Eat, Pray, Love
Based on a best-selling book that plugs directly into the hot button issue of what to do about soullessness of modern life, Eat, Pray, Love is one of those films that many people made up their minds about long before it was actually released. It deals with every cliche concerning “getting away from it all and finding your true self,” and with Julia Roberts in the leading role, it also embraces the slick big-money, celebrity culture it purports to criticize. Whatever one might think about the original book by Elizabeth Gilbert, there seems to be a wide consensus that the film, by Ryan Murphy (who also adapted and directed Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors), is too glib and commercial for its own good. Beautiful to look at, but the formula of the Hollywood romantic drama obliterates any deeper issues.
The Town
Gangster drama directed by and starring Ben Affleck that might have worked better if Affleck had stayed either in front of or behind the camera. Flitting back and forth seems to have undermined his own work in what is otherwise a strong production with outstanding performances from the likes of Jeremy Renner, Chris Cooper and Pete Postlethwaite. The relationship between buddies in crime Doug MacRay and right-hand man Jem (Renner) starts to unravel when MacRay, for all his armed robbery tough-guy act, starts going soft on a hostage (Rebecca Hall), revealing his fundamental decency. Although Affleck’s character is less a personality than a catalogue of male virtues, his recreation of the Irish underworld of wrong-side-of-the-tracks Boston is widely praised as capturing the sounds and atmosphere of that milieu.
Let Me In
A Hollywood reboot of Swedish cult hit Let the Right One In has widely been hailed as one of the better remakes of a deeply cherished European film. Director Matt Reeves shifts the setting from post-war Stockholm to Reagan-era America and casts two outstanding child actors: Kodi Smit-McPhee, most recently from The Road (2009); and Chloe Moretz, who we last saw sporting purple hair as Hit Girl in Kick Ass (2010). Kodi is a kid who gets bullied at school and finds help from Moretz, who seems like a nice girl but is actually a vampire who feasts on human flesh. The contradictions involved in this complex romance of early adolescence are well handled, and while Let Me In may not generate quite the same cult devotion as the Swedish original, it will probably be seen by more people.
The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
Whatever else it may achieve, The Human Centipede has certainly got the horror movie fraternity talking. Tom Six’s film depicts the connecting of a hapless Japanese man and two American girls into a single multi-limed creature with a single digestive system by a mad German scientist. Critic Roger Ebert refused to give the film any stars at all, but grudgingly concedes that in Six “there stirs the soul of a dark artist.” Horror magazine Fangoria dismisses Six’s film as “the punchline for a 10-minute short [wrapped up] in a feature’s worth of ineffective genre tropes and cliches.” Certainly the concept behind the film is utterly gross, but whatever else Six may or may not have achieved, he has certainly pushed boundaries beyond what many people regard as acceptable, which is exactly what he set out to do.
The Experiment
A straight-to-DVD film with an unexpectedly strong lineup that includes Adrien Brody, Forest Whitaker and Ethan Cohn. A remake of the German movie Das Experiment (2001), the film is inspired by events surrounding the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment that took place at Stanford University in 1971. The experiment, conducted by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, sought to study how people would react when assigned to extended role-playing as prison guards and prisoners. The experiment was cut short because of violence and sadistic behavior by the “guards.” While the film creates a fictional narrative around the experiment, it plays with the same ideas. It is directed by Paul Scheuring, one of the creators of the highly regarded television series Prison Break (2005-2009).
Egg/Milk//Honey Trilogy
Three loosely linked films by Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu that take long, sensitive looks at various aspects of the life and identity of an aspiring poet called Yusuf. Not too everybody’s taste, though, with Variety magazine describing Egg (Yumurta, 2007) as a “faux metaphysical snoozeroo, centered on a poet returning to his village after his mother’s death, is pure fest fare for the long-take, minimalist crowd.” Milk (Sut, 2008), has the same poet protagonist, though it finds him at an earlier point in life striving to establish himself. The most recently released of the trilogy, Honey (Bal, 2010), may be the strongest of the three films, and has brought the trilogy to prominence by winning the Golden Bear for the director and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Berlin Film Festival. This is art house social drama with good acting and high philosophical aspirations.
Encirclement
A film made in Canada by director Yuan Ye (原野) with an explicit pro Falun Gong (法輪功) agenda, Encirclement (圍剿) is supposedly based in part, according to an Epoch Times (大紀元) article, “on the experiences of senior Chinese diplomat Yonglin Chen (陳用林), who defected from his post in the Sydney Consulate in 2005 and asked for political asylum in Australia.” One of the grounds on which Chen sought asylum was his downplaying of activities by Falun Gong practitioners and other dissidents in the face of China’s harsh persecution. The acting and style of the film, if judged from the trailer released on YouTube, are those of a low-budget soap, and it takes less than a minute to realize that, whatever else it may be, Encirclement is propaganda of a fairly undiluted nature. One’s position on Falun Gong, rather than any cinematic or aesthetic considerations, will determine whether this film can be appreciated.
Imperium: Pompei
Not to be confused with Pompeii, the much-anticipated adaptation of Robert Harris’ book of the same name scheduled for release next year, Imperium: Pompei is an Italian mini-series released in 2007. The story is different from that of the Harris novel, but the backdrop of the imminent eruption of Vesuvius, which would bury one of the Roman Empire’s great cities, is the same. As befitting a mini-series with running time to burn, there are numerous strands to the story, including romance and political assassination. The series, which reportedly cost US$130 million to make, has high aspirations but occasionally hokey effects, but at 180 minutes it is value for money and a great way to kill an afternoon.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not