Watch Leonardo DiCaprio's Emotional, Oscar-Winning Grunting In The Revenant Honest Trailer

2016 was Leonardo DiCaprio's year, as he finally won the Academy Award he'd been working towards his whole career. It was The Revenant that afforded him that chance, and as Screen Junkies promised with their previous Oscar round-up, a full riffing of the Academy Award nominated film has come. You can watch the madness for yourself below. Leave it to the guys at Screen Junkies to totally roast Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar winning performance, as a huge sticking point of their rundown of The Revenantseems to chalk the film up to a lot of sky shots, confusing accents, and the most soulful, award winning grunting a man could ever muster. After six nominations, this is the role that DiCaprio won his golden glory for, and this seems like a mixed bag judging by the reaction of the guys at Honest Trailers. 

Though as good as Leonardo DiCaprio was in The Revenant, the video doesn't hesitate to point out that there were a lot of factors that helped DiCaprio's performance run as naturally as he would wish. Keep in mind, Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu did film his epic of fur trapping and revenge over the course of an extended, naturally lit shooting schedule. Not to mention, LeonardoDiCaprio himself actually went uber-method while shooting the film, which could only help clinch his nomination, and eventual win. All of that said, it still doesn't wipe away the fact that this film featured more grunting than any of the drug trips DiCaprio endured during his last award-nominated performance in The Wolf of Wall Street. 



Strangely enough, The Revenant is criticized by this Honest Trailer for one, key factor. Despite the fact that the film has been heralded as a brutal, unflinching work of cinema, there are some who may find the pacing and artistry of the film a bit dull. Considering how the film was marketed as an intense exercise in vengeance and survival, it's fair to say that the finished product is a much slower burn than most would have expected. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on what type of moviegoer you are, as The Revenant is just as divisive as Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu's last film, Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance. So if really artfully done, slow moving narratives still aren't your thing, you're obviously not going to enjoy this film. 

No matter how you look at it, Leonardo DiCaprio was overdue for an Academy Award for Best Actor, and as far as award winning performances go, you could do a lot worse than his efforts on display in The Revenant. Should you need any convincing, you can purchase The Revenant on Digital HD now, with the Blu-ray and DVD releases scheduled for April 19th.  

Taiwan earthquake: Search ends as death toll reaches 116

Taiwan earthquake: Search ends as death toll reaches 116

Search and rescue operations after a 6.4 magnitude earthquake that struck southern Taiwan ended Saturday as the death toll rose to 116, Taiwan's Central News Agency reported.

The last trapped person was rescued alive on Saturday afternoon, the city's disaster response office said.

A total of 289 people were rescued, 96 people remain in hospital.

Most of the fatalities and injuries came from the collapse of the Weiguan Golden Dragon high-rise tower in Tainan, the response center said.

Aerial images in the immediate aftermath of the temblor showed the Weiguan Golden Dragon tower transformed into rubble. Structures around it remained intact.

Rescuers found tin cans packed into the collapsed walls of the high-rise.

"There are so many other older buildings in Tainan that are still standing. Why was it only this building that was completely destroyed?" asked Wang Xingyou, a city cab driver.

Three people, all former executives of the company that built the collapsed apartment building, were arrested Tuesday and face charges of professional negligence resulting in death.

1.magnitude 大小

2.fatalities 死亡人數

3.temblor  這場地震

4.negligence 疏忽

Oxford’s 2015 Word of the Year Is This Emoji

It's a historic moment of recognition for little images that have been gaining popularity since 1999

Oxford Dictionaries made history on Monday by announcing that their “Word of the Year” would not be one of those old-fashioned, string-of-letters-type words at all. The flag their editors are planting to sum up who we were in 2015 is this pictograph, an acknowledgement of just how popular these pictures have become in our (digital) daily lives:

“Although emoji have been a staple of texting teens for some time, emoji culture exploded into the global mainstream over the past year,” the company’s team wrote in a press release. “Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”

Oxford University Press—which publishes both the august Oxford English Dictionary and the lower-brow, more-modern Oxford Dictionaries Online—partnered with keyboard-app company SwiftKey to determine which emoji was getting the most play this past year. According to their data, the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji, also known as LOL Emoji or Laughing Emoji, comprised nearly 20% of all emoji use in the U.S. and the U.K., where Oxford is based. The runner-up in the U.S., with 9% of usage, was this number:

Caspar Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, explained that their choice reflects the walls-down world that we live in. “Emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders,” he said in a statement. And their choice for the word of the year, he added, embodies the “playfulness and intimacy” that characterizes emoji-using culture.

Though this marks a historic moment of recognition for the pictures plastered throughout tweets and texts, Oxford has not added or defined any emoji in their actual databases. Nor, says a spokesperson for the publisher, do they have plans to do so at this point. The word emoji, however, has been in both the OED and Oxford Dictionaries Online since 2013.

Japanese telecommunications planner Shigetaka Kurita is credited with inventing these little images in 1999, taking the emoticons that had been gaining steam on the Internet to an iconic level. Inspired by comics and street signs, the name for the alphanumeric images comes from combining the Japanese words for picture (e-) and character (moji). “It’s easy to write them off as just silly little smiley faces or thumbs-up,” sociolinguist Ben Zimmer told TIME for a story on how emoji fit into humans’ long history of using pictures to communicate. “But there’s an awful lot of people who are very interested in treating them seriously.”

Here are the other words that made Oxford’s short list:

ad blocker, noun: A piece of software designed to prevent advertisements from appearing on a web page.

Brexit, noun: A term for the potential or hypothetical departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union.

Dark Web, noun: The part of the World Wide Web that is only accessible by means of special software, allowing users and website operators to remain anonymous or untraceable

lumbersexual, noun: a young urban man who cultivates an appearance and style of dress (typified by a beard and checked shirt) suggestive of a rugged outdoor lifestyle

on fleek, adjective: extremely good, attractive, or stylish

refugee, noun: A person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster

sharing economy, noun: An economic system in which assets or services are shared between private individuals, either free or for a fee, typically by means of the Internet.

they (singular), pronoun: Used to refer to a person of unspecified sex.

1.pictograph 象形

2.staple 釘書針

3.plastered 抹灰

4.intimacy 親密關西

Myanmar jade mine landslide kills around 100

About 100 people have been killed in a landslide as they picked through mountains of waste rubble in a remote mining area of northern Myanmarsearching for precious jade, state media has reported.

Those killed were thought to have been mainly itinerant miners, who make a living scavenging through mountains of waste rubble dumped by mechanical diggers used by mining firms at the centre of a secretive multibillion-dollar industry in the restive Kachin state.

Saturday’s massive landslide crushed dozens of shanty huts clustered on the barren landscape and which were home to an unconfirmed number of people.The disaster happened at about 3.30am local time (9pm GMT) and lasted just a couple of minutes, according to Zaw Moe Htet, a local gems trader whose village overlooks the devastated area in the Hpakant mining area.

“Even people living in villages further away could hear the cries of those who rushed to the scene,” he said.

Video footage of the area shot on Saturday shows men carrying several bodies slung in blankets watched by a crowd of local people in a dusty plain near the village of Sai Tung.

Nilar Myint, an official from the local administrative authorities in Hpakant, said rescue teams have so far found 97 people killed in the landslide.

Landslides are a common hazard in the area as people living off the industry’s waste pick their way across perilous mounds under cover of darkness, driven by the hope they might find a chunk of jade worth thousands of dollars.

Scores have been killed this year alone as local people say the mining companies, many of which are linked to the country’s junta-era military elite, increase their operations in Kachin.

Myanmar is the source of virtually all of the world’s finest jadeite, a translucent green stone that is prized above almost all other materials in neighbouring China.

In an October report, advocacy group Global Witness estimated that the value of jade produced in 2014 alone was $31bn (£20.4bn), the equivalent of nearly half the country’s GDP.But that figure is about 10 times the official $3.4bn sales of the precious stone last year, in an industry that has long been shrouded in secrecy with much of the best jade thought to be smuggled directly to China.

Local people in Hpakant complain of a litany of abuses associated with the mining industry, including the frequency of accidents and land confiscations.The area has been turned into a moonscape of environmental destruction as huge diggers gouge the earth looking for jade.

Itinerant miners are drawn from all parts of Myanmar by the promise of riches and become easy prey for drug addiction in Hpakant, where heroin and methamphetamine are cheaply available on the streets.

“Industrial-scale mining by big companies controlled by military families and companies, cronies and drug lords has made Hpakant a dystopian wasteland where locals are literally having the ground cut from under their feet,” said Mike Davis of Global Witness, calling for companies to be held accountable for accidents.

The group wants the jade industry, which has long been the subject of US sanctions, to be part of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global scheme designed to increase transparency around natural resource management.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.