The Other Woman
A chick flick revenge comedy, with some pretty hot chicks, making this a film with wide appeal. The Other Woman is predictable, absurd, not as clever as it thinks it is, but bubbly enough to keep you entertained. Cheating husbands and boyfriends getting their comeuppance has pretty solid appeal, and Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann and Kate Upton are appealing as the cheated-on women who first become friends and then hatch an outlandish plot to bring the Lothario (Mark, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones) to book. The three female characters are drawn in broad strokes, but the cast carries the flat characterization. The comedy is often pretty broad, and there is plenty of eye candy to sweeten the pill of the less than flattering portrayal of philandering men. Mark suffers various types of humiliation, but once the tables are turned, director Nick Cassavetes has trouble keeping the comedy alive and The Other Woman begins to come apart at the edges.
The Butler
Director Lee Daniels is bold, fearless even, in handling complex emotional and social issues. This was what made his Oscar-winning film Precious work. It was what made the movie that followed it, The Paperboy such a catastrophe. In The Butler, Daniels has found some middle ground, lacking the inspiration of Precious, but dialing down the excess. Still, Daniels is not a man who has much need of subtlety, and his film, based on the experiences of Cecil Gaines, a black man who serves eight presidents during his tenure as a butler at the White House, and who inevitably gained a remarkable perspective on a slice of American history, is often heavy handed. The cast is loaded down with big names, with Forest Whitaker playing Gaines. He plays against Oprah Winfrey as Gloria Gaines, and a host of major stars have minor roles in this tapestry of Americana. Fine performances help to balance out Daniels’ unashamed manipulativeness in pushing the audiences’ buttons.
Cheap Thrills
A thriller with brains and guts that still manages to be thoroughly objectionable due to the sheer nastiness of the violence in which the characters engage. Cheap Thrills follows Craig (Pat Healy), a struggling family man who loses his low-wage job and is threatened with eviction. He heads to a local bar where he meets up with an old friend (Ethan Embry) and the two are drawn into a series of drinking games by a charismatic and wealthy stranger (David Koechner) and his mysterious wife (Sara Paxton), who push the duo into performing increasingly disturbing dares in exchange for money. This is a small picture basically based on a gimmick, but it uses its committed cast to lift the material into something more. Whether that more is something you want to stomach is another matter entirely.
The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box
“Never underestimate the power of buried treasure,” says the voice of Michael Sheen in The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box. Certainly the producers thought they saw a hit with yet another period fantasy to follow in the wake of Pirates of the Caribbean. Despite the presence of Sheen, along with Sam Neill, Lena Headey, Ioan Gruffudd and Keeley Hawes, who all soldier away manfully, the buried treasure does not successfully exercise its power to fascinate audiences. The film is intended as the first in a film franchise based upon the Mariah Mundi novels of G. P. Taylor. As with the Narnia series and His Dark Materials in which outstanding source material failed to make the transition to the screen, it is more than possible that franchise ambitions will gradually evaporate as the film fails to bring the source material alive.
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