The Hitcher isn't shy about declaring its intentions. The opening image is of a jackrabbit crossing a desert highway and being pulped by a car. Soon after, the vacationing young hero, Jim (Zachary Knighton), asks his girlfriend, Grace (Sophia Bush), to hold the wheel of his 1970 Oldsmobile 442 so he can hang out of the driver's side window and clean a splattered bug off the windshield. Message: Roadkill comes in all shapes and sizes.
Like the same-titled 1986 cult movie, this remake fuses elements of The Terminator, the Twilight Zone episode with the phantom hitchhiker, and Steven Spielberg's desert chase Duel. Dave Meyers, directing his first feature, and his three screenwriters (including Eric Red, who wrote the original) have conceived the tale as a crash-and-burn action-horror film with intellectual pretensions.
As the mass-murdering, hero-framing title character, the British actor Sean Bean brings parched charisma, a nondescript "American'' accent and an overachiever's commitment to nuance. In the original, Rutger Hauer's lip-smacking baddie was Satan with a driver's license. Bean's version plays like the murderous hero of Crime and Punishment reimagined as a wraithlike stalker. He's a sadistic philosophical theorist, mucking with people who didn't get the memo saying God is dead.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PANASIA
His victims include a family whose bumper sticker identifies them as evangelicals. When Jim and Grace inspect the Hitcher's butchery, the scene ends with a close-up of a bloodied Sunday school booklet titled "Will I Go to Heaven?'' Later, asked "Why'd you do it?'' the Hitcher replies, "Why not?''
The remake preserves many of the original's notorious set pieces, including a showstopper in which the cab and trailer of an 18-wheeler are used as a torture rack. The mix of mystical solemnity and chain-reaction slapstick suggests a Road Runner cartoon directed by John Woo (吳宇森). This is the kind of film in which the heroes often have the evildoer dead to rights but fail to pull the trigger, ostensibly because they're prisoners of bourgeois morality, but really because if they did the smart thing, the film would be a short subject.
The movie genuflects toward pop depth in a scene where Grace sprawls on a motel bed watching Alfred Hitchcock's Birds, another thriller about implacable, undefined evil, but there's a difference between refusing to give viewers the answers and having nothing to say. For all its death-metal vigor, The Hitcher falls into the latter camp.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
For many people, Bilingual Nation 2030 begins and ends in the classroom. Since the policy was launched in 2018, the debate has centered on students, teachers and the pressure placed on schools. Yet the policy was never solely about English education. The government’s official plan also calls for bilingualization in Taiwan’s government services, laws and regulations, and living environment. The goal is to make Taiwan more inclusive and accessible to international enterprises and talent and better prepared for global economic and trade conditions. After eight years, that grand vision is due for a pulse check. RULES THAT CAN BE READ For Harper Chen (陳虹宇), an adviser
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
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