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.
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 the aftermath of the 2020 general elections the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had crushed them in a second landslide in a row, with their presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning more votes than any in Taiwan’s history. The KMT did pick up three legislative seats, but the DPP retained an outright majority. To take responsibility for that catastrophic loss, as is customary, party chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) resigned. This would mark the end of an era of how the party operated and the beginning of a new effort at reform, first under