Taipei Film Festival 2010
Starting today and running until July 15, the Taipei Film Festival (台北電影節) combines competition and exhibition elements. The festival, now in its 12th year, focuses on the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Shanghai, and also has other components to highlight new films from around Asia. The Taipei Awards section provides an opportunity to check out some of the better local feature films released this year. Three films each by directors Suzana Amaral and Hector Babenco, in the Directors in Focus component, will also be screened. Ticketing information and English-language information about the festival are available at eng.taipeiff.org.tw/Default.aspx.
Knight and Day
This new Tom Cruise vehicle might be retitled “Mission Implausible,” as agent Roy Miller breezes through a host of action set pieces while exchanging not very witty badinage with co-star Cameron Diaz. Special effects aim to be big but are found wanting, and the film also fails to pull off its sly nudge and wink that Cruise will win the day and get the girl. Talented cast, including Peter Sarsgaard and Jordi Molia, is wasted as the script tries too hard to get laughs and doesn’t bother with character development.
Baaria
This epic story of an Italian family spanning three generations by director Giuseppe Tornatore, the creator of Cinema Paradiso, is beautiful to look at and full of sincere passion. The huge canvas that he takes on in Baaria, the slang name of the place in Sicily where he grew up and where much of the film is set, gets a bit cluttered, and the formal mastery of individual scenes fails to generate the narrative energy to carry the story through the 150 minutes of the film.
Crows Zero 2
Sequel to a popular Japanese manga-based series about school punks fighting it out to be the coolest, meanest toughs on the street. This second installment revolves around a feud between rival gangs from two different schools, and there is plenty of bloody fight scenes and visceral violence. Amid the feuding flow numerous subplots catering to those who know the manga series, which ran for eight years, but they might prove confusing for newcomers.
Mondovino
A long and sometimes rambling documentary on the wine industry providing revelations that not everything there is rosy, at least for those who prize individuality and character over the bottom line and the streamlining of taste. Director Jonathan Nossiter talks with major business leaders such as the Mondavi family (the world’s biggest winemakers and the bug bear of many wine connoisseurs), opinion makers like wine critic Robert Parker, and wine growers and vintners both large and small on both sides of the globalization debate. A must-see for foodies.
Solomon Kane
Low-budget fantasy film based on stories by pulp writer Robert Howard about a brutal mercenary who tries to renounce violence after a meeting with the devil. There is nevertheless lots of violence in Solomon Kane, which has been described as the film that Van Helsing (2004) might have been. Starring James Purefoy as a grizzled fighter and a very respectable ensemble including Pete Postlethwaite and Max von Sydow. Good B-movie entertainment unhampered by pretension.
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