Burma VJ
The 10 Conditions of Love is getting all the press, but those looking for a first-class political documentary have another option — and it’s coming to a university campus near you. Burma VJ is an award-winning film by Anders Ostergaard that depicts and recreates the activities of underground Burmese journalists who risked their lives to get video footage of the 2007 protests out of the country.
Details on this highly regarded film are at burmavjmovie.com, while playdates and locations are listed in Chinese at tasskn.blogspot.com.
Surrogates
Bruce Willis isn’t getting any younger, but unlike other big action stars over the years, he has managed to stay very credible. In Surrogates, Willis is a law enforcer in a world where idealized android copies interact on behalf of their homebound human versions. When a rare murder occurs, Willis goes off the grid to investigate — using his real self. Jonathan Mostow, who ably directed another aging action star in the third Terminator installment, is at the reins of this movie metaphor for the overuse of technology. With a bit of luck he won’t deliver a generic futuristic flick like The Sixth Day, which this film resembles in places, but the lack of press previews does not fill one with confidence.
Sorority Row
Speaking of new installments of aging material, this is yet another remake of a horror flick from the late 1970s-early 1980s. Like the original The House on Sorority Row, a bunch of young ladies kill one of their sorority sisters when a … wait for it … prank goes wrong, and some time later, oddly enough, a psycho returns with a trusty tire iron for some gory payback. The vengeful return of the mistreated was done to death in My Bloody Valentine and its remake, The Burning, I Know What You Did Last Summer and a host of others. The main difference to be noted in this film, therefore, is not the updated script (date rape drugs, fashionable technology) but the changing ethnic makeup of the girls on sorority row (there’s one Asian: Jamie Chung from Dragonball: Evolution).
Amalfi
The title refers to the famed region of Italy, which is where this family-friendly Japanese thriller was shot. An efficient embassy official investigates when a Japanese kid is kidnapped, putting in train a series of adventures that might impress stay-at-home folks in Japan (and Taiwan), but not those seeking high-octane confrontations and bloodshed. The Japan Times said the film is “pretty to look at, mildly entertaining and reaffirms the essential niceness of Japanese folks.”
Ichi
In feudal Japan, a blind musician with lethal sword skills (Haruka Ayase from Oppai Volleyball and Happy Flight) sets out to find her blind masseuse father, encountering the usual bandits and deadly political intrigue. This is an update of the famed series centering on the blind Zatoichi character, who could be this forlorn young woman’s father. Critics admired the film’s visuals and noted its retention of genre conventions rather than a modern reworking of theme and character, notwithstanding the female lead.
Naoko
Another manga-based film from Japan, this one turns to the curious sport of relay marathons and the relationships among the members of one team. Naoko (Juri Ueno) is a manager for the team, but her ability to deal with the best of its runners is compromised by memories of a fatal accident some years before. Of more interest than the manga-based, baseball-themed Rookies: Graduation, which opened last month, if only because marathons have better scenery.
The Little Finger and the Forbidden Body
A mannered Japanese incest potboiler from 2005, this is being promoted as an earlier feature starring Hiroyuki Ikeuchi (Ip Man). Ikeuchi gets it on — and on — with his sister, only to later block the memory of the experience. But his line of work in a red light district doesn’t let his repressed past stay buried. Actor-director Kei Horie seems to have a thing for grim subject matter. Also known in English as Finger and Body and The Whole Body and the Little Finger — the mind boggles. The Baixue theater in Ximending is the best possible place for a movie like this.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
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