Guardians of the Galaxy
Do we really need more installments from the Marvel Superhero Universe? For fans, it is clearly a case of never being able to get enough, and Guardians of the Galaxy proves that the format is endlessly being refined. Having amassed a positively indecent amount of money from its main stable of superhero — from X-Men to the Avengers — Marvel can afford to have a bit of fun and take some risks, and the result is this irrepressibly rollicking space romp. Unlike the stiff-jawed heroics of the other Marvel films, Guardians is a little looser and lighter, with Chris Pratt as charming, amoral accidental leader Peter Quill, an earthling among the stars, and a motley crew that includes the likes of Bradley Cooper as Rocket, a genetically engineered raccoon who is a mercenary and master of weapons and battle tactics and Vin Diesel as Groot, a tree-like humanoid who is Rocket’s accomplice. Even if there is not a great deal of originality in the story, there is plenty of madcap humor, smart pop culture references and a great retro soundtrack to pull the movie through, and it is a great antidote to the grandly tragic themes that have increasingly invaded other Marvel franchises.
<>Step Up: All In
This is the fifth movie in this franchise and is definitely showing its age. Step Up: All In, which has even less plot than its dance-heavy predecessors, features the leads of the second and fourth films, Ryan Guzman as Sean and Briana Evigan as Andie, along with miscellaneous members of previous installments, all heading toward a Caesars Palace finale — a flame-throwing spectacular that runs for nine-minutes and is really the only thing going for this movie. The screenplay reaches new heights of improbability, but that in itself is fine for this sort of movie, but the failure of any kind of real emotional chemistry between the leading pair rips the heart out of what was ultimately a pretty cynical exercise in exploiting a reasonably successful property. Step Up can be credited with launching Channing Tatum’s career, but apart from that, it has done little to enrich the world’s cinema experience. For dance fans though, All In is reputed to have a lot more moves that actually take advantage of the 3D format, and sports some outstanding dance talent. Just don’t go see it for the story.
Inevitable
Romantic drama from Argentina by director Jorge Algora, who also has a writing credit for the film. Algora’s track record as a director is primarily in television, and Inevitable, with its conversational intimacy, does seem to be made for a smaller screen. Fabian (Dario Grandinetti) works as a bank executive. After one of his colleagues in the bank dies, he falls into crisis. He meets a famous author (Federico Luppi) who puts a mystic spin on Fabian’s predicament and following his advice, Fabian embarks on a relationship with Alicia (Antonella Costa), a young artist that he considers his inevitable love. This brings about equally inevitable conflict with his psychologist wife Mariela (Carolina Peleritti). Grandinetti is probably best known for his part in Pedro Almodovar’s international hit Talk to Her, and other roles sport strong performances, but the film never manages to rise above its rather humdrum material.
Life Feels Good
This Polish entry into the disability genre by writer-director Maciej Pieprzyca has done well on the festival circuit and shows good command of contemporary art house style, but provides little that pushes the envelope in this already much exploited niche. Life Feels Good tells the first-person perspective story of a boy suffering from cerebral palsy. Mateusz (Dawid Ogrodnik), who is growing in Poland during the late 1980s is written off by doctors as a hopeless case, but his mother (Dorota Kolak) believes that he can understand what is going on around him. After decades of care, she is proved right, as Mateusz learns to communicate through pictographic symbols. The tone of the film is a bit uneven, and every time the story drifts into buoyant sentimentalism, the director drags the audience back to a painful reality with some dreadful turn of events, putting yet another seemingly insuperable challenge in the face of its hero’s beleaguered optimism and love of life. The film features strong performances from an excellent cast.
Girls (閨蜜)
Billed by some as a Chinese version of Sex in the City, Girls struggles against the stultifying conventions of the Chinese romance drama and fights desperately to open up the conversation about love, sex, commitment and individual freedom. For the most part, convention wins, as Hong Kong actor-turned-director Barbara Wong (黃真真) goes for the tried and test set up of three school friends whose commitment to each other is tested by the men in their lives. The three girls, played by Ivy Chen (陳意涵), Fiona Sit (薛凱琪) and Yang Zishan (楊子姍) are all very different. Chen’s character is conservative, Sit’s sexually liberated and Yang is a careerist with little experience of love. Things start to go wrong when a fiance (played by Wallace Chung, 鍾漢良) goes off the rails and two other men enter the picture: VanNess Wu (吳建豪) and Shawn Yue (余文樂). The cast is good looking and experienced, and while Wong, who also wrote the screenplay, pushes the dialogue into intimate and sexually playful territory, Girls never really gets beyond the shallow posturing of celebrity soap opera.
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