Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
A feature-length documentary from last year on the recording sessions and musings of the US jazz legend ahead of a new album/DVD of the same title. It includes footage of Paul Simon, Sting, Annie Lennox, Carlos Santana, Brian Eno, Christina Aguilera and many other artists.
Love My Life
If you came away from the Taiwanese film I Saw a Beast feeling like you'd been beaten around the head with a patronizing lecture on the evils of lesbianism (complete with sex scenes), then this Japanese manga adaptation might just be the tonic you need: a family-friendly lesbian drama. There are no torrid couplings, bouts of hysteria or religious naysaying as two clean-cut college students try to keep their relationship afloat in the face of multiple challenges.
Noriko's Dinner Table
Another disturbing story of teenage alienation and manipulation from director Sion Sono, who made Suicide Club in 2002. Filmed in 2005 and not nearly as timely now as it was then, this effort sees teenager Noriko run away from home and link up with a sinister group she met online. It includes the mass suicide of teenage girls from the earlier film as a plot point.
Second Kadokawa Film Festival
Rush to see five films from this Japanese production company. Adiantum Blue asks what you would do if your partner had a month to live. Veteran Kon Ichikawa's The Inugamis is a remake of his family drama from 1976. Tonari Machi Senso (The War Next Door) is a strange love story. Then there's A Hardest Night!! from 2005, (Japanese title: Nezu No Ban), a black and incredibly bawdy wake comedy that makes Frank Oz's Death at a Funeral seem terribly polite. Finally, Taiwan's legion of young baseballers should check out The Battery, an adaptation of a bestseller on kids growing up - with baseball helping them along the way. The films will show at the Spring Cinema Galaxy and the Changchun in Taipei until Oct. 18; then at the Vieshow in Hsinchu and the Shin Kong in Taichung until Nov. 1, then at the Ambassador in Tainan and the Vieshow in Kaohsiung until Nov. 15.
Web site: www.taipeiwalker.com.tw/pub/kadokawa2/mo2.htm.
Gitano
Already available on DVD, this exercise in "flamencorotica" from 2000 may be worth seeing on the DVD-projected big screen at the Caesar theater first. Gitano is the name for gypsies in Spain, and this restricted-category film noir about a Gitano excon combines dance, music, sex, revenge and murder. Just the ticket for audiences who fell asleep before the sex scenes in Lust, Caution.
Dracula
Also getting a DVD promotional run at the Caesar theater, Roger Young's version of the Count's wicked exploits is an Italian-German TV production from 2002, and stars Patrick Bergin (Patriot Games) as the immortal neck-muncher and always watchable Giancarlo Giannini (Casino Royale, Hannibal) as Valenzi the vampire expert. Trivia: Bergin also played Frankenstein in a 1992 TV movie.
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
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
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