The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Robin Wright Penn is Pippa Lee, a housewife in Connecticut whose psychological history and social milieu makes it to the big screen courtesy of Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur Miller), who adapted her own work and directed. Pippa is married to publisher Alan Arkin and has an interesting network of friends, family and associates, but there’s no shortage of dissatisfaction in her life. Flashbacks to Pippa as a young woman (played by Blake Lively from TV’s Gossip Girl) help explain why. Big cast includes Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Keanu Reeves, Monica Bellucci and Maria Bello, but critics were divided on this one.
Couples Retreat
Vince Vaughn and wife travel to lovely Bora Bora for therapy along with three other couples, but the program on offer by the local resort chief (Jean Reno) is not quite what they expect. American critics liked the actors but retreated from the rest of the production, which — as with many mainstream US comedies these days — injects surprisingly crude material throughout in the hope of appearing lively, if not funny.
Om Shanti Om
Bollywood films never took off in Taiwan, and while this week’s release (under the mini-festival title “Bling! Bling! Bollywood!”) of two big-budget odes to the movie industry won’t change that, it will surely remind adventurous local audiences of the dynamism of India’s filmmakers. In Om Shanti Om, Shahrukh Khan (Slumdog Millionaire) plays the two “Oms” in segments set decades apart, but possibly connected through reincarnation, while Deepika Padukone is his love interest, Shanti. Packed with musical numbers, action, romance, color and dance, India’s trade office couldn’t have asked for a more majestic advertisement for Indian tourism.
Billu Barber
In this accompanying Bollywood release made last year, the wildly popular Shahrukh Khan is back as a movie star whose struggling barber friend, Billu, enjoys a new lease of life when the village Khan is shooting in learns of their connection. This is not, however, a standard happy tale, even though it is laced with Bollywood exuberance: Billu’s newfound popularity is mostly based on the opportunism and insincerity of his neighbors.
Noriben: The Recipe of Fortune
A woman in her early thirties leaves her husband and returns to her family home and community with child in tow to find that her calling is making and selling bento, and noriben (seaweed, soy sauce and rice) in particular. This is another in a selection of Japanese films of late that have older women striking out on their own. Oddly enough, this is also a manga adaptation, and it’s hard not to think of the first Sonny Chiba-Uma Thurman scene in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 when our plucky heroine asks to be an apprentice chef.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
A sultry sea mist blankets New Taipei City as I pedal from Tamsui District (淡水) up the coast. This might not be ideal beach weather but it’s fine weather for riding –– the cloud cover sheltering arms and legs from the scourge of the subtropical sun. The dedicated bikeway that connects downtown Taipei with the west coast of New Taipei City ends just past Fisherman’s Wharf (漁人碼頭) so I’m not the only cyclist jostling for space among the SUVs and scooters on National Highway No. 2. Many Lycra-clad enthusiasts are racing north on stealthy Giants and Meridas, rounding “the crown coast”
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and