Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones. Directed by the actor Steve Buscemi, and based on an earlier film by the Dutch director Theo van Gogh (whose slaying by an Islamic extremist in 2004 inspired this remake), the movie is one of those chatty, catty, conceptual face-offs that are often best left to the stage and for which sports metaphors seem to have been invented. Two well-matched opponents enter, spar, punch, clinch, flail, break, draw blood (metaphoric, literal), block and knock down. Do they score? Yes and no.
Buscemi plays a liverish, rumpled journalist, Pierre Peders, who has been, much to his great and obvious disgust, assigned to interview an actress. She would be Katya, a beautiful blonde with no apparent last name, persuasively inhabited by the movie's single real surprise, Sienna Miller. Though she stars in horror flicks and a television show that looks and sounds a bit like Sex and the City, Katya plays an even bigger role in the gossip columns, for which she provides endless delectable fodder, perhaps willingly, perhaps not. Her celebrity shines so brightly that two restaurant patrons even surrender their table to Katya after they've been seated (hey, it's her favorite), cooing fawning sweet nothings to her as they float to a lesser perch.
What Katya wants, Katya seems to get, though she probably never thought she'd get as openly contemptuous an interviewer as Pierre. They first meet in a restaurant; she's late, he's steamed. He soon insults her, she blanches. It's on.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF CIMAGE
It's no great shock that Pierre and Katya seem equally eager to sell each other out. Journalism's bad rap and the contempt with which successful women are often held hardly make another scenario possible. Still, despite the story's obvious drift, the sham setup, the dubious details and the dreariness of the digital-video colors and tones, Interview keeps you watching because its two stars do. Buscemi's evident lack of vanity is its own kind of vanity, one that is well matched by Miller's utter confidence.
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
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located