Life Style

3/5 starsIt’s hardly every day that a novelist-turned-filmmaker will follow up an award-winning, genial family drama with a live-action adaptation of a video game.Appropriating images and ideas aplenty from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Genki Kawamura has turned a simple premise – in which a player is made to run repeatedly down a short underground passage to search for a way out – into a psychological thriller exploring a man’s guilt and redemption.For those who haven’t played The Exit 8, which has attained cult status among gamers since its release in 2023, fear not: Kawamura did the uninitiated a huge favour by outlining its rules on screen from the get-go.Reading those instructions, displayed on a wall, out loud, “The Lost Man” (Kazunari Ninomiya) learns that his goal is to look for a...

Cruise ships are trying to navigate murky waters.Do travellers want more and faster waterslides? Or the number of decks to reach the 20s? Do they still want to hike on all seven continents? Or just stay on the ship and sip fruity cocktails?Growth in cruise ship travel is starting to slow compared with the post-pandemic boom. That trend has cruise lines looking at several ways to keep people coming on board.Some are creating new private resorts. Others are doubling down on super-high-end luxury trips. Still others are offering river cruises.Carnival Cruises’ Carnival Conquest ship departs from PortMiami as beachgoers enjoy the nice weather at Miami’s South Beach during spring break on March 21, 2025. Photo: TNSIn December, Royal Caribbean will debut its third all-inclusive resort, the Royal...

When the University of Minnesota offered to let me experience what it’s like to die, naturally I said yes.Aren’t we all morbidly curious about the undiscovered country, as Hamlet put it, from which no traveller returns?Except this time, happily, I would get to return because it would be a virtual death, an experience in a VR studio that’s part of the American university’s Health Sciences Library system.The dying experience is part of a series of VR simulations developed by a nine-year-old California-based company called Embodied Labs.As part of Embodied Labs' VR experience of dying, the user looks across the bed and sees his loved ones gathered around him, watching him intently but sadly. Photo: embodiedlabs.comIt has created immersive, first-person experiences of what it’s like to have de...

Opera Hong Kong’s new production of The Magic Flute is a conundrum: the singing, acting and music are first rate, but they are let down by a misjudged concept and designs.Mozart’s final opera, despite being written when he was suffering from illness and financial woes, is among his most joyous. The libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, a popular entertainer, offers a combination of low comedy and lofty sentiments.He and Mozart were both Freemasons and the work has strong masonic elements, advocating universal brotherhood and calling for people to seek harmony and enlightenment.The fairy-tale plot is far removed from the more realistic drama of other Mozart operas like Don Giovanni or The Marriage of Figaro.The mysterious Queen of the Night promises the young hero, Tamino, the hand of her daught...

The first monologue Daniel Dae Kim ever performed was by David Henry Hwang.He had to do one for his college summer programme at the National Theatre Institute in the US state of Connecticut. Kim chose a scene from FOB, Hwang’s 1980 play about the assimilation struggles of a Chinese-American.So it is fitting that 35 years later Hwang – the first Asian-American to win the Tony Award for best play – would be the one to bring Kim into the Tony spotlight.Known for TV series such as Lost and Hawaii Five-0, Kim, 56, is the first Asian nominee in the category of best leading actor in a play in the Tonys’ 78-year history for his work in a Broadway revival of Hwang’s Yellow Face.It’d be a huge surprise if I won, but I will say that even getting the nomination is a win“I can imagine a lot of things, ...

Kazuo Ishiguro’s mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped.When Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate and author of Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, started writing fiction in his twenties, his first novel, 1982’s A Pale View of Hills, was inspired by his mother’s stories, and his own distance from them. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but, when he was five, moved to the UK with his family.A Pale View of Hills marked the start of one of the most lauded writing careers in contemporary literature. And, now, like most of Ishiguro’s other novels, it is a film, too.Kei Ishikawa’s film by the same name premiered on May 15 at the Cannes Film Festival in its Un Certain Regard section. The 70-year-old author has been here before; he was a member of the jury in 1994 that gave Pulp Fiction ...

Jumbo, an Indonesian cartoon about a spirited orphan boy named Don, has toppled the Disney film Frozen 2 to become Indonesia’s highest-grossing animated movie in a major boost for the country’s fledgling animation industry.As of mid-May, Jumbo had been watched by more than 9.6 million people locally and earned more than US$20 million.Released on March 31 and produced by Indonesian company Visinema Pictures, the story about a bullied village boy who tries to stage a talent show has also become Southeast Asia’s most-watched animated feature, entertainment website Deadline reported in April.“This is an incredible milestone,” said Angga Dwimas Sasongko, Visinema Pictures’ founder and a film director. “That it could surpass Frozen 2 is not just about numbers, but also proof that Indonesians are...

Virgin Galactic says it plans to charge more for its space tourism flights when it resumes sales in the first quarter of 2026.The Richard Branson-founded company had been selling tickets for suborbital joyrides on its forthcoming Delta spacecraft at about US$600,000 a seat.Company executives did not disclose a new price tag during a call with analysts after Virgin Galactic reported results for the first quarter last week.Virgin Galactic’s now-retired VSS Unity taking off for a suborbital space flight from the US state of New Mexico in 2024. The company will replace it with its forthcoming Delta spacecraft. Photo: Anadolu via Getty ImagesThe first flight with the new spaceship – a research mission – is planned for summer 2026, with private astronaut flights slated for the autumn of that yea...

In 1989, Zhou Xiaoping was a 29-year-old Chinese artist travelling around Australia pursuing his passion for Aboriginal culture.He had explored the desert town of Alice Springs and the tropical Arnhem Land region before he arrived in the coastal resort of Broome. Here, immersed in an environment that felt completely foreign to him, Zhou was shocked to discover a connection to his home country.“I met the Aboriginal songwriter Jimmy Chi,” Zhou says. “Jimmy asked me to say something to him in Chinese. He wanted to hear the sound of spoken Chinese. He then told me that his father was James Joseph Minero Chi, the son of a Chinese gold miner who had come to Australia around 1870.”The conversation sparked Zhou’s decades-long fascination with Aboriginal-Chinese history, culture and communities, wh...

4.5/5 starsThe Cannes Film Festival may be hosting yet another virtual-reality programme this year, but the most immersive event on the Croisette in the French seaside city so far has been the premiere of an old-school, two-dimensional, three-hour movie filmed in the classic 4:3 aspect ratio.Revolving around its titular Portuguese explorer’s expeditions to Southeast Asia in the early 16th century, Magellan is relentlessly engrossing – an epic in which viewers witness the distress, death and destruction brought about by one man’s delusions of colonial conquest.By presenting Ferdinand Magellan as a dogmatic, slave-owning colonialist who brooks no dissent from his quixotic mission, Filipino auteur Lav Diaz and his Mexican lead actor Gael García Bernal have delivered a subversive portrait of a...