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.
July 28 to Aug. 3 Former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) reportedly maintained a simple diet and preferred to drink warm water — but one indulgence he enjoyed was a banned drink: Coca-Cola. Although a Coca-Cola plant was built in Taiwan in 1957, It was only allowed to sell to the US military and other American agencies. However, Chiang’s aides recall procuring the soft drink at US military exchange stores, and there’s also records of the Presidential Office ordering in bulk from Hong Kong. By the 1960s, it wasn’t difficult for those with means or connections to obtain Coca-Cola from the
Taiwan is today going to participate in a world-first experiment in democracy. Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers will face a recall vote, with the results determining if they keep their jobs. Some recalls look safe for the incumbents, other lawmakers appear heading for a fall and many could go either way. Predictions on the outcome vary widely, which is unsurprising — this is the first time worldwide a mass recall has ever been attempted at the national level. Even meteorologists are unclear what will happen. As this paper reported, the interactions between tropical storms Francisco and Com-May could lead to
A couple of weeks ago the parties aligned with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), voted in the legislature to eliminate the subsidy that enables Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) to keep up with its burgeoning debt, and instead pay for universal cash handouts worth NT$10,000. The subsidy would have been NT$100 billion, while the cash handout had a budget of NT$235 billion. The bill mandates that the cash payments must be completed by Oct. 31 of this year. The changes were part of the overall NT$545 billion budget approved
No one saw it coming. Everyone — including the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — expected at least some of the recall campaigns against 24 of its lawmakers and Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) to succeed. Underground gamblers reportedly expected between five and eight lawmakers to lose their jobs. All of this analysis made sense, but contained a fatal flaw. The record of the recall campaigns, the collapse of the KMT-led recalls, and polling data all pointed to enthusiastic high turnout in support of the recall campaigns, and that those against the recalls were unenthusiastic and far less likely to vote. That
RSS