My Best Friend’s Girl
Jason Biggs (American Pie) is back, but he’s not the main character in this, the latest rude and sexually aggressive comedy to come from the US. Dustin (Biggs) adores Alexis (Kate Hudson), but the feeling isn’t mutual, so he calls on his buddy Tank (Dane Cook) to weave his manly magic and disgust her so grievously on a date that she will flee back to our Jason. But — you guessed it — the two hit it off instead. Wicked, politically incorrect humor abounds, but Variety warns of a possible altered ending to pacify preview audiences, which suggests that director Terry Zwigoff (Bad Santa) might have been the man to stand up to the studio and keep the mayhem real instead of Howard Deutch.
Passengers
Peter Weir’s Fearless from 1993 has been on cable TV lately, and fans of that fine film might be interested in a similarly themed offering in Passengers. As with Fearless, this film focuses on plane crash survivors and their debilitating traumas, but unlike Weir’s film, this one is just as interested in thriller elements in the form of mysterious characters, twists and revelations. Case in point: Attendees at a counseling session start disappearing. Stars Anne Hathaway, Patrick Wilson and David Morse.
Finishing the Game
The “game” is Game of Death, the film that Bruce Lee didn’t finish shooting before his tragically premature death. In this “mockumentary,” a bunch of luckless Asian American actors, including Dustin Nguyen (21 Jump Street), vie to be the one to replace Lee in the completion of the kung fu classic. M.C. Hammer, George Takei and Ron Jeremy appear in cameos. It’s taken a little while to get released here, which is a little surprising given that director Justin Lin (林詣彬), who directed the third Fast and the Furious entry, has Taiwanese heritage.
Seraphine
Fittingly released here in the week of the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, this is a French film based on the relationship between famed painter Seraphine Louis and art enthusiast Wilhelm Uhde. Uhde spies the struggling Seraphine’s art while visiting her village on the eve of the war and their patron-client relationship blossoms, but bloody conflict and personal vulnerability take a heavy toll. Yolande Moreau (Amelie) stars as the troubled artist in a film that is receiving warm reviews.
One Piece The Movie: Episode of Chopper — Bloom in the Winter, Miracle Sakura
Those crazy anime pirates are back in action in this perennial series, this time revisiting the story of Chopper — the crew’s adolescent medic and transformable blue-nosed reindeer —for the first time since 2002. A search by the Straw Hat pirates for a doctor brings them to an island kingdom where danger and evil characters lurk and preparations for battle are made, but also where a horned hero waits in the wings.
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam in 1979, following a year of increasingly tense relations between the two states. Beijing viewed Vietnam’s close relations with Soviet Russia as a threat. One of the pretexts it used was the alleged mistreatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Tension between the ethnic Chinese and governments in Vietnam had been ongoing for decades. The French used to play off the Vietnamese against the Chinese as a divide-and-rule strategy. The Saigon government in 1956 compelled all Vietnam-born Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship. It also banned them from 11 trades they had previously
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
Jan. 12 to Jan. 18 At the start of an Indigenous heritage tour of Beitou District (北投) in Taipei, I was handed a sheet of paper titled Ritual Song for the Various Peoples of Tamsui (淡水各社祭祀歌). The lyrics were in Chinese with no literal meaning, accompanied by romanized pronunciation that sounded closer to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) than any Indigenous language. The translation explained that the song offered food and drink to one’s ancestors and wished for a bountiful harvest and deer hunting season. The program moved through sites related to the Ketagalan, a collective term for the
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