After Earth
A Will Smith vanity project in which the actor co-stars with his son Jaden Smith in a leaden sci-fi adventure that delves through all the cliches of father-son relationships. While Smith the elder produces an acceptable minimalist performance as an elite soldier paralyzed in a post apocalyptic Earth with his son, Smith the younger is unable to carry the heavy burden of the wildly nonsensical roadtrip across a hostile landscape to get some sort of beacon that will save them. The fact that this film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, who has made some of the most willfully self-indulgent and silly movies of the 21th century (The Last Airbender, Signs) should be warning enough that After Earth isn’t going to provide anything as sustaining as a solid genre-type adventure, laden down as it is with aspirations to plumb all sorts of emotional depths. Even the action sequences manage to be profoundly unexciting.
After the Flowers (Hana no Ato)
Directed by Kenji Nakanishi from a story by Shuhei Fujisawa, the author who also provided the material for Yoji Yamada’s samurai trilogy, The Twilight Samurai, The Hidden Blade and Love and Honor, classics of the samurai genre. This fact is recommendation enough. The film starts off unassumingly, with Ito (Keiko Kitagawa), the exquisitely kimonoed daughter of a clan official, meeting with Magoshiro (Shuntaro Miyao), a handsome low-ranking samurai, while on a trip to enjoy the cherry blossoms. Ito is trained in swordsmanship, and the two hit it off, but are bounded by all kinds of social constraints that make the story of star-crossed lovers predictable enough. The story is rooted in human behavior mediated by a rigid social code that brings alive a world that is very different from our own.
The Place Beyond the Pines
A beast of a movie with huge ambitions, some excellent acting, and a roller-coaster of emotions that is constantly in danger of derailing. Whether you think it does or not depends on how you approach it, either as a flawed masterpiece, or just as a horrendous mess of macho posturing. Ryan Gosling is Luke, a stunt motorcycle rider who has strong echoes of his role in Drive, a comparatively safe and tightly structured film. He finds himself resorting to robbery to support his son by waitress Romina (Eva Mendes), but is taken down by rookie cop Avery Cross, (Bradley Cooper). Cooper is moving into new territory with this role, and is almost unrecognizable as a policeman who rises to district attorney after his path briefly crosses that of Luke. Director Derek Cianfrance works too hard to tie up a complex web of stories, and ultimately the 140-minute film becomes weighed down by the weight of its ambition.
Michael H. Profession: Director
A made-for-TV movie about the director Michael Haneke directed by Yves Montmayeur. As is usual with such documentaries, interviews with the subject are intercut with talking heads that include the great and good of European cinema, including the likes of Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert, who speak with great respect for the man and the difficulties of working with such a driven and relentless director. There are many rewarding insights into the Haneke’s work although the director is a notoriously difficult interviewee. That said, the film does well in presenting something a little more than just the cold, clinical and controlling side of his personality. Some familiarity with the Haneke’s work is probably a requirement for this film.
What Maisie Knew
Based on a novel by Henry James, and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, What Maisie Knew is a contemporary adaptation of a once avant-garde novel that has polarized critics, some gushing over the outstanding performances and the “rightness” of the story for contemporary society, while others see it as just a depressing soap about people it is impossible to care for. The film introduces Onata Aprile, whose performance as the young Maisie, caught in the middle of a horrendous tug-of-love between divorced parents and their new partners, has been uniformly praised as an outstanding portrayal of childhood’s mix of knowingness and innocence, and the adult cast, which includes Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan and Alexander Skarsgard are generally excellent.
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
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