Last Night
A sexual thriller from the hand of first-time director Massy Tadjedin that has garnered praise for providing intellectual stimulation as well as eye candy. There is certainly plenty of the latter with leading actors Keira Knightley and Sam Worthington, who play a well-off couple. They each in their own way become involved with another person, though the exact nature of those relationships is kept tightly under wraps. Knightley’s character meets a former lover (Guillaume Canet) who harbors hopes of getting things started again, while her husband is off on a business trip with a new and very sexy colleague (Eva Mendes). The characters are well aware of the price they might have to pay for screwing around, but rationality does not always trump lust.
Art and Music Film Festival (舞樂祭影展)
A mini film festival put together by distributor Cineplex (聯影電影股份有限公司) that focuses on cinematic treatments of theatrical arts. The three films, which will screen from today until March 3 at the recently refurbished Blossom Cinema (梅花數位影院), encompass ballet, opera and acrobatic theater. The program comprises the French film Snow White (Blanche Neige, 2009), featuring choreography from Angelin Preliocaj and costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier with the music of Gustav Mahler, British director Kenneth Branagh’s reworking of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, relocated to the killing fields of France during World War I, and Zingaro Revisited, a film about the Zingaro Equestrian Theatre, a company based close to Paris that is known for combining classic dressage with circus tricks. Screening times can be found at www.cineplex.com.tw.
Slovenian Girl
This German/Slovenian coproduction from the assured hand of director Damjan Kozole tells the story of small-town girl Alexandra who uses prostitution as a shortcut to the good life after moving to the big smoke. She takes to her new life like a fish to water, and she has a clear vision of where she wants to be and how far — and it’s quite far — she’s prepared to go to get there. Kozole excels on the details, and does an outstanding job of building up the world of lies, dissimulation and lurking violence that is the meat and potatoes of a call girl’s life in the lawless economies of a liberated Eastern Europe.
Carancho
This Argentinean movie by noted Latin American director Pablo Trapero might make you think twice before taking to the road. It’s point of departure is the frightening statistic of Argentina’s 8,000 deaths each year from traffic accidents. Carancho is a Spanish term that refers to an ambulance-chasing lawyer, in this case played by Ricardo Darin, regarded as the George Clooney of Argentine cinema. He becomes involved with a hot paramedic who fights on the front line of the country’s traffic hell. There are moments of realism in the emergency room and at the site of accidents that work well, as Trapero successfully conveys a sense of chaos and mayhem, but unfortunately the chaos leaks into the storytelling, which only works in fits and starts.
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
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
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