When U-Theatre returned to its mountain compound after extensive renovations, it held a festival. Next up is a performance in honor of the group's abode

By Diane Baker
Last month, when U-Theatre (優劇場), Taiwan's Zen drumming group returned to the Laoquanshan (老泉山) compound after a two-year absence due to renovations, it celebrated with a "mountain festival." Being back on the mountain, which has been the troupe's home for 15 years, led U-Theater founder-director Liu Ruo-yu (劉若瑀) and drumming director Huang Chih-chun (黃誌群) to think about doing a performance about and for the mountain.

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By Ian Bartholomew
Government efforts to clean up the streets of Taipei over the last decade have, as even a fleeting familiarity with the darker corners of the city shows, done little more than driven the capital's sex industry underground. In many cases, it has simply made life harder for some of society's most vulnerable members.

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By Noah Buchan
After the huge success of their summer workshops and performances, Dance Works (舞工廠舞團) return to the stage this weekend with their Fred Astaire-inspired modern tap performance 160x24h Tapcode (踢踏密碼).

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Compiled by Noah Buchan
The wave of police raids and accusations of drug use continued this past week with Little Pan-pan (小潘潘) holding a press conference to rebut a report in the United Daily News that her phone number was found on the mobile phone of an associate of alleged drug kingpin Wang Feng-yu (王豐裕).

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Taipei Times staff
1. Alan Luo (羅志祥) and Show Your Dance (舞所不在) with 25.97 percent of sales

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By Ron Brownlow
On Wednesday night at The Queens, a plush, LED-festooned club on the 12th floor of the Core Pacific (京華城) mall that hosts live bands every night of the week, a group of more than 40 people gathered for what looked like a corporate party. Most of them were in their late thirties or older, and the men were wearing jackets and ties - not the kind of audience you'd expect to turn up for a show by Rabbit Is Rich (兔子很有錢), a raw, New York-style garage-rock band influenced by The Strokes, The Hives and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But several songs into the set, as the group's petite singer Andrea Huang (黃盈誼) screeched, yelped and strutted around in a black mini-dress with a glittering silver-studded belt, nearly everyone was on the dance floor, bobbing like pogo sticks and flailing their hands in the air as she sang, "I'm gonna, gonna, gonnna kick your ass. I'm gonna, gonna, gonnna kick your ass."

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By Tom Leeming
Luxy is gearing up for Christmas by getting get back to basics and dishing out what only it has been able to offer: massive hedonistic parties full of special love and beautiful people. Tomorrow night, it's war on all things mediocre that have invaded Taiwan's nightlife.

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By Ho Yi
Because of Carnegie's long-standing reputation as a dining and nightclub fixture among Western expats, it's easy to become cliche when reviewing it. Even those who have little experience of Taipei's nightlife know the place for its 30-plus crowd. What people seem to be less aware of, though, is Carnegie's brunch. It's a feature that deserves applause for its relaxing ambience, friendly prices and, of course, good food.

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By Noah Buchan
Bakeries serving a variety of German, Italian and French breads are becoming increasingly common and up-market grocery stores are going out of their way to sell cheese and cold meats from around the world, but a deli worthy of the name has yet to be found in the capital.

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This animation is likely to be a hit with the grown-ups, but the kids may not understand the humor
By A. O. SCOTT
Bees rarely fly in a straight line. They hover and zigzag, with a purpose known only to the collective brain of the hive. The most genuinely apian aspect of Bee Movie, DreamWorks' new animated movie about, well, bees, is that it spends a lot of its short running time buzzing happily around, sniffing out fresh jokes wherever they may bloom. There is a plot - the usual big, elaborate story with the usual important messages about saving the planet, living together in interspecies harmony and believing in yourself - but it's a little beside the point. The real fun is the insect shtick.

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'We Own the Night' pits the police against drug dealers in a fight to the death, but mistakes sentiment for profundity
By A. O. SCOTT
On a show like The Wire, policemen and criminals belong to competitive organizations locked in uneasy, permanent coexistence. In We Own the Night, James Gray's operatic new film, the police and drug dealers are imagined as warring tribes in a fight to the death. The Russian gangsters on one side appear ready to take out the entire NYPD. And some of the cops are just as eager to forgo the legal niceties and do some righteous killing of their own.

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By MANOHLA DARGIS
Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones. Directed by the actor Steve Buscemi, and based on an earlier film by the Dutch director Theo van Gogh (whose slaying by an Islamic extremist in 2004 inspired this remake), the movie is one of those chatty, catty, conceptual face-offs that are often best left to the stage and for which sports metaphors seem to have been invented. Two well-matched opponents enter, spar, punch, clinch, flail, break, draw blood (metaphoric, literal), block and knock down. Do they score? Yes and no.

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By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Adapted by the director David Slade from Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's graphic novel about vampires taking over an Alaska town, 30 Days of Night is a series of gory set pieces that seems to have been edited with a meat ax. A major early transition is so clumsy that you may assume that the projectionist accidentally skipped a reel. No such luck: it's a style thing.

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South Korea's notorious art-house director abandons raw violence for a quieter tone in this unlikely romance
By Ho Yi
Once notorious for dealing with extremity and violence in films such as Bad Guy, South Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk goes for something less disturbing with his latest and 14th feature Breath. This movie, tinted with a quiet and bewildering tone, tells the story of an eccentric romance between a housewife and a condemned criminal.

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Preachy, weepy 'I Wish,' with well-known faces instead of actors, induces nausea but little in the way of emotions
By Ian Bartholomew
There is nothing intrinsically vicious about a tearjerker movie, and going to the movies for a good cry has a long and distinguished tradition. I Wish (奇妙的旅程), the new celebrity vehicle featuring TV host Blackie (陳建州) and model Cheryl Yang (楊謹華) sets out to move its audience to tears, but unfortunately, instead of tugging at the heart strings, it launches into an assault on the tear ducts that flagrantly disregards all sense of good taste and common decency. It's an act of emotional battery that has all the subtlety of a blow to the head from a blunt instrument.

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AGENCIES
A Chinese movie sharply critical of deteriorating morals amid the country's rapid economic growth will finally hit theaters later this week after being heavily censored and delayed for a key Communist Party meeting, its producer, Fang Li (方勵), said.

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COMPILED BY MARTIN WILLIAMS
Nanking

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TAIPEI TIMES STAFF
Theater

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