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.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
A sultry sea mist blankets New Taipei City as I pedal from Tamsui District (淡水) up the coast. This might not be ideal beach weather but it’s fine weather for riding –– the cloud cover sheltering arms and legs from the scourge of the subtropical sun. The dedicated bikeway that connects downtown Taipei with the west coast of New Taipei City ends just past Fisherman’s Wharf (漁人碼頭) so I’m not the only cyclist jostling for space among the SUVs and scooters on National Highway No. 2. Many Lycra-clad enthusiasts are racing north on stealthy Giants and Meridas, rounding “the crown coast”
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and