Vanishing on 7th Street
A solid little indie horror flick by Brad Anderson, Vanishing on 7th Street is quick on its feet and the director proves adept at creating some real scares on a stripped-down budget. Although there are some strong performances, notably from John Leguizamo, the quality of the cast is uneven, and the script fails to take the audience all the way through the picture, which loses its way badly and often finding itself marooned in cheap, thoughtless genre territory and culminates in a vastly disappointing denouement.
Amalia
A story based on the life of Portuguese singer Amalia Rodrigues, an exponent of fado, a kind of Portuguese flamenco. It never does justice to its wonderful material. Director Carlos Coelho da Silva goes for a glossy portrayal of Amalia’s mostly unfortunate romantic entanglements through the 1950s and 1960s, with only a passing concern for her enduring musical legacy, which both revived the traditional fado form and defined how it should be performed. Pretty pictures, including the beautiful Sandra Barata Belo as the title character, and snippets of Amalia’s music almost make this film worthwhile.
The Music Never Stopped
Based on Oliver Sacks’ essay The Last Hippie, this movie by first-time director Jim Kohlberg fails to realize its very considerable potential as a meditation on the power of music in our lives. A story about a boy who walks out on his family and is rediscovered two decades later suffering from a brain tumor that prevents him from forming new memories. Father (JK Simmons) and son (Lou Taylor Pucci) need to find a way of bonding. Enter a music therapist played by Julia Ormond, and an inspirational (and oddly drug free) Grateful Dead concert, and The Music Never Stopped sinks into a gelatinous goo of nostalgia for a time when rock ’n’ roll mattered.
Passion Play
After his wonderful comeback in The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke continues to demonstrate his massive talent for picking turkeys. In Passion Play he co-stars with Megan Fox and Bill Murray, one of the oddest lineups for some time. Rourke is a jazz musician, inevitably on the fringe, who meets an angel, the improbably cast Fox. Mobster Murray wants a piece of the action. The possibility of some mildly entertaining B-movie titillation is utterly destroyed by writer/director Mitch Glazer’s pretensions that he is another Wim Wenders.
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