The 5th Wave
The latest to ride the wave of post-apocalyptic young adult science fiction adaptations, there’s really nothing in the plot description that makes The 5th Wave stand out. Even the fact that it’s set to become a trilogy follows the golden rule established by the Hunger Games and so on. Anyway, aliens have devastated the world in four distinct waves of attacks, and while people await the fifth one, spunky teen Chloe Grace Moretz teams up with a stranger to save her younger brother who has been captured by aliens. Throw in some budding romance stuff, survival scenes and kids being forced to grow up and fight, and you have the perfect film — for a teenager. Adult alien-invasion enthusiasts should probably wait for this summer’s sequel to Independence Day.
Steve Jobs
If you don’t know what this movie is about after reading the title, just don’t watch it. Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire fame directs this Oscar-hopeful biopic based on Walter Isaacson’s book on the man who co-founded Apple, recruiting a big-name cast of Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen and Jeff Daniels. The book itself is quite impressive — released 19 days after Job’s death in 2011, it is based on extensive interviews with Jobs and more than 100 family members and friends. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who won multiple awards for his similarly-themed The Social Network, has divided the movie into three acts — each marked by a significant Jobs invention. There’s talk that many people featured in the movie and people who knew Jobs have criticized the film as an inaccurate portrayal, so just take it with a grain of salt.
Dirty Grandpa
First Bruce Willis, now Robert De Niro — our iconic stars are aging and fading into insignificance — but at least De Niro still gets the titular role in Dirty Grandpa. Plus, the former tough guy has been venturing into big budget comedy for awhile, not all with bad results. This low-brow comedy is directed by Ali G collaborator Dan Mazer, and has Zac Efron playing De Niro’s straight-laced grandson whom De Niro drags to Daytona Beach for a good time before he gets married to an equally uptight woman. Seems like a terrible idea, but judging from the trailer, it actually could be funny as the characters somehow make it work, especially with Efron being pushed around by De Niro. Warning: there’s a De Niro sex scene in the film.
Black Souls
Francesco Munzi’s crime film that won four Venice Film Festival prizes and nine David Di Donatello awards in 2014 is finally premiering in Taiwan. The story is about three brothers from a Calabrian mafia clan in southern Italy — all living in different places doing different things — who are drawn back home, becoming involved in a re-opened blood feud that goes way back. Most of the film is shot in Africo, a poor, rural town where clan violence, which has been featured in the news several times in the past decade, runs rampant. The ‘Ndrangheta, the mafia family the brothers belong to, is often considered the most powerful in all of Italy — surpassing their Sicilian counterparts. It seems like a more dramatic, slow-paced piece that explores the ties of kinship and honor and how they can drive generation after generation to reenact the never-ending violence.
Son of Saul
Another multiple award-winning European film is making its local premiere this week: Son of Saul, which won the Cannes Grand Prix and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, the first Hungarian film to do so. Impressively, it’s both director Laszlo Nemes’ and lead actor Geza Rohring’s debut feature. Rohring is Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando — concentration camp prisoners who were forced to help the Nazis in leading other prisoners to the gas chambers and disposing of the bodies afterward. Things change when Saul sees a body of a young boy that he claims is his son, and embarks on a mission to give the boy a proper Jewish burial. It’s one of the more morally dark takes on the holocaust, one where prisoners are forced to turn on others just to prolong their lives for a few months. The entire film is shot from the perspective of Saul, which should make this grim story even more powerful.
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
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
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