Carrie
Much as it is a pleasure to see Chloe Moretz back on the big screen without the comic book Hit Girl outfit, the question is: Do we really need a remake of Carrie? The film that virtually created the subgenre of teen horror. Most everybody knows the story, and from the start it is clear that director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) has nailed most of the main elements. But her control of tone is a little suspect, but with Moretz supported by Julianne Moore, an actress who has a line on crazy that few can match, it remains interesting to see how Carrie has been updated. The psychology of the relationship between mother and daughter is well captured, but the school scenes sometimes look just a bit too High School Musical to feel quite right. Peirce does not break any new ground, and has smoothed off some rough edges from the Brian De Palma original. Oddly, this manages only to highlight how we might miss the occasional weirdness of the original.
The Fifth Estate
The fallout of Wikileaks is still falling but already the drama based on actual events is ready to hit the big screen. The film cannot help but be topical, and there is an outstanding performance by Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange, but in its headlong rush to cover all the contextual bases, The Fifth Estate burdens itself with a load of exposition under the weight of which the film is constantly in danger of sinking. Director Bill Condon is at pains to show that the Brave New World of technology we live in is like nothing else that has gone before, but unlike The Social Network, The Fifth Estate does not manage to remind us how new, and life-changing, all this techno whizz-bang really is. Condon seems content to let the mechanics of the political intrigue movie take over, and while the film gallops head-on, content with itself, it follows a groove that is a little too worn.
Homefront
Another action-packed Jason Statham cops and bad-guys flick that manages to tick most of the boxes for action fans but is not likely to stay in the memory for very long. The fact that Homefront was penned by Sylvester Stallone, putting it firmly in the screenwriting tradition of Rocky, Rambo and The Expendables, might give potential viewers some pause, but to give Stallone his due, the dialogue is far from being the worst you can find in this very high-paced, not to say, expendable, genre. Statham plays a DEA agent who finds his retirement disrupted when his identity is rumbled by the local meth chef in the small town he has retired to with his family. Bad things inevitably happen and Statham has plenty of opportunities to make the bad guys pay. James Franco makes for a sinister villain, adding a bit of luster to the movie.
Camille Claudel, 1915
Juliette Binoche plays sculptress and lover of Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel, in a mini-biopic that focuses on a short period at the end of her life when she is virtually abandoned in an asylum by her family. A powerful, committed performance by Binoche provides a harrowing portrayal of the final days of a deeply troubled life, but the film’s sparse setting and grim emotions can be off-putting. Directed by Bruno Dumont, Camille Claudel, 1915 continues a body of work that has never been anything other than controversial, the film’s close and unblinking look at incipient madness and the final horrors of mental dissolution does not make for easy watching. The trade magazine Variety, not usually given to hyperbole, describes Binoche’s performance as “mesmerizing,” but the pace and the focus on abstract mental states, and the total absence of beautiful art and glamorous people mark Camille Claudel, 1915 out from the mainstream of artistic biopics.
Still Mine
Slow-paced movies about the elderly facing the prospects of physical and mental deterioration are not a rarity on the big screen any more, and they have provided a showcase for many fine actors no longer in their first youth. It has been proved over and over again that the concerns of seniors looking back over life and forward to dissolution can be powerfully affecting, and Still Mine, a film written and directed by Canadian director Michael McGowan and starring James Cromwell and Genevieve Bujold, does not disappoint. Cromwell and Bujold are both veterans who have both versatility and power. They are beautifully cast as an octogenarian couple living in rural New Brunswick who are not only coping with the threats of dementia, but also with a bureaucratic structure that is not sympathetic to their aim to live out their lives in the way they want. In an age of super-heroes, Still Mine is determined to be a big picture about ordinary people, and it captures the mix of innocence and pride of its determinedly self-sufficient couple who want nothing else from the world but each other.
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
A sultry sea mist blankets New Taipei City as I pedal from Tamsui District (淡水) up the coast. This might not be ideal beach weather but it’s fine weather for riding –– the cloud cover sheltering arms and legs from the scourge of the subtropical sun. The dedicated bikeway that connects downtown Taipei with the west coast of New Taipei City ends just past Fisherman’s Wharf (漁人碼頭) so I’m not the only cyclist jostling for space among the SUVs and scooters on National Highway No. 2. Many Lycra-clad enthusiasts are racing north on stealthy Giants and Meridas, rounding “the crown coast”
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
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