First impressions count, even in film. That helps explain why an opening credit sequence that invokes Woody Allen's Manhattan, though without the shimmering imagery (or the eventual payoff of midcareer Allen) is a bad idea. It also explains why opening a film with a small child straining on a toilet and talking about poop isn't just a bad idea; it's an invitation to unfortunate metaphor.
Thus Trust the Man is a strained, flatulent relationship comedy about two couples, only one of which proves of interest to its writer and director, Bart Freundlich, perhaps because the woman in that couple is played by his own wife, Julianne Moore. She's Rebecca, a film actress about to take the theatrical plunge at Lincoln Center. Rebecca is married to Tom (David Duchovny), who has ditched a lucrative advertising gig to trundle their little girl around town and flirt with a single mother lurking at his son's school. Rebecca and Tom live in a West Village townhouse filled with light and tasteful appointments. Every so often they have sex; once a year they visit a therapist (Garry Shandling, having fun). They're vaguely dissatisfied and crushingly dull.
Rebecca and Tom need our love to work as characters, but their kind of self-love leaves no room for outsiders. What it does leave room for are her brother, Tobey (Billy Crudup), and his girlfriend, Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the couple's unmarried best friends who are experiencing their own relationship pains partly because she seems to hear her biological clock ticking and partly because he's a jerk. Elaine and Tobey are in meltdown because Freundlich subscribes to the theory that every Lucy-and-Ricky needs its Ethel-and-Fred, a cruder version of itself to mirror its ecstasies and agonies, no matter how banal. To that end, Elaine and Tobey ape their better-groomed pals while screeching and rattling the cage.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PANDASIA
Moore is nicely lighted, but she too is poorly served by Freundlich's unfunny, unfocused screenplay, which basically stitches together a series of short scenes of four people whining in various combinations. Throughout the whining, Tom wears a small, amused smile that suggests he's in on some cosmic joke, though it may just be that Duchovny knows that when you play what looks like the director's surrogate you can't help but come out ahead. Tom makes his wife weep, a little, and doesn't share her limelight, but he turns out to be a great guy with hidden talents just waiting to be revealed. The final scene dies on the vine.
It makes you wonder why anyone bothered. Like a lot of American films made under the rubric of independence, Trust the Man lacks urgency and purpose; you never get a sense of why this story had to be made, much less shared. With its loud noises and costly effects, the typical Hollywood blockbuster at least tries to sell itself (and more films like it) to the audience.
Trust the Man, on the other hand, assumes that it has something the audience wants to buy. It's an assumption that leaves a lot of talented actors hanging, the exception being James Le Gros, who makes a very funny, regrettably brief appearance as a would-be Lothario who turns a rueful caress of his mustache into an epic of smut.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
April 28 to May 4 During the Japanese colonial era, a city’s “first” high school typically served Japanese students, while Taiwanese attended the “second” high school. Only in Taichung was this reversed. That’s because when Taichung First High School opened its doors on May 1, 1915 to serve Taiwanese students who were previously barred from secondary education, it was the only high school in town. Former principal Hideo Azukisawa threatened to quit when the government in 1922 attempted to transfer the “first” designation to a new local high school for Japanese students, leading to this unusual situation. Prior to the Taichung First
RSS