The actress Julianne Moore has one face as transparent as water, the other as opaque as a mystery. With her milky complexion and lapidary features, Moore can seem alarmingly fragile, as breakable and translucent as fine French porcelain. It's a face that suggests vulnerability, femininity and an almost otherworldly ethereality.
But there is a tough side to the actress, too, a core resolve that can harden her beauty into a mask, and it is in the space between her perceived delicacy and this mask that Moore does her best work. For filmmakers who know how to put her faces into play, the actress can work wonders, as she did for the director Todd Haynes in Safe and his wrenching melodrama Far From Heaven.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF BVI
In the preposterous thriller The Forgotten, however, a pseudospiritual, mumbo-jumbo, science-fiction inflected mess that opens in Taiwan today, the director Joseph Ruben does not just fail to tap into Moore's talent; he barely gets her attention. As Telly, a Brooklyn mother in mourning, Moore delivers a performance that has all the emotional commitment of a bored kid playing with a light switch. Even after Telly discovers that all the images of her dead son, Sam (Christopher Kovaleski), have been erased from the photographs scattered around her home, Moore keeps flipping the switch: sad, not sad, sad, not sad.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF BVI
Initially, the disappearing images are explained away by Telly's creepy psychiatrist, Dr. Munce (Gary Sinise). As her husband (Anthony Edwards) nervously sits by, Telly learns that Sam never existed and that, after suffering a miscarriage, she invented the boy out of thin air. Telly finds this hard to believe (she isn't the only one) and embarks on a Search for the Truth.
The search leads her to a hard-drinking ex-hockey player, Ash (Dominic West), whose watery eyes obscure a sensitive soul and potential romantic interest. Burdened with his own tragedy, Ash joins Telly in her increasingly mysterioso quest, one that takes them from under the Brooklyn Bridge to the wilds of Long Island and, in due course, involves the National Security Agency, a police detective (Alfre Woodard), an omniscient stranger (Linus Roache) and some tawdry special effects.
In the 1987 pulp-horror movie The Stepfather, Ruben managed to squeeze first-rate chills and atmosphere from what might have been just another sleazy serial-killer flick. In the years since, he has ranged across genres, doing his best work with cryptohorror thrillers like Sleeping With the Enemy. Here, however, working with a screenplay credited to Gerald Di Pego, Ruben never settles into a coherent groove, partly because the movie simultaneously tries for cheap thrills, emotional uplift and some nonsense about the eternal mother. The other problem is that the film takes too long to let us know what is going on and why. Like a good striptease, a good thriller reveals its secrets a little at a time because without the buildup, the shivers of anticipation, we may not want to stick around.
Oct. 14 to Oct. 20 After working above ground for two years, Chang Kui (張桂) entered the Yamamoto coal mine for the first time, age 16. It was 1943, and because many men had joined the war effort, an increasing number of women went underground to take over the physically grueling and dangerous work. “As soon as the carts arrived, I climbed on for the sake of earning money; I didn’t even feel scared,” Chang tells her granddaughter Tai Po-fen (戴伯芬) in The last female miner: The story of Chang Kui (末代女礦工: 張桂故事), which can be found on the Frontline
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President William Lai’s (賴清德) National Day speech was exactly what most of us expected. It was pleasant, full of keywords like “resilience” and “net zero” and lacked any trolling of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Of course the word “Taiwan” popped up often, and Lai reiterated the longtime claim of his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), a claim that now dates back 30 years on the pro-Taiwan side. But it was gentle. Indeed, it was possible to see the speech as conciliatory, leaving room for the PRC to make a gesture. That may have been one of its purposes: if
In the tourism desert that is most of Changhua County, at least one place stands out as a remarkable exception: one of Taiwan’s earliest Han Chinese settlements, Lukang. Packed with temples and restored buildings showcasing different eras in Taiwan’s settlement history, the downtown area is best explored on foot. As you make your way through winding narrow alleys where even Taiwanese scooters seldom pass, you are sure to come across surprise after surprise. The old Taisugar railway station is a good jumping-off point for a walking tour of downtown Lukang. Though the interior is not open to the public, the exterior
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