Meat Grinder
A coming-on-middle-aged street vendor projects her madness and history of abuse onto (mostly) unsuspecting, sleazy men — and cooks up a storm. Surprisingly good reviews greeted this gory Thai drama, which is right up there with Hong Kong’s The Untold Story (八仙飯店之人肉叉燒包) as a boundary-pushing, gag-inducing Asian incarnation of Sweeney Todd; it’s also a perfectly timed essay for people who think US beef is the sign of the Devil. Abstruse political subtexts (it’s set during student riots in the 1970s) and class and gender commentary ... or blood, guts and torture for their own sake? Take your pick. Taiwan’s censors have let this one through without cuts, though it isn’t clear if this is the version originally banned in Thailand. Either way, here’s the question: Why doesn’t Taiwan make movies like this?
Taipei County Film Festival
The Taipei County Government is screening a series of local and foreign films, including documentaries, in hardtops and on the road for another week. Outdoor screenings are free. See tcff.eracom.com.tw/eng/eng02.html for details in English of indoor screenings. There’s also a related exhibition at the county government building in Banciao.
Baby Love
A gay doctor (Lambert Wilson) in France wants to adopt a baby but circumstances conspire against him, starting with the authorities and the hostility of his partner. Solution: Arrange a phony marriage with an illegal immigrant from South America and thus acquire a surrogate child. Touches of Green Card and La Cage aux Folles abound, but they don’t quite balance the mood of apprehension that accompanies the fatherly yearnings of the lead character. French title: Comme les Autres.
Rage
The Spot theater in Taipei is taking a chance in screening this strange film. Viewers expecting any sort of standard plot or setting will find themselves hemmed in as the camera (meant to be a cellphone held by some kid at a fashion show) trains on a series of characters who talk for more than 90 minutes as troubling events take place in the vicinity. Fans of Andy Warhol’s films might get nostalgic, and there is a lineup of superb performers (starting with Judi Dench, Steve Buscemi and Jude Law). But director Sally Potter (a million miles away from her excellent Orlando) gives new technology more credence than it’s due; in one of the less convincing gimmicks of recent years, this film premiered simultaneously on mobile phones. Starts Sunday.
Love Happens
Aaron Eckhart (The Dark Knight) is a motivational speaker and author motivated by his wife’s death on the roads. Jennifer Aniston is a florist he meets while hosting a seminar in Seattle. A relationship blooms, even as other people in Eckhart’s life remain difficult customers. “As each struggles with the hurt of love and loss, they realize that in order to move forward, they need to let go of the past. And if they can, they’ll find that, sometimes, love happens when you least expect it,” says the promo. That should tell you all you need to know.
The Girl in the Park
It’s taken more than two years for this drama to be released here; it barely screened theatrically in the US after poor reviews. Sigourney Weaver’s daughter goes missing in New York’s Central Park; years later, her confrontation with a young thief (Kate Bosworth) — who would have been her daughter’s age — sets some very strange behavior, thoughts and relationships in motion. Lots of talent in this one, but for many critics it just didn’t add up.
November Child
Last week the Taipei Times reviewer lamented the superficial rendering of Taiwan’s White Terror era as a love story in Prince of Tears (淚王子). This award-winning German film shows what might have been had there been more commitment to the gravity of the material and human complexity. A young woman and a would-be writer try to locate her mother amid the obstacles posed by Germany’s partitioned history. The lead actress (Anna Maria Muehe) also plays her mother in flashbacks.
M.W.
Another week, another manga adaptation from Japan, though this one is a little unusual because the star of the show is a homicidal maniac (Hiroshi Tamaki) with ambitions of mass murder, and the rest of the cast spend most of the time trying to stop being killed — or stop him from killing just about everyone in Japan. The diseased — but no less debonair — product of a gas attack when he was a youngster, Tamaki does not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent among his victims. A fellow survivor-turned-priest is among those on this happy chappie’s trail.
Savage Planet
In the future, when Earth has become almost uninhabitable, a greedy company seeks to make a handsome profit by taking control of an alternative planet to which some of the population can be moved, but its advance team comes under attack from dangerous creatures that resemble large bears. Actually ... they are large bears. The only notable thing about this no-budget, made-for-cable fodder from 2006 is that it’s directed by Paul Lynch, a veteran TV director who made the original Prom Night with Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen way back in 1980. Starts tomorrow at the Baixue theater in Ximending; yes, it’s another DVD promotion.
A French Gigolo
Another slice of life among restless French folk centers on a married, part-time gigolo (Eric Caravaca) and his latest divorcee customer (Nathalie Baye) and how their widening relationship affects both sets of friends and family. Warm reviews met this rich character study, which prefers to dabble in minds and not bodies. The wonderful Baye made this film before starring in Tsai Ming-liang’s (蔡明亮) Face (臉). French title: Cliente.
Wheat (長平大戰之麥田)
What first might appear to be another tiresome period costumer about one of the millions of battles in China’s history turns out to be something rather different. Two deserters from the Qin army in the Warring States period lucklessly find themselves in an enemy town whose men are away fighting. Their lies and ingratiations with the women gradually wear thin — especially as others arrive with contradictory news. This meticulously photographed drama-comedy is structured around elemental themes, of which wheat, the local crop, is prominent. Directed by He Ping (何平), who made The Swordsman in Double Flag Town (雙旗鎮刀客).
Lehuo festival
Tomorrow and Sunday the Spot theater is running a festival that includes rare screenings of Taiwanese short features and idiosyncratic foreign films such as Rage, The Cats of Mirikitani and Naoko Ogigami’s Megane. Entry is free.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
During her 2015 trip to Taiwan, Sophia J. Chang (張詠慧) got fewer answers than she’d hoped for, but more revelations than she could have imagined. “That was the year I last saw my grandmother. She was in hospice care in Tainan, and it was painful to see her in bed, barely able to open her eyes,” says Los Angeles-born Chang. “The grandma I’d known, a fantastic cook and incredibly kind, was already gone.” After their visit, Chang and her grandfather went back to his apartment. There she asked him how he’d met her grandmother. “He hesitated, then started talking a bit.
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