Le Week-End
Directed by Roger Michell, who has brought us such delights as Venus and Morning Glory, and with a script by Hanif Kureishi (who wrote the likes of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and My Beautiful Launderette, one can only expect great things from Le Weekend. From the very high standards of the abovementioned works, Le Week-End is ever so slightly a disappointment, but the presence of Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent in the starring roles makes it a supremely endurable film with much to enjoy. Duncan and Broadbent are a British couple, long married with children grown up and leaving the nest, who have returned to Paris for a second honeymoon to see if they can rediscover the spark to their failing relationship. The emotional seesaw is somewhat overworked, but there are some lovely lines, beautifully delivered, tapping into rich veins of humor and sadness while revealing truths about life, love and loss that manage to ring true despite the rather formulaic setup.
Jadoo
Another British movie by writer/director Amit Gupta about two brothers, both wonderful chefs, who fall out catastrophically. At the climax of their dispute they rip the family recipe book in half and set up rival restaurants across the road from each other. The daughter of one of the brothers, Shalini (Amara Karan), wants to get them back together for her wedding? Will she succeed? Given the mood of the film, which is steeped in affection and warmth, aiming not for big laughs but a natural, jovial family dynamic, the results are fairly predictable, but that is not really the point. Built around stories from the director’s youth in Leicester, the story has many well-observed moments that pick up on Indian life in Britain with humor and wit. The film has a slight tendency to luxuriate in Indian exoticism, but the whole story, and the attractive and talented cast, helps create appealing characters, who while not exactly memorable, are more than interesting enough for the short and sweet 84 minutes for which the film runs.
Sex Tape
To put some spice back into their marriage, Jay and Annie decide to film themselves having sex. The fact that Annie is played by Cameron Diaz gives this concept some laddish interest, but sadly even Diaz in the buff doesn’t provide enough of a recommendation for Sex Tape. Inevitably, the film is accidentally uploaded to “the cloud” and begins to circulate among friends and family. What follows is a mad romp to get the video back under wraps. There is clearly nothing improbable about films of intimate conjugal moments going viral on the web, and there are times early in the film when it seems possible that Sex Tape could take us to some interesting places in modern married life, but sadly we are disappointed. The first third is solid setup, but then director Jake Kasdan falls back on limp, reheated gross-out gags that we’ve all seen a hundred times before. There is not even the over-the-top raunchiness of something like American Pie, so the jokes don’t sparkle and the actors simply fall into lazy comedic routines that make the second half of the film almost unbearably tedious.
As Above, So Below
Low-budget horror that never overcomes its shortage of funds and acting talent. A team of explorers ventures into the catacombs that lie beneath the streets of Paris. There is plenty of claustrophobic tension, but after a while, scenes of people wondering around in the dark get a little tiresome and the sets look like they are being reworked a little too often. According to the producers, As Above, So Below is “a journey into madness and terror that reaches deep into the human psyche to reveal the personal demons that come back to haunt us all.” Actually, what the film does is to scare its characters by tapping into various fears and memories, but since we never really get involved with this group of explorers, this device fails to provide much insight into their psyche. A greater fault is that despite a few well-contrived moments, most of the scares are the result of the heavy-handed sound design rather than anything you see on screen. No more than mediocre DVD fare.
Delicious
It looks like another food movie. It even tastes like a food movie. But Delicious fails to do the one thing a good movie should do: create a celebration of how food and human emotion interact. Instead, we have a passionate chef who resorts to extreme measures — and we are talking cruel and unusual here — to get an obsessive dieter to eat good food. The dieter in question is Stella, played by Louise Brealey, who is probably best known as Molly Hooper, the morgue assistant who carries a torch for Sherlock Holmes in the TV series Sherlock. She is subject to the tiresome importunities of Nicholas Rowe, a Scotsman pretending to be French chef called Adolf, who has come to work at the restaurant of the man who he believes to be his father, played by Adrian Scarborough. The whole thing is stuffed to bursting with improbable plot twists and poor Stella is bludgeoned to such a degree that you almost want her to continue with her anorexic and bulimic tendencies just as a matter of principle. Sheila Hancock pops in for a cameo as a nosy neighbor who spouts a few platitudes about life. Writer/director Tammy Riley-Smith may have something to say in this film, but it is not something that anyone really needs to hear.
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist