Valentine’s Day
Best start with the most obviously timed of the New Year slate of offerings. A huge cast that crosses the generations locks horns with a limited timeframe and a dozen plot lines to try to deliver romantic entertainment for the masses. With Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman) at the helm, one might expect a brisk package of laughs and a few tears, but early reviews have largely dumped all over this one. Got a date? Maybe you should consider ...
I Love You Phillip Morris
Now this is a Valentine’s Day movie. Jim Carrey throws hypocritical Hollywood pseudo-liberalism out the window and takes up his role as a comically shaded gay criminal with devil-may-care gusto. In so doing he might lose a few fans (Variety wondered if the film “will give some fans of Ace Ventura heart attacks”), but he’s also bound to gain some, too. Carrey plays a real-life fraudster who ends up in prison and smitten with Ewan McGregor. Directed by the writers of the uproarious Bad Santa, which in itself is a reason to give this movie a chance, but with a warning that the humor will be in your face.
The Wolfman
Romance is in the back seat for this faithful version of one of the oldest — if less revisited — movie monster traditions. Benicio Del Toro is the afflicted one, Anthony Hopkins is his father, Hugo Weaving is the Scotland Yard detective on the trail and Emily Blunt the woman caught up in it all. Few previews available for this one, which usually suggests nervous distributors, and what reviews are out there are split down the middle. Includes many computer animation effects, which would not impress those of us brought up on The Howling and An American Werewolf in London. But it does have Benicio.
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
Based on a series of popular books, Percy makes it to the big screen but without the massive publicity blitz and nurturing of critics that preceded the first Harry Potter movie. In fact, as with The Wolfman, we’re two days out from a wide US release and there are virtually no reviews out there save those of Australian critics in an earlier time zone. Percy is a normal youngster who suddenly discovers he has blood ties to the Greek gods, and this is not such a good thing if there’s trouble brewing around Mt Olympus. Directed by Chris Columbus, who also made the first two Harry Potter installments.
Hidden Diary
A professional woman in Canada falls pregnant and returns to France; there, amid tensions with her mother, she discovers the diary of the title, which belonged to her grandmother she never knew, and whose sad experiences are recounted in flashback — or are they? A sober but searching family drama with more than a hint of wistfulness, this stars Catherine Deneuve as the mother and is a welcome adult entertainment for this holiday season. French title: Meres et Filles.
Changing Sides
The other French-language release of the week features another top actress, Sophie Marceau, as a woman who swaps working roles with her husband to save their marriage. In so doing, this crafty couple find that changing sides brings early frustrations but longer-term benefits, but not without a few relationship crises along the way. The swap also pigeon-holes the book on which the film was based, resulting in charges of gross sexism on the part of the filmmakers ... which leads to the question: Assuming the original author was unhappy with the film’s treatment of her work, why didn’t she have her name removed or changed? (Mme Alaina Smithee, perhaps?)
Bride Flight
Good to see New Zealand featuring on the big screen other than as a setting for hobbits, dwarves and monsters. In this Dutch period piece, three northern European women move to the Shaky Isles to start new lives with their hubbies-to-be, and the intrigue deepens as relationships form and suffer in the process. For more discerning and adventurous moviegoers who don’t want to be confronted by headlong comedy, this might be the Valentine’s Day pick. Rutger Hauer appears briefly as the love interest on his deathbed in the present day.
Boa
The last three movies this week started last week at the Baixue theater in Ximending as DVD promos, so get in quick if they appeal. The first is a 2006 wildlife-on-the-loose flick from Thailand whose poster gets down to business: A bloodied babe somewhere in the Thai jungle is half-consumed by a ravenous constrictor. Of course, there will be other youngsters on the menu. Really, boas don’t deserve this kind of press.
To Live and Die in Mongkok (旺角監獄)
As with Boa, get in quick to see this pair of movies from vet Hong Kong producer-director-writer-actor Wong Jing (王晶) that didn’t enjoy a proper theatrical release. In this one, co-directed by Chung Siu-hung (鍾少雄), Wong ups the self-conscious style quotient in a strange tale of a gang member who gets out of prison, but only in the literal sense (the Chinese title means “Prison Mongkok”). Stars Nick Cheung (張家輝) as the hapless gangster.
Underdog Knight (硬漢)
This earlier production by Wong Jing and directed by Ding Sheng (丁晟, whose Jackie Chan starrer Little Big Soldier starts in Taiwan in two weeks) also suggests that the king of populist cinema is trying to extend himself a little, even if he is hampered by Chinese content restrictions. Liu Ye (劉燁) is a People’s Liberation Army officer who becomes a simpleton after a diving accident; he then turns into a fighter for justice, albeit hamstrung by his condition. Co-stars Anthony Wong (黃秋生) as a sympathetic crook.
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
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
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
RSS