I wanted to believe. But with his big-screen blowup of his great and weird television series The X-Files, Chris Carter has turned me into a reluctant skeptic. Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark, The X-Files: I Want to Believe is the generally bad-news follow-up to the show's first feature-film incarnation, The X-Files. Released in 1998 and directed by Rob Bowman, one of the show's regular frontmen, that earlier film was a seamless translation of the series's paranoid vibe and trademark geek cool. The series supersized nicely, filling the larger spatial dimensions by staying true to its conceptual parameters.
Not that it isn't swell to see Mulder and Scully, the Nick and Nora of paranormal freakouts - aka David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson - once again trading dark, searching looks under the cover of the long night, or even by bright eerie day. Mulder may be wearing a bushy beard (Carter builds up the character's entrance so dramatically I expected something rather more leprous), and Scully looks thinner, more angled, a touch weary. But it's still them, the sexy renegade agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who, for almost a decade, poked into strange goings-on, partly driven by Mulder's belief that his sister had been kidnapped by extraterrestrials and partly by a work relationship that became something more.
That relationship still simmers, though at a reduced temperature. There's nothing stirring the air between Mulder and Scully, who, having left the bureau, come across as unmoored and unfocused, even when they're working on the outlandish criminal case that drags them back into the twilight zone. A similar lack of urgency characterizes the movie, which despite its yowling dogs, barking Russians, screaming women, swelling choral voices and moody cinematography by Bill Roe - which turns even dark blue a deeper shade of black - never finds a sustainable pulse. Carter knows how to grab your attention visually, but the amalgam of trashy thriller cliches that he has compiled with Frank Spotnitz, another series regular, creates its own deadening effect. It's no wonder Mulder and Scully seem so diffident.
The first X-Files movie, released before the show ended, added nothing substantive. It came off like a contract clause writ large, a shot at a potential franchise. The new film, Carter's debut as a feature director, adds even less, but it won't hurt the show's legacy, at least among die-hard fans who appreciated it as a wittily sustained pop take on what the historian Richard Hofstadter has called "the paranoid style in American politics." In the years since the show's demise, US politics has grown all the more paranoid, an observation that Carter - who throws out an easy laugh about US President George W. Bush to no real purpose - might have run with instead of stumbling in less interesting directions.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built