In Babylon AD Vin Diesel, the slowest-moving action hero in movies, travels over land and under water from somewhere in the former Soviet Union to New York City in the company of a nun (Michelle Yeoh, 楊紫瓊) and a young woman named Aurora (Melanie Thierry). Aurora is either some kind of biological weapon or some kind of messianic figure.
I won’t say which, though this odd, solemn disaster has made itself spoiler-proof by refusing to make any sense at all. The only explicable thing about Babylon AD is that it was not screened in advance for critics. Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as “pure violence and stupidity.”
He did not mean that in a good way, and while I hate to contradict an artist’s assessment of his own work — Kassovitz blames 20th Century Fox for compromising his political and metaphysical vision — a purely violent and stupid film might have been kind of fun. This one, while it has some nice futuristic design touches (including grubby East Bloc housing projects and a splendidly renovated Harlem brownstone), combines badly executed action sequences with mystic mumbo-jumbo that I suspect not even a two-disc director’s cut DVD could make comprehensible.
Kassovitz, whose acting credits include Amelie and Munich, might earn the benefit of the doubt for some of his earlier work as a director, or at least for La Haine, his scrappy urban melodrama from 1995. On the other hand, he is also the director of Gothika, a Halle Berry horror vehicle that, now that I think of it, makes me look a bit more kindly on Babylon AD.
Which at least has an interesting cast: not only Yeoh, one of the world’s great movie stars, but also Charlotte Rampling as a high priestess and Gerard Depardieu (wearing the most superfluous prosthetic nose extension in film history) as a Russian mobster. What they are doing here is not for me to say, though perhaps Diesel, in an early voice-over, offers a clue.
“I learned something today,” says his character, a tattooed mercenary with the curious name Toorop. “You can’t always walk away.” I’m sure he wishes otherwise. I certainly do.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
At Computex 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) urged the government to subsidize AI. “All schools in Taiwan must integrate AI into their curricula,” he declared. A few months earlier, he said, “If I were a student today, I’d immediately start using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro and Grok to learn, write and accelerate my thinking.” Huang sees the AI-bullet train leaving the station. And as one of its drivers, he’s worried about youth not getting on board — bad for their careers, and bad for his workforce. As a semiconductor supply-chain powerhouse and AI hub wannabe, Taiwan is seeing
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