Are You Here
Director Matthew Weiner was a major part of the television series The Sopranos and Mad Men, serving as a writer and producer on both. In his feature directing debut, one gets an occasional glimpse of his considerable talents, but for the most part, Are You Here meanders aimlessly through various styles, genres and moods, and never quite decides what exactly it wants to be. Owen Wilson and Zach Galifianakis play two childhood best friends who embark on a road trip back to their hometown after Zach’s character Ben comes into a substantial inheritance. These two characters are at the heart of a stoner bromance that has echoes of comedies such as Hangover and Grown Ups. Then there is Ben’s young step-mother (Laura Ramsey) and sister (Amy Poehler), who work in a rom-com theme, that segues rather uncomfortably into a Silver Linings Playbook meditation on mental illness. The film is so conflicted, its attempts to be witty undermining its more serious aspirations, and its exploration of whether Ben is actually sick or something preciously original only manages to fizz and pop sporadically. The most frustrating thing about this really rather bad movie is that it contains so many good ingredients, but the result is little better than an undifferentiated sludge.
The Boxtrolls
Another Gothic fantasy from the company that brought us Coraline and ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls is a very loose adaptation from Alan Snow’s Here Be Monsters book series. It has an interesting concept, and tells the story of a young orphaned boy raised by underground cave-dwelling trash collectors. These creatures, as afraid of humans as humans are terrified of them, find themselves the target of the genocidal Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Ben Kingsley), who has used the supposed kidnapping of the child (called Eggs, and voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright from Game of Thrones) as an excuse to launch wholesale war against the boxtrolls. There are plenty of hints at contemporary hot button issues, but unfortunately the film’s script is not strong enough to give either the boxtrolls, or Eggs, much appeal, and its ham-fisted storytelling makes it difficult for adult audiences, let alone children, to discover the emotional core of the film. The absence of both humor and heart is a killing double blow for the film, which has been lovingly drawn and filmed, but which never manages to find its feet.
Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
It is a commonplace that fact is often stranger than fiction, and Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery is a celebration of this weird and wonderful world through the life of Wolfgang Beltracchi, a man who evolved from “improving” on anonymous works scoured from real estate sales, making them more salable, to outright forgery of well-known masters, many now in various museums and private collections, often sold for millions of dollars. Beltracchi, whose unrepentant attitude for what he did is likely to infuriate those who have been fooled or who recognize the damage he has done in the field of art history, but will probably delight those who secretly think that the world of high art is slightly fraudulent in its very nature. Beltracchi, now a longhaired sexagenarian, is delighted that works that he forged have been passed by experts as superior examples of the work of famous artist, and claims that he has little difficulty in replicating the works of even some of the greatest masters like Leonardo da Vinci. He led a high flying life style before swapping his Italian palazzo for a jail cell, when finally brought to book, but Beltracchi is all the more appealing as a character for his acceptance of the ups and downs of life.
The Zero Theorem
It’s been a very long time since Terry Gilliam’s great classic of dystopian black comedy Brazil first hit the screen, and since then his output has constantly failed to achieve the same heights of inspired madness (with the possible exception of Twelve Monkeys). The Zero Theorem returns to Gilliam’s favorite stomping ground of a society operated by shadowy forces and a protagonist who finds himself caught between a well ordered fantasy and a crazy reality. Christoph Waltz is Qohen Leth, an eccentric programmer, who gets caught up in the dark side of his society’s ruling elite, meeting the likes of Dr Shrink-Rom (Tilda Swinton), an AI therapist designed to provide mental evaluation of Leth, and getting waylaid by Bainsley (Melanie Thierry), and various other party animals, whose mission is to distract him for discovering the truth about the world he lives in. The fact is, the audience is unlikely to discover very much at all through the course of the film, which manages to look brilliant, but is chaotic, convoluted and confusing. The old Monty Python humor seems to have given way to a manic existential angst; there’s plenty of energy, but there is not much room for laughter.
The Maze Runner
Following the The Hunger Games, there have been a slew of films about young people caught up in the operation of dystopian societies. Divergent is the most recent, and was already feeling a bit stale as the format was reworked all over again. The Maze Runner brings nothing original to the table, and while the maze, a prison surrounded by a moving maze filled with terrible monsters, looks pretty good on screen, and director Wes Ball has a good handle on the monster/horror aspects of the film, the deeper story is a sad rehash populated with cardboard cutout characters who fail to engage our interest. Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) is deposited in a community of boys after his memory is erased. This Lord of the Flies group has made up its own rules of survival, and various members are nominated to run out into the maze to discover the truth about their situation. Those who fail to make it back by nightfall never return. It is safe to say that O’Brien is no Jennifer Lawrence, and the supporting cast has nothing much to offer. The main fear in watching The Maze Runner is that it will spawn a sequel (it is based on the first book of a trilogy).
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