Draft Day
Kevin Costner has made some of his most memorable roles as relatively inarticulate sporting heros, as Billy Chapel in For the Love of the Game (baseball) and Roy McAvoy in Tin Cup (golf). With Draft Day Costner plays Sonny Weaver, the general manager of a less than successful football team playing in the NFL who is fighting to rebuild his team with some strategic trades during the NFL draft. The scenario has some similarities to Moneyball, which saw with Brad Pitt do something similar in a baseball setting. The dynamic between the politics of the game, the character of the players and the drive of an underdog going against conventional wisdom to achieve some kind of greatness is all there. Costner feels right at home and puts on a real star turn and is backed up by an able and appealing supporting cast. Everyone is well and truly in their comfort zone, which means that for all its effort to build tension, Draft Day is essentially a rather predictable sports movie that takes few risks, but everything is all so professionally done that it is highly entertaining all the same, even for those with small interest in American football.
So Young (致我們終將逝去的青春)
A debut directing effort by one of China’s best-known leading ladies, So Young (致我們終將逝去的青春) reveals a sure grasp of filmmaking fundamentals developed over the course of a 15-year acting career, yet still boasts the fresh voice of a newcomer. Director Vicki Zhao (趙薇) is aided in her success by some inspired casting choices, offsetting the star power of Taiwanese A-lister Mark Chao (趙又廷) and mainland pop idol Han Geng (韓庚) with the freshness of two lesser-known female leads, Yang Zishan (楊子珊) and Jiang Shuying (江疏影). The story of a college freshman encountering new friends, romance, and adventure upon her arrival at campus is adapted from Xin Yiwu’s (辛夷塢) romance novel To Our Youth That Is Fading Away,” which depicts the Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) era with vivid detail and a nostalgic sense of yearning. Supporting roles are also given fuller characterizations than one normally gets in this kind of movie, and the whole thing is a delightful web on intricately woven relationships that get tied up with social, economic and personal factors; sadly the director’s light footwork cannot quite keep pace and toward the end, So Young gets bogged down by its own ambitions.
Thermae Romae II
A second installment of the phenomenally successful Thermae Romae by director Hideki Takeuchi, who has created a huge box office winner with his time travel comedy that has public baths as its central feature. More than happy to make fun of Japanese culture, Takeuchi manages to create something truly unique in his mashup of personal hygiene, ancient and modern. The humor, with its strong screwball bent, is clearly not for everyone, but there is an innocent joy that the director takes in Japanese high tech hygiene that he manages to mix up with his story of a much put upon architect in ancient Rome tasked with creating the ultimate bathing experience and finding his inspiration in a worm hole that links him to a bathhouse in modern Japan. It might not have the whimsy that made a film like Tampopo so appealing, or it may be simply that this writer prefers food to spas, but Thermae Romae II has plenty of fun at its heart and well-judged execution in its presentation.
The Great Beauty
Director Paolo Sorrentino is well on the way to auteur status and with The Great Beauty he has been repeatedly compared to Federico Fellini. This is a latter day La Dolce Vita tinged with an operatic sadness yet shot through with indulgent nostalgia for a world of dramatic excess. It would be hard to find a film so full of stylized beauty that mocks itself and its aspirations to such a degree. The Great Beauty follows Jep Gambardella, a man who has seduced his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades. His 65th birthday brings an unexpected epiphany, and suddenly the aging king of the high life looks past the nightclubs and parties to find a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty. The film embraces, and even celebrates, the idea that beauty is just skin deep, but manages to look deep to find the soul that animates and enlivens the shimmering surfaces. The Great Beauty has already picked up Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars this year as well as a slew of awards at other film festivals.
Brick Mansions
Yet another movie to feature the extreme sport of parkour and also a posthumous homage to actor Paul Walker. The film is not too far off from his regular offerings, but this is nothing to inspire a retake on his acting career. For all that, the stunt work is exemplary, with many fine action sequences that are far more tightly scripted than the screenplay. The absurdity of the plot, which focuses on an undercover Detroit cop who enters a dangerous neighborhood surrounded by a containment wall with the help of an ex-con in order to bring down a crime lord does not need to be dwelt on, but the housing estate does provide a perfect playground for parkour, turbo charged cars and very big guns. There is also plenty of rippling flesh that is probably more memorable than the film itself.
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
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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