The latest messiah of the multiplex is Chris Vaughn, the character played by the former professional wrestler the Rock in Walking Tall, which opens today nationwide. Crisply directed by Kevin Bray, this film is a remake of the Nixon-era law-and-order hit of the same title, which was set in a Tennessee town taken over by vice peddlers, and starred Joe Don Baker as Sheriff Buford Pusser, a no-nonsense guy who cleaned up the streets with the help of a huge wooden club.
In the new film, the action has been transposed to Washington State (probably to allow the producers to shoot in the budget-friendly confines of British Columbia), and the Southern sheriff has become a Special Forces veteran who returns to find his hometown, once a cozy logging community nestled in a mountain valley, turned into a hellish den of iniquity.
Mothers abandon their squealing babies in their strollers while they duck into alleys to score methamphetamines; high school kids openly smoke marijuana; and the main street hardware store has been replaced by a Home Depot out by the highway. Mill workers, once dignified, are reduced to employment as bouncers in the town's only remaining business, the casino owned by Chris's childhood friend Jay Hamilton (a nicely menacing turn by Neal McDonough).
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX
The big stick is back, too, and gets plenty of play once the fed-up townspeople elect Chris as their new, reform sheriff. Chris enlists his best buddy from high school (Johnny Knoxville), a reformed drug addict, to serve as his deputy, rescues his own childhood sweetheart (Kristen Wilson) from her career as a pole dancer at the casino and takes on his former friend's well-armed henchmen in what quickly becomes an apocalyptic battle of good versus evil.
With a brisk running time of 86 minutes, Walking Tall has no more fat on it than the Rock himself, a hulking yet curiously ingratiating presence who seems the most likely candidate to replace Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as America's favorite living comic book character. For all of his bulk, the Rock has a mildness of speech and a modesty of bearing that immediately give him a human dimension, something Schwarzenegger did not achieve until well into his career. Unlike so many of our recent action heroes, the Rock seems to be less about anger and revenge than about justice and self-discipline, a nuance that is also a saving grace.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist