My Week With Marilyn
With a similar premise to the delightful Me and Orson Wells, My Week With Marilyn takes an everyday kind of guy and puts him together with a great cinematic icon, in this case Marilyn Monroe. For those who buy Michelle Williams’ performance, the film is a gem, but if you don’t, the movie becomes rather less effective, though with a supporting cast that includes contemporary acting royalty playing the roles of Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench), there is such a wealth of talent, all very astutely marshaled by director Simon Curtis, that the flick has charm, energy and beauty to spare. The film is based on the diary of Colin Clark (played in the film by Eddie Redmayne), a young man who found himself looking after Monroe for one week when she was in London for the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl in the 1950s. A nobody in a world of theatrical titans, he catches a glimpse of the Marilyn that her contemporaries were unable to see.
Sleeping Beauty
The debut feature by Australian Julia Leigh, who also wrote the screenplay, and made under the aegis of Jane Campion (The Piano, Bright Star), Sleeping Beauty tells the story of a young university student who becomes involved in erotic entertainments for older men. The film, which stars Emily Browning (Sucker Punch), fetishizes its lead, making her a kind of erotic object of desire, building its dramatic tension through the disconnect between her passive role as a provider of amatory fantasy and her own sexual desires. With a strong psychosexual theme and a languid pace, Sleeping Beauty is likely to divide audiences between those who can embrace its strangeness and those who simply find it pretentious. We get to see a very great deal of Browning, the camera lingering over her generally unclothed body, which may be enough of an attraction in itself, but there are also some interesting, if rather peculiar, reflections on sexuality as well.
Love Is Not Blind (失戀33天)
Romantic comedy that relies on a decent story and good chemistry between the two leads; the absence of either high artistic pretension or absurd slapstick also helps. The story revolves around the romantic life of Xiaoxian (played by Bai Baihe, 白百何), a wedding planner, who catches her fiance and her best friend kissing in a Beijing shopping mall. She gets lots of support from her gay colleague Xiaojian (played by Wen Zhang, 文章), and it is this friendship that holds the movie up. Within the genre conventions of the rom-com, Love Is Not Blind is not without insight into the lives of young Chinese urbanities trying to juggle sexual independence and old-fashioned romantic fantasy.
Sengoku Basara — The Last Party
A feature film installment that follows on from a popular anime series of the same name. The backstory is hugely complex and the film dives into the action, winning praise from fans for taking the whole production to a new level. But if you have not been a regular viewer of the TV series, which started in 2009, you are likely to get thoroughly lost in the intricacies of the plot. Set in the Warring States period of Japanese history just prior to the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate, various warlords battle and intrigue for supremacy. There is no aspiration to historical accuracy, though the film takes the story up to the Battle of Sekigahara, which determined the final winner of the conflict.
Mahler Symphony No. 2 in C Minor “Resurrection”
A classical music recording released on the big screen that presents Leonard Bernstein conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. The recording is part of a 20-year-long association between Bernstein and the Unitel label to release a complete cycle of Mahler recordings. The performance features soloists Sheila Armstrong and Janet Baker. The series of recordings, mostly made between 1971 and 1985, is credited with triggering a major re-appreciation of Mahler’s work.
When Yesterday Comes (昨日的記憶)
Following the success of The Long Goodbye (被遺忘的時光), the Taiwan Catholic Foundation of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia (財團法人天主教失智老人社會福利基金會) has embarked on a second documentary film dealing with the plight of elderly people suffering from conditions like Alzheimer’s and other degenerative disorders resulting in memory loss. When Yesterday Comes takes the route of a compendium of four shorts by different directors. The films are in different styles and reflect the sensibilities of directors Ho Wi-ding (何蔚庭), Shen Ko-shang (沈可尚), Chiang Hsiu-chiung (姜秀瓊) and Singing Chen (陳芯宜). The project has enlisted the participation of a number of well-known actors, particularly Chang Chen (張震) and Sonia Sui (隋棠) in the segment titled Healing.
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