Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Captain America: The First Avenger was a perfectly solid origins story for an oft neglected member of the superhero lineup. After all, Captain America has none of the darkness of Batman, the inner turmoil of Wolverine, or the high camp of Thor. He’s just an all-American guy in a silly stars and stripes costume. The First Avenger was one of the more character-driven films of the superhero genre, and all the better for that, and The Winter Soldier builds on that, adding a new layer of interest in dealing with the time shift that brings Steve Rogers from his World War II deep freeze to the more treacherous world of 1970s global intrigue. Chris Evans manages to make his Captain America appealing with an edge of complexity, and he is ably supported by Scarlett Johansson as “Black Widow” Natasha Romanoff and Anthony Mackie as “The Falcon” Sam Wilson. But the icing on the cake is Robert Redford who plays against type and creates a villain of oily, smooth talking perfidiousness.
The Broken Circle Breakdown
A film from Belgium nominated in the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars this year has done well on the festival circuit. It is a simple story of two people who fall in love. Didier Bontinck (Johan Heldenbergh) is a romantic atheist, and Elise Vandevelde (Veerle Baetens) is a religious realist. When their daughter becomes seriously ill, their love is put on trial. There is a strong melodramatic undercurrent, but director Felix van Groeningen deflects this by providing a non-linear telling of the tale, gradually filling in the gaps that made the relationship between Didier and Elise so strong, and then seeing many of the same factors at work tearing that relationship apart. There is a raw emotional heart in the film, which is given dramatic presentation in the bluegrass music that is a central feature. (Didier and Elise are both performers, and their professional and personal lives merge in their music.) The fact that Heldenbergh and Baetens perform together with their own band gives the music even greater power. Tough and vital for much of its course, the film sags in the third act where the screenplay sinks under a burden of some unnecessary minor themes.
Short Term 12
This small indie film set in a residential care facility for at-risk young people is the real thing: A tightly directed film that looks at the minutiae of people’s lives and how it can, and sometimes can’t, tell us things about these people. The film centers on Grace (Brie Larson) and her longtime boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr), who work at the facility and do their best to care for the residents and for each other. Director Destin Cretton has achieved a remarkable feat in capturing a profound naturalism in his actors so that Short Term 12 often has an almost documentary feel, but at others in pushes the rough edged story into the more familiar form of the inspirational teacher genre. Even this does not do much to erode the intimate power of the film, and Larson has been praised by many critics as a performer to watch. Short Term 12 runs just 96 minutes, but it is packed with detail and feeling, and despite some flaws, is an outstanding example of what cinematic storytelling is all about.
Sunshine on Leith
A film that is almost too upbeat for its own good, Sunshine on Leith is a musical set somewhere between micro-budget romance Once and all-star ABBA romp Mamma Mia!. The mood is closer to the latter, but its setting in Edinburgh and story about two Scottish squaddies back from Afghanistan looking to find stability and love back home gives it an exotic charm. The songbook for the movie is taken from Scottish group The Proclaimers, but you don’t have to be a fan to get into the movie, with is a no-holds-barred knees-up that should delight audiences. There are plenty of cheesy moments, and sometimes the film veers too far toward becoming a promotional title for all things Scottish, and for the city of Edinburgh in particular. Director Dexter Fletcher throws in a little bit of grit, and life is not all warm pints and singalongs, but the film wants to make you feel good, and on the whole it succeeds.
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