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.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s