Melody’s Smile
A deceptive title, this; the original French title is La Chambre des Morts, which gives viewers a much better idea of what’s in store (the Chinese translates as “Sample of a Smile,” which is somewhere in between). The Hollywood Reporter raved about this “horror classic,” in which single mother and detective Melanie Laurent closes in on a duo of sick puppy lesbian kidnappers as a ransom goes missing. The multiple viewpoint style of Rashomon collides with The Silence of the Lambs in this depiction of the worst and best that humanity has to offer.
Always: Sunset on Third Street 2
A sequel to the 2005 original, this film is essential viewing for anyone who has lived in Tokyo. Following several story strands, Part 2 mixes good-natured neighborhood and family melodrama with another widescreen presentation of unusually detailed and moving special effects that recreate the Japanese capital of the late 1950s. Variety and the Japan Times disagreed on the accessibility of this film for those who didn’t see the first one; that debate is quickly shut down by a quick trip to the DVD store.
One Piece The Movie: Episode of Alabaster — The Desert Princess and the Pirates
Part 8 in Japan’s One Piece theatrical saga has Princess Vivi of Alabaster and our trusty band of Straw Hat Pirates travel once again to the scorched kingdom. This time it’s to do battle with a formidable crocodile who heads a criminal network and who has designs on the kingdom’s subjects, and is prepared to use the most nefarious means to take power. Lots of fight scenes for the faithful.
4bia
In case you don’t get the pun, this film is also listed as Phobia. Four of Thailand’s better suspense directors deliver short pieces for this “portmanteau horror film,” but with titles like Happiness, Tit For Tat, In the Middle and Last Fright, it may seem more like Twilight Zone: The Movie than Creepshow; the last episode even takes place on an aircraft. Still, ghostly images on a cellphone, curses, ghost stories that come true and animated corpses should please fans of the latter minor classic.
The Love of Siam
This pastel-shaded Thai youth film pits female fans of a boy band frontman against his unstoppable desire for another young gentleman who has reentered his life, all the while coping with dysfunction in the latter’s family. Amid military coups and the protests of an autocratic middle class, Thailand keeps churning out gay and ladyboy-themed flicks such as this to the delight of local audiences, a phenomenon one would be hard pressed to find anywhere else. Variety says the film courts gay audiences and their straight friends; one could add to this list undiscriminating fans of boy-band music.
Winds of September PLUS The Pain of Others
With local productions Cape No. 7 and Orz Boyz doing splendidly at the box office, the producer of Winds of September, a coming of age drama set in Hsinchu, is re-releasing the film to boost its modest haul. There are two more incentives this time around to see it. The first is a cut price ticket of NT$150; the second is a bonus, award-winning short film from 2005 by Winds director Tom Shu-yu Lin (林書宇), The Pain of Others, a drama about military service. Screening exclusively at Xinyi Vieshow.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and