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Day: 23 September 2015

Walk this way, fashion this way

Written by Kathryn Murray on . Posted in Fashion & Beauty.

Since autumn is just around the corner, most of us are thinking about purchasing that all-important fluffy jumper or those handy leather boots. But those higher up the fashion chain are past all of that, and are now focusing on what we will all wear in spring and summer next year. Talk about forward thinking.

Here is the low down of what is to come:

Crochet

I have only just come around to accepting crochet as a fashion choice. Once associated with kettle covers, crochet has been a major trend in 2015 with knitted swimsuits suddenly gracing the beaches… but not the sea. That wouldn’t work well. Tommy Hilfiger and BCBG Maz Azaria had crochet pieces on their catwalk, so stock up now.

Hippie chic

For those of you who thought that the 1970s trend would slowly fade out, sorry. Flares, flower garlands, suede and bold prints are here to stay. Luckily, chunky layers also fit in nicely here. You can be a trend-setter months before the spring/summer seasons.

All the fringing

You may have noticed this trend slowly making its way onto the high street. A little trim of fringe on a bag, maybe a beaded, 1920s style dress, even a suede jacket with some fringing on the sleeves. Well, next year, expect the world to go fringing mad. Usually used for added texture, the clothes of the future will be in full swing… literally. Add some fringing into your wardrobe, designers including Christian Siriano and Prabal Gurung have.

Print blocking

Huge names such as Diane Von Furstenberg, Tommy Hilfiger and Victoria Beckham all went print-blocking bonkers when it came to showcasing their new designs. Luckily, this is a pretty easy trend to go along with. Layer some bold prints, we dare you.

Show off those shoulders

Remember those bardot tops you bought a few months ago? Congratulations, you called it! You will be on trend next spring if you keep these bad boys handy. Givenchy, Lacoste and Victoria Beckham all loved this bare shoulder look, with many pieces cut down just enough to expose a bit of collarbone.

UCLAN exclude UK students from medicine degree

Written by Jennifer Sterne on . Posted in News.

A medicine degree course at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), has been made available only to overseas students.

The medicine course costs £36,500 per year and a total of £182,500 over the five years. The university announced it was unable to admit UK students due to government’s limits on places to study medicine.

38 overseas students are in the initial intake, while students from the UK or anywhere in the EU are unable to apply.

Deborah Streatfield told the BBC “this does absolutely nothing to help young students from disadvantaged backgrounds who struggle to access medical courses and then face five years of fees and tuition loans. These students would love to work and give back to the NHS if given a chance.”

A spokesperson from UCLAN has said that while they would like to admit UK students, the government limit set on medicine places for UK students prevented them.

Student number controls for 2015/16 entry was lifted for most degree courses, but is left in place for medicine. This restriction has been left as medicine degrees, part funded by the NHS, cost more than the £9,000 limit on fees in England.

Cathy Jackson, head of UCLAN’s medical school said “we are very much not an elitist organization… these international students self-fund their course in the same way as international students do at every other medical school in the UK. Unlike other schools however, we don’t yet have any home students.”

Jackson confirmed that if there was an increase in the number of UK medical students permitted “we will certainly be making a bid for those increased numbers.”

A Department of Health spokesperson told the BBC that they “fund student places for doctors based on the numbers the NHS tell us it will need in the future to ensure we get value for money for the taxpayer and we are committed to deliver an estimated 5,000 more doctors in general practice by 2020.”

This all comes after research from the Medical Schools Council released in December showed half of UK schools and colleges had not provided a single medicine candidate in recent years, leading to concerns that universities are not doing enough to recruit students from a range of backgrounds.

The report released in 2014, examining the issue of widening participation into medicine, found that 80 per cent of all medical students came from just 20 per cent of schools.

Japanese government cuts swathes of university departments

Written by William Brown on . Posted in News.

Across Japan, university humanities, law, and social science departments have come under systemic fire over the past few weeks.

Hakubun Shimomura, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has sent a letter to Japan’s 86 national universities strongly encouraging them to take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities] organisations or to convert them to serve areas that better meet society’s needs.”

The order from Tokyo is not binding, but the letter has led to a purge with more than 25 universities announcing they will close or severely cut departments, focusing instead on engineering and science-based subjects.

The news of Japanese university departments’ closures comes as the Japanese parliament last week voted to reform the ‘pacifist’ constitution which has been in place since the horrors of WWII and the Japanese occupation of China.

Both moves are widely seen as part Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s broader attempt to revitalise Japan’s stagnant economy and reassert Japan’s geopolitical standing in the world.

While Japan enjoyed incredible economic growth figures in the post-war years, since 1990 Japan has been experienced the so called ‘Lost Decade’ with both incomes and GDP declining significantly.

Economic growth in the post-war boom years was largely based on high-tech manufactured goods, and reports suggest that the Japanese government’s hope is that by driving more students into science and engineering they might stimulate more sustainable economic growth, avoiding the unpredictable route towards a service-based economy many Western countries have taken.

Moreover, as Time reports, the move is most likely connected to the ongoing financial pressures on Japanese higher education. Japan’s low birth rate and ageing population mean there are increasingly fewer students to fill university places, with many institutions running at half capacity.

However, commentator Noah Smith, writing for Bloomberg View, argues that given that Japan’s humanities departments lean heavily to the political left, the recent move might be part of a darker attempt “by the social conservatives—Abe’s main power bloc—to move the country in a more illiberal direction by stifling dissent and discussion.”

Review: Everest

Written by Nadia Cheung on . Posted in Film.

Baltasar Kormákur’s latest film is featured as a 3D disaster thriller, based upon the real life events of the 1996 Everest tragedy that took 12 lives—which became known as one of the deadliest years on the mountain. The plot is interesting—all or most characters have one goal to achieve, to reach the summit—which proves to be a deathly challenge.

Between the 10th and 11th of May, two commissioning camps on Mount Everest, led by the expedition leaders, New Zealander Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) and American Scott Fisher (Jake Gyllenhaal), give paying clients the opportunity to climb the summit of Mount Everest, a very dangerous expedition. Josh Brolin plays one of the film’s survivors, Beck Weathers, a Texan Doctor with depression that he cures by climbing mountains.

The majority of this film is set on Earth’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, where two camps aim to reach the summit. This is where the majority of the action happens, and 3D technology makes very good use of this, making you feel as if you were part of the mountaineering experience without being exposed to the danger of it.

Being based on a real life tragedy, I would not necessarily say I felt an enormous amount of sympathy for the characters. That is not to say I did not care about them; there were, of course, moments where I had rooted for some of them, in particular the character of Rob Hall. In fact, the character of Rob, alongside his pregnant wife, Jan Arnold, played by Keira Knightley, were the only two characters that I really felt the most sympathy for.

I felt as though a lot of the characters in the film became predictable, which made the plot quite predictable too, because of the actions and decisions made. In fact, I felt a slight disconnect between some of the characters, particularly the mountaineers, who, it seemed, were much too concerned about their own wishes and problems, unaware of the realistic situation and unwilling to accept or face that fact, which to me was annoying. But of course, if you are paying $65,000 to get to the summit of Mount Everest, you would by any means, want to get your money’s worth—which in a way, I could empathise with.

To summarise, I think the highlight of Everest as a cinematic experience is certainly the cinematography and vivid visuals you get through the use of 3D, which is definitely its strongest point, although the plot relies on its setting, which, in my opinion, saves the film from being extremely mediocre. A film that markets itself mostly on the idea of a 3D feature taking over such a monstrous setting like Mount Everest and translating it on screen will by all means have to focus very much on cinematography above all else to be successful—which is a very good thing because it was such a pleasure to see in 3D the details of a large snowy mountain.

But because of the sheer focus on the visuals, I felt that in terms of the film’s overall narrative and the fact this film deals with a real-life disaster that had actually happened, it loses the sympathy you would expect to have. If, however, you’re looking for a film that gives you stunning visuals and an almost visceral experience without causing conflict over how you should feel, then this is a film well recommended.

3/5

Feature: Conflict in the French Film Industry

Written by Dylan Kerlann on . Posted in Film.

In the recent years following 2008, the French State has especially been criticized for its wrong allocation of resources. This raises questions when it comes to the cultural segment of the economy, with private movies tending to be more profitable than publicly funded ones. France is known to heavily fund its culture through a subsidy system derived from the implementing of the Exception Culturelle policies in 1958.

These subsidies are created from taxes on cinema tickets and media companies in general. These subsidies given by the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma) may be complemented by local subsidies. But does heavy public spending automatically yield better results in terms of profits as movie directors can focus more on art? Is the system in need of change?

The French publicly-funded movie industry, though flawed, has procured—through its connections with the French theatres and acting schools—many of France’s biggest actors, such as Lea Seydoux (trained in the Parisian school, Les enfants terribles, and revealed through her role in La Belle Persone, a public movie).

This system, however, combined with a tradition of centralisation, causes the actors to be limited in terms of skills—French actors rarely shine abroad as they are primarily trained for plays, not movies —and to limit their background to a certain demographic: Parisian from a upper middle-class background or higher, in general.

The public segment of this industry has also been known, secondly, to be more daring, as it does not have profitability in mind as its first concern. But on the other hand, we must take into account that profitability in the movie industry is synonymous with high spectator turnover. This fact must often need to be counterbalanced by critical success.

In France, however, traditional interconnection of the members of the cultural sector of the economy (press, television, plays, art), make some journalists write favourable reviews for certain movies that may not deserve them. For instance, Stéphane Brizé’s Cannes award-winning La loi du marché (The Measure of a Man), a social drama featuring Vincent Lindon, though critically praised, only had 835,979 entries at the box office, compared to Avengers: Age of Ultron which made 4,240,197 entries.

This demonstrates the tendency of French publicly-funded movies to not focus much on profitability, with the CNC often never paid back the loans given as subsidies (often due to the failure of the movie to yield profits), according to the French Inspection des Finances, thus making the French public movie industry very indebted.

The French private counterparts of the movie industry have the main difference to rely mainly on private companies to write, direct and distribute their movies. Examples of such companies are StudioCanal or Europacorp. These companies, however, do tend to ask and obtain subsidies, creating controversy. This recurring issue in the industry underlines one of the major problems with publicly funded movies—the lack of transparency (unacceptable, as it is the people’s money that is used) often displayed when choosing the projects to support.

This especially transpired with the overall failure of the French cinema industry, one of the biggest in terms of quantity in the world (third behind India and the United States). Indeed, less than 50,000 spectators viewed 60 per cent of the movies produced in 2010 in France, according to the French Cour des Comptes, which noted these issues several times in the state-sponsored movie business.

Such issues, less prevalent in privately-run cinema, have spawned scandal, such the Maraval (Wild Bunch) affaire, revealing in 2013 that actors were being overpaid for performances in movies far below expectations in terms of acting quality and sales, thus artificially elevating the budget.

Movies in France also suffer from lack of originality in their scenario (prevalence of buddy comedies, social and family dramas). This handicap especially plagues publicly-funded movies, already crippled by a deficient funding system some no longer want to support, even though it is mainly focusing on the artistic aspect of cinema, but so are some of the private movie companies. Yet, as it is with its movies, the industry might have to rethink itself, private and public alike.