The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) met in Hanoi on August 20 to review tourism activities in the past seven months and discuss ways to boost the tourism industry in Northern Vietnam.
The agency’s report shows a total of 14 million tourists, domestic and foreign, in Vietnam in seven months, a year-on-year increase of 13%.
The report indicates that Northern provinces have taken steps to attract more tourists such as improving fee collection and strengthening security at tourist sites. They have also liaised with border provinces of neighbouring countries to promote tourism, launch new tours and develop new tourist products.
At the meeting, the tourism watchdog asked travel businesses in Northern Vietnam to focus on campaigns such as the one to promote the 1000th anniversary of Thang Long - Hanoi and National Tourism Year 2010. It also urged them to accelerate the establishment of an association of travel agencies and another one for hotels with the aim of improving Vietnamese businesses’ competitiveness in domestic and regional markets.
Director General of VNAT Nguyen Van Tuan said his agency will concentrate on tourism promotion campaigns inside and outside the country and long-term human personnel training. In addition, he said, VNAT will boost investments in order to upgrade the tourism sector’s infrastructure.
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Increasingly, studios are slapping 3D on movies not to add entertainment value but to conceal a lack of dimension in a movie's story or characters. While not the worst in recent 3D films, "Gulliver's Travels" is more gimmicky than a crackling good yarn.
The film feels rushed and slight at every point. Thanks to inspired clowning by Jack Black and a solid cast that breathes life into an inert story, the movie works as a moderately entertaining children's movie.
Travels," is that librarians and schoolteachers have forever relegated to the shelves of children's books what is, in fact, a scathing moral satire of the corrupt English society of his time and mankind's proclivity for irrationality and vice over common sense and virtue.
The latest version, which comes from several filmmakers with backgrounds in animation, casts Black as a shy, ambition-challenged mailroom clerk for a New York newspaper. This opening setting is a nostalgic one, mind you, as its busy newsroom is crowded with employed journalists, and a travel editor occupies an office fit for a managing editor.
Black's Gulliver has a longstanding crush on that travel editor (Amanda Peet) but can never bring himself to ask her out. Goaded by a colleague into approaching her, he winds up not with a date but with a travel assignment.
That takes him to the Bermuda Triangle, where a storm washes him into an inter-dimensional portal that carries him to Lilliput, where remnants of Swift's tale take over. The kingdom is made to look somewhat like 18th century England and features mostly British actors.
The tiny Lilliputians struggle to imprison this "giant," but when he escapes, he performs heroic deeds that save the people. Among these displays of bravery is the day when he puts out a fire in the royal palace by urinating on the flames.
Emboldened by his newly acquired size, Gulliver now exaggerates his past, drawing on film culture to cast himself as the victorious hero of stories ranging from Star Wars to Titanic. This kernel of an idea - a small man suddenly talking big - never develops beyond a few gags involving contemporary movies, however. In the tiresome manner of most studio-generated comedies, its protagonist must undergo a trajectory that confronts him with his character flaws and improves his defective personality.
Gulliver also inserts himself into a romantic triangle featuring the island's princess (Emily Blunt), her military suitor (Chris O'Dowd) and the commoner (Jason Segel) who really loves her.
When Peet's character somehow turns up in Lilliput - that's one busy inter-dimensional portal - the movie truly loses its mooring. There is even a sequence, borrowing loosely from Gulliver's second voyage to Brobdingnag, where Black, a tiny friend and a giant child all occupy the same frame in a CGI shootout. Any sense of fun slowly drains away as the movie insists on highlighting effects over character and story.
Black does his best to keep you entertained, and the rest of the cast, which includes a dignified Billy Connolly and an aloof Catherine Tate as Lilliput's king and queen, keep tongues firmly planted in cheeks as they maneuver around the CG effects. Blunt amusingly spoofs some of her serious films, such as "The Young Victoria," while O'Dowd and Segel achieve a farcical rivalry.
The production is smooth given how it's pieced together from so many elements. But there is something cheesy about the overlit kingdom of six-inch humans and the way Black prances around with no thought for the countless creatures he must be trampling to death.
As of January 13, “Gulliver's Travels” holds a score of 21 percent, based on 100 reviews on Rottentomatoes.com, with the consensus: "Though Jack Black is back doing what he does best, Gulliver's Travels largely fails to do any justice to its source material, relying instead on juvenile humor and special effects.”
