The Expendables 3
The first two were not much to look at, but managed to be marginally entertaining due to their gung-ho R-rated violence and occasional sense of their own ridiculousness. The third iteration is clearly reaching out for a younger demographic and has toned down the brutality to a PG-13 level, more or less ripping the guts out of the movie. Somehow to make up for this, the cast of meatheads from the 1990s has been padded out with other aging celebs such as Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, and perhaps as a draw for the Hispanic market, Antonio Banderas as an over-eager assassin who attempts to provide comic relief. Cynical is not the word for it. Apart from the geriatrics stars, there is now a second team of younger Expendables, which includes one woman, the mixed-martial arts sensation Ronda Rousey, but the youngsters are not given much to do either. Characters are definitely secondary to explosions, and there are plenty of those. The action sequences are exciting enough, but are little more than exercises in stunt mechanics. The only real acting is done by Gibson, who is mildly amusing as the villain of the piece.
Deliver Us From Evil
A reasonably effective mashup of a police procedural and a horror flick from emerging horror-meister Scott Derrickson (Sinister, The Exorcism of Emily Rose), Deliver Us From Evil packs in plenty of above-average scares amid the silly demonic possession mumbo jumbo. Derrickson evokes a mood of menace with rainy streets, gloomy interiors, and the transformation of comforting everyday objects into something horrible. Eric Bana is perfectly fine as a tough New York cop faced with horrors that tear through the city and eventually threaten his family. He joins forces with an unconventional priest (Edgar Ramirez), schooled in the rites of exorcism, who does his best with some pretty inept dialogue. Some critics have found redeeming features, seeing in the film new twists to genre conventions, but for the most part, this is nothing more than slightly upmarket horror that has packaged together the usual tricks of the trade into a reasonably attractive bundle.
Lost on a Red Minibus to Taipo (那夜凌晨,我坐上了旺角開往大埔的紅van)
Also released under the more manageable title of The Midnight After, Red Minibus is a long awaited feature release by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan (陳果). The movie is a wildly inventive ride that pushes the comedy-horror-fantasy genre in new directions, while also being a touching adieu to present-day Hong Kong. The source material is a Web novel by 25-year-old Hong Kong writer “Pizza”, which was released as a book in 2012. The story is simple enough: a late-night minibus takes 16 passengers from downtown Kowloon to Tai Po, a New Territories suburb. Along the way, they go through a time-warp, and end up in an alternative Hong Kong that is undergoing some sort of apocalypse. The overall plot does not actually make a lot of sense, but the focus of the film is on the characters caught up in this ordeal, as they panic, argue, cooperate and turn on each other. Some of the fission comes from knowing the cast, which features veteran actors and musicians, but Chan manages to handle his chaotic story with style, and is constantly pushing at the limits of conventional post-apocalyptic horror.
Planes: Fire and Rescue
The Hollywood studios have produced a slew of flicks with endearing automotive characters. Planes: Fire and Rescue is a serviceable release that provides nothing new either in animation artistry, which is surprisingly flat, or character development. The first film, Planes, last year, told the story of Dusty, a cropdusting plane with a fear of heights that lives his dream of competing in a famous around-the-world aerial race. In this second installment, Dusty learns that his engine is damaged and he may never race again, so he joins a forest fire and rescue unit to be trained as a firefighter. The messages of good fellowship and overcoming challenges are all there, and the host of characters, which includes planes, and various pieces of forest clearing equipment, are cute, voiced by a great cast, with occasional good lines, but all too much played by the numbers. Many critics have noted that it is a marked improvement on the first film, with some great rescue scenes that are certainly worthy of the big screen, but for all its qualities, Planes: Fire and Rescue fails to lift itself above the herd of films like Cars and Turbo.
What If
What If so wants to be something more than a regular Friday night romantic comedy. It is one of those incessantly talky movies in which characters explore the nature of their relationship with each other in clever banter that hides deeper themes. Except with What If, the cute, fluffy surface doesn’t hide anything at all. This is not to say there are not some perfectly fine performances, notably by Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan, who play Wallace, a man burned out from a string of failed relationships, and Chantry, with whom he forms an instant bond, but who lives with her longtime boyfriend. They spend long days and nights wondering around bars and cafes in Toronto, having dinner with friends and talking about why men and women can’t just be friends. There is a nice indie vibe to the Irish-Canadian co-production, but the screenplay just isn’t up to the film’s ambitions, and the whole thing was done so much better in When Harry Met Sally.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
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
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
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