The Hitcher isn't shy about declaring its intentions. The opening image is of a jackrabbit crossing a desert highway and being pulped by a car. Soon after, the vacationing young hero, Jim (Zachary Knighton), asks his girlfriend, Grace (Sophia Bush), to hold the wheel of his 1970 Oldsmobile 442 so he can hang out of the driver's side window and clean a splattered bug off the windshield. Message: Roadkill comes in all shapes and sizes.
Like the same-titled 1986 cult movie, this remake fuses elements of The Terminator, the Twilight Zone episode with the phantom hitchhiker, and Steven Spielberg's desert chase Duel. Dave Meyers, directing his first feature, and his three screenwriters (including Eric Red, who wrote the original) have conceived the tale as a crash-and-burn action-horror film with intellectual pretensions.
As the mass-murdering, hero-framing title character, the British actor Sean Bean brings parched charisma, a nondescript "American'' accent and an overachiever's commitment to nuance. In the original, Rutger Hauer's lip-smacking baddie was Satan with a driver's license. Bean's version plays like the murderous hero of Crime and Punishment reimagined as a wraithlike stalker. He's a sadistic philosophical theorist, mucking with people who didn't get the memo saying God is dead.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PANASIA
His victims include a family whose bumper sticker identifies them as evangelicals. When Jim and Grace inspect the Hitcher's butchery, the scene ends with a close-up of a bloodied Sunday school booklet titled "Will I Go to Heaven?'' Later, asked "Why'd you do it?'' the Hitcher replies, "Why not?''
The remake preserves many of the original's notorious set pieces, including a showstopper in which the cab and trailer of an 18-wheeler are used as a torture rack. The mix of mystical solemnity and chain-reaction slapstick suggests a Road Runner cartoon directed by John Woo (吳宇森). This is the kind of film in which the heroes often have the evildoer dead to rights but fail to pull the trigger, ostensibly because they're prisoners of bourgeois morality, but really because if they did the smart thing, the film would be a short subject.
The movie genuflects toward pop depth in a scene where Grace sprawls on a motel bed watching Alfred Hitchcock's Birds, another thriller about implacable, undefined evil, but there's a difference between refusing to give viewers the answers and having nothing to say. For all its death-metal vigor, The Hitcher falls into the latter camp.
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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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