Seediq Bale 1 (賽德克.巴萊:太陽旗)
With a US$25 million budget, Seediq Bale (賽德克.巴萊) is the costliest Taiwanese production to date. For its domestic release, the four-hour long movie has been divided into two parts, the first hitting screens today, the second on Sept. 30. Director Wei Te-sheng’s (魏德聖) ambitious battle epic centers on the little-known 1930 Wushe Incident (霧社事件), when tribal chief Mouna Rudo led warriors of the Seediq tribes in a violent uprising against their Japanese oppressors, who later crushed the rebellion with aircraft and poison gas bombs. The first segment begins when Taiwan is ceded to Japan in 1895 under the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Deep in the lush mountains of Wushe, in present-day Renai Township, Nantou County (南投縣仁愛鄉), tribal youngster Mouna Rudo, played by novice actor Yu Da Ching (游大慶), is trained to hunt and fight and, after proving his mettle, receives the facial tattoos that in Seediq culture mark a boy’s initiation into manhood and the rank of warrior known as the Seediq Bale. Fast-forward to 1930, and the now mature Mouna Rudo, played by commanding first-timer Lin Ching-tai (林慶台), secretly forms an alliance with other Seediq leaders to stage an attack on the Japanese colonialists who, after taking over Taiwan, have launched a ruthless campaign of suppression against the indigenous tribes, banning their cultural practices and setting out to “civilize” them.
Colombiana
Fast-paced action drama of the chicks-with-heavy-weapons variety. Zoe Saldana, who played the blue-faced Navi love interest in Avatar, is Cataleya, a young woman who survives the assassination of her parents by a drug lord, and turns herself into a stone-cold killer out for vengeance. The screenplay is by Luc Besson, who arguably created this genre with the classic Nikita (1990), and the basic structure of this new film, directed by the wonderfully named action director Olivier Megaton, does not depart much from the original formula, but high production values and quick tempo ensure that audiences have little time to reflect on the lack of originality.
Fright Night 3D
This remake of the 1985 film of the same name is directed by Graig Gillespie and based on a script by Marti Noxon (Mad Men and Buffy the Vampire Slayer). It manages the difficult feat of showing respect to the original while standing on its own two feet as an effective horror movie that balances humor, knowing genre references, and some solid scares. Colin Farrell has found a very comfortable groove as a sly bloodsucker, and there are memorable performances by Christopher Mintz-Plasse and former Dr Who star David Tennant. Even the 3D makes a kind of campy sense with all the fangs and spurting blood, though critic Roger Ebert suggests sticking to old fashioned 2D, as much of the action inevitably takes place at night, and 2D provides a brighter image.
Overheard 2 (竊聽風雲 2)
A stand-alone film in all but name, Overheard 2 shares a general theme of surveillance and financial misdeeds with its namesake, but that’s about all. Some of the same big-name actors also appear, including Lau Ching-wan (劉青雲), Louis Koo (古天樂) and Daniel Wu (吳彥祖), but the characters and the story are totally new. The general buzz online is that this second iteration is vastly superior to the first, with careful plotting and deft handling of the seemingly complex financial transactions that are at the center of the story. Cops and villains battle it out on the street, but soon enough it becomes clear that the real bad guys are the suits sitting in boardrooms of banks and corporations. Solid direction from veterans Alan Mak (麥兆輝) and Felix Chong (莊文強).
Romantics Anonymous
Cute and cozy French romcom by director Jean-Pierre Ameris starring Isabelle Carre and Benoit Poelvoorde, who play two very shy people who take a long time to realize that they are in love. Sound familiar? Fortunately Carre, as a shy but hugely talented chocolatier, is infectiously appealing, and despite the silly and often predictable misunderstandings and pratfalls, keeps the film alive with her beauty and light touch.
Friends With Benefits
Friends With Benefits will be screened today through Monday for the Mid-Autumn Festival, and goes on general release next Friday. The movie, a breezy, speedy and (no kidding) funny comedy with a nicely matched Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, is about love and sex in the age of social networking, and gets some of its juice and tang partly by trash-talking its own genre. The setup is familiar, as are the essential elements: a single man and a single woman, two battered hearts yet a pair of resilient, eager, pretty bodies. Friends With Benefits is certainly likable, but it may be the ugliest digitally shot movie ever released by a major studio. The problem isn’t the serviceable shooting, the camera setups and the like, but the poor digital quality that makes New York look like a blurred Xerox copy and puts so much yellow in the actors’ faces, especially Kunis’; you may think it’s their livers that are giving them trouble instead of their hearts.
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