The Giver
Based on the highly awarded and sometimes controversial novel of the same name by author Lois Lowry. Published in 1993, the novel has echoes of famous dystopian novels from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The story is set in a society that is at first presented as utopian, but which Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), a young boy who has been selected as the receptacle for past memories of the human race, discovers has a much darker side. The society has eliminated pain and strife by converting to “Sameness,” a plan that has also eradicated emotional depth from the community’s life. At the same time, other fundamental things have been lost. Many critics note that the mystic vitality of the book has not carried over into the film, in which the sheer improbability of the narrative development and sloppy linking of the complex thematic material undermine dramatic impact. Directed by Phillip Noyce, the film’s A-list cast announces this as a prestige production for young adults, with Meryl Streep, Jeff Bridges, Alexander Skarsgard and Taylor Swift just some of the big names to feature. The film has considerable visual grace but it does not look deep enough into the source material to be really thought-provoking.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
The first movie, Sin City, back in 2005, was a revelation of how the moods and styles of a noir graphic novel could be transferred to the big screen. This second iteration, as sequels inevitably have to do, ups the ante and teases us with a powerful blend of sex, violence and general mayhem. Director Robert Rodriguez does not even seem particularly interested in creating something original, and has opted for a plot which cribs heavily from the first film, and stacks the film with a surfeit of warmed-over tough-guy talk that strives ineffectively for depth. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is an exercise in style, and it has that in spades, but it is too eager to put it all on show and bounces the audience from one bloody atrocity to the next, not giving the audience any time to drink in the dank, dark fumes of Sin City’s seedy streets. The cast is a powerhouse of well-known American names, with the likes of Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Josh Brolin all taking their place in the lineup of characters who variously smash, pummel, decapitate, main, shoot or otherwise wreck self-destructive vengeance on each other. For fans, you probably wouldn’t want it any other way, but for the rest, the pointless mayhem, faux soul and the crudely manipulative sexuality get stale pretty quickly.
The Rover
The second feature film by Australian director David Michod, The Rover is a worthy successor to the outstanding and terrifying Animal Kingdom, which launched him into the big time. From the clearly defined settings of the Melbourne criminal underworld, Michod has moved into a post-apocalyptic setting. Ten years after a global economic collapse, a hardened loner (Guy Pearce) pursues the men who stole his only possession, his car. Along the way, he captures a brother of the thief (Robert Pattinson), and they form an uneasy alliance in making a difficult and dangerous journey through a kind of Mad Max landscape somewhere in the Australian outback. In The Rover Patterinson well and truly puts his Twilight years behind him and gives a strong and nuanced performance, creating a powerful central pillar to the film. The story is not particularly lively, but with death and betrayal a constant presence in the background, it’s long on menace, with bursts of startling violence and consistently fascinating insights into a world of people with nothing to lose.
Words and Pictures
It all comes down to strong performances by Juliette Binoche and Clive Owen in Words and Pictures, who are able to make the literary dialogue funnier than it actually is. They play an art instructor and an English teacher who develop a rivalry that ends up with a competition at their school in which students decide whether words or pictures are more important. Against the intellectual sparring, the two inevitably discover other emotions, and despite the vast improbability of much that happens in the film, the two veterans manage to keep things afloat. The film, by Australian director Fred Schepisi, has some clever dialogue and but too much trite meditation on literature and art, but the whole thing is good-hearted and makes for a fluid two hours of entertainment.
Turning Tide
This French film by director Christophe Offenstein tells the story of Yann Kermadec (Francois Cluzet), a talented sailor whose dreams suddenly come true when he has to replace a star skipper at the last minute before the start of the Vendee Globe (a three-month-long round-the-world non-stop single-handed yacht race). Offenstein tries to balance a family drama, as Kermadec is constantly in touch with his wife and daughter, to the much more persuasive drama of a man battling the overwhelming power of the oceans, but the two stories, which are then further stirred up when a young immigrant boy (Samy Seghir) sneaks on board when Kermadec stops for repairs, never manage to work together to any dramatic effect. The relationship between Kermadec and his stowaway develops as you would expect, evolving from hostility to a kind of weary friendship, but neither character has enough to work with to make the relationship anything more than superficial. The issues of refugees to Europe is left on the side lines. For all its failings, the sequences of man, boat and ocean are beautifully shot, capturing the awesome forces that the sailors in this race must contend with.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50