Painted Skin: The Resurrection (轉生術)
Films with the word “resurrection” in their title often suggest a lifeless remake or extension of a franchise. In the case of Painted Skin: The Resurrection this is undoubtedly the case. Gordon Chan’s (陳嘉上) Painted Skin (畫皮) in 2008, was a huge success and this second film tries to get a little more mileage out of the classic story taken from Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (聊齋誌異). Directing duties have been taken over by the hyper-stylish Mongolian-born director Wuershan (烏爾善), who came to prominence with the Golden Horse-winning The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman (刀見笑). Wuershan has created a luscious effects-driven movie. As with the original, the film stars Chen Kun (陳坤) and Zhou Xun (周迅), but they have no chemistry as general and a fox demon intent on benefiting from his star-crossed romance with the disfigured Princess Jin, played by Zhao Wei (趙薇). Visually stunning, but without heart.
Rebirth
Based on a popular novel by Mitsuyo Kakuta with a screenplay by Satoko Okudera, this Japanese psychological drama shows the skill of director Izuru Narushima, who manages to take sensational and melodramatic material and present it in a flat, almost documentary style that heightens rather than blunts the emotions on display. A number of fine performances, particularly from Hiromi Nagasaku, who plays a young woman who steals the young child of her married lover and engages in a long-distance rivalry with the child’s birth mother (played by Yoko Moriguchi) before she is finally tracked down by police and put on trial for kidnap. Told in a complex arrangement of flashbacks, the film also tells the story of the child, Erina, who becomes deeply attached to her kidnapper, who shows her nothing but affection and love during their four years together. Narushima, despite the title, refuses to provide any kind of easy redemption for all the emotional suffering that he depicts.
Bliss
Based on an account in the novel Crime by attorney/novelist Ferdinand von Schirach, Bliss tells of love on the harsh Berlin streets between two of society’s disenfranchised: Irena (Alba Rohrwacher), an illegal immigrant who has seen her parents killed and has herself been gang raped during ethnic conflicts in Macedonia, and Kalle (Vinzenz Kiefer), a hard-living, but disconcertingly philosophical, German punk who sleeps rough. Director Doris Doerrie mixes harsh realism with moments of cloying sentiment in a manner that can be profoundly irritating, and resorts to heavy-handed use of the soundtrack and stylistic tricks to build up the emotions in a story that would be quite powerful enough without such enhancements.
Beloved
Director Christophe Honore works from his own screenplay about Madeline, a shopgirl who earns a few extra dollars as a call girl. She meets the man she loves while on the job, gets married, gives birth to a daughter, watches her marriage fall apart, and then sees her daughter making the same sort of mistakes that led her to her current lot. Madeline is played by Ludivine Sagnier as a young girl, and by Catherine Deneuve as a mature woman. Her daughter is played by Chiara Mastroianni, who is a real revelation in this role. There are hints of Pedro Almodovar in Honore’s delight in watching the ways women define themselves; then there are also songs, which can be off-putting if you expected to watch a drama and find yourself floundering in a musical. The quality of the cast makes up for much, but watching Deneuve burst into song produces the same kind of dissonance as Meryl Streep getting lyrical in Mamma Mia!.
Ice Age 4: Continental Drift
The delightful cast is back, but are they beginning to wear out their welcome? Ice Age 4: Continental Drift has many of the same elements that made its predecessors such solid entertainment, including the core characters of Manny (Ray Romano), Sid (John Leguizamo), and Diego (Denis Leary), who continue to entertain. There are even a couple of good ideas in the story, but as with so many franchises, the producers have felt an overpowering need to up the ante, creating an avalanche of new characters (including Jennifer Lopez as a feisty white tigress), ratcheted up the silly scale to include pirates on an ice-boat powered by narwhals and an army of Ewok chipmunks. One can’t help but sigh in weary appreciation at the producers’ efforts, but ultimately, it is the almost silent and wholly iconic Scrat the squirrel who reminds us of the spark that gave life to Ice Age.
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
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
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
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located