China braces as water rises at quake lake

MIANZHU, China (AFP) — China’s quake-hit southwest braced Friday for the breaching of a swollen “quake lake”, with water expected to finally reach the top and put to test an emergency drainage plan.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who arrived at the landslide-created Tangjiashan lake late Thursday, was seen on state television ordering the evacuation of everyone who could be in harm’s way.

Up to 1.3 million people could be in danger of floods if the vast amount of rock and debris that has blocked the Jianjiang river bursts open, officials have warned.

More than 250,000 people have already been evacuated but many others will have to be moved out if the quake lake empties downstream rapidly.

According to local authorities, the controlled draining of some of the 200 million cubic metres (700 million cubic feet) of water behind the dam could start on Friday afternoon, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Lots of juicy issues wrapped in a so-so script

There’s a potentially interesting movie or three wrapped up in Finn’s Girl, a Canadian drama about a lesbian widow trying to cope with caring for her deceased partner’s wayward 11-year-old daughter. At least, that’s the central story into which Toronto documentarians Laurie Colbert and Dominique Cardona try to cram more lesbian parenting/reproductive rights/abortion issues than any 88-minute drama should be expected to contain.

At the core, though, there’s a simple mother-daughter story that you can root for, with natural, understated acting, solid production values and – something we don’t see enough of onscreen – a modern Canadian urban milieu. Toronto theatre veteran Brooke Johnson (looking middle-agedly handsome in a silvery helmet of hair) plays gynecologist and reproductive scientist Dr. Finn Jeffries. When her lover and a fellow doctor, Nancy, dies of breast cancer, Finn decides to take over her abortion clinic and assumes full-time responsibility of their 11-year-old daughter, Zelly (Maya Ritter).

For all her professional authority, Finn isn’t exactly a confident parental figure. She dashes around on her motorcycle like a teenager, works long hours and smokes dope at night while she mulls over her research.

A dull, dutiful march through the mountains

As predictable as it is picturesque, The Children of Huang Shi is one of those international co-productions full of good intentions and blandly polished results. The film chronicles the life of British journalist and adventurer George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a recent young Oxford graduate who ended up as a teacher in China in the 1940s during China’s three-sided war between Mao’s Communists, Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists and the invading Japanese army.

In the last year of the war, Hogg took a group of orphans on a 1,000-kilometre trek through mountains in winter to a safer area.

With a script co-written by James McCamus, the Daily Telegraph’s former Beijing correspondent and author of a biography of Hogg, the film manages to turn lively history into dull drama.

The script’s first of several inventions is to place Hogg in the midst of the Japanese atrocities in Nanking, where he is saved at the last minute from a beheading by an amiable communist guerrilla leader and sent to take charge of an orphanage filled with war-traumatized boys, ranging in age from little kids to teenagers.

Germans unhappy as iTunes movies hit UK and Canada

Almost two years after its movie service launched in the United States, Apple is this week expanding the international domination of iTunes with the official availability of downloadable cinematic content for customers residing in both the United Kingdom and Canada.

For those iTunes users based in the UK, more than 700 titles will be offered from launch, with 100 of that initial catalogue available for viewing in high definition (HD). Canadian customers will receive around 1,200 titles, with 200 of those in HD.

And, to further increase the content’s consumer appeal, Apple has confirmed that a number of the movies hitting both the UK and Canadian stores at launch will be arriving on the same day they are released on DVD in those regions.