Fast Five
As the title suggests, this is the fifth in the Fast and Furious franchise. Dominic (Vin Diesel) and his crew find themselves on the wrong side of the law once again, this time in Rio de Janeiro. Director Justin Lin has taken the hugely improbable action of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) and pushed it up several notches, with a couple of set piece automotive heist sequences whose only purpose is to push the stunt crew to new heights of imaginative mayhem. As for the rest of the movie, the hot chicks in tight pants and muscle men in clinging T-shirts could have come out of any number of previous Vin Diesel vehicles.
Water for Elephants
A great big three-ring circus of a movie featuring Robert Pattinson, for whom Water for Elephants is a big push to escape the mantle of his Twilight fame and establish himself as something more than cinema’s best-looking vampire. Unfortunately, Pattinson cuts a rather glum figure in this glittering drama about a veterinary student who abandons his studies to work in a traveling circus. Set in depression era America, with great production values and the usually charming presence of costar Reese Witherspoon. Pattinson’s character worships a woman he can never have and is pretty cut up about it for most of the movie. This hardly seems to matter much since the chemistry between Witherspoon and Rosie the elephant is a lot more convincing than the romantic sparks between the two leads.
A Chinese Ghost Story 2011 (倩女幽魂2011)
In revisiting the classic Chinese ghostly romance A Chinese Ghost Story (倩女幽魂), made back in 1987 and credited by many as a seminal work in bringing Hong Kong cinema to the Western market, Wilson Yip (葉偉信) has taken on a big challenge. Yip, a veteran director fresh from his success with the two Ip Man movies, has been able to draw on some of the top talent in the industry, and the film reportedly had a budget of over US$20 million, which is huge for this kind of production. Unfortunately, riffing off a classic work fails to generate any fireworks. Despite the updated special effects, the remake is likely to have people digging through their VHS tapes for the original.
Bedevilled (Kim Bok-nam salinsageonui jeonmal)
A psychological drama that swings sharply into horror during its latter stages, Bedevilled has earned praise from fans of Asian horror for its willingness to build slowly, rooting the horrific finale in strongly depicted characters. Hae-won is a city girl on the verge of career burnout who goes to a small undeveloped island were she meets childhood friend Bok Nam, who has been writing her for years despite a total lack of response. Bok Nam has become a virtual slave to the inhabitants of the island, and Hae-won’s indifference to her plight pushes her over the edge. There is some great bloodletting action with a sickle and top-class acting from actress Seo Yeong Hie as the worm that turned.
Days We Stared at the Sun (他們在畢業的前一天爆炸精華版)
A cinematic reworking of a television series of the same name that was shown on Taiwan’s Public Television Service (公視) in December last year. The story is about a group of high school students — their dreams, fantasies, their failures and of course their romantic entanglements — and generated a huge Internet response. While drawing on much of the action that took place in the five-episode mini-series, director Cheng Yu-chieh (鄭有傑) has also changed, added or re-shot a large number of scenes to make this condensed version work in cinematic terms.
Goodbye May (走出五月)
The first film project by the Godot Theater Company (果陀劇場), better known for its popular and accessible stage adaptations of Western theatrical works. Theatrical producer Chu Feng (朱峰), taking his place in the director’s chair for this debut effort, juxtaposes the traditional theater of Chinese opera and conservative morals with electronic music and a contemporary romance. Actor and singer Alan Kuo (柯有綸) has the starring role as a musician who wins a music scholarship to work on contemporary interpretations of operatic music. His relationship with his grandmother, a former opera star, sends the story back in history. When she dies, her husband, a painter now blind and helpless, relives his former romance through the intervention of an aspiring Chinese opera student.
Patisserie Coin de Rue
Foodie movie by Japanese director Yoshihiro Fukagawa that follows in a long line of similar offerings, but fails to inspire despite some fine acting from leading lady Yu Aoi (All About Lily Chou-Chou). The story is about a small-town girl who goes to Tokyo to embark on an arduous apprenticeship in an upmarket patisserie in her quest for a boyfriend who has gone missing. There are the usual list of cliched characters: the dour and demanding boss, the cranky senior chef, the enigmatic critic, and of course the love interest, whose secrets finally, if inevitably, see the light of day. Of course, everything turns up smiles, and there is shot after shot of mouth-watering cakes, which will delight or disgust depending on your tolerance for high-priced, over-worked confections.
My Darling Is a Foreigner
Marry-a-foreigner wish fulfillment fantasy based on a popular manga series and adapted by director Kazuaki Ue for the big screen. Moderately amusing in bite-sized manga chunks, this feature length interracial romantic comedy is so considerate of everybody’s feelings that there isn’t a sharp edge for its whole 100-minute running time. Saori (Mao Inoue) is an aspiring manga illustrator who falls for Tony (Jonathan Sherr), a sensitive New Age American with great proficiency in Japanese whose only fault is that he’s not very good at housework. His efforts to help out around the house and his curiosity about the idiosyncrasies of Japanese life provide the bulk of the humor, but that’s not enough to make this picture work.
Memory Loss (憶世界大冒險)
Memory Loss claims the title of being Taiwan’s first fully original 3D animation feature film, but while it might be the first, let us hope that it will be quickly superseded by superior efforts. It draws on experienced talent from the children’s DVD market, and does not cast off the feeling that it would be more appropriate as a slot on the Yoyo TV children’s channel (東森幼幼台). The story tells of a little
girl who inadvertently causes her mother to lose her memory after a family tragedy. She then goes in search of these memories in a journey on which she is accompanied across the dangerous lands of the subconscious by the “memory dog.”
The Silent House
Creepy flick from Uruguayan director Gustavo Hernandez about a father and daughter camping out in an old backwoods house prior to beginning renovations the next day. Things start to go badly wrong and Hernandez shows an undeniable talent for low-budget creepiness using handheld camera and exploiting the foreground to create plenty of tension without expensive CGI effects. There are strong echoes of The Blair Witch Project and the two [Rec] films, and both narrative and character motivation are weak, but as a masterclass on shoestring filmmaking, The Silent House has quite a lot
to offer.
Treeless Mountain
The second feature film from South Korea-born, Brooklyn-based art house director Kim So Yong, Treeless Mountain is a closely observed story of two children surviving the disappearance of their father and the consequential remoteness of their mother, who leaves them with relatives when she decides to go in search of him. The relatives include an alcoholic aunt and kindly grandparents. Kim elicits natural performances from her child actors, and there are some beautiful and evocative scenes, but Treeless Mountain suffers from a fatal lack of narrative urgency.
Lost on Journey (人在囧途)
Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Chinese characteristics. Starring veteran of stage and screen Xu Zheng (徐崢) and Wang Baoqiang (王寶強) as two unlikely companions who meet up and gradually get to know and understand each other in the course of a trying journey back home during the Lunar New Year rush. There is some competent satire of contemporary Chinese society in this film, which celebrates the boisterous bonhomie of those forced to make their way through the Byzantine labyrinth of contemporary Chinese society.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s