Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
A feature-length documentary from last year on the recording sessions and musings of the US jazz legend ahead of a new album/DVD of the same title. It includes footage of Paul Simon, Sting, Annie Lennox, Carlos Santana, Brian Eno, Christina Aguilera and many other artists.
Love My Life
If you came away from the Taiwanese film I Saw a Beast feeling like you'd been beaten around the head with a patronizing lecture on the evils of lesbianism (complete with sex scenes), then this Japanese manga adaptation might just be the tonic you need: a family-friendly lesbian drama. There are no torrid couplings, bouts of hysteria or religious naysaying as two clean-cut college students try to keep their relationship afloat in the face of multiple challenges.
Noriko's Dinner Table
Another disturbing story of teenage alienation and manipulation from director Sion Sono, who made Suicide Club in 2002. Filmed in 2005 and not nearly as timely now as it was then, this effort sees teenager Noriko run away from home and link up with a sinister group she met online. It includes the mass suicide of teenage girls from the earlier film as a plot point.
Second Kadokawa Film Festival
Rush to see five films from this Japanese production company. Adiantum Blue asks what you would do if your partner had a month to live. Veteran Kon Ichikawa's The Inugamis is a remake of his family drama from 1976. Tonari Machi Senso (The War Next Door) is a strange love story. Then there's A Hardest Night!! from 2005, (Japanese title: Nezu No Ban), a black and incredibly bawdy wake comedy that makes Frank Oz's Death at a Funeral seem terribly polite. Finally, Taiwan's legion of young baseballers should check out The Battery, an adaptation of a bestseller on kids growing up - with baseball helping them along the way. The films will show at the Spring Cinema Galaxy and the Changchun in Taipei until Oct. 18; then at the Vieshow in Hsinchu and the Shin Kong in Taichung until Nov. 1, then at the Ambassador in Tainan and the Vieshow in Kaohsiung until Nov. 15.
Web site: www.taipeiwalker.com.tw/pub/kadokawa2/mo2.htm.
Gitano
Already available on DVD, this exercise in "flamencorotica" from 2000 may be worth seeing on the DVD-projected big screen at the Caesar theater first. Gitano is the name for gypsies in Spain, and this restricted-category film noir about a Gitano excon combines dance, music, sex, revenge and murder. Just the ticket for audiences who fell asleep before the sex scenes in Lust, Caution.
Dracula
Also getting a DVD promotional run at the Caesar theater, Roger Young's version of the Count's wicked exploits is an Italian-German TV production from 2002, and stars Patrick Bergin (Patriot Games) as the immortal neck-muncher and always watchable Giancarlo Giannini (Casino Royale, Hannibal) as Valenzi the vampire expert. Trivia: Bergin also played Frankenstein in a 1992 TV movie.
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
From a nadir following the 2020 national elections, two successive chairs of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) and Eric Chu (朱立倫), tried to reform and reinvigorate the old-fashioned Leninist-structured party to revive their fortunes electorally. As examined in “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How Eric Chu revived the KMT,” Chu in particular made some savvy moves that made the party viable electorally again, if not to their full powerhouse status prior to the 2014 Sunflower movement. However, while Chu has made some progress, there remain two truly enormous problems facing the KMT: the party is in financial ruin and
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