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.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In the aftermath of the 2020 general elections the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had crushed them in a second landslide in a row, with their presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning more votes than any in Taiwan’s history. The KMT did pick up three legislative seats, but the DPP retained an outright majority. To take responsibility for that catastrophic loss, as is customary, party chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) resigned. This would mark the end of an era of how the party operated and the beginning of a new effort at reform, first under