007: Spectre
It seemed just yesterday when everyone was questioning whether Daniel Craig was suitable to replace Pierce Brosnan as the seventh face of the 007 film franchise. Well, he’s done it well enough that he is starring in his fourth Bond production in 10 years, Spectre, the 26th movie overall featuring that dashing special agent. It’s also the most expensive Bond film to date, costing US$303 million to shoot, with US$34 million going to trashed cars. Anyway, if you watched the Sean Connery 007 productions, you might remember the evil organization Spectre, which appeared in six films between 1962 and 1971. The organization finally returns after being shelved for decades due to a longstanding copyright dispute between the movie producer and the author of the original novels, which was finally resolved in late 2013. This is pretty much a reboot of the Spectre storyline, so forget what you saw before, as it will be Bond’s first time dealing with the organization. But will its iconic evil mastermind Ernst Blofeld also return? There’s no bald man with a white cat in the trailer, but there has been speculation.
Regression
The sixth feature by writer-director-producer Alejandro Amenabar (The Others, Agora) marks his return to the psychological thriller genre after the 1997 Open Your Eyes, which Hollywood turned into Vanilla Sky. What better place to start than 1990s small town America, especially one where there’s some secret satanic stuff going on. Emma Watson takes on the role of a teenage sexual abuse victim, while Ethan Hawke plays the cop investigating the incident. The title refers to a form of psychotherapy where one relives his or her past experiences to uncover repressed memories — which has been controversial because of our tendency to create false memories. Indeed, remembering the past is a major theme in the movie from the very beginning, when Watson’s character’s father admits to the crime but claims he has no recollection of it. It’s up to a psychotherapist to use regression techniques to discover the truth, but his pendulum reveals much more than anyone would ever want to know.
Macondo
Named after the fictional South American town in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magnus opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, this Macondo is a real-life refugee settlement on the outskirts of Vienna, housing about 2,000 people from 20 countries. Director Sudabeh Mortezai spent her childhood between Tehran and Vienna, and draws from her own cross-cultural experience to tell the tale of Ramasan, an 11-year-old Chechen refugee whose father, whom he reveres as a hero, was killed in battle. Ramasan, obviously haunted by the war, must try to find his way in a new environment, juggling his duties at home and trying to fit in with his new friends. It’s an intimate, slice-of-life look at refugee life, with the major turning point being when a former war buddy of his father’s also arrives in Macondo. Mortezai, originally a documentary filmmaker, chose to cast non-actors who have had similar life experiences as their characters. There was no script for the actors to follow — they created their own dialogue for each scene, which was shot in chronological sequence so the they could actually grow with their characters and build upon prior improvisation.
Shrew’s Nest
This claustrophobic Spanish horror-thriller is about agoraphobia, revolving around two sisters living alone in a cramped apartment. The older one, Montse, is haunted by past family trauma and cannot set foot out the door, while the younger one, raised by Montse, is ready to be free of her sister’s constraints and live her life. Montse, psychotic, morphine-addicted and terrified of being alone, is often abusive to her sister, but when an injured neighbor comes asking for help, things get real intense and horrific. There’s also some heavy repressed memory/tragic backstory stuff going on that adds to the tension. Critics have compared this film to the 1990 Misery, based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, and since the whole thing is shot inside the apartment, it relies on the actors to truly shine.
Coffin in the Mountain (心迷宮)
Small town China may contain just as much potential for disturbing and grim storylines as its American counterpart. Nominated for two Golden Horse awards last year (best new director, best original screenplay), 30-year-old Chinese director Xin Yukun (忻鈺坤) weaves a trilinear narrative revolving around the discovery of a corpse near a remote village. Three seemingly independent stories slowly come to a head as the whodunnit mystery unravels. It’s said to be a black comedy featuring idiosyncratic performances and the absurd, but the trailer just shows bleak scene after bleak scene to the tune of ominous music. Xin, who studied cinematography at the Beijing Film Academy, only used no-name actors and shot the whole thing on location. Clocking in at over two hours, though, this film might be a bit too long for its subject material unless the dark humor is prominent and smart enough to sustain the narrative.
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
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
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would