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.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and