Nebraska
The director of About Schmidt and Sideways, not to mention the more recent Oscar-winning The Descendants, Alexander Payne has a fine eye for human frailty and a big heart that encompasses the many and varied flaws of his characters. In Nebraska, an aging, booze-addled father (Bruce Dern) makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son (Will Forte) in order to claim a million-dollar Mega Sweepstakes prize. The thing is a scam, but a perfect setup for a road movie that explores the humor and sorrow of small lives and big dreams. The odyssey combines, quite effortlessly, prickly combat between father and son and a stirring exploration of Woody’s past, for which he harbors little fondness. Shot in black and white and with photography that evokes the American Gothic of Grant Wood, Nebraska is beautiful and often funny. We know that Dern’s character has not won any money, and that his life won’t change in any material way, but the dream of riches, and the expectation that others have of sharing this wealth, reveals the dark and often confused souls of lead characters and bit players alike. The real winner from all of this is the audience.
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
The first Paranormal Activity was released way back in 2007 and its minimalist, found-footage style with plenty of shaky camera, weird angles and bad light was still able to provide some excitement, if not exactly scares. But six years and three movies later, there just isn’t that much mileage in that kind of treatment anymore. So what do you do? You go big budget and plunge into serious occult maximalism; but then you keep bits of shaky cam and other pseudo low-budget effects. Performances are actually above par here, and director Christopher Landon, who was the screenwriter for all the Paranormal Activity films except the first, and who produced Paranormal Activity three and four, is at home with the genre. Teenager Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) is playing around with a camcorder and captures images from strange doings in the flat below. Then he gets a strange mark on his arm, develops superpowers and seems to be targeted by demons. Landon tries for some twists and turns in the plot, but these only manage to make an already inarticulate story even more confused.
The White Storm (掃毒)
This is a pulse-pumping Hong Kong action thriller from director Benny Chan (陳木勝), who has set the bar impossibly high for similar genre films in 2014. At its center, The White Storm is the story of three friends, all DEA types, whose mutual love, respect and dependency upon each other has enabled them to survive and navigate the dangerous world of the Golden Triangle’s drug trade. When a big operation goes terribly wrong, their careers and friendship are put under intolerable strain. The action is top draw, as Chan looks to outdo the grand scale and outlandish bombast of films such as Dante Lam’s (林超賢) The Viral Factor (逆戰), and mix in themes of loyalty and honor that hark to the 1980s heyday of John Woo. Massive amounts of gunfire and some truly gut-wrenching close-up violence ensure that audiences get their money’s worth of action, and Lau Ching Wan (劉青雲), Nick Cheung (張家輝) and Louis Koo (古天樂) all provide solid performances that gives some spirit to a messy, sometimes bloated storyline.
Firestorm
Explosions, firefights, powerful weaponry, cars and trucks crashing into each other, and more explosions. That is pretty much what Firestorm is about. Oh, there is also some ridiculous macho posing in between. The story, as far as it goes, is about a tough by-the-book cop, Lui (Andy Lau), who is brought in to deal with a wave of crime inflicted on Hong Kong by a group of ultra-violent thieves armed with heavy weapons. Written and directed by Alan Yuen, the film shows little interest in Lui’s character and simply delights in letting the straight-laced cop unravel so that he can catalyze a whirlwind of carnage. The publicity material gleefully informs the public that in Firestorm, Hong Kong gets turned into a battlefield, and Yuan has certainly upped the ante for complex action sequences staged in the dense urban environment of Hong Kong. These are often spectacular and almost worth the price of admission.
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