The shaky comedy My Super Ex-Girlfriend must have been a dream to pitch: Fatal Attraction meets Wonder Woman, but funny. The casting seems as if it should have been equally breezy, with Uma Thurman doing double duty as a New York neurotic, Jenny Johnson, and a secret superhero, G-Girl, who flies through the air putting out fires, though only when her drab brown hair turns a costly shade of Hamptons blond.
Toss in Luke Wilson as the nice guy who says and does all the right things and Rainn Wilson as the second banana who says and does all the wrong ones. Stir, or, in the case of the director Ivan Reitman, of Ghostbusters fame, hope for the best.
Why G-Girl and not G-Woman? For the same reason that this particular superhero can access her powers only after she slips on something tighter and a whole lot less comfortable-looking: she's a joke. Whether you laugh at this joke will depend on whether you think the film says more about men than women (which it does), and whether you find its characterization of the spurned she-devil a sexist cliche (which it is) or an amusing sexist cliche (which it also is, reservedly).
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
A pasty Luke Wilson plays Matt Saunders, a single guy who has one of those dream jobs and Manhattan pads that seem to exist only in the minds of Hollywood filmmakers. One day on the subway Matt, spurred on by his pal Vaughn (Rainn Wilson), strikes up a conversation with a woman busily paying no mind to anyone else. Before long, he and the stranger he first knows as an art dealer, then as a crusader, are tussling in one of the kinkier sex scenes to earn a PG-13 rating in the US, as in: “parents strongly cautioned” that Jenny makes like a battering ram, executing night moves that crack the wall, break the bed and leave her dazed partner rather unbelievably intact. And, yes, there are jokes about that superhero name.
Matt's postcoital smile and a wobbly walk that brings to mind Jake Gyllenhaal's first morning-after in Brokeback Mountain suggest that, however physically demanding, Jenny is a keeper. Alas, as if by clockwork or the professional lout's handbook, she turns out to be wildly insecure, possessive, needy, the whole crazy-woman nine yards, which means that, at least as far as the filmmakers are concerned, she's both a drag and a threat.
It also means that before too long she's history, soon replaced in Matt's affections by the nice, naturally blond Hannah (Anna Faris). Those who rooted for Glenn Close, even while admitting that the boiled bunny was a wee bit excessive, may enjoy the sight of G-Girl punching a skylight into her ex's ceiling.
The screenwriter Don Payne, a writer on The Simpsons here earning his first big-screen credit, may not have had Close, much less the Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon, in mind when he wrote this film. But he might as well have since, unwittingly or not, it perfectly expresses what Gordon once called the “fear of a female planet.”
In My Super Ex-Girlfriend, G-Girl rockets around saving the day in skirts and high heels like some nitro-fueled Carrie Bradshaw, outshining her dweeb of a boyfriend at every turn. So of course he dumps her. Who cares? Good riddance to bad-boyfriend rubbish. This super chick may be super nuts, but when trouble comes calling, as it tends to do in the big city, who you gonna call? Wall-buster!
Nine Taiwanese nervously stand on an observation platform at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. It’s 9:20am on March 27, 1968, and they are awaiting the arrival of Liu Wen-ching (柳文卿), who is about to be deported back to Taiwan where he faces possible execution for his independence activities. As he is removed from a minibus, a tenth activist, Dai Tian-chao (戴天昭), jumps out of his hiding place and attacks the immigration officials — the nine other activists in tow — while urging Liu to make a run for it. But he’s pinned to the ground. Amid the commotion, Liu tries to
The slashing of the government’s proposed budget by the two China-aligned parties in the legislature, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), has apparently resulted in blowback from the US. On the recent junket to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, KMT legislators reported that they were confronted by US officials and congressmen angered at the cuts to the defense budget. The United Daily News (UDN), the longtime KMT party paper, now KMT-aligned media, responded to US anger by blaming the foreign media. Its regular column, the Cold Eye Collection (冷眼集), attacked the international media last month in
A pig’s head sits atop a shelf, tufts of blonde hair sprouting from its taut scalp. Opposite, its chalky, wrinkled heart glows red in a bubbling vat of liquid, locks of thick dark hair and teeth scattered below. A giant screen shows the pig draped in a hospital gown. Is it dead? A surgeon inserts human teeth implants, then hair implants — beautifying the horrifyingly human-like animal. Chang Chen-shen (張辰申) calls Incarnation Project: Deviation Lovers “a satirical self-criticism, a critique on the fact that throughout our lives we’ve been instilled with ideas and things that don’t belong to us.” Chang
Feb. 10 to Feb. 16 More than three decades after penning the iconic High Green Mountains (高山青), a frail Teng Yu-ping (鄧禹平) finally visited the verdant peaks and blue streams of Alishan described in the lyrics. Often mistaken as an indigenous folk song, it was actually created in 1949 by Chinese filmmakers while shooting a scene for the movie Happenings in Alishan (阿里山風雲) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), recounts director Chang Ying (張英) in the 1999 book, Chang Ying’s Contributions to Taiwanese Cinema and Theater (打鑼三響包得行: 張英對台灣影劇的貢獻). The team was meant to return to China after filming, but