War Horse
As a director, Steven Spielberg can be a deeply sentimental guy. Think Empire of the Sun, Amistad and Saving Private Ryan. In these films, Spielberg’s mix of high seriousness and firm hold on the heartstrings can be very effective if sometimes a trifle stodgy. In War Horse, Spielberg steers clear of political themes and lets rip with a poem to the power of the human spirit to triumph over adversity. But the film’s background, World War I, is largely ignored. Boy meets horse, horse gets appropriated by the army, boy joins up, both endure untold horrors of a world in chaos, both survive and are eventually reunited by small acts of compassion by a wide range of characters. You can give yourself over to the director, who will have you weeping rivers, or you can curse his manipulative sentimentality. The cast is exemplary and the production top-notch. Whatever you think about the story, it is a beautiful work of cinematic craftsmanship.
The Descendants
George Clooney has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most thoughtful actors and filmmakers, and with The Descendants, he has critics raving at what must surely be one of the strongest entries in the Oscars this year. Working with Alexander Payne (Sideways, About Schmidt), who has both director and writer credits for this picture, Clooney provides a highly nuanced portrait of Matt King, a workaholic lawyer living in Hawaii who discovers that all the cliches about living in paradise don’t add up when you are busy creating your own hell-on-earth. Matt’s efforts to reconnect with his two daughters after the death of his joyrider wife manage to mix the comic and tragic in ways that are very rarely successful, but when they succeed, as they largely do in The Descendants, it creates one of those classic takes on the human condition that is likely to be referenced for many years to come. High-class entertainment that also provides a window into deeper issues of love, loss and living with family.
The Awakening
Debut feature for director Nick Murphy, The Awakening owes a little too much to films like The Others and The Orphanage in creating its creepy atmosphere, and despite a few well-constructed scares, it follows a well-trodden path. The includes Dominic West, Imelda Staunton and Rebecca Hall as Florence Cathcart, a ghost-buster who after some success breaking up a hoax, finds herself face-to-face with some real nastiness when investigating ghostly manifestations at a boy’s boarding school. A lack of any real commitment to the period background and weak dynamics between the characters wastes the talents of the cast.
Machine Gun Preacher
Starring Gerard Butler as a drug-dealing biker who finds god and becomes a crusader for Sudanese children, Machine Gun Preacher is billed as being based on a “true story.” Unfortunately, despite seemingly noble intentions to tell an inspiring story, the film veers off into action movie territory, skewing what is clearly a fascinating tale. Butler does his best, but his acting range isn’t broad enough to encompass the complex character of Sam Childers, who exchanges violence on the streets of Pennsylvania for even more violence in the wilderness of East Africa.
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
Nicolas Cage is back as Johnny Blaze, burning up the highway and shooting things. Reviews of the first film in the Marvel comic franchise, Ghost Rider, released in 2007, received mixed reviews at best, and it is safe to say that Johnny has a long way to go before achieving the kind of appeal of Spiderman, aka Peter Parker. Clearly directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are aiming for a kind of high school schlock vibe, but the film is undone by its aspirations to deeper, darker subtexts about evil, the devil, and other cool stuff. It’s probably a good thing that Old Horse Face spends a good deal of time in a CGI blaze, for the explosions are about the only real sparks that the film generates.
The Chopin Piano Concertos
This is basically a concert recording of performances given during the Ruhr Piano Festival in 2010 with The Staatskapelle Berlin and pianist Daniel Barenboim conducted by Andris Nelsons. Mounted, in part, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederic Chopin, the concert’s program includes the Polish composer’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21 and Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 11.
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
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
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
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located