Starting with the title and extending everywhere else, Peaceful Warrior is blatantly ludicrous. A didactic enlightenment parable couched as a heroic sports flick, the film stars Scott Mechlowicz as Millman, an arrogant gymnast in Berkeley, California, who is learning New Age life lessons from a pseudo-Buddhist gas station guru played by Nick Nolte. Mindlessly espousing principles of "no mind" and evidently capable of teleportation, this gravel-voiced fortune cookie suggests the missing link between Grizzly Adams and Yoda.
Based on a best-selling book by Dan Millman, this rich slice of spiritualist cheese has been served up on screen by the director Victor Salva, best known to audiences for his Jeepers Creepers horror movies, and perhaps best known to authorities in California as a man who served time in prison in the 1980s for molesting a 12-year-old boy who had appeared in his movies.
Whether or not one thinks of this while observing the intense eroticism of the film and its gawking display of sweating, half-nude teenagers, knowing about it insinuates a queasy frisson to the themes of mentorship and initiation, with their appeal for trust and relinquishing control.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF LIONSGATE
But there I go letting ego cloud my mind, when the seminal fact of Peaceful Warrior is that for all its manifest corniness, this is an achingly sincere and supremely unembarrassed effort to transform an audience for the good. Its heart is very much in the right place - a place that movies all but ignore - but its mind is a mush.
June 9 to June 15 A photo of two men riding trendy high-wheel Penny-Farthing bicycles past a Qing Dynasty gate aptly captures the essence of Taipei in 1897 — a newly colonized city on the cusp of great change. The Japanese began making significant modifications to the cityscape in 1899, tearing down Qing-era structures, widening boulevards and installing Western-style infrastructure and buildings. The photographer, Minosuke Imamura, only spent a year in Taiwan as a cartographer for the governor-general’s office, but he left behind a treasure trove of 130 images showing life at the onset of Japanese rule, spanning July 1897 to
One of the most important gripes that Taiwanese have about the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is that it has failed to deliver concretely on higher wages, housing prices and other bread-and-butter issues. The parallel complaint is that the DPP cares only about glamor issues, such as removing markers of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonialism by renaming them, or what the KMT codes as “de-Sinification.” Once again, as a critical election looms, the DPP is presenting evidence for that charge. The KMT was quick to jump on the recent proposal of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to rename roads that symbolize
In an interview posted online by United Daily News (UDN) on May 26, current Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) was asked about Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) replacing him as party chair. Though not yet officially running, by the customs of Taiwan politics, Lu has been signalling she is both running for party chair and to be the party’s 2028 presidential candidate. She told an international media outlet that she was considering a run. She also gave a speech in Keelung on national priorities and foreign affairs. For details, see the May 23 edition of this column,
On the evening of June 1, Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) apologized and resigned in disgrace. His crime was instructing his driver to use a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon. The Control Yuan is the government branch that investigates, audits and impeaches government officials for, among other things, misuse of government funds, so his misuse of a government vehicle was highly inappropriate. If this story were told to anyone living in the golden era of swaggering gangsters, flashy nouveau riche businessmen, and corrupt “black gold” politics of the 1980s and 1990s, they would have laughed.
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