Bad Girls (女孩壞壞)
A lighthearted action/romance from emerging female director Seven (翁靖廷) that plays with genre conventions of the adolescent movie. A kind of girl’s take on the hugely successful You Are the Apple of My Eye (那些年，我們ㄧ起追的女孩), the film stars Ella Chen (陳嘉樺), formerly of Taiwan girl band S.H.E, as the leader of a pack of girls who have a strong sense of social responsibility and a powerful dislike of the shallow and chauvinistic boys they see all around them. The arrival of a celebrity, played by Mike Ha (賀軍翔), causes sneers of derision, until the inevitable happens. Two very different personalities gradually fall for each other. The film also seeks to appeal to the foodie crowd with a cameo role for Taiwan’s most famous baker, Wu Pao-chun (吳寶春), who has won a host of prestigious international baking awards.
Xin Hai Ge Ming (1911—辛亥革命)
Another big-budget historical drama from China. Action hero Jackie Chan (成龍) does double duty as director and Huang Xing (黃興), a general and statesman who joined the 1911 revolution that shaped modern China. The film is long on big set-piece battles and expositional speechifying, and very short on any real drama. Chan is joined by the likes of Winston Chao (趙文瑄), as Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) and Li Bingbing (李冰冰) as Hsu Zonghan (徐宗漢), a rich widow who took up the revolutionary cause and was closely connected to Huang. Chan is all seriousness in his first fully dramatic role, denying himself, and the audience, his vivacity and physical humor. One of the most interesting things about the film is that it’s Chan’s 100th movie. Quite a record!
Mirror Mirror
Directed by music video maker Tarsem Singh and starring Julia Roberts as the evil queen in this revisionist version of Snow White, Mirror Mirror is proof, if proof were needed, that however good a film looks, there needs to be something going on beneath the surface. The surfaces in Mirror Mirror are impressive, giving a slick contemporary sheen to the venerable tale. Roberts is always a pleasure to watch, and the costumes by Japanese designer Eiko Ishioka are to die for, but all these visuals never quite manage to bring the film to life. This is a splendid piece of window dressing.
Elles
French film about a journalist, played by Juliette Binoche, who is investigating the subject of teenage prostitution. Binoche works hard to track the development of her character, who becomes increasingly shocked by what she learns, and somewhat restive about the sterility of her own existence. Unfortunately, director Malgorzata Szumowska seems intent on providing plenty of voyeuristic titillation for his audience, which makes the film almost as exploitative as the dirty business which it purports to describe.
A Little Bit of Heaven
When filmmakers try and put terminal illness, comedy and romance together, they enter dangerous territory. The laughter-and-tears formula often falls victim to irredeemable shallowness and cynicism. The story of A Little Bit of Heaven focuses on Marley Corbett (Kate Hudson), a vivacious, spirited 30-something who is determined to live life to the full, free of constraints. Diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, she calls on all her resources to look life in the face, and at this most trying time, also discovers true love with her sexy oncologist, Julian Goldstein (Gael Garcia Bernal). Cancer is given the Hollywood makeover, and even going through chemotherapy, Hudson keeps her beautiful complexion and full head of golden locks. While the plot and humor are all very nuts-and-bolts chick-flick material, and competently put together, if you don’t leave the cinema in disgust, you’ll probably be reaching for the tissues.
Titanic
After the considerable success of the Lion King 3D conversion released last year, it is no surprise that a slew of retrofitted back-catalog releases have recently hit the screen. James Cameron was an early critic of post-production conversions, but reports suggest that the director has immersed himself in the technical process to make sure everything gets done right. Those who loved the original may find something more with the additional dimension, but Roger Ebert complains that releasing a 3D version is “a shabby way to treat a masterpiece.”
Dark Flight
The first feature length 3D horror film from Thailand, Dark Flight is directed by Isaara Nadee and stars Marsha Vadhanapanich as a flight attendant with a troubled past who finds herself on an aircraft filled with the ghosts of passengers who have died during airplane accidents. The passengers on the flight spend a good deal of time looking scared, but unfortunately this sense of fright does not transfer to the audience.
The Bird Who Saved the World (什麼鳥日子)
A springboard for singer-songwriter William Wei (韋禮安) into the cinema business, The Bird Who Saved the World falls victim to a case of insufferable whimsy. Wei plays an aspiring singer who is at a crossroads, wondering whether to pursue his career as a musician. At this difficult time, a giant bird enters his life, giving him a new perspective in assessing his future. This fantastic creature, the nature of whose existence we are free to speculate about, builds a strong relationship with the central character, but begins to fade from his life as things fall into place. The larger-than-life bird is rumored to have cost NT$150,000 to build.
The 33D Invader (蜜桃成熟時33D)
Soft porn, cheap humor and even cheaper special effects join forces in this wannabe cult classic from Cash Chin (錢文錡), the director of Sex and Zen II (玉蒲團II — 玉女心經), The Fruit Is Ripe 3 (蜜桃成熟時3 — 蜜桃仙子), The Forbidden Legend: Sex and Chopsticks (金瓶梅) and many other raunchy flicks. In 33D, Chin has brought in Japanese porn legend Taka Kato, who has been nicknamed “Goldfinger” for his skills at digital manipulation (ample details available online), and Akiho Yoshizawa, also from the Japanese hard-core scene. The story revolves around a man from the future who comes to the present time in search of the perfect woman. But no one really cares, as this is basically a sci-fi skin flick with silly special effects.
Love Is Infinity: Romantic and Heartwarming Film Festival (愛∞無限:2012全球浪漫溫馨傑作精選)
A catchall mini film fest that brings together films with a romantic theme from around the world. The program includes The Romantics, Welcome to the Rileys, Leila, Mother and Child, Beloved Berlin Wall, Everything Must Go, Ondine, The Good Guy, The Greatest, City Island, An Invisible Sign, The Open Road, The Winning Season, Then She Found Me, Under the Same Moon, Little White Lies, My Week With Marilyn and Creation. The festival runs until April 27. A special deal of four tickets for NT$796 is available through the distributor’s Web site (catchplay.me) and at 7-Eleven ibon kiosks. All screenings are at SPOT — Taipei Film House (光點台北), 18, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市中山北路二段18號). Detailed information can be found at www.catchplay.com/festival.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
What a gift Werner Herzog offers with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, an inside look at the astonishing Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc — and in 3D too. In southern France, about 644km from Paris, the limestone cave contains a wealth of early paintings, perhaps from as long ago as 32,000 years. Here, amid gleaming stalactites and stalagmites and a carpet of animal bones, beautiful images of horses gallop on walls alongside bison and a ghostly menagerie of cave lions, cave bears and woolly mammoths. As the smooth-handed director of photography Peter Zeitlinger wields the camera, Herzog walks and even crawls for your viewing pleasure. He’s an agreeable, sometimes characteristically funny guide, whether showing you the paintings or talking with the men and women who study them.
Taiwan’s overtaking of South Korea in GDP per capita is not a temporary anomaly, but the result of deeper structural problems in the South Korean economy says Chang Young-chul, the former CEO of Korea Asset Management Corp. Chang says that while it reflects Taiwan’s own gains, it also highlights weakening growth momentum in South Korea. As design and foundry capabilities become more important in the AI era, Seoul risks losing competitiveness if it relies too heavily on memory chips. IMF forecasts showing Taiwan widening its lead over South Korea have fueled debate in Seoul over memory chip dependence, industrial policy and
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
There is considerable frustration and confusion among many, both in Taiwan and abroad — including in Washington — as to why the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) seems so dead set on using their legislative leverage to slash defense spending and disrupt the ability of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration to function. Are they pawns of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Are they traitors? In reality, there are multiple reasons. In the first column in this series on this subject, “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How and why the TPP and KMT help Beijing” (Sat May 16, page 12), we examined three
It took 12 years and months of standing in the same mountain location for director Liang Chieh-te (梁皆得) to capture a few seconds of footage: Taiwan’s largest resident raptor locking talons with its mate and spinning through the air in a courtship ritual. With only about 1,000 left in the wild and very short flight windows, the mountain hawk-eagle remains among Taiwan’s most elusive birds. The species generally produces only one offspring per year. Using forest cameras, the film crew and research teams document the arduous process the monogamous pairs go through for the chick to hatch and grow up, weathering
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