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.
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