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.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
By far the most jarring of the new appointments for the incoming administration is that of Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) to head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). That is a huge demotion for one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tseng has one of the most impressive resumes in the party. He was very active during the Wild Lily Movement and his generation is now the one taking power. He has served in many of the requisite government, party and elected positions to build out a solid political profile. Elected as mayor of Taoyuan as part of the
Moritz Mieg, 22, lay face down in the rubble, the ground shaking violently beneath him. Boulders crashed down around him, some stones hitting his back. “I just hoped that it would be one big hit and over, because I did not want to be hit nearly to death and then have to slowly die,” the student from Germany tells Taipei Times. MORNING WALK Early on April 3, Mieg set out on a scenic hike through Taroko Gorge in Hualien County (花蓮). It was a fine day for it. Little did he know that the complex intersection of tectonic plates Taiwan sits
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50