17 Again
Teen heart melter Zac Efron leads the cast in a pastiche of Click and all those body switch/time travel movies of the mid-to-late-1980s (Big, Back to the Future and the eerily similar title 18 Again!, for example). In this one, Zac’s loser adult manifestation (Matthew Perry) is sent back in time by a weird janitor to ... the late 1980s. There, in the irritatingly dissimilar body of spunky Zac, our hero gets his chance to straighten out his life, but not before some uncomfortable propositions. Younger male moviegoers are advised to skip this and see Splinter instead (see below). Older males might wish to see ...
Two Lovers
Joaquin Phoenix has taken a strange turn lately with a bizarre new appearance and manner and an attempt at a career in rap. Hopefully it’s a trick, because movies like Two Lovers, Walk the Line and 8MM show that Phoenix the actor should never be underestimated. This film by James Gray was made before Phoenix grew the beard; in it he is a troubled New Yorker enticed by two women (Vinessa Shaw and Gwyneth Paltrow). The emphasis here is on dialogue, character and complexity.
The Lark Farm
A movie about the Armenian genocide directed by Italy’s famed Taviani brothers sounds unmissable — unless you’re a Turkish nationalist, of course. The story follows the misfortune of a well-to-do family brought undone by massacres and expulsion. But Variety expressed disappointment at how the epic approach clouded characterization. Still, the subject matter alone may intrigue audiences dimly aware of this little understood historical outrage.
Night Train
Danny Glover continues to dabble in low budget genre fare with this nocturnal horror flick. Weird passengers and Glover’s conductor start behaving very greedily and/or bloodily when a strange box activates their worst instincts — starting with the theft of diamonds from a dead fellow passenger. Sadly, Night Train is apparently still looking for a release in the US. This and the next three titles are being released in Taipei by distributor CatchPlay as a horror festival of sorts.
Splinter
Any low budget horror opus that gets killer reviews from Variety, the Village Voice and Fangoria magazine is probably worth seeing. The central plot device borrows a bit from From Dusk Till Dawn: a couple are forced to end a night’s camping, and on the way to a motel they are held at gunpoint by another couple. But all nefarious plans are abandoned when a much more dangerous foe emerges — a creature that exists and infects through splinter-like spines — and the luckless foursome are besieged in a gas station. Gory, fun, scary and smart; not many horror films can claim all these.
Dante 01
In the future, humans will be sent to a prison in space, where they can be quietly experimented on and killed by state medicos. If this grim French mixture of science fiction and Kafka sounds like a cross between the third and fourth Alien installments — but with human cruelty replacing the Alien — then there may be good reason. It was directed by Marc Caro, a member of the team that made Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, and whose partner directed Alien: Resurrection.
The Guard Post
It was an idea whose time had come: a gory horror movie set in a gloomy military station on the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. The Thing meets Event Horizon as a military investigator on a tight schedule probes a massacre at Guard Post 506. But the forces of evil that triggered the killings couldn’t care less about his superiors’ deadlines, and start playing havoc with his own team of soldiers after awful weather traps them inside. Also known as GP506.
Fist of the North Star: The Legend of Kenshiro
This is the final episode in the recent animated revival of the popular futuristic Japanese manga — and is actually a prequel to the manga’s storyline, filling in the missing year that resulted in so much of the warrior Kenshiro’s deadly motivation and torment, including the murder of his girlfriend. This film was released last year on the 25th anniversary of the manga’s creation.
Tamagotchi: Lost Child in Space!?
That Japanese toy pet fad from some years ago may have died out for kids (and kids at heart) in most markets, but now the franchise’s first movie is here to get your little’uns addicted all over again. A chaotic story puts our child heroes into Tamagotchi land before they end up in space and are threatened by a black hole.
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
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
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