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.
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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