The Heat
Do we really need a female cop buddy movie that falls somewhere between Lethal Weapon and Bad Boys? Probably not, but we have got it anyway, and with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy at the helm, the film manages to hit the funny bone on a pretty regular basis, even if some audiences are likely to find the humor grotesque. The director is Paul Feig, who has a track record in American TV comedy that includes Arrested Development and The Office, and whose 2011 feature Bridesmaids proved that he could span the feature film divide. With The Heat, he has created a crude, low-brow audience-pleaser that plays to the strengths of his two stars. Dialogue is sharp and tightly edited, and is well-synced with the physical humor; the first is often profane, and the second violent to an extreme, but cast and crew give themselves over to the wholesale mayhem of The Heat to create something really quite funny.
Pacific Rim
There are big fighting robots and Godzilla-type monsters, the kind of overblown apocalyptic scenario of Transformers, and the anime absurdity of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. There is an abundance of blockbuster silliness in a story about super robots battling invading aliens coming through a wormhole in the Pacific Ocean. The robots are piloted by twin controllers who are required to enter into a kind of mind-meld, providing a core of pop psychology that takes the place of actual emotional interaction. At the helm of this bizarre story is the creative talents of Guillermo del Toro, who has proven with film’s such as the Hellboy franchise that he can provide both depth and visual impact to fantasy features. It is tempting to think that the visual elements will overwhelm attempts to achieve anything deeper, and the referencing of the kind of boy’s adventure emotions of Top Gun doesn’t do much to alter this, but del Toro is a master of his craft and he may well be able to turn this unpromising material into something more than the sum of its parts.
Casting By
A documentary that looks at one of the most neglected roles in the film industry, that of casting director, and focuses particularly on the work of Marion Dougherty, who not only more or less created that position, but also anchored it as part of the creative process for some of the greatest films to come out of Hollywood. Dougherty helped break the mold of only casting the most handsome or beautiful, and helped to launch the careers of actors such as Robert Duvall and Glenn Close. Her vision helped create the groundbreaking look of such films as Midnight Cowboy, Panic in Needle Park and Taxi Driver. While inevitably a bit of a hagiography, with the good and great of Hollywood speaking about her genius, the film provides a look at how one woman’s commitment changed an important aspect of the Hollywood system. A must see for cinephiles.
The Rooftop (天台)
Jay Chou’s (周杰倫) second attempt at making a feature film, following on from his less than mind-blowing Secret (不能說的秘密) in 2007. Roof Top is a romantic fantasy set in a fictional Asian town that plays to a nostalgia of Taiwan’s “good old days” of innocence and friendship. Chou plays a handsome young man from the slums who has his heart set on Xin Ai (心艾), an emerging entertainment industry star, played by newcomer Li Xinai (李心艾). The two meet by accident and an unlikely romance blossoms, though this inevitably meets with resistance and draws Chou’s character into all kinds of capers. Chou sets aside his celebrity status to play a poor boy with nothing, who teaches his love interest that the outward trappings of celebrity are not worth the candle. Inevitably, the result is somewhat contrived and self-serving.
The Girl with Nine Wigs
Films about beautiful, caring people dying of cancer usually sound all kinds of alarm bells, offering as they do far too many opportunities for a poisonous mix of heavy melodrama and cheap sentimentality. The Girl with Nine Wigs, based on a best-selling German novel by Sophie van der Stap and directed by Marc Rothemund, has, by all accounts, managed to avoid the worst of these pitfalls. It features a strong performance by Lisa Tomaschewsky, who captures the mix of tenacity, vulnerability and confusion in a young woman faced with the horrors of chemotherapy just at the moment when she thought her life was about to really begin. Inspiring and uplifting, if not exactly a bundle of laughs.
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