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.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
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