Season of the Witch
The latest Nicolas Cage vehicle, Season of the Witch, is much anticipated for all the wrong reasons. The big question is: Exactly how awful is it going to be? Cage has been in more than his fair share of turkeys, and Season of the Witch, which casts him as Behmen, a 14th-century knight tasked with transporting a girl (Claire Foy) to a monastery for the performance of a ritual to end the Black Plague, has plenty of potential to be ridiculous. The girl has been accused of being a witch, but Behmen questions the truth of these allegations. There are elements of a standard quest movie mixed in with fantasy horror. The dialogue has B-movie written all over it, but the production values are good, and if you can excuse Cage’s hair style and his extreme earnestness, there might be something to enjoy.
Morning Glory
A highly rated comedy about the trials and tribulations of a naive (but also very engaging) young woman (Rachel McAdams) brought into a network newsroom to revive a sagging current affairs program with two warring cohosts (Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton). Despite the two veterans doing some of their best work, McAdams is almost unanimously hailed by critics as the star turn of this finely honed comedy. The plot is far from original, and Morning Glory does not match something like Broadcast News (1987, with Holly Hunter and William Hurt) for depth, but the chemistry between the three lead players generates a wonderful dynamism that carries the film through its few dud sequences (a romantic subplot with Patrick Wilson as the eye candy) for a thoroughly enjoyable 110 minutes of entertainment.
Happy Few
Sexy French drama by Antony Cordier about two couples who discover the pleasures and dangers of their liberated attitude to sex. Affluent, middle-class and sophisticated, Vincent (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and his wife Teri (Elodie Bouchez) become entangled in a web of sexual interplay with Rachel (Marina Fois) and husband Franck (Roschdy Zem). Their regular partner swapping allows all four leads to regularly get naked for the camera, and while tensions inevitably arise from this complex menage a quatre, Happy Few remains irretrievably rooted in fantasy fulfillment. Questions about the nature of love and the impact on family life and children are asked, but in such a tepid fashion that it does not really disturb the skin-deep look and feel of the film.
Acoustic
South Korean teen-pop movie that features a slew of young celebrities including top boy bands CNBlue and 2am as well as actress Shin Se-kyeong. (If you don’t already know who these people are, you probably don’t want to see the film.) The movie is made up of three tenuously connected sections, the first about a singer-songwriter whose approaching death leads her to embark on a course of dangerous living, the second about two impoverished musician brothers who lose their guitars, and finally a futuristic segment about a couple living in a world in which music is illegal. Judging from the Internet response, the appeal of this film among local audiences has been hurt by the mood of anti-Korean feeling among its target teen audience following the recent taekwondo scandal sometimes referred to as “Sockgate.”
Chatroom
Aiming to be a tech-savvy horror/thriller, Chatroom is outdated before it even hits the screen. This UK movie starring Aaron Johnson, Imogen Poots and Matthew Beard, among others, is directed by Hideo Nakata, the creator of the Ringu films, which have achieved iconic status among horror aficionados. Chatroom looks like a misstep as the director enters unfamiliar territory and attempts to moralize on the social phenomenon of Internet bullying. The chatrooms are realized as glitzy rooms off a bleak corridor where a bunch of lost souls gather to socialize, a simplistic metaphor that is at the heart of the film’s failings. This is exacerbated by unsympathetic characters and weakly realized motivations, resulting in a profound indifference to the fate of the cast.
Hereafter
Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial outing continues his busy schedule dealing with complex issues through well-crafted cinematic narratives. In Hereafter, as the title suggests, the afterlife is a significant part of the film. This metaphysical and pop psychological focus has led one critic, who otherwise praises Eastwood’s oeuvre, to describe the film as “something like an M. Night Shyamalan movie in extreme slow motion.” The film can also be compared to Paul Haggis’ lugubrious Crash, as it uses the same narrative technique and has the same improbable conjunction of multiple storylines. That said, Eastwood’s skills as a director and storyteller ensure that for those who don’t find maudlin musings on the afterlife distasteful in principle, this is a well-made, thoughtful and even uplifting film.
The Unbroken (Shizumanu taiyo)
Japanese film that is a fictionalized account of Japan’s worst airline disaster, the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123 in 1985, which killed 520 people. Directed by Setsuro Wakamatsu, this 192-minute epic has some excellent material, especially in the latter half when it settles down to deal with the corporate politicking that takes place as the airline goes into damage limitation mode. Unfortunately, this is preceded by far too much standard disaster movie cliche, as characters are introduced, then shown at the last moments as they face certain death. Finally there is the crash itself, which is a cheap effect that punches a big hole in the credibility of the film. A solid performance by Ken Watanabe as a union leader campaigning for stricter aviation safety regulations is not quite enough to hold this overlong film together.
Caterpillar (Kyatapira)
Among its many other qualities, director Koji Wakamatsu’s Caterpillar is a powerful anti-war movie that pulls no punches about the horrors of war and the collateral damage to every aspect of life even when the fighting itself is over. Tadashi Kurokawa (Keigo Kasuya) is a soldier returned from the Sino-Japanese war as a “war god,” a hero of the nation. He is the caterpillar of the title, having lost all four limbs and the ability to speak as the price of his heroism, and can only perform the most basic of human functions. His wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima, who won a Silver Bear at Berlin last year for her performance) must learn to deal with this barely human monstrosity. Wakamatsu’s presentation is realistic and understated, but neither is he afraid to venture into grand guignol at key moments.
Our Festival (我們的.影展)
A mini film festival organized by Taiwan’s Central Motion Picture Corporation (中影) featuring new digital prints of classic Taiwan movies. The digitization of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (侯孝賢) Dust in the Wind (戀戀風塵), Edward Yang’s (楊德昌) The Terrorizers (恐怖份子), Tsai Ming-liang’s (蔡明亮) Vive L’Amour (愛情萬歲), Chen Yu-hsun’s (陳玉勳) Tropical Fish (熱帶魚), and Chen Kuo-fu’s (陳國富) The Personals (徵婚啟事) is the first stage of an ongoing process to preserve the best of Taiwanese cinema. This is a great opportunity to see the films that represent an all too short efflorescence of Taiwanese cinema during the decade beginning in the mid-1980s. The festival opens today and runs until Jan. 20 with screenings at Blossom Digital Cinema (梅花數位影院), 2F, 63, Heping E Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市和平東路三段63號2樓) and Hsin Hsin Showtime Cinema (欣欣秀泰影城), 247 Linsen N Rd, Taipei City (台北市林森北路247號). Tickets are NT$200 and are available at 7-Eleven ibon kiosks, SPOT — Taipei Film House (台北光點) at 18, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市中山北路二段18號), and at the venue, or online at tickets.books.com.tw. More information can be found at cmpctw.pixnet.net/blog.
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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
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