Scholar cinema closes
It’s never good news if a theater closes, even if it doesn’t have the best reputation. The Scholar multiplex on Changchun Street in Taipei was one such place, its owner apparently deciding that China offers better business. No one will miss the cramped interiors or sullen staff, but Scholar did show fringe and low-budget product no one else would touch. How else would we have seen Wolf Creek and Five Across the Eyes in cinemas? A moment’s silence ... and on to this week’s other titles:
The Lucky Ones
Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams (The Time Traveler’s Wife) and Michael Pena (Nicolas Cage’s co-survivor in World Trade Center) are US soldiers home from Iraq with various personal problems — sexual, financial, familial — who share a car trip across the US. This road movie with a difference scored mixed reviews, but few were left cold by the three leads, who might make this one worthwhile for audiences who are feeling lucky.
Gamer
If you loved the Crank films, which were generously off the wall for anyone who could stay the distance, then you might find something to admire in this chaotic movie from the same writer-directors. Gerard Butler (300) is a death row prisoner of the future and participant in a video game in which he and his fellows are manipulated by paying players. He’s about to win yet another bout and secure his release, perhaps to liberate his child and wife, who is in a vile sexual game environment of her own, but he might know too much about the people who run the show. After all these years, Tron still seems to rise above the pack of video-game movies — without cuss words, sex or nasty violence.
Let the Right One In
An award-winning Swedish horror film with a sense of humor and a willingness to play in the dark (though not as much as the book on which the film is based, according to Variety), this is possibly the strongest release of the week. A bullied young boy makes the acquaintance of a strange girl of the same age whose apparent father figure runs strange errands for the pallid-looking creature. Just when you thought vampirism had nowhere left to go ...
Tsunami
The timing is unfortunate, or perhaps fortunate from the distributor’s point of view, but this first-ever South Korean disaster epic was scheduled for release before the Samoan tsunami occurred. So audiences can watch this odd mixture of Irwin Allen and Korean character ensemble with a clear-ish conscience. An ensemble of wave fodder — including the obligatory character with a tragic past — take up a good part of the running time before Mother Nature sends one crashing home. From Yun Je-gyun, the formerly lowbrow director of Sex Is Zero and Crazy Assassins. Korean title: Haeundae, which is where the movie is set.
Time Lost, Time Found
As heartrending plots go, this one rends with the best of them. A Japanese first-time mother-to-be in her late 30s is diagnosed with cancer and must make the impossible choice of starting treatment and losing her baby or keeping the child and likely condemning herself to the grave. Expect bawling audiences with this one (i.e., the same people that went to see terminal illness weepie April Bride last month), but if you don’t want to know the ending, for goodness’ sake don’t look at the poster. Features a song called Get a Life ~Again~. If only Takashi Miike had been the director ...
Tear This Heart Out
Sprawling yarn covers a subject little touched on by Hollywood: lust and political intrigue in early-to-mid-20th-century Mexico. A teenager beds and weds an ambitious general in some detail (hence the restricted rating) before the relationship between the two develops into a political asset — and an emotional liability. Largely a love story and a melodramatic study of a woman’s travails in Mexico’s always stormy history, those interested in slightly more nuanced treatments of gender relations in Mexico might be better off renting Frida with Salma Hayek. Spanish title: Arrancame La Vida.
Sappho
The first of two DVD promotional releases this week is a curio. A Ukrainian production set in Greece with a British director, American leads and many other nationalities in the cast, its successful release in its home country was accompanied by inexplicably angry protests by local Christians who objected to homosexual scenes between a newly married American woman and a Russian. But this is not a sex film, as such, even if it is showing at the Baixue theater in Ximending. Starts tomorrow.
Necessary Evil
Two of the grimmest-looking and hardest-working actors anywhere, Lance Henriksen (Aliens) and Danny Trejo (Desperado), star in a demonic tale involving a pregnant woman researcher, her lethal doctor and lots of mumbo jumbo (not to mention shades of The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby). This went straight to DVD in the US. Starts tomorrow.
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
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