Fast Five
As the title suggests, this is the fifth in the Fast and Furious franchise. Dominic (Vin Diesel) and his crew find themselves on the wrong side of the law once again, this time in Rio de Janeiro. Director Justin Lin has taken the hugely improbable action of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) and pushed it up several notches, with a couple of set piece automotive heist sequences whose only purpose is to push the stunt crew to new heights of imaginative mayhem. As for the rest of the movie, the hot chicks in tight pants and muscle men in clinging T-shirts could have come out of any number of previous Vin Diesel vehicles.
Water for Elephants
A great big three-ring circus of a movie featuring Robert Pattinson, for whom Water for Elephants is a big push to escape the mantle of his Twilight fame and establish himself as something more than cinema’s best-looking vampire. Unfortunately, Pattinson cuts a rather glum figure in this glittering drama about a veterinary student who abandons his studies to work in a traveling circus. Set in depression era America, with great production values and the usually charming presence of costar Reese Witherspoon. Pattinson’s character worships a woman he can never have and is pretty cut up about it for most of the movie. This hardly seems to matter much since the chemistry between Witherspoon and Rosie the elephant is a lot more convincing than the romantic sparks between the two leads.
A Chinese Ghost Story 2011 (倩女幽魂2011)
In revisiting the classic Chinese ghostly romance A Chinese Ghost Story (倩女幽魂), made back in 1987 and credited by many as a seminal work in bringing Hong Kong cinema to the Western market, Wilson Yip (葉偉信) has taken on a big challenge. Yip, a veteran director fresh from his success with the two Ip Man movies, has been able to draw on some of the top talent in the industry, and the film reportedly had a budget of over US$20 million, which is huge for this kind of production. Unfortunately, riffing off a classic work fails to generate any fireworks. Despite the updated special effects, the remake is likely to have people digging through their VHS tapes for the original.
Bedevilled (Kim Bok-nam salinsageonui jeonmal)
A psychological drama that swings sharply into horror during its latter stages, Bedevilled has earned praise from fans of Asian horror for its willingness to build slowly, rooting the horrific finale in strongly depicted characters. Hae-won is a city girl on the verge of career burnout who goes to a small undeveloped island were she meets childhood friend Bok Nam, who has been writing her for years despite a total lack of response. Bok Nam has become a virtual slave to the inhabitants of the island, and Hae-won’s indifference to her plight pushes her over the edge. There is some great bloodletting action with a sickle and top-class acting from actress Seo Yeong Hie as the worm that turned.
Days We Stared at the Sun (他們在畢業的前一天爆炸精華版)
A cinematic reworking of a television series of the same name that was shown on Taiwan’s Public Television Service (公視) in December last year. The story is about a group of high school students — their dreams, fantasies, their failures and of course their romantic entanglements — and generated a huge Internet response. While drawing on much of the action that took place in the five-episode mini-series, director Cheng Yu-chieh (鄭有傑) has also changed, added or re-shot a large number of scenes to make this condensed version work in cinematic terms.
Goodbye May (走出五月)
The first film project by the Godot Theater Company (果陀劇場), better known for its popular and accessible stage adaptations of Western theatrical works. Theatrical producer Chu Feng (朱峰), taking his place in the director’s chair for this debut effort, juxtaposes the traditional theater of Chinese opera and conservative morals with electronic music and a contemporary romance. Actor and singer Alan Kuo (柯有綸) has the starring role as a musician who wins a music scholarship to work on contemporary interpretations of operatic music. His relationship with his grandmother, a former opera star, sends the story back in history. When she dies, her husband, a painter now blind and helpless, relives his former romance through the intervention of an aspiring Chinese opera student.
Patisserie Coin de Rue
Foodie movie by Japanese director Yoshihiro Fukagawa that follows in a long line of similar offerings, but fails to inspire despite some fine acting from leading lady Yu Aoi (All About Lily Chou-Chou). The story is about a small-town girl who goes to Tokyo to embark on an arduous apprenticeship in an upmarket patisserie in her quest for a boyfriend who has gone missing. There are the usual list of cliched characters: the dour and demanding boss, the cranky senior chef, the enigmatic critic, and of course the love interest, whose secrets finally, if inevitably, see the light of day. Of course, everything turns up smiles, and there is shot after shot of mouth-watering cakes, which will delight or disgust depending on your tolerance for high-priced, over-worked confections.
My Darling Is a Foreigner
Marry-a-foreigner wish fulfillment fantasy based on a popular manga series and adapted by director Kazuaki Ue for the big screen. Moderately amusing in bite-sized manga chunks, this feature length interracial romantic comedy is so considerate of everybody’s feelings that there isn’t a sharp edge for its whole 100-minute running time. Saori (Mao Inoue) is an aspiring manga illustrator who falls for Tony (Jonathan Sherr), a sensitive New Age American with great proficiency in Japanese whose only fault is that he’s not very good at housework. His efforts to help out around the house and his curiosity about the idiosyncrasies of Japanese life provide the bulk of the humor, but that’s not enough to make this picture work.
Memory Loss (憶世界大冒險)
Memory Loss claims the title of being Taiwan’s first fully original 3D animation feature film, but while it might be the first, let us hope that it will be quickly superseded by superior efforts. It draws on experienced talent from the children’s DVD market, and does not cast off the feeling that it would be more appropriate as a slot on the Yoyo TV children’s channel (東森幼幼台). The story tells of a little
girl who inadvertently causes her mother to lose her memory after a family tragedy. She then goes in search of these memories in a journey on which she is accompanied across the dangerous lands of the subconscious by the “memory dog.”
The Silent House
Creepy flick from Uruguayan director Gustavo Hernandez about a father and daughter camping out in an old backwoods house prior to beginning renovations the next day. Things start to go badly wrong and Hernandez shows an undeniable talent for low-budget creepiness using handheld camera and exploiting the foreground to create plenty of tension without expensive CGI effects. There are strong echoes of The Blair Witch Project and the two [Rec] films, and both narrative and character motivation are weak, but as a masterclass on shoestring filmmaking, The Silent House has quite a lot
to offer.
Treeless Mountain
The second feature film from South Korea-born, Brooklyn-based art house director Kim So Yong, Treeless Mountain is a closely observed story of two children surviving the disappearance of their father and the consequential remoteness of their mother, who leaves them with relatives when she decides to go in search of him. The relatives include an alcoholic aunt and kindly grandparents. Kim elicits natural performances from her child actors, and there are some beautiful and evocative scenes, but Treeless Mountain suffers from a fatal lack of narrative urgency.
Lost on Journey (人在囧途)
Planes, Trains and Automobiles with Chinese characteristics. Starring veteran of stage and screen Xu Zheng (徐崢) and Wang Baoqiang (王寶強) as two unlikely companions who meet up and gradually get to know and understand each other in the course of a trying journey back home during the Lunar New Year rush. There is some competent satire of contemporary Chinese society in this film, which celebrates the boisterous bonhomie of those forced to make their way through the Byzantine labyrinth of contemporary Chinese society.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 28 to May 4 During the Japanese colonial era, a city’s “first” high school typically served Japanese students, while Taiwanese attended the “second” high school. Only in Taichung was this reversed. That’s because when Taichung First High School opened its doors on May 1, 1915 to serve Taiwanese students who were previously barred from secondary education, it was the only high school in town. Former principal Hideo Azukisawa threatened to quit when the government in 1922 attempted to transfer the “first” designation to a new local high school for Japanese students, leading to this unusual situation. Prior to the Taichung First
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
The Ministry of Education last month proposed a nationwide ban on mobile devices in schools, aiming to curb concerns over student phone addiction. Under the revised regulation, which will take effect in August, teachers and schools will be required to collect mobile devices — including phones, laptops and wearables devices — for safekeeping during school hours, unless they are being used for educational purposes. For Chang Fong-ching (張鳳琴), the ban will have a positive impact. “It’s a good move,” says the professor in the department of
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