Into the White Night (Byakuyako)
A murder mystery with strong psychological overtones from director Yoshihiro Fukagawa, based on a best-selling novel. The film is unusual in dealing with the lives of two main characters who were children at the time of the murder. There is a good story trying to get out, but the multistranded narrative never quite comes together and viewers are left struggling to work things out for themselves.
Gigola
A film by Laure Charpentier, adapted from one of her own novels, the story of Gigola is set in the “sexy Parisian lesbian underworld of the 1960s.” There is style aplenty, with swanky hookers in men’s clothing and rich older women looking for another kind of love. The title character, played by Lou Doillion, is a student who after the suicide of her first love, closes down emotionally and embarks on a journey through the underbelly of lesbian clubs. Though the settings are luscious and the cast is fine, the film is oddly anemic.
The Resident
Hilary Swank seems to have picked yet another dud, one in a long line of unremarkable films since she burst onto the scene in 1999 with Boys Don’t Cry. In The Resident, she is cast as Juliet Devereau, a young woman who moves into a gorgeous apartment, but soon discovers that her landlord has an unhealthy interest in her. The psychological thriller quickly degenerates into a by-the-numbers stalker movie that offers few surprises. Lingering shots of Swank in a state of undress are used shamelessly to sex up the movie, but you’ve probably seen it all before.
Yves Saint Laurent: L’Amour Fou
A documentary about the life of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent told largely by his lover Pierre Berge in the lead-up to a huge auction of the tremendous art collection that the two built up over nearly half a century together. Given who the narrator is, this is necessarily something of a hagiography, and while it provides a wonderful glimpse into the life of an artist, it fails to provide much social context for those unfamiliar with the shifts in the fashion and art worlds that Saint Laurent inhabited. The film does include some great archival footage and the interviews with Berge are interesting if a little narrow in scope.
Draw Yourself (Dessine-toi)
This documentary by French director and cinematographer Gilles Porte starts with a fairly simple premise that is turned into a charming 70 minutes of cinema. The production team set up a big transparent surface at locations around the world and invited children to draw themselves. That’s pretty much it. There are no interviews, though occasionally one of the children’s drawings is brought to life through CGI. It’s as cute as can be, but there is more to be found in both the children’s expressions and their art if you choose to look hard enough.
Here Comes the Bride, My Mom!
Japanese family drama about a single mother and young daughter, whose cozy life together is disrupted by the arrival of mom’s new boyfriend. The daughter, played by Aoi Miyazaki, is confused and angered by this new romance, and friendly neighbors try and repair the damage. There is a cute dog and the suggestion of terminal illness, which puts Here Comes the Bride, My Mom! into the laughing-through-the-tears category of cinematic entertainment.
Honeybee Hutch
A feature film based on a hugely successful Japanese anime cartoon series released in the early 1970s that crossed over to the English-speaking market. This film version is notable for its screenplay by Kundo Koyama, who also wrote Departures, the unexpected winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2009. The story tells the tale of a young bee called Hutch, who is separated from his mother and must survive in a mostly hostile world after their hive is destroyed by a wasp attack.
SP: The Motion Picture
The second of a two-part motion picture based on a hugely successful Japanese television cop drama titled SP, referring to Security Police. Part I was released here in March. SP: The Motion Picture is a big-budget action film with some spectacular car chases and other set pieces, and stars pop idol Okada Junichi as supercop Inoue Kaoru. Kaoru routinely uses his extraordinary abilities to fight crime, but his insubordinate ways get him no love from his superiors. When he gets caught up in a terrorist plot hatched deep within government, even his almost superhuman gifts fail to keep him out of the firing line.
Amazon Forever
A film written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux that was released in 2004 and which has avoided virtually any mainstream interest. It is the story of a French filmmaker who goes into the Amazon forest, falls in love with the daughter of a local chief, films the destruction of the forest by Portuguese loggers and tries to raise awareness about the plight of the rain forest and the people who live there. The film is notable for its portrayal of authentic daily life among the Indians in the forest, with many roles taken by local tribespeople.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
A sultry sea mist blankets New Taipei City as I pedal from Tamsui District (淡水) up the coast. This might not be ideal beach weather but it’s fine weather for riding –– the cloud cover sheltering arms and legs from the scourge of the subtropical sun. The dedicated bikeway that connects downtown Taipei with the west coast of New Taipei City ends just past Fisherman’s Wharf (漁人碼頭) so I’m not the only cyclist jostling for space among the SUVs and scooters on National Highway No. 2. Many Lycra-clad enthusiasts are racing north on stealthy Giants and Meridas, rounding “the crown coast”
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and