Oh, if only Robert Aldrich were alive! The pulpmeister of the horror lollapalooza What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? certainly knew how to build a grand showcase for his corrugated divas (Bette Davis and Joan Crawford), while the hapless Jon Avnet hasn’t a clue what to do with his (Al Pacino and Robert De Niro). In Righteous Kill these two godheads of 1970s cinema go macho-a-macho with each other — furrowing brows, bellowing lines, looking alternately grimly serious and somewhat bemused — in a B-movie (more like C-minus) duet that probably sounded like a grand idea when their handlers whispered it in their ears.
De Niro and Pacino have squared off only once before on the big screen, in Michael Mann’s 1995 thriller, Heat, in which they spent most of the film in separate story lines, joined only by the parallel editing and a late-act, disappointingly anticlimactic meeting at a diner. They share far more face time in Righteous Kill, playing well-seasoned New York City Police Department detectives and long-term partners who take turns clucking at each other like hens while swaggering around town like gamecocks. True to strut, pouf and wattles, Pacino’s cop goes by Rooster, while De Niro is just Turk, which doesn’t appear to be short for Turkey, though it sure does help to pass the time if you think about it.
Time, alas, doesn’t so much pass in Righteous Kill as crawl, despite the usual overcutting, which tries to pump energy into the inert proceedings. Avnet, whose last movie was the clunker 88 Minutes (one of Pacino’s worst), is not a natural director, to put it kindly. His handiwork is most evident in the unsteady tone, though to be fair it’s always hard to know who deserves most of the blame for this kind of star-struck, suit-crammed (eight producers, three executive producers, one co-producer) mush. Suffice it to say that everything from the camera placement to the cheap use of the consistently good, lamentably underemployed Carla Gugino is shoddy. (Note to Avnet: Yes, Gugino has breasts, but, really, her acting is more interesting.)
Like most actors, Pacino and De Niro need a strong hand, some kind of visionary authority to put them in their best light and prevent them from leaning on the tics and tricks — Pacino tends to turn up the volume, while De Niro glowers until he looks ready to pop — that now too often mar their performances. Righteous Kill, a clutter of recycled cop-movie and serial-killer film cliches (it’s hard to believe that the screenwriter, Russell Gewirtz, also wrote Inside Man), is far from their worst effort. And the two have some nice moments with each other and some of the other actors. Pacino seems to be genuinely moved during his final showdown with De Niro, or maybe he’s just a sweet sentimental fool.
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
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
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