Battleship
Independence Day meets Transformers in this special effects laden new action drama about the US Navy fighting off an alien incursion. It is about as believable as Rihanna as a sailor on a battleship, fighting the good fight to save humanity. Liam Neeson dials in yet another performance as a stoic tough guy who does what needs to be done. Model Brooklyn Decker provides the eye candy for the boys, and Taylor Kitsch gets his second blockbuster outing following John Carter. Battleship has been built to impress, and if you like giant robots, collapsing cities, the possible (but not probable) destruction of the human race, and some of Hollywood’s hottest bodies, then this is for you.
That Summer (Un ete brulant)
Film from the veteran director Philippe Garrel that is a character sketch of two couples staying in Rome. There is plenty of art and beauty, but the central characters fail to convince. The director’s son Louis Garrel stars as Frederic, a painter, whose marriage with his Italian actress wife Angele (Monica Bellucci) heads south after they are joined by another couple. There is a shortage of chemistry, which in a film about sexual and emotional tensions is fatal, and Garrel has even managed to make Bellucci, one of the most beautiful women in French cinema, look frumpy.
Remember the Italian Auteurs — Antonioni
Mini film fest that brings together three films by the Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni. L’Avventura, Le Amiche and Il Deserto Rosso will be screened at Blossom Digital Cinema (梅花數位影院), 2F, 63, Heping E Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市和平東路三段23號2樓) until April 24. Detailed screening times can be found at the distributor’s Web site at flashforward.pixnet.net/blog.
Elektra Luxx
The second installment in a projected trilogy about a porn star called Elektra (Carla Gugino). The first film, Women in Trouble, was released in 2009. In this iteration, Elektra falls pregnant. A second plot deals with Bert Rodriguez, a sex blogger who is obsessed with Elektra and teaches a How to Act Like a Porn Star in Bed class to Los Angeles housewives at a community center. There are also other subplots, all stitched together rather clumsily. The film is mildly sexy and considerable flesh is bared, but the aim is to tickle the funny bone.
I Wish (Kiseki)
Hirokazu Koreeda, who moved from documentary filmmaking into the indie scene, has now taken aim at the commercial market beyond the art house with I Wish, a cute film about two brothers separated by their parents’ divorce. The siblings come up with a hair-brained scheme to make their wish for a family reunion come true. The premise is ripe for teary melodrama, but Koreeda’s skill and the layering of close observation with fiction lift this film well clear of the melodramatic mainstream.
Red State
Director Kevin Smith has tried repeatedly to regain form since his success with Clerks and Chasing Amy. In Red State, he shifts his gaze from the slacker society of those early movies to the world of Christian fundamentalism. The film, in which a group of young kids looking for sex find themselves kidnapped by a cult led by Abin Cooper, played to mesmerizing effect by Michael Parks, riffs off the horror and torture porn genres. The mix of profanity, absurdity, and occasional moments of real terror give the film a rough charm, but it is too unfinished and shapeless to provide a satisfying film experience.
Stake Land
The undead genre has been going for a long, long time, and it covers a wide swath of material from 28 Days Later to Zombieland. A winner in the Midnight Madness category at the Toronto International Film Festival, Stake Land does not have much that is new, but it has a strong performance by Nick Damici as an unnamed man who leads a small, beleaguered group of humans to possible salvation after much of the country’s population dies and then comes back to life again. In addition to the zombies, there is a fundamentalist militia whose members interpret the crisis as the Lord’s work, giving this splatter film some contemporary ideological edge as well.
Wrecked
A debut film from Michael Greenspan, Wrecked is about a man who wakes up at the bottom of a ravine with terrible injuries, uncertain who he is and why he is where he is. Information leaks into the film through a car radio and occasional flashbacks, and the story keeps you guessing right to the end. Features a strong performance by Adrian Brody. The film aims for cleverness, its structure echoing that of 127 Hours, but in so doing largely sacrifices the suspense that you would expect from a thriller.
The Ward
It has been many years since horror-meister John Carpenter has taken his place in the director’s chair of a major feature film, and it is sad to say that The Ward is unlikely to get anyone terribly excited about his return. The creator of They Live, Escape From New York and The Thing, Carpenter has such a command over the basic skills of making horror that even this rather generic flick can be seen as a masterclass of what can be done with good old-fashioned storytelling and old-school effects. The film plays off the fears of invasive psychological therapy, packing a solid punch though never breaking into new territory.
When Pigs Have Wings
A European coproduction set in Gaza that tells the story of Jafaar, a poor Palestinian fisherman who finds a pig in his nets. His financial situation dictates that he find a buyer for this unclean beast, but this is, of course, easier said than done. Humor follows. A strong performance by Sasson Gabay as Jafaar and some amusing ideas (not least dressing the pig in a sheepskin to avoid giving offense to his Muslim brethren), balanced against strong confrontation between Jafaar and his wife, and the Palestinian community with Israeli soldiers, provide a more serious context for this porky predicament.
We Not Naughty (孩子不壞)
Prolific Singaporean director Jack Neo (梁智強) is back with yet another film satirizing various aspects of Asian, particularly Singaporean, culture. Money Not Enough mixed incisive social commentary with rollicking humor that painted a less than complimentary picture of the city-state and its people. In We Not Naughty, Neo has become too entangled in his social message, and attempts to touch on gambling addiction, family violence, the negative influence of the media, criminal gangs, Chinese-language education and much else. All this baggage is too heavy for what is essentially a situational family comedy.
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