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.
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist