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.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s