SEOUL: About 20 per cent of South Korea’s trainee doctors said on Friday (Feb 16) they would resign effective on Tuesday to protest a government plan to admit more students to medical schools, saying this would hurt the national health insurance scheme. Representatives of the trainees, who work at theContinue Reading
“Quite frankly, I wasn’t looking at the world when we set out to make this movie,” Yamazaki said in a recent interview. “A lot of our team members said, ‘Oh, it’s Godzilla, The whole world is going to see this. You have to treat it differently.’ I told them all: ‘This is a small budget film made for a certain audience.’ They’ve proved me wrong and I’m very happy that they did.”
Much has been made of the pairing of Oppenheimer and Barbie, but the better double feature for Christopher Nolan’s film might be Godzilla Minus One. Across seven decades of movies, Godzilla has been deployed in a variety of ways. But Godzilla Minus One returns to the essential nature of Godzilla as a sober symbol of nuclear holocaust and atomic trauma.
In the 1954 original, Godzilla is woken by hydrogen-bomb testing. Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka once said: “The theme of the film, from the beginning, was the terror of the bomb. Mankind has created the bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind.”
Ironically, that Godzilla didn’t reach American audiences at the time. The version released in the US was heavily edited and stripped of much of political themes. Raymond Burr, a Canadian actor, was inserted in new footage.
For some Western moviegoers, Godzilla Minus One is a truer introduction of Godzilla, one of the movies’ greatest and grandest metaphors, than ever before.
“One of the many interpretations of Godzilla, through the evolution of the series of films over the years, has been forgotten – which is the original interpretation,” says Yamazaki. “Given the current state of affairs, what the world is going through right now, I thought it was very important that message not be forgotten. My intent was to put a spotlight on what Godzilla represented.”
In Godzilla Minus One, just as WWII is ending, Godzilla is growing. He begins appearing off the coast of Tokyo. For a kamikaze pilot Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), who didn’t kill himself in battle, confronting Godzilla offers a chance for redemption. When Koichi returns to Japan, he finds his parents dead and the city in ruins. Meanwhile, American bomb tests on Bikini Atoll are fuelling Godzilla’s power.
Recent Hollywood versions of Godzilla have put the kaiju into less Japan-centric contexts. The last was 2021’s Godzilla Vs Kong. Legendary Pictures, which licenses the character from Toho, will on Mar 29 release with Warner Bros Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. If not for its coming debut, Godzilla Minus One might still be playing in theatres. It bowed out of cinemas in late January after the one-week run of a black-and-white version.
But unlike more broadly blockbuster-styled Godzilla films, Godzilla Minus One is rigorously rooted in a Japanese perspective. Some have lamented that Oppenheimer, in staying close to J Robert Oppenheimer’s story, leaves out any Japanese experience of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what’s absent of Oppenheimer is everywhere in Godzilla Minus One.
Yamazaki has only seen an English version of Oppenheimer; the film hasn’t yet been released in Japan. But he believes it’s telling that both he and Nolan were separately drawn back to the dawn of the nuclear era.
BANDUNG, Indonesia: Voters in the world’s third-largest democracy, Indonesia, have elected former army general Prabowo Subianto as its eighth president, despite his campaign being dogged by accusations of human rights violations and electoral fraud.
According to the latest reliable polling, Prabowo – Indonesia’s defence minister – secured almost 60 per cent of the votes in what is considered as the largest and most complex single-day election in the world. This will likely mean that there will be no second round.
More than 200 million eligible voters in more than 17,000 islands cast their votes at more than 820,000 polling stations. The one-day voting process involved 5.7 million election workers, almost the size of Singapore’s population.
Given the complexity of the election, General Elections Commission will announce the official result on Mar 20. But since its first direct presidential election in 2004, Indonesia has relied on quick counts to know their new president on the election day.
According to these preliminary results Prabowo defeated other candidates – former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, who is backed by Muslim conservatives, and former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, who is supported by the country’s largest political party, Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).
Prabowo’s victory is a long time in the making. This is his fourth attempt to run for the country’s top jobs. He first ran as the vice presidential candidate for Megawati Sukarnoputri, PDI-P chairwoman, in the 2009 presidential election.
The pair lost to the Democrat Party’s chairman, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. In the 2014 and 2019 elections, Prabowo ran against the incumbent president, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. He lost in close elections on both occasions as Jokowi had the backing of Megawati’s party.
It was after his 2019 election defeat that Prabowo accepted the offer of a job as Jokowi’s defence minister.
In this year’s election, Prabowo teamed up with Jokowi’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, after a dispute between Jokowi and Megawati over their choice of candidates. It’s an example of how unpredictable the manoeuvres by politicians in Indonesia can be to stay in power and retain their dignity.
Mr Nicky noted that the different scenarios depend on what Mr Prabowo – as the likely presidential winner – has to offer the other parties. These may include offering them a seat as a minister in his Cabinet, considered to be the norm in Indonesia.
In claiming victory on Wednesday night, Mr Prabowo told his supporters at the Istora Senayan stadium in Jakarta to wait for the official tally by the KPU.
Political lecturer from the University of Indonesia Aditya Perdana believes there is little value for political parties to be in the opposition.
Given that political parties in Indonesia tend not to work based on ideologies but rather on benefits, Mr Aditya said that he thinks some parties would rather join forces with Mr Prabowo and his coalition, even if they campaigned for different things and ideologies during the election.
“It will be more promising and beneficial for parties to join the government than to be an opposition.
“It will be easier for them to maintain their constituents and voters if they are in power. So it will be just pragmatic,” said Mr Aditya.
He also highlighted that Indonesia will hold local elections in November, where voters will choose governors and other local leaders.
Thus, political parties would consider this before making the next move.
Mr Aditya surmised that, ultimately Mr Prabowo is not in a rush to form a coalition in the parliament, and any party can join later on.
The newly elected members of parliaments will only be inaugurated on Oct 1, while the president and vice-president will be sworn in on Oct 24.
“In Indonesian politics, anything can happen. Because here, everyone tries to accommodate the needs of others.
“They are not very ideological,” said Mr Aditya.
NEW DELHI: Thousands of Indian farmers on tractors are riding towards New Delhi in a revival of past protests that saw highways into the capital blockaded by agricultural machinery for more than a year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was pressed into a rare retreat in 2021 after a successful campaignContinue Reading
“EVERYONE’S FIGHT” The protesting farmers are in no hurry to head back home. Kamaljit Singh, 35, insisted everyone had a cup of the super-sweet milk tea he had on offer. “We have 100 litres of milk,” said Kamaljit, a farmer from Punjab’s Patiala district, saying his village had gifted theContinue Reading
“Cross-border carbon capture and storage is an emerging solution in Asia, and supports Singapore’s transition towards a low-carbon future,” said Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) deputy secretary Keith Tan in the joint statement. “With this LOI, Singapore and Indonesia can become the pathfinders to catalyse deployment of cross-border CCSContinue Reading
TAIPEI: Taiwan called on Beijing on Thursday (Feb 15) to restrain its citizens from illegal fishing in the waters around the self-ruled island, defending its coast guard over the pursuit of a boat that led to the deaths of two Chinese nationals. The boat was carrying four people when it capsizedContinue Reading
MANILA: The Philippines is firmly committed to negotiations for a code of conduct between China and Southeast Asian countries to avert confrontations in the South China Sea, its foreign minister said on Thursday (Feb 15). Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo also said tensions in the South China Sea were not allContinue Reading
BEIJING: China’s top diplomat Wang Yi will visit Germany for the Munich Security Conference then travel to Spain and France in the coming days, Beijing’s foreign ministry said on Thursday (Feb 15). “From Feb 16 to 21 … Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi will attend the 60th Munich SecurityContinue Reading