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.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s