The Host
If The Twilight Saga has not satiated your craving for teen romance in a world threatened by the supernatural, there is now The Host, also based on a novel by Twilight author Stephenie Meyer and featuring many varieties of overwrought adolescent emotion. When an unseen enemy threatens mankind by taking over their bodies and erasing their memories, Melanie (Saoirse Ronan) risks everything to protect the people she cares most about. Transcendent love once again proves to be a force that aliens have not reckoned with. Directed by Andrew Niccol, who wrote and directed the excellent Gattaca in 1997, isn’t doing himself any favors with this ponderous, self-important production, but Ronan proves once again that she can shine even in unpromising material.
Saving General Yang (忠烈楊家將)
Big-budget kungfu drama from Hong Kong director Ronny Yu (于仁泰), whose Fearless (霍元甲) back in 2006 proved a massive box office success in the region. With Saving General Yang, Yu has drawn on a classic of Chinese literature, telling the story set during the sunset years of the Song Dynasty, when nomads from the north were pressing hard on China’s borders and power struggles where tearing the government apart from within. The film mixes a small dose of intrigue with big battle sequences and powerful, though often rather one-dimensional, emotions. The story about seven brothers facing the might of the nomadic Liao kingdom in an effort to rescue their father is inevitably dominated by forthright, manly passions, and lots of hacking up of hapless extras. The film also sees the debut of Taiwan’s Vic Chow (周渝民) in a costume drama.
The Croods
It’s not terribly sophisticated, but who cares? Summer is coming, and light, easy entertainment that does that insult your intelligence is something to be cherished on those occasions when a trip to the cinema is required for the whole family. Ok, the film does feature Nicolas Cage, but at least it is only his voice, and you don’t have to actually see him or his hairstyle. The story is a familiar one about a family adapting to unfamiliar circumstances, though in this case the family is the Croods, a group of early Homo sapiens faced with catastrophic environmental change. It’s kind of Ice Age with people and family instead of buddy dynamics. Emma Stone voices Eep, a teenage girl who is the central character, and there is plenty of well-worn humor rejigged for a Paleolithic setting.
Snitch
A hard-hitting action flick with a social conscience features Dwayne (formerly “The Rock”) Johnson as a dad who goes undercover for the DEA in an effort to obtain a plea bargain to get his son off a charge of drug smuggling. Susan Sarandon is the tough DA who wants to get the most out of the deal as possible, and Johnson is soon up to this biceps in seedy Mexican drug barons, heavy-duty armaments and big car chases. Johnson has been lauded by some critics for his convincing imitation of acting, while others have seen the film’s attempt to deal with serious issues of law enforcement as a fatal flaw that tears the film apart as it tries to balance the adrenalin rush of big stunts with a discourse on the judicial system. Directed by Ric Waugh, a stunt coordinator turned director, the action is good enough to cover the film’s other failings.
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (明天記得愛上我)
Directed by Arvin Chen (陳駿霖), who had considerable success with Au Revoir Taipei (一頁台北) in 2009, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? is yet another urban romance that draws inspiration from the melodramatic style of TV soaps. It sports a big name cast, which may or may not be enough to bring in the punters. Mavis Fan (范曉萱) playing Ah Feng, a woman who believes that she has the perfect marriage with optician Wei Chung (Richie Ren, 任賢齊), discovers that not everything is as rosy as its seems; it turns out Wei has a romantic past that is not completely over and done with. Wei’s sister does a runner at the altar steps in the hope of finding true love. The film rings the changes competently enough but doesn’t go anywhere you wouldn’t expect.
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
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
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