Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi may have made megabucks directing the overrated Spider-Man trilogy, but good-natured, in-your-face horror is where his heart lies, and Drag Me to Hell is a welcome return to his Evil Dead days of joyous moviemaking. Alison Lohman is in charge of bank loans but refuses to oblige an old woman who turns out to have infernal connections. It’s all (ahem) downhill from there. Justin Long plays Lohman’s boyfriend, and has about as much success withstanding Pure Evil as he did in Jeepers Creepers.
Hatchet
Shot three years ago, this amalgam of Southern Comfort and Friday the 13th is being rushed into theaters with little advertising, but that may not be a reason to avoid it; it is, after all, something that Sam Raimi might have made when he was a lot younger. A bunch of youngsters in New Orleans for Mardi Gras fall foul of a local psycho in this fanboy’s dream of a cast including Kane Hodder (Jason in the later Friday the 13th films) as the unwelcoming southerner Victor Crowley, Robert Englund (Freddy Kreuger), the wonderful Tony Todd (Candyman) as “Reverend Zombie” and special effects ace/director John Carl Beuchler. It’s not clear if the Taiwan release is the US R-rated or unrated version. Starts tomorrow.
Grace Is Gone
The American love of the road movie continues as John Cusack takes his daughters way, way out of town (Florida) to find a way to tell them that their mother, a soldier, was killed in Iraq. A brief diversion sees Cusack visit his anti-war brother, but apart from that all the drama is in the anticipation of a sad revelation for the children and Cusack coming to terms with his loss. Reviewers had problems with the production qualities of this movie, but plenty of nice things to say about the cast.
Jerichow
Intriguing film about a Turkish small businessman in the east German town of Jerichow who married a woman by paying off her debts and now must hire a driver/minder — a rather unsettling disgraced soldier — to help him make ends meet. The Postman Always Rings Twice is the frame as the wife and the minder, both Germans, get it on behind our wistful hero’s back, but for this movie lust takes a back seat to the worthlessness of money as a measure of self-worth.
All’s Well Ends Well 2009 (家有囍事2009)
The latest entry in this Hong Kong comedy series features returning producer-star Raymond Wong (黃百鳴) and Sandra Ng (吳君如), a slew of in-jokes and middling celebrities. Ng is a stubbornly single professional woman whose marital status is blocking other family members from tying the knot. Enter matchmaker Louis Koo (古天樂). The curious thing about this film is that it was a successful Lunar New Year release in Hong Kong but has taken almost six months to get here. Does it take this long for a film with the China market in mind to get dubbed into Mandarin?
Pleasure Factory
Set in Singapore’s Geylang red light district and starring Taiwan’s Yang Kui-mei (楊貴媚), this undernourished tale from 2007 of prostitutes and their clients mixes artiness and docudrama to superficial effect. Variety magazine was the most dismissive, blasting every aspect of production, direction and acting and concluding that Pleasure Factory “borders on the inept.” A shame, really, because the grim subject matter is full of opportunities. Starts tomorrow.
Cineplex 46th Anniversary Festival
Local distributor Cineplex thinks 46 is a number worth celebrating, and it certainly is for audiences that like a bit of eroticism and sex in their art house movie diet. The shame of it is that the films selected are very recent; what about a 40-year-old release? Still, there’s good stuff here: Claude Lelouch’s Chances or Coincidences, Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Goya’s Ghosts, Salsa, The Whore and the Whale, Sex and Lucia, Summer Palace (頤和園) and a cut version of Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs. Screening at the Majestic theater in Ximending until July 17.
Killer Bees
A German TV movie gets a minor theatrical release in which errant scientists and experiments trigger a possible cataclysm, resulting in a hunt for the queen bee before everything is lost. That’s funny ... isn’t the disappearance of bees supposed to be a serious ecological problem? Nothing in the film can match the poster, which has a human hand enveloped by angry insects and seems to have been borrowed from a US production with similar content. Original title: Die Bienen: Toedliche Bedrohung.
Der Bibelcode
Another German TV movie, this time ripping off The Da Vinci Code, in which the pope is implicated in a conspiracy that has our heroes globe-hopping with killers in tow until the final confrontation (not with the Antichrist, sadly; this is not The Final Conflict). Some Taiwan sources list this release as Bible Code II, but it should not be confused with the US documentary of the same name. One final warning: the original version runs for three hours in two parts, so Heaven knows what kind of chopped-up version is screening here.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and