Mademoiselle Chambon
Low-key French drama about a blue-collar dad who falls for his son’s teacher, a woman of high culture who nevertheless finds herself becoming a victim of her own desires. Scriptwriter and director Stephane Brize picked up a Cesar Award last year for best film adaptation of this work from a novel by Eric Holder, and he keeps the whole thing very buttoned down. The power of the film derives from the turmoil that is taking place beneath the surface and the terrible consequences for the very respectable main characters if it breaks loose. The level of restraint has the critics polarized. Despite generally acknowledged fine performances by leads Sandrine Kiberlain and Vincent Lindon, Mademoiselle Chambon might be just a tad too respectful and bloodless to attain widespread appeal.
Rec 2
Aliens meets The Exorcist meets Cloverfield in Spanish. This is a sequel to the highly regarded Rec, a classic of hand-held camera point-of-view filmmaking. In the original the camera in question was that of a television crew. In Rec 2 it is cameras mounted on the helmets of an elite armed response team sent into the same abandoned city block to find out what happened to the original media expedition. A clue is provided by the presence of a Catholic priest in mufti who is on hand to face down evil with the power of the divine. Things don’t go as planned and there is plenty of killing and blurry scares to keep the audience jumping, but critics agree the sequel lacks the immediacy and raw power of the original.
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Stars (一閃一閃亮晶晶)
Documentary-style feature by Lin Cheng-sheng (林正盛) who has pretty much been going down hill since his big success with Betelnut Beauty (愛你愛我, 2001). Opting for a new format might be a way of finding his way back on track, though his choice of a worthy but already somewhat shopworn topic of Asperger syndrome suggests he still has a passion for the sort of social earnestness that sunk Crusoe’s Robinson (魯賓遜漂流記, 2002) and fatally marred The Moon Also Rises (月光下,我記得, 2005). The film focuses on four children who suffer from this often debilitating condition and explores their unique vision of the world through projects such as turning their drawings into film animations. Unfortunately, good intentions don’t always make the best films.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your