Shame
Following on from the sensational Hunger, a film about Irish republican Bobby Sands’ hunger strike, director Steve McQueen is once again pushing spiritual and physical boundaries with his latest film, Shame, which is about a young man addicted to sex. The film has received almost unanimous praise from critics, who laud McQueen’s discipline and rigor in presenting such a difficult topic. As with Hunger, the film stars Michael Fassbender, who once again plays a complex role with utter conviction. The intense sadness of watching a man being destroyed by addiction (especially to sex, something that is usually glamorized in cinema), is both mesmerizing and horrific. A strong supporting performance by Carey Mulligan (An Education, Drive) as the protagonist’s needy sister, who disrupts his carefully choreographed existence, is also excellent.
The Lady
Not to be confused with The Iron Lady, The Lady is a tribute to the heroic effort of Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi to bring democracy to Myanmar. Like many tributes, it goes on for too long. Despite a solid performance by Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) in the title role, The Lady is heavy going at 132 minutes, given that its protagonist spends much of her time in the limbo of house arrest. Director Luc Besson, a specialist in action movies, seems to have decided to forgo any type of edginess in this worthy presentation of Aung San Suu Kyi’s life, giving the bare bones of a story about dignity in the face of evil. Unfortunately, he never gets beneath the surface of what drives Aung San Suu Kyi in her decades-long resistance to the military junta. Production values are excellent, but the screenplay by Rebecca Frayn rarely rises above platitudes, and neither the political turmoil nor the domestic tragedy of Aung San Suu Kyi’s relationship with her husband ever really come to life.
Gone
Amanda Seyfried is a wonderful actress to watch, and in Heitor Dhalia’s Gone, she is put in a role that has been inhabited by countless beautiful actresses before her. Seyfried is Jill, a survivor from a brutal abduction who comes home one day to find that her sister has gone. She thinks it is the same person who abducted her, but the police don’t want to take her seriously. From a maiden-in-distress, she becomes a loose cannon on the street, searching through a dark underworld of criminality to find her sister. It all goes like clockwork, which in a thriller is absolutely not what you want. Dhalia leaves no room for surprises, the characters are largely cardboard cutouts, and the conclusion is likely to elevate your disappointment with the film to a whole new level.
Act of Valor
An action film about a covert Navy SEAL operation to recover a kidnapped CIA agent that began life as a recruiting ploy for the military and features a number of actual members of elite military units as members of the cast. Pentagon restrictions on depictions of covert operations were supposedly relaxed for the film. The result is a superior action flick that has a slight veneer of reality TV. If you can stomach the heavy doses of patriotism, it provides some new angles on the overworked cliches of Hollywood war films. There is plenty of military hardware on show, but the script gets mauled by the less-than-outstanding acting skills of the professional soldiers. A must for military geeks and war film fans.
23.59 Horror Festival (三驚半月影展)
Three Asian horror flicks make up this mini festival of horror. The lineup: 3xTrouble (行X踏錯), a Malaysian movie that stars Taiwanese singer and model Landy Wen (溫嵐) and follows three night market vendors as they get caught up in the investigation of a gruesome murder; Twisted (撞鬼) from Singapore, a package of three shorts by director Tsai Yu-wei (蔡於位); and 23:59, a horror story, supposedly based on supposedly real events, set in a military barracks in Singapore. The festival runs until March 30. More information about the films and screening times can be found at www.facebook.com/3HorrorFF.
Le Havre
A movie by Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki, who is widely regarded as the inheritor of the comic-humanist tradition of Jean Renoir and Jacques Tati. It is a film that not only looks back fondly at older cinematic traditions, but also at an older, even slightly unreal world of community values and decency. It is the story of a shoeshine man working the port of Le Havre who takes in a young illegal immigrant from Gabon, hiding him from the police until a way can be devised to ship the boy to England, where he has family. Kaurismaki is not making a film about the inequalities of the world; he thinks his audience is smart enough to know about that. His theme instead is the kind of human spirit that can not just survive, but celebrates life despite its many deficiencies.
Always
South Korean film by Song Il-gon, a director who has made an international reputation with films such as Spider Forest. Always is a rather unexpected turn into the realm of the all-too-familiar Asian soap opera. An ex-boxer decides to re-enter the ring for a no-holds-barred fight to earn the money for his blind girlfriend to get an operation that will restore her eyesight. Despite having mega-stars So Ji-sub in Han Hyo-ju in the leading roles, the story never rises above its soapsuds roots.
Beethoven Symphonies No. 7 and No. 9
Another in a series of recordings released under the Unitel label, the film presents Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and Symphony No. 9 as performed by the Berliner Philharmonic Orchestra under Herbert von Karajan. These performances are part of a series created by Karajan during the 1960s and early 1970s that shows him at the height of his powers.
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