovitz blames 20th Century Fox for compromising his political and metaphysical vision — a purely violent and stupid film might have been kind of fun. This one, while it has some nice futuristic design touches (including grubby East Bloc housing projects and a splendidly renovated Harlem brownstone), combines badly executed action sequences with mystic mumbo-jumbo that I suspect not even a two-disc director’s cut DVD could make comprehensible.
Kassovitz, whose acting credits include Amelie and Munich, might earn the benefit of the doubt for some of his earlier work as a director, or at least for La Haine, his scrappy urban melodrama from 1995. On the other hand, he is also the director of Gothika, a Halle Berry horror vehicle that, now that I think of it, makes me look a bit more kindly on Babylon AD.
Which at least has an interesting cast: not only Yeoh, one of the world’s great movie stars, but also Charlotte Rampling as a high priestess and Gerard Depardieu (wearing the most superfluous prosthetic nose extension in film history) as a Russian mobster. What they are doing here is not for me to say, though perhaps Diesel, in an early voice-over, offers a clue.
“I learned something today,” says his character, a tattooed mercenary with the curious name Toorop. “You can’t always walk away.” I’m sure he wishes otherwise. I certainly do.
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
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