The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Robin Wright Penn is Pippa Lee, a housewife in Connecticut whose psychological history and social milieu makes it to the big screen courtesy of Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur Miller), who adapted her own work and directed. Pippa is married to publisher Alan Arkin and has an interesting network of friends, family and associates, but there’s no shortage of dissatisfaction in her life. Flashbacks to Pippa as a young woman (played by Blake Lively from TV’s Gossip Girl) help explain why. Big cast includes Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore, Keanu Reeves, Monica Bellucci and Maria Bello, but critics were divided on this one.
Couples Retreat
Vince Vaughn and wife travel to lovely Bora Bora for therapy along with three other couples, but the program on offer by the local resort chief (Jean Reno) is not quite what they expect. American critics liked the actors but retreated from the rest of the production, which — as with many mainstream US comedies these days — injects surprisingly crude material throughout in the hope of appearing lively, if not funny.
Om Shanti Om
Bollywood films never took off in Taiwan, and while this week’s release (under the mini-festival title “Bling! Bling! Bollywood!”) of two big-budget odes to the movie industry won’t change that, it will surely remind adventurous local audiences of the dynamism of India’s filmmakers. In Om Shanti Om, Shahrukh Khan (Slumdog Millionaire) plays the two “Oms” in segments set decades apart, but possibly connected through reincarnation, while Deepika Padukone is his love interest, Shanti. Packed with musical numbers, action, romance, color and dance, India’s trade office couldn’t have asked for a more majestic advertisement for Indian tourism.
Billu Barber
In this accompanying Bollywood release made last year, the wildly popular Shahrukh Khan is back as a movie star whose struggling barber friend, Billu, enjoys a new lease of life when the village Khan is shooting in learns of their connection. This is not, however, a standard happy tale, even though it is laced with Bollywood exuberance: Billu’s newfound popularity is mostly based on the opportunism and insincerity of his neighbors.
Noriben: The Recipe of Fortune
A woman in her early thirties leaves her husband and returns to her family home and community with child in tow to find that her calling is making and selling bento, and noriben (seaweed, soy sauce and rice) in particular. This is another in a selection of Japanese films of late that have older women striking out on their own. Oddly enough, this is also a manga adaptation, and it’s hard not to think of the first Sonny Chiba-Uma Thurman scene in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 when our plucky heroine asks to be an apprentice chef.
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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