The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
Most of us survived The Twilight Saga, but the tween market is being inundated with ever more ridiculous otherworldly dramas of vampires, demons and saving the world from evil. The Percy Jackson franchise has made it into its second installment already, and now we are threatened with The Mortal Instruments, which clearly has franchise ambitions as well. Percy Jackson is replaced with a female counterpart, Clary Fray (Lily Collins), who learns that she is descended from a line of warriors who protect the world from demons. She joins forces with others like her and embarks on a journey of self-discovery and effects-laden combat with all kinds of CGI-creations. The young cast may for some viewers make up in good looks what they lack in dramatic skill, but there is precious little onscreen chemistry as the actors struggle with the clunky expository dialogue.
We’re the Millers
Comedy about a pot dealer (Jason Sudeikis) who cobbles together a fake family to help him get a huge consignment of marijuana into the US from Mexico. Jennifer Aniston continues to challenge our ability to suspend disbelief by playing a stripper masquerading as his wife. Will Poulter and Emma Roberts complete the set of mum, dad and two kids in a mobile home stacked with drugs. It goes without saying that the trip goes horribly wrong, but the scenario is not without its potential and there is the occasional good laugh, though don’t expect to be going home with aching sides. The problem with We’re the Millers is that it is just not funny enough, or dramatic enough, or oddball enough. It actually is not much more than a sitcom hoisted onto a big screen trying to look like a real film.
Empire State
Dwayne (formerly “the Rock”) Johnson has moved from second-tier fantasy (The Scorpion King) to second-tier action dramas (Fast and Furious five and six), and is broadening out on more ambitious projects like the soon-to-be-released Pain and Grain with Mark Wahlberg. Empire State falls somewhere in between, calling on Johnson’s basic, but more than adequate, acting skills. On this occasion, he actually helps hold together his complex mish-mash of a heist drama starring Liam Hemsworth. The film, which tries to look into the socioeconomic and ethnic divides of New York’s less salubrious neighborhoods, has plenty of ambition but ultimately falls victim to genre cliches. Hemsworth, who played a peripheral romantic interest in The Hunger Games and also featured in The Expendables 2, has his shot at a starring role, but he fails to make himself a real force in the film, overshadowed by his sidekick played by Michael Angarano, and even by Johnson.
Killing Season
A film dealing with the fallout of the Bosnian war that fails to convince, Killing Season has the added disadvantage of John Travolta pretending he is a Serbian assassin with some particularly unconvincing facial hair and an accent that sounds like something out of a variety show sketch. Robert De Niro is an American soldier who experienced the conflict on the front lines, and has subsequently retreated into the picturesque Appalachian Mountains. Travolta’s character arrives to settle all scores and the two engage in a deadly cat-and-mouse game during which secrets on both sides are revealed. The casting is so profoundly unconvincing that not much else matters, but director Mark Steven Johnson tries to shock audiences with some vicious scenes of torture and close combat. This is not enough to give the movie the punch it strives for.
Tiny Times 2.0 (小時代2)
It seems only weeks since the first installment of Tiny Times was released, but already the second installment, billed as even more dramatic, is unleashed onto the big screen. The film continues to follow the four female and four male characters. The casting, calculated to appeal to a wide fan base in the Chinese-speaking world, is Yang Mi (楊冪), Amber Kuo (郭采潔), Hsieh Haden Kuo (郭碧婷) and Hsieh Yi-lin (謝依霖) as the female leads, and Kai Ko (柯震東), Rhydian Vaughan (鳳小岳), Li Yue-ming (李悅銘) and Cheney Chen (陳學冬) as the male. Love, betrayal, easy lies and hard truths get the characters into quite a lather, but in the end, this is little more than a high-end soap.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built