Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
It wasn’t even that great back in the 1980’s as a television show, but director Jonathan Liebesman, working with Michael Bay, has created something significantly less interesting even that that blip in the pop culture radar. The concept retains the pre-adolescent vibe, but to grab an audience which has reached puberty, the filmmakers have added Megan Fox as April O’Neil, the chick who discovers the quartet of lovable skateboarding dudes whose mission is to protect New York City from arch villain Shredder and his evil Foot Clan. Liebesman directed Wrath of the Titans, and with the presence of Bay, one can expect a film that aims to impress simply by ramping up the volume. For Hollywood gossip watchers, one of the most notable features of the film is the return of Fox to the good graces of Bay, after he fired her from Transformers: Dark of the Moon for making a silly comment comparing Bay and Hitler. This has all the production values you can expect from a huge budget and the kinds of resources that Bay commands, and with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles you get exactly what you deserve.
Into the Storm
If Twister left you yearning for more tornado mayhem, then Into the Storm is just the ticket. The film tracks the events over a single day when the town of Silverton is ravaged by an unprecedented onslaught of tornadoes. Everything is by the book. There are the group of university graduates caught in their campus, the anxious father trying to save his son, the crazy tornado chasers with their specialist gear looking for the ultimate adrenalin rush and the attractive female scientist who gets to say things like: “I have been studying storms all my life and this is the biggest storm ever.” There is nothing new, and the special effects are not noticeably superior to Twister, which was made way back in 1996, though more and bigger things do get thrown up into the air. The film is directed by Steven Quale, who has worked as a second unit director for major films like Titanic and Avatar, but whose own directorial debut was the very-far-from-memorable Final Destination 5. Production values are adequate, but for the most part Into the Storm is little more than lots of people shouting at each other and getting very wet.
20 Feet from Stardom
Backing singers have been crucial to the success of some of the best-loved works of pop music, but their names are often unknown. 20 Feet from Stardom takes a look into the world of these anonymous singers who have contributed so much. Director Morgan Neville mixes amazing archive footage of singers along with searching contemporary interviews that explore the choices and circumstances that kept these singers always standing behind the star. The singers, mostly African-American women, gave their all to their art, and while 20 Feet from Stardom does not shy away from the unfairness of the music industry that kept many of these women out of the limelight despite their manifest talent, it celebrates them rather than pities them, and follows them through their frustrations and frequent despondency and glories in their contribution to contemporary music. 20 Feet from Stardom is the kind of film that immediately has you searching for tracks you haven’t heard before, and listening to familiar tracks with new interest. A must see for all music lovers.
Deepsea Challenge
James Cameron is in love with deep sea exploration, and in Deepsea Challenge, the director of Aliens, Terminator and Avatar takes us on a journey into the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on the earth’s surface, with a maximum-known depth of 10.911km. Unlike previous deep sea documentaries like Aliens of the Deep and Ghosts of the Abyss, Deepsea Challenge is not directed by Cameron. A trio of associates takes the helm, and the focus is put on Cameron and his crew of submarine designers trying to get the unique craft ready for the adventure. Effort is made to create a sense of drama to the whole event, and the risks that Cameron is taking are undeniable, but ultimately Deepsea Challenge does not really warrant the big screen treatment it is given here. Apart from the talking heads, the Mariana Trench, for all its fame, is really not much to look at. Sure there are occasional creatures never seen before, but for the rest, it is rather like a lunar surface, and the film would be perfectly enjoyable as a primetime National Geographic feature, which it in fact resembles. This is clearly a bit of a vanity project for Cameron, who has already reached the pinnacle of fame as a film director, and it is both a worthy and an interesting venture. The only question is: Is it worth cinema prices?
Two Lives
Loosely based on a novel by Hannelore Hippe that taps into the effects of Lebensborn, Heinrich Himmler’s mad effort to engineer an Aryan super-race during the Second World War. The project saw the commandeering of offspring of blond, blue-eyed Germans and similar counterparts in Nazi-occupied countries such as Norway, and, as with all such efforts at eugenic engineering, the price is born by the children. Directed by German filmmaker Georg Maas, Two Lives taps into this extraordinary material using the techniques of the spy movie, with distant echoes of John le Carre, as the characters try and discover the truth about others even as they desperately hide the facts about themselves. The film tells the story of Katrine (Juliane Kohler), the daughter of a Norwegian woman and a German occupation soldier, who finds her idyllic life disrupted as she refuses to testify in a trial against the Norwegian state on behalf of her fellow “war children.” There are moments when the film falls into mawkishness, but on the whole it proceeds at a brisk pace, and features a small but powerful performance by Liv Ullmann.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and