Priest 3D
Paul Bettany and Maggie Q go into battle as ninja priests. To save a little girl, they must vanquish a horde of reptilian vampires. The story is very loosely based on a South Korean graphic novel by Hyung Min-woo, but has developed in the hands of Scott Charles Stewart into a 3D kung fu action film with loads of style and the bare hint of a coherent narrative. Fortunately nobody seems to be taking Priest 3D too seriously, and there are some pretty nifty action sequences and gags. It has the same kind of Catholic-infused B-movie magic as Legion, a film in which Bettany got to play an Uzi-toting Archangel Michael.
The Detective 2 (B+ 偵探)
The most recent work of the prolific horrormeister Oxide Pang (彭順), The Detective 2 is the second in what may well become a series of comedy/horror/detective movies starring Aaron Kwok (郭富城) as the bumbling private eye Chan Tam. On this occasion, the inept detective, who previously produced great mirth and box office profits, has grown more competent, to the detriment of the movie. Tam has to get inside the head of a psychopath who is committing a series of crimes involving genital mutilation. As a police procedural or even as a thriller, The Detective 2 amounts to little, but Pang applies his horror director skills to good effect.
Paper Man
Jeff Daniels plays Richard, a writer suffering from writer’s block who has rented a rundown house to find peace after separating from his wife. He bears similarities to other man-child characters of recent movies, such as Greenberg, but in this case his idiosyncrasies are seen as a sufficient driving force for the narrative as a whole. A friendship with a young girl develops when Richard hires her as a babysitter (he has no children). He also begins a dialogue with an imaginary friend, Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds), who dresses in a cape and spandex bodysuit. Some very fine acting almost saves Paper Man from its pretensions — but not quite.
The Human Resource Manager
A solid effort from the highly regarded Israeli director Eran Riklis, whose previous films The Lemon Tree (2008) and The Syrian Bride (2004) both did exceptionally well on the film festival circuit. The character of the title, never named, finds himself trying to repatriate the corpse of a foreign worker from Eastern Europe who has become an unwitting victim of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He finds himself embroiled in a Kafkaesque nightmare in which all efforts to get the body decently buried run into unforeseen problems. The humor is as dry and dark as coal, and though the complex political situation against which the film is set is never made explicit, it resonates through the blackly humorous situations in which the human resource manager finds himself.
Mao’s Last Dancer
Bruce Beresford is not a director who can easily be accused of subtlety. Even so, Mao’s Last Dancer pushes the limits of what is acceptable as something that is not overt propaganda. The film has won rave reviews from many critics, but for audiences in Taiwan, both foreign and local, the story of a ballet dancer who seeks asylum so that he can find his own artistic soul is too much played by the numbers. The film is based on the true story of Li Cunxin (李存信), who escaped the rigors of communist arts diplomacy, became a principle artist with the Australian Ballet and is currently a stock broker and motivational speaker based in Melbourne. There is some good dancing, but the quality of both the acting and the script is too uneven to make this more than an average television movie.
Oh Shit!
Made-for-TV comedy from Germany by director Christoph Schrewe, Oh Shit! is a bit of comic mayhem that may amuse those starved of Teutonic humor. A ridiculous story line inspired by the already tired butterfly analogy from chaos theory tries to generate laughs, but when a romantic contretemps causes the release of a killer butterfly that could annihilate the Earth, you’ll probably wish that it will succeed.
The Second Chance (La Chance de ma vie)
French rom-com with strong US influences. Central character Julien (Francois-Xavier Demaison) finds that he is something of a curse to any woman he dates — they invariably have terrible luck and often as not suffer grave physical injuries. He meets Johanna (Virginie Efira) and the two just click, but the curse kicks in and life becomes a succession of disasters for Johanna. How much can she take? The romance between the two leads is spirited but the gags all a little shopworn.
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