The Final Destination
Part 4 of this fading series of gory match-ups between Death and heavily disadvantaged Spunky Young Things brings back Part 2 director David R. Ellis. The veteran stuntman delivered a fantastic freeway disaster premonition in the earlier film’s opening scene, but it’s hard to see how he can top it here, especially given that the carnage takes place at a (sigh) NASCAR meet. Car racing? If the producers had explored the determinism of Death’s design with a little more wit, they might have focused on Death hunting down stock brokers and bankers who survived last year’s crash. Screening in 3D in select theaters.
Che: Part One and Che: Part Two
This four-hour Steven Soderbergh biography of the Latin American revolutionary is being screened in two parts under the titles The Argentine and Che (also titled Guerrilla), so you’ll have to fork out twice to see Che Guevara preside over the Cuban Revolution before finding oblivion in Bolivia. Many critics didn’t know what to make of this idiosyncratic production, while others took turns attacking and praising it. But for those who know little about modern Latin American history, this could be a splendid introduction. Stars Benicio Del Toro as Che.
Lady Cop & Papa Crook (大搜查之女)
This Hong Kong/Chinese crime drama was made before another Alan Mak (麥兆輝)/Felix Chong (莊文強) feature, Overheard, which was released here last week. The Infernal Affairs (無間道) buddies like mixing right and wrong, and in this case the police work with crooks to solve the kidnapping of the young child of a triad heavy. The filmmakers had to make compromises of their own: Variety reports that the Chinese government ordered sanitizing material be added (scenes were also deleted, no doubt) to secure a much-delayed release.
Sophie’s Revenge (非常完美:奪愛大作戰)
The dynamic Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) is the main draw for this stylish, crowd-pleasing, slightly surreal comedy set in a very spruced-up Beijing. Zhang is Sophie, a cartoonist whose good-looking Korean beau (So Ji-sub) falls for a movie star (Fan Bingbing, 范冰冰). The walls come crashing down, almost literally thanks to computer animation, as Zhang seeks a way to get back on her feet and get her man back. Enter Taiwanese Peter Ho (何潤東), who agrees to help Sophie in her quest but is not without his own baggage — including a growing desire for Sophie herself (subtext alert!).
April Bride
In Japan, if you make a movie about a gorgeous bride with terminal breast cancer and cast the hottest young actors, you can make a lot of money. Whether or not it will encourage female viewers to have their breasts checked regularly is another matter. Nana Eikura is the unfortunate woman, whose diagnosis and a mastectomy send her fleeing from her perfect boyfriend (played by Eita), who manages to track her down in time to propose. Based on a true story.
Franklyn
Eva Green, so memorable opposite Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, is in a cast of seeming thousands in this dark fantasy of a future gone wrong and the present that leads there. It’s set in London and a sinister somewhere in the future called Meanwhile City that may or not be the same place. Splendid visuals are offset by likely confusion and dislocation for many viewers. But the cast is handsome, including the wonderful Art Malik.
Puccini and the Girl
What is it about composers and their romantic misadventures that gets filmmakers going? Ken Russell remains the king of composer biopics, but this unusual effort from Italy has a similar spirit, with dialogue heavily trimmed in a stylized yarn about the death of a maid at the Puccini home. Like Franklyn, style reigns over substance, but for most music buffs there’s substance enough in the sound track.
2009 Escents Film Festival
The cosmetics firm Escents is behind this two-day festival that hopes to raise money for victims of Typhoon Morakot. There are six films, each screened twice: The Mistress of Spices (2005) from the US, the Greek-Turkish co-production A Touch of Spice (2003), the award-winning Taiwanese documentary Chronicle of the Sea: Nan-Fang-Ao (南方澳海洋紀事) from 2004, and two more recent releases: The Grocer’s Son from France and the excellent Lemon Tree from Israel. The highlight for many, though, would be the 170-minute director’s cut of Cinema Paradiso. Get in quick: The festival starts today and finishes tomorrow night.
Love Twisted
Late last year we previewed Man, Woman and the Wall (2006), a Japanese erotic thriller steeped in voyeurism. Love Twisted was made in Japan two years earlier, but shares the theme, as well as crossover porn star Sora Aoi in one of her first non-porn roles. Imagine Fatal Attraction with more nudity and set in a really depressing housing complex. Starts tomorrow.
Into the Faraway Sky
Taiwanese actor Chang Chen (張震) has a supporting role in this 2007 film set in Hokkaido about offbeat villagers standing in the way of an airport project and the government man sent to fix the problem. The Taiwanese distributor, ahead of a DVD rollout, has changed the Chinese title to link it to the otherwise unconnected Taiwanese production Orz Boyz! (冏男孩). Starts tomorrow.
The breakwater stretches out to sea from the sprawling Kaohsiung port in southern Taiwan. Normally, it’s crowded with massive tankers ferrying liquefied natural gas from Qatar to be stored in the bulbous white tanks that dot the shoreline. These are not normal times, though, and not a single shipment from Qatar has docked at the Yongan terminal since early March after the Strait of Hormuz was shuttered. The suspension has provided a realistic preview of a potential Chinese blockade, a move that would throttle an economy anchored by the world’s most advanced and power-hungry semiconductor industry. It is a stark reminder of
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
The last couple of weeks spectators in Taiwan and abroad have been treated to a remarkable display of infighting in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) over the supplementary defense budget. The party has split into two camps, one supporting an NT$800 billion special defense budget and one supporting an NT$380 billion budget with additional funding contingent on receiving letters of acceptance (LOA) from the US. Recent media reports have said that the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) is leaning toward the latter position. President William Lai (賴清德) has proposed NT$1.25 trillion for purchases of US arms and for development of domestic weapons
As a different column was being written, the big news dropped that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) announced that negotiations within his caucus, with legislative speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT, party Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chair Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) had produced a compromise special military budget proposal. On Thursday morning, prior to meeting with Cheng over a lunch of beef noodles, Lu reiterated her support for a budget of NT$800 or NT$900 billion — but refused to comment after the meeting. Right after Fu’s
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