Animal Kingdom
Top-notch Aussie drama about Josh Codey (James Frecheville), a young lad caught in the grip of his family, a group of Melbourne criminals under the leadership of matriarch Smurf Codey (magnificently played by Jacki Weaver), a petite blonde grandmother who calls hits on rivals while popping a casserole in the oven. The Codeys are engaged in a war with the cops of the armed robbery division, who are almost as corrupt and violent as the criminals they pursue. Gritty and hard hitting, Animal Kingdom portrays suburban Melbourne as a jungle, and its characters grimly fight to stay alive, fending off enemies from without and betrayal from within. Animal Kingdom will not make you feel good, but it will keep you enthralled.
Las Buenas Hierbas
Family saga from Mexican director Maria Novaro focusing on a mother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and her grown daughter’s attempts to cope. The director, who first came to prominence in 1989 with the highly praised Lola, eschews melodrama for a richly textured tapestry of modern Mexican life. Novaro has been described as an impressionistic director for her weaving together of sometimes disconnected bits of story to build up a complex and unresolved picture of real life. This makes a perfect fit with the understated musical interludes of guitar and percussion, which enrich the mood without obtruding on the meandering flow of the narrative.
Black Heaven (L’autre monde)
French film by Gilles Marchand that uses an alternate reality video game as its main trope. The setup is promising: A young couple, Gaspard and Marion, find a cellphone at the beach. It rings, they answer, and with that they are drawn into the discovery of the sexy Audrey (Louise Bourgoin), who has apparently tried to commit suicide. This action is somehow related to the online game Black Hole (a darker version of Second Life), and Gaspard opens an account to see if he can discover Audrey’s story. Amazing computer graphics and dark eroticism are not quite enough to save the film from its confused and confusing narrative.
The Ghost Must Be Crazy
Horror comedy out of Malaysia made up of two separate shorts by different directors: The Day Off, a story of the supernatural fears of a bunch of military reservists undergoing training in the jungle by director Boris Boo (巫培雙) and Ghost Bride, a film about the consequences of making Faustian pacts, by TV-host and first-time director Mark Lee (李國煌). The general mood of slapstick and some occasional real scares is similar to the Singapore movie Where Got Ghosts? (嚇到笑), which was released here late last year.
Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires)
Quebecois director Xavier Dolan, aged just 21, picked up the special youth prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for his debut feature I Killed My Mother. In this, his second film, Dolan shows he has talent to spare in what can be seen as an homage to cinematic idols Wong Kar-wai (王家衛), Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Bernardo Bertolucci and Pedro Almodovar. Heartbeats is an utterly over-the-top film about a love triangle between three amazingly good-looking people exploring their sexuality and the limits of love. Everything is utterly gorgeous, the emotions utterly superficial, and an undercurrent of sorrow and tragedy runs beneath the surface.
Something Borrowed
Soft fluffy rom-com starring Ginnifer Goodwin as Rachel and Kate Hudson as Darcy, two best friends who become involved with the same guy, Dex — played by Colin Egglesfield. He is about to marry Darcy, while Rachel has a long-time crush that is only getting worse as the impending nuptials approach. There is a lot of running about, often in the rain, and some rather ham-handed slapstick as Rachel dithers over whether she can hurt her best friend by coveting the man she loves. What the audience will be wondering is how the gorgeous Rachel could have any feelings at all for the self-satisfied and smarmy Dex.
We Are What We Are (Somos lo que hay)
Life can be hard for cannibals in Mexico City, with the daily grind of picking up a member of the general public for dinner. A debut feature by Jorge Michel Grau, this is an urban fable that revels in urban decay, and its family of people eaters are only the most ghastly of many living on the fringes of subsistence. Technically, this is a more than adequate horror flick, but too much is left unexplained to make it entirely satisfying.
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