Captain Phillips
Director Paul Greengrass is an acknowledged master of the action thriller, with two of the greatest films of that genre, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum to his credit. With Captain Phillips he takes a story based on an actual incident in which Captain Richard Phillips and his ship, the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, were boarded by Somali pirates. He was subsequently rescued in a daring operation by Navy Seals. Anchoring the movie are two fine performances by Tom Hanks as the captain of the title, and Barkhad Abdi as the head of the Somali pirates, who face off through a number of tense days as the pirates try to escape with their prize. Hanks and Abdi develop a complex human drama even as Greengrass pushes the action into overdrive. There are many edge-of-seat action sequences, handled with Greengrass’ usual finesse, which are given emotional traction both by the characters and the complex context of piracy in the modern age.
The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman
A crime romance starring Shia LaBeouf, Evan Rachel Wood and Mads Mikkelsen looks promising at the beginning, and even LaBeouf looks like he might be tolerable as a young traveler who finds himself thrown together with a woman (Wood) who is claimed by a violent criminal (Mikkelssen). The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman shows plenty of enthusiasm by director Fredrik Bond, and LaBeouf, who remains indelibly associated with the appalling Transformer franchise, throws himself into his role with a degree of emotional recklessness that is disarming, disconcerting, and which may have been effective if the script gave him any kind of help at all. It doesn’t, and once again LaBeouf comes across as a hopeless dweeb who it is impossible to sympathize with. Mikkelssen does the kind of cold evil that is one of his specialties, but it is a dialed-in performance, and all Bond’s cinematographic whizz-bang used to create the seedy criminal world in which Charlie Countryman finds himself fails to make the film interesting.
Haute Cuisine
A foodie film that is light on drama but is tantalizing enough to have foodies salivating at the delicious food brought to the table. Directed by Christian Vincent, Haute Cuisine tells the story of Hortense Laborie, a celebrated chef living in the Perigord region who is appointed as private chef to the French president. For a while, she manages to impose herself on the presidential kitchen despite the jealousies she arouses among the other chefs in the presidential kitchen, She insists on stylish and authentic cuisine, and Vincent clearly has an eye for presenting culinary art on screen. But while the food might excite, the drama between Laborie and her male-dominated kitchen is pretty lightweight. Foodies will have their eyes on the glories of French culinary art, and the insubstantial content will probably be forgiven.
Baby Blues (詭嬰)
A 3D horror movie from director Leung Po-chi (梁普智) and starring singer Raymond Lam (林峰). The main selling point of Baby Blues is the big-budget 3D effects that publicists boast brings Asian 3D filming a major step up toward the best Hollywood product. The story itself does not break any new ground. A young couple moves into a new house. A doll is found there and kept. Lam plays a successful musician who just after moving to the house composes an eerie song; bad things happen to people who listen to it, though; and as can be expected, the doll comes to life and gets up to all kinds of mischief. Have we seen these things before? Of course, but the project has a number of big names from the Hong Kong music industry involved, and the visual effects and score are likely to prove a major draw.
Mida (夢見)
Animated fantasy by local director Chang Yung-chang (張永昌) has big ambitions to tell a story about the power of dreams. The story is about a high-school girl who has particularly vivid dreams of terrible events to come. She meets with a dream therapist Mida who has the power to enter her dreams and even link the dreams of different people. Mida’s work attracts the attention of government authorities who want to harness her power for their own ends. Mida finds herself in terrible danger, but also meets a kindred spirit, and the two must fight to preserve their freedom. The quality of the animation and visual design is rather crude, as is the storytelling, never achieving either a science-fiction slickness of something like Akira or the dreamlike whimsy of the works of Hayao Miyazaki.
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would