Pompeii
Taylor-made for those who love big CGI effects, Pompeii is a version of Dante’s Peak dressed up in sandals and togas. Throw in some of the beefcake and battles of the Spartacus TV franchise, and there you have it. Director Paul W.S. Anderson’s track record further emphasizes the preponderance of big-budget effects over anything so mundane as acting or storytelling: This is the man, after all, who brought us the Resident Evil franchise, AVP: Alien vs Predator and the truly appalling 2011 version of The Three Musketeers. In Pompeii, gladiator Milo (played by Kit Harington from Game of Thrones) finds himself in a race against time to save his true love from a forced marriage to a corrupt Roman senator and flee the city before it is engulfed in the eruption of Mt Vesuvius. Harrington battles his way through hordes of enemies as the city crumbles, dodging fire showers and tidal waves all the while fetchingly kitted out in leather. It goes without saying that the movie is in 3D, but the effects are all a bit tame, not nearly good enough to overcome the film’s complete lack of drama.
Dallas Buyers Club
Matthew McConaughey has come a very long way indeed from the infinitely forgettable actor he was back in the days of Sahara and Failure to Launch. In Dallas Buyers Club he proves that he has established himself as a versatile and powerful actor able to take on melodramatic roles and imbue them with layers of tragedy and humor. As Ron Woodroof, a homophobic rodeo hustler who is diagnosed with AIDS, he manages to be appalling and appealing, tragic and pathetic all at the same time. Woodroof draws on his lifetime of scamming after he is told he only has 30 days to live in order to obtain the trial drug AZT and other unapproved drugs for himself, and subsequently for others. The background is a grim tale of the height of the AIDS epidemic, and the foreground a story of a little guy who takes on the pharmaceutical giants. It is refreshingly free of sentimentality, and McConaughey portrays Woodroof as a man with an overwhelming lust for life and is not subject to the humbling epiphanies that are the stock in trade of such films.
Saving Mr Banks
The novel and the Walt Disney film Mary Poppins have established themselves as classics of children’s fiction and musical cinema. Saving Mr Banks is the story of the transition of that classic from the page to the silver screen. The film features two greats of cinema, Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson, who play Walt Disney and the author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers. It would be easy to play the rocky relationship between Disney and Travers as a collection of trans-Atlantic cliches, but both Hanks and Thompson are experience actors in top form, and they manage to build up a real chemistry that gives the attempts of each to understand the other real emotional depth. There is splendid support work from Paul Giamatti as a chauffeur who drives Travers around Hollywood. Colin Farrell, who plays Travers’ father in flashbacks to her childhood is more melodramatic, and is more or less appealing depending on how much one can stomach Farrell’s Irish rogue routine. The story is well told and consistently interesting, the period setting lovingly recreated, and the script tightly crafted if not particularly inspired.
Philomena
A well balanced drama that deals with serious social issues with a light touch that never undermines the injustice at the heart of the film. In Philomena, a world-weary political journalist, Martin Sixsmith (played by Steve Coogan, who also has a writing credit) picks up the story of an Irish woman’s search for her son, who was taken away from her decades ago after she became pregnant and was forced to live in a convent. Sixsmith attempts to reunite mother and child after many years and discovers terrible things about the inhumanity of the convent’s sisters. On this journalistic exploration Sixsmith is accompanied by the title character, played with grace and impish humor by Judi Dench. Much of the film is carried by the splendid interaction between Sixsmith and Philomena, who are separated by a huge gulf of education, class and character. The development of the story also manages to defy expectations, sidestepping the pitfalls of what could have easily been a heavy-handed tearjerker. This film comes off the back of some rather lackluster efforts by director Stephen Frears, and is without doubt his best film since The Queen.
Only God Forgives
There are those who like the films of Nicolas Winding Refn, and there are many others who find his films mystifying and boring. Drive in 2011 was probably his most accessible work to date, held together by its simple structure and riveting performance by Ryan Gosling. Only God Forgives has more in common with other of Refn’s work, with the cinematographic exuberance of Bronson and the shattering violence of Valhalla Rising. Set against the colorfully seedy backdrop of Bangkok’s mean streets, Only God Forgives sees Gosling reprise his role as a laconic and tortured criminal. Gosling’s character, Julian, is a drug dealer whose brother has been killed. He is duty bound to seek vengeance, but his long history in the criminal world complicate matters. The film features the bizarre presence of Kristin Scott Thomas as the violently vengeful matriarch of a criminal organization, and is played with operatic ostentation. Don’t expect the film to make a lot of sense, but as an exercise in the aesthetic of sleaze, it is something approaching a masterpiece.
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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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