台灣平溪天燈 Taiwan Pingsi Sky Lantern Festival 2009

Happy Chinese New Year!! & Happy Valentines Day!!

(This is a smaller event on January 31st. 2009. Later they have 2 larger events on Feb. 7 and 9. )

Pouting Rupert Penry-Jones

I was a big fan of Spooks (MI-5) thanks to Rupert Penry-Jones who makes the spy business attractive, and while I'm struggling yes or no I should keep watching the series now lead by the "Robin Hoods" villain Richard Armitage. Here I found something really funny to read about the former Spooks hero.

Rupert Penry-Jones shines in The 39 Steps

The success of The 39 Steps was mostly down to Rupert Penry-Jones, who re-creates his role from Spooks in rather better tailoring. He isn’t really an actor, in the sense of someone who actually acts. He is more somebody who stands around pouting. He manages to project a bland and fuzzy likeability through a conventionally pretty face. He reminds me of a male version of Audrey Hepburn. This is not a criticism. Well, it is a criticism. But not a bad one. Standing around pouting, looking like Audrey Hepburn, is quite as difficult and admirable as marching up and down being Hamlet. He has a defined and narrow range of emotions and reactions available to him, most delivered with a Botoxed gauche minimalism, and in this he perfectly fits the strange, sensually neutered understatement and studied insouciance that is the default setting of your archetypal Edwardian hero. Those weird boy-men, tongue-tied around women but effusive with horses and dogs, scrupulously fair but comprehensively prejudiced, a bizarre collection of public-school contradictions, repressions and neuroses became the template for derring-do heroes. You can see him in Dirty Harry and Indiana Jones, in Matt Damon and Batman.

- by AA Gill - The Sunday Times - January 4, 2009 Original article