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.
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