The Sparkle in the Dark (黑道之無悔今生)
Set in Taiwan but largely a Hong Kong production, The Sparkle in the Dark tells the story of an orphan whose tragic and grisly loss and inability to adapt to subsequent home life leave him marooned in a world of hatred and drug abuse. Eventually he gets involved with gang members, among whom he finds support, animosity, romance and — judging by the trailer — no shortage of machete violence. Most of the songsters starring in this effort hail from Hong Kong, which isn’t likely to lend the movie any verisimilitude. That’s possibly the reason why this downbeat flick is being released in only one theater in Taipei (Vieshow Xinyi).
Eagle Eye
The big-budget release for this week is a chase film in which the pursued (Shia LeBeouf and Michelle Monaghan) are caught up in a plot involving government security forces, terrorism, a renegade supercomputer with a female voice and an FBI interrogator (Billy Bob Thornton). Eagle Eye has Steven Spielberg as executive producer, but that doesn’t necessarily lend it the trenchant worldview that marks his later films, such as Minority Report and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Expect big explosions, crashing trucks and disposable paranoia instead. Also screening in IMAX format.
Igor
Produced by a French animation company, this US coproduction is a film for kids that explores the world of the title character who, like his fellow Igors, works for mad and bad scientists. Our Igor (John Cusack), however, makes the leap to mad scientist himself, creating new creatures for sinister ends — but with results that don’t quite live up to expectations. As usual for bigger budget animated features, Igor has a noteworthy cast of voice talent (Christian Slater, John Cleese, Steve Buscemi, Jay Leno, Arsenio Hall), but this time around the script and animation have resulted in a “mirthless,” “underimagined” and “strenuously unfunny” movie, according to Variety.
Fear Factors (恐懼元素)
Two short thrillers combine for this feature-length outing from Hong Kong — which the Hong Kong Movie DataBase’s review claims was shot on the cheap in unfinished Chinese office blocks. In the first yarn, a dying man and his female abductor are confined in a room as flashbacks paint a more complicated picture. The second has a meat vendor come upon an inheritance in the form of a factory — if he can survive an encounter with a knife-wielding lady wearing the obligatory white sheet. Perhaps released in Taiwan to take a bite out of 4bia’s slice of the box office pie, this undistinguished pairing might even struggle to make money on DVD, let alone in its limited theatrical release.
Three Monkeys
A real downer awaits audiences with this Turkish entry. A fatal accident prompts a politician to convince his driver to take the rap, but the reward he promises once the latter leaves jail doesn’t save anyone involved from deteriorating relationships with spouses, children and lovers. The title seems to refer to the act of shunning responsibility, and the moral of the tale leaves no way out, while some suggest that the scenario is a metaphor for Turkey as a whole. For this film, Nuri Bilge Caylan won the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes film festival.
Vow of Death
A couple of months ago the Thai film The Coffin taught us that lying in coffins when you’re not dead is an overrated tradition that can shorten one’s lifespan. In Vow of Death, also from Thailand, a bunch of teenagers clearly suffering from excessive parental expectations discover that a supernatural tree, which they hoped would help them with exams, has been ripped from the ground and wants them dead. More than a year-and-a-half since its home release, this one is entering theaters here with virtually no fanfare.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
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