Bolt
This Disney animated feature tells the story of Bolt, a pumped-up little doggie whose TV star persona (should that be “canina”?) in an action show is a lot less real than he thinks. When he finds himself cast astray, the challenge is not only to adapt to the new world and his newfound physical limitations but also to find his true identity. Some have likened this well-received film to The Truman Show and doggone road epics like Homeward Bound, but the most fetching comparison that leaps to mind is Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, a tale of innocence supplanted that also ends with an action sequence in Hollywood. With the voices of John Travolta as Bolt, Miley Cyrus as his owner and Malcolm McDowell as the baddie. Screening in 3D at compatible theaters.
Transporter 3
Jason Statham is back in theaters as Frank Martin, the inscrutable deliveryman of choice for organized crime in Europe. In this entry, thugs kidnap the daughter of a Ukrainian environment official (Jeroen Krabbe from The Fugitive) to force him to do their bidding, and Statham is the man they turn to to keep her out of harm’s way — for the time being. Natalya Rudakova, as the daughter, offers her services as the exotic but irritating female love interest that Taiwan’s Shu Qi (舒淇) provided in Part 1. Written and produced — again — by Luc Besson.
Elegy
Ben Kingsley is a professor of literary criticism in New York who never got over the bug for seducing students — careful seductions, so as not to jeopardize his tenure — and his next target is Penelope Cruz. The wily bugger isn’t quite prepared for his own primal jealousy, and that’s before Cruz’s Cuban character ratchets up the emotional heat. A good supporting cast (Dennis Hopper, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Saarsgard) helps to sell a story that will put off a lot of potential audiences from the get-go. The Village Voice called this adaptation of Philip Roth’s book The Dying Animal “dreary,” but other critics have been kinder. Either way, it’s got Kingsley, who has seduced movie lovers for decades, and Cruz, whose best movies have been the ones that fewer people see.
The Last Princess
This is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, the rich clan warfare classic from 1958 that provided Western filmmakers with bountiful inspiration — not least George Lucas. This version of hidden gold and epic battles prefers celebrity and computer-generated special effects to characterization, which marks it as a would-be classic for the Nintendo era. Those who think depictions of samurai are falling apart on the big screen these days should check out Kurosawa’s oldies, or even the Lone Wolf and Cub series for immediate, if even more bloodthirsty, relief. Directed by Shinji Higuchi, whose last effort was The Sinking of Japan, which did reasonable business here two years ago.
The King of Ping Pong
An award-winning Swedish drama, the king of the title is a very large youngster with an odd family whose dirty laundry is more hindrance than help to his personal development. But he does have a supportive — if combative — brother, and his devotion to table tennis is a bonus. Family secrets emerge over time, and things take a turn from the slightly whimsical to the dramatic. Likened to My Life as a Dog, the classic Swedish thematic forerunner to this effort, there might also be a touch of the younger Jane Campion (Sweetie, for instance) in the way director Jens Jonsson goes about his business.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would