My Best Friend’s Girl
Jason Biggs (American Pie) is back, but he’s not the main character in this, the latest rude and sexually aggressive comedy to come from the US. Dustin (Biggs) adores Alexis (Kate Hudson), but the feeling isn’t mutual, so he calls on his buddy Tank (Dane Cook) to weave his manly magic and disgust her so grievously on a date that she will flee back to our Jason. But — you guessed it — the two hit it off instead. Wicked, politically incorrect humor abounds, but Variety warns of a possible altered ending to pacify preview audiences, which suggests that director Terry Zwigoff (Bad Santa) might have been the man to stand up to the studio and keep the mayhem real instead of Howard Deutch.
Passengers
Peter Weir’s Fearless from 1993 has been on cable TV lately, and fans of that fine film might be interested in a similarly themed offering in Passengers. As with Fearless, this film focuses on plane crash survivors and their debilitating traumas, but unlike Weir’s film, this one is just as interested in thriller elements in the form of mysterious characters, twists and revelations. Case in point: Attendees at a counseling session start disappearing. Stars Anne Hathaway, Patrick Wilson and David Morse.
Finishing the Game
The “game” is Game of Death, the film that Bruce Lee didn’t finish shooting before his tragically premature death. In this “mockumentary,” a bunch of luckless Asian American actors, including Dustin Nguyen (21 Jump Street), vie to be the one to replace Lee in the completion of the kung fu classic. M.C. Hammer, George Takei and Ron Jeremy appear in cameos. It’s taken a little while to get released here, which is a little surprising given that director Justin Lin (林詣彬), who directed the third Fast and the Furious entry, has Taiwanese heritage.
Seraphine
Fittingly released here in the week of the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, this is a French film based on the relationship between famed painter Seraphine Louis and art enthusiast Wilhelm Uhde. Uhde spies the struggling Seraphine’s art while visiting her village on the eve of the war and their patron-client relationship blossoms, but bloody conflict and personal vulnerability take a heavy toll. Yolande Moreau (Amelie) stars as the troubled artist in a film that is receiving warm reviews.
One Piece The Movie: Episode of Chopper — Bloom in the Winter, Miracle Sakura
Those crazy anime pirates are back in action in this perennial series, this time revisiting the story of Chopper — the crew’s adolescent medic and transformable blue-nosed reindeer —for the first time since 2002. A search by the Straw Hat pirates for a doctor brings them to an island kingdom where danger and evil characters lurk and preparations for battle are made, but also where a horned hero waits in the wings.
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