In his heyday Roland Joffe was an Oscar-nominated director feted for films like The Mission and The Killing Fields.
Today he is the helmsman of Captivity, a stupid, sexually exploitative slice of post-Saw sleaze which hit US headlines thanks to a leery ad campaign promoting the "Abduction," "Confinement," "Torture," and "Termination" of its glamorous young star.
What the hell happened?
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CMC
Presumably, after a string of clunkers such as The Scarlet Letter and Goodbye Lover, Joffe couldn't afford to turn down this grotty Russian-American co-production, in which a "heartless" model (Elisha Cuthbert) is kidnapped, imprisoned and forced to dress up in short skirts and stilettos by a madman who pumps liquidized eyeballs into her gagging mouth because of some residual problems with his mother.
"Captivity is both a thriller and a love story," offers Joffe gamely in his Director's Vision statement, which goes on to use words such as "erotic" and "sensual" to describe this dreary misogynist claptrap.
Admittedly, the finished film bears little resemblance to the Larry Cohen-scripted first cut, which was shot in Moscow in 2005 (and indeed screened at the Sitges Film Festival in 2006) before its American distributors demanded substantial gory re-shoots to cash in on the so-called "torture porn" zeitgeist.
The result is a genuinely loathsome car-crash of a movie, a misshapen, ill-wrought work of vulgar opportunism of which all involved should be deeply ashamed.
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its sock puppet, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), passed their version of the government’s proposed supplementary defense spending bill last week, engendering much commentary. While all eyes were on the defense budget, the PRC’s assault on Taiwan was advancing on other fronts. The removal of domestic drone production and other technologies critical to the nation’s asymmetrical defenses from the list of items purchased in the “compromise” bill shows how the KMT-TPP alliance appears to be serving the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Ironically, the cuts will impact industries heavily represented by tech firms in areas run
RSS