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.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
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