Romancing in Thin Air (高海拔之戀II)
After last year’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (單身男女), a blockbuster aimed at China, Hong Kong director Johnnie To (杜琪?) returns to the big screen with yet another romance. This time, Louis Koo (古天樂) and Sammi Cheng (鄭秀文), who makes a handsome comeback to the silver screen with this finely executed flick after a three-year hiatus, head the cast. Set in the Himalayas in China’s Yunnan Province, where Shangri-la is supposedly located, the film begins with Hong Kong superstar Michael (Koo) escaping to the mythical place to heal his wounded heart after his bride runs away on their wedding day. There he meets hotel proprietor Sue (Cheng), who has been in mourning since her husband disappeared into the nearby forest seven years previously. Friendship and then love bud between the two heartbroken souls. Though the film has its fair share of overwrought plot devices and contrived characters, director To and writer Wai Ka-fai (韋家輝) show their ingenuity by creating a film within a film that blurs the boundary between art and life.
The Lucky One
Based on a work by best-selling author Nicholas Sparks, the tone and direction of The Lucky One will be familiar to people who have enjoyed other adaptations from his books, such as Nights in Rodanthe, The Notebook, and Message in a Bottle. If those films did it for you, The Lucky One, directed by Scott Hicks, who made Shine, and starring Zac Efron, is likely to prove just as effective. Efron is an appealing screen presence, and if the predictability of the story and the sweetness of the romance don’t make you feel ill, then you are likely to slip into the warm, cozy and bitter-sweet world of romantic love that Sparks is such an expert at conjuring up.
The Raid
Action movie fans are in for a treat with The Raid, a no-holds-barred slugfest featuring extensive use of the Indonesian martial arts technique called pencak silat. The story is simple: a SWAT team is tasked with taking out a ruthless mobster who is ensconced at the top of a tower block. They fight their way up floor by floor, and once the violence begins, it is unremitting. There is some suggestion that relations within the SWAT team are not as simple as they might seem at first, but this is really a relatively insignificant digression from the action. Directed by Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans with a mostly Indonesian cast. Although the film is spoken in Indonesian, the dialogue is limited and mostly self-explanatory.
Goodbye First Love (Un amour de jeunesse)
Romantic drama by Mia Hansen-Love, whose Father of My Children was released here last year. That film dealt with a family trying to come to terms with a suicide. In Goodbye First Love, Hansen-Love turns her lens on the development of young love, telling the story of Camille (Lola Creton), who falls head over heels in lust for Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a slightly older boy. When Sullivan drops her to travel the world, Camille discovers another kind of relationship with a much older man, which promises intellectual fulfillment and material stability. Of course, when Sullivan returns, the old fire is once again ignited.
The Kick
South Korean/Thai coproduction about a family of taekwondo experts who relocate to Thailand to set up a gym. They only become an accepted part of the martial arts community in their new home after they help foil a bunch of bank robbers. Needless to say, this scenario provides plenty of opportunities for martial arts action. The fact that one member of the family has ambitions to be a pop star provides an opening for a nice soundtrack as well.
The Wings of the Kirin and Keigo Higashino Fest
The screening of The Wings of the Kirin, which will open in cinemas today, generated such local interest by fans of the best-selling whodunit novels of author Keigo Higashino that the distributor managed to obtain two other films based on his work for a one-day triple feature. The two other films are Before Sunrise and The Hovering Blade. The Wings of the Kirin is a feature spin-off of a popular TV series featuring detective Kyoichiro Kaga (Hiroshi Abe). An intricately crafted plot with plenty of twists and turns keeps the audience engrossed to the end. The triple feature film fest is today at the Ambassador Theater Spring Center (國賓影城長春廣場), 176 Changchun Rd, Taipei City (台北市長春路176號).
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
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