The Revenant
Coming off multiple Oscars for Birdman, Alejandro Inarritu’s sixth feature film is set in the Wild West in 1823, and is based on the life of trapper and explorer Hugh Glass, whose tale of survival and revenge after being abandoned by his companions has been retold ever since. Glass was a member of “Ashley’s 100,” whom General William Ashley recruited on a fur-trading expedition up the Missouri River. After being severely wounded by a bear, Glass is pretty much left for dead, and the story is about his struggle to survive. A revenant, in European folklore, is a corpse who comes back from the grave to terrorize the living, and that’s what many people called Glass back then. Leonardo DiCaprio portrays Glass, and reunites with Tom Hardy on the big screen for the first time since Inception.
The Dressmaker
Another film about a revenant, Kate Winslet stars as Myrtle Dunnage, returns to the town she was exiled from as a schoolgirl as a successful dressmaker to take care of her ailing mother. But this one seems like an over-the-top dark comedy, one which Jocelyn Moorhouse, returning to the director’s seat after almost 20 years, describes as “Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven with a sewing machine.” The town seemingly hasn’t changed much, full of morally questionable characters, and it’s up to Dunnage to stir things up, literally. The film won big at the Australian Academy Awards, including Best Actress and People’s Choice for Favorite Australian Film. It’s a pretty crazy patchwork of multiple genres that probably shouldn’t be taken seriously but it should be fun to go along with the ride.
Suffragette
The first film in history to be filmed in the UK’s Houses of Parliament, Suffragette is set during the time of the suffragette riots, when the women’s fight for the right to vote intensified with acts such as smashing windows and setting off bombs. Maud Watts, played by Carey Mulligan, is a young mother who is caught up in the struggle but later becomes increasingly involved as her life changes forever. It should be mentioned that even though Meryl Streep is on the the movie poster, she only appears in one scene as Emmeline Pankhurst, the famous leader of the suffragette movement. Fun fact: Helena Bonham Carter, who plays a fellow activist, is the great-granddaughter of H. H. Asquith, the prime minister at that time who was against women having the right to vote.
The Map of DNA (他媽2的藏寶圖)
Like many mainstream Taiwanese movies, just the description of this “magical romantic comedy” makes one feel dizzy. So there’s something about a swindler mother who gives her mute and introverted son a treasure map to get him out of his shell, and he meets a bunch of weird characters along the way, including the “goddess of his dreams,” and it probably gets more complicated from there. The trailer is equally frantic and schizophrenic, not to mention cheesy, and says absolutely nothing about the story. How does ventriloquy fit into all of this is also a mystery. Maybe it’s not as bad at it appears to be, as local movie trailers often undersell the product. It’s the second commercial film to be set in Changhua in the past five years, and definitely will give local tourism a boost.
Sisters
Okay, so this seems like pretty typical, low-brow stuff (a music box gets stuck up someone’s butt in the trailer) that’s sure to resonate with most of America, but when you have Saturday Night Live castmates Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and screenwriter Paula Pell working together, it really can’t be that bad. Fey and Poehler play two 40-something sisters with opposite personalities who return to their family home and decide to throw a huge party before their parents sell it. Unlike 2008’s Baby Mama, this time Poehler is the uptight one while Fey is the irresponsible party woman. But after they plan the party, they agree to switch roles so Poehler can get drunk and let loose. This type of all-night, destroy the house and alert the cops type of affair usually takes place in teen comedies, and this different angle could actually prove to be refreshing.
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