Good Will Evil 凶魅
This strangely titled Taiwanese chiller has nothing to do with Good Will Hunting. A rising politician can’t raise a family because his nightmare-prone wife won’t agree; eventually they agree to adopt because it will benefit his career, but the strange child they pick from an orphanage has a thing for dismembering dolls and other sinister behavior. Like most horror flicks with disturbed children and flawed adults, there’s a horrible secret awaiting to surface. There’s also the requisite red ball bouncing down the stairs in slow motion, though not as slowly as the release for this film (it was made last year).
Be Kind Rewind
Jack Black gets too close to a power station and his magnetic body ends up wiping clean the videos in a rental store where his friend (Mos Def) works. To save the situation before the boss returns, the enterprising lads recreate the library by shooting their own goofy versions of movies that were lost. Critics couldn’t help asking: Have these people never heard of DVDs, or buying ex-rentals online? Taking a break from her Darfur activism, Mia Farrow plays a customer who can’t tell the faked movies from the originals. From Michel Gondry, music video heavyweight and director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers
Offbeat, charming Japanese production features Juri Ueno as a housewife whose absent husband and admiration for her self-assured best friend (Yu Aoi) prompt her, True Lies-style, to seek adventure as a spy. But this is no action film; it’s more a character study and a philosophy of life dressed as quirky comedy. Turtles may be fast underwater, but the movie has taken time to build an audience — and three years to get a Taiwanese release. It screens first in Taipei before swimming to other centers on the west coast.
South Taiwan Film & Video Festival
For movie lovers who despair at the Golden Horse film festival and competition’s political agenda, here’s the perfect alternative. The South Taiwan Film & Video Festival is chock full of exciting Taiwanese and international product that would never get the Horse’s nod, ranging from celluloid features to animation and video productions. This year’s retrospectives include Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), whose debut feature Cape No. 7 (海角七號) has become a bona fide Taiwanese phenomenon, Lin Shu-yu (林書宇), director of Winds of September (九降風), and Hsu Hui-ju (許慧如). The festival is screening at the Ambassador complex in Tainan until Nov. 20, then at the Kaohsiung Film Archive from Nov. 29 to Dec. 7. Chiayi Performing Arts Center will also screen a selection of titles on Dec. 6 and Dec. 7. Some films have English subtitles and there are free screenings. More details are at www.south.org.tw/south2008.
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
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