The Four Little Piggies — Wild Hogs, the real title, doesn't work as well — is a comedy about male midlife anxiety. Some of us may not find the subject so funny, but never mind. Somebody needed to revive the City Slickers formula, and this time the job has gone to Brad Copeland, who wrote the screenplay, and Walt Becker, who directed.
Four buddies, fed up with the frustration and disappointment of their lives, set out on a road trip aboard their beloved motorcycles. Doug (Tim Allen), a dentist, worries that he has become so dull and uncool that he has lost the respect of his preadolescent son. Woody (John Travolta) is a hotshot deal maker who has lost his wife and his money. Bobby (Martin Lawrence), a plumber turned writer, is hopelessly henpecked, while Dudley (William H. Macy) is a hopeless nerd. (He is also at least the second character in a comedy released this year, after Diane Keaton's in Because I Said So, whose computer gets stuck on a noisy Internet porn site, a situation he is unable to remedy. This kind of thing must happen a lot to Hollywood screenwriters.)
The main thing about these guys — the main source of the movie's fumbling attempts at humor — is that they're not gay. Really. Seriously. No way. They may worry about people thinking that they're gay, and they may do things that might make people think that they're gay — dance, touch one another, take off their clothes, express emotion — but they're absolutely 100 percent not gay. No no no no no no. No sir, I mean, no ma'am. That's what makes it funny, see.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BVI
After camping out one night, for example, they have a conversation that's overheard by a highway patrolman (John McGinley) who decides, based on his misunderstanding of the perfectly innocent things they're saying, that they must be gay. But the thing is — get this — he's the one who's gay! You think he's a stereotypical homophobe, but he turns out to be a homophobic stereotype. It's magic!
Anyway, the four nongay guys run afoul of some real bikers — one of whom might be gay! — and have to prove their manhood by standing up to the bullies. In the process, one of them gets it on with Marisa Tomei in the most nongay way imaginable within the limits of a PG-13 movie. The wives of the two who still have wives show up, proving, well, you know. And the fourth one? Could it be? Shut up!
Lawrence and Allen, who have never aspired very far beyond their affable television-comedy personas, are easier to watch than Travolta or Macy, who both undertake what can only be called acting. This is more than the picture deserves, but then again, so is Ray Liotta, as the chieftain of the bad bikers, and so is Tomei.
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
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