Mayday 3DNA (五月天追夢 3DNA)
A concert movie in 3D that includes fictional elements, Mayday’s (五月天) debut foray into cinema demonstrates how the charisma of a big-name pop rock outfit alone cannot save a film. The idea may look good on paper as a music video, but it doesn’t translate well onto the big screen. This packaging of Mayday’s popular concerts, however, does provide a substitute for those who cannot make a live performance. The 3D doesn’t much enhance the spectacle, and CGI technology is used crudely for visual effects. To add narrative weight to the venture, three fictional segments were inserted into the film in which different characters fulfill their dreams to go to a Mayday concert. The movie goes on release this month in nine countries within the Asia-Pacific region, including China, Malaysia, Brunei and Australia. For serious Mayday fans only.
Johnny English Reborn
The first Johnny English movie, a spoof on the James Bond franchise, got a devastatingly poor 33 percent approval from critics on the Rotten Tomatoes film Web site. This second incarnation of British funny man Rowan Atkinson — of Mr Bean fame — as super sleuth Johnny English, is likely to do no better. Brought out of retirement to deal with an assassination attempt against the premier of China, Atkinson has a chance do his shtick in a Shaolin Temple martial arts setting, which has some mildly amusing moments. But there are only so many jokes to be made about a bumbling, inept spy, and most of these have already gone to the place where old jokes go to die. Sadly, director Oliver Parker’s talents in this film do not extend to reincarnation.
Friends With Benefits
Friends With Benefits was screened for four days last week for the Mid-Autumn Festival. It goes on general release today. 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.
Drive
A fast, tough, talent-loaded action movie that made a big impact at Cannes earlier this year. The unnamed central character, played by Ryan Gosling, is a stunt driver by day, but hires himself out to crooks as a short-term getaway driver. Inevitably, one of the heists he is involved in goes badly wrong, and he must find his own salvation. Gosling’s work bares comparison with Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, though rather than horses and a Colt revolver, the mode of transport and weapon of choice are the automobile. The film won director Nicolas Winding Refn the best director award at Cannes, a festival not known for giving away top prizes to action flicks. Playing at Miramar Cinemas (美麗華影城), Dazhi (大直), 22 Jingye 3rd Rd, Taipei City (台北市敬業三路22號), tel: (02) 8161-1900 and Tianmu (天母), 4F, 202, Zhongcheng Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市忠誠路二段202號4樓), tel: (02) 8142-2345. On the Net: www.miramarcinemas.com.tw.
Till You’re Told to Stop: James Blunt
A documentary that charts the meteoric rise of singer-songwriter James Blunt, a British soldier who resigned his commission in the Queen’s Guard to pursue a musical career. The film, by first-time director Ruth Somalo, makes use of plentiful footage collected during the relatively short time that Blunt was a struggling musician. With the release of songs like You’re Beautiful and Goodbye My Lover, which were included on his debut album Back to Bedlam (2004), Blunt rose to international stardom and picked up a slew of awards. Given that his musical range is not very wide, and that his rise to fame was remarkably smooth, even the film’s restrained 83-minute run time might seem a bit long for anyone other than his fans.
Pearl Jam Twenty
This documentary, by the great chronicler of rock ’n’ roll Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous), takes a look at the two-decade long career of Pearl Jam, one of the great survivors of the American music scene. The film brings together huge quantities of archive footage of interviews with the likes of Kurt Cobain and Neil Young. Frontman Eddie Vedder looks back over 20 years of keeping it real, or whatever it is that bands do to survive fame and continue to release music that people continue to listen to. There are those who criticize the group for taking grunge up the commercial high road, and Pearl Jam Twenty is a chance to revisit the music, both as a celebration and a re-evaluation. Playing at Vieshow Cinemas Xinyi (信義威秀), 18 Songshou Rd, Taipei City (台北市松壽路18號), tel: (02) 2757-2345. On the Net: www.vscinemas.com.tw.
Celebrating 100 Years through Song and Dance — A Retrospective of Classic Chinese Musicals (歌聲舞影慶百年)
A film festival of Taiwanese musicals from the 1930s through the 1970s. Screenings are at the Wonderful Theatre (真善美戲院), 7F, 116 Hanzhong St, Taipei City (台北市漢中街116號7樓). Tickets for individual screenings are NT$150. Detailed information about the films and screening times can be found online at cscf100.pixnet.net/blog.
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
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
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