Priest 3D
Paul Bettany and Maggie Q go into battle as ninja priests. To save a little girl, they must vanquish a horde of reptilian vampires. The story is very loosely based on a South Korean graphic novel by Hyung Min-woo, but has developed in the hands of Scott Charles Stewart into a 3D kung fu action film with loads of style and the bare hint of a coherent narrative. Fortunately nobody seems to be taking Priest 3D too seriously, and there are some pretty nifty action sequences and gags. It has the same kind of Catholic-infused B-movie magic as Legion, a film in which Bettany got to play an Uzi-toting Archangel Michael.
The Detective 2 (B+ 偵探)
The most recent work of the prolific horrormeister Oxide Pang (彭順), The Detective 2 is the second in what may well become a series of comedy/horror/detective movies starring Aaron Kwok (郭富城) as the bumbling private eye Chan Tam. On this occasion, the inept detective, who previously produced great mirth and box office profits, has grown more competent, to the detriment of the movie. Tam has to get inside the head of a psychopath who is committing a series of crimes involving genital mutilation. As a police procedural or even as a thriller, The Detective 2 amounts to little, but Pang applies his horror director skills to good effect.
Paper Man
Jeff Daniels plays Richard, a writer suffering from writer’s block who has rented a rundown house to find peace after separating from his wife. He bears similarities to other man-child characters of recent movies, such as Greenberg, but in this case his idiosyncrasies are seen as a sufficient driving force for the narrative as a whole. A friendship with a young girl develops when Richard hires her as a babysitter (he has no children). He also begins a dialogue with an imaginary friend, Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds), who dresses in a cape and spandex bodysuit. Some very fine acting almost saves Paper Man from its pretensions — but not quite.
The Human Resource Manager
A solid effort from the highly regarded Israeli director Eran Riklis, whose previous films The Lemon Tree (2008) and The Syrian Bride (2004) both did exceptionally well on the film festival circuit. The character of the title, never named, finds himself trying to repatriate the corpse of a foreign worker from Eastern Europe who has become an unwitting victim of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He finds himself embroiled in a Kafkaesque nightmare in which all efforts to get the body decently buried run into unforeseen problems. The humor is as dry and dark as coal, and though the complex political situation against which the film is set is never made explicit, it resonates through the blackly humorous situations in which the human resource manager finds himself.
Mao’s Last Dancer
Bruce Beresford is not a director who can easily be accused of subtlety. Even so, Mao’s Last Dancer pushes the limits of what is acceptable as something that is not overt propaganda. The film has won rave reviews from many critics, but for audiences in Taiwan, both foreign and local, the story of a ballet dancer who seeks asylum so that he can find his own artistic soul is too much played by the numbers. The film is based on the true story of Li Cunxin (李存信), who escaped the rigors of communist arts diplomacy, became a principle artist with the Australian Ballet and is currently a stock broker and motivational speaker based in Melbourne. There is some good dancing, but the quality of both the acting and the script is too uneven to make this more than an average television movie.
Oh Shit!
Made-for-TV comedy from Germany by director Christoph Schrewe, Oh Shit! is a bit of comic mayhem that may amuse those starved of Teutonic humor. A ridiculous story line inspired by the already tired butterfly analogy from chaos theory tries to generate laughs, but when a romantic contretemps causes the release of a killer butterfly that could annihilate the Earth, you’ll probably wish that it will succeed.
The Second Chance (La Chance de ma vie)
French rom-com with strong US influences. Central character Julien (Francois-Xavier Demaison) finds that he is something of a curse to any woman he dates — they invariably have terrible luck and often as not suffer grave physical injuries. He meets Johanna (Virginie Efira) and the two just click, but the curse kicks in and life becomes a succession of disasters for Johanna. How much can she take? The romance between the two leads is spirited but the gags all a little shopworn.
June 9 to June 15 A photo of two men riding trendy high-wheel Penny-Farthing bicycles past a Qing Dynasty gate aptly captures the essence of Taipei in 1897 — a newly colonized city on the cusp of great change. The Japanese began making significant modifications to the cityscape in 1899, tearing down Qing-era structures, widening boulevards and installing Western-style infrastructure and buildings. The photographer, Minosuke Imamura, only spent a year in Taiwan as a cartographer for the governor-general’s office, but he left behind a treasure trove of 130 images showing life at the onset of Japanese rule, spanning July 1897 to
One of the most important gripes that Taiwanese have about the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is that it has failed to deliver concretely on higher wages, housing prices and other bread-and-butter issues. The parallel complaint is that the DPP cares only about glamor issues, such as removing markers of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonialism by renaming them, or what the KMT codes as “de-Sinification.” Once again, as a critical election looms, the DPP is presenting evidence for that charge. The KMT was quick to jump on the recent proposal of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to rename roads that symbolize
On the evening of June 1, Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) apologized and resigned in disgrace. His crime was instructing his driver to use a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon. The Control Yuan is the government branch that investigates, audits and impeaches government officials for, among other things, misuse of government funds, so his misuse of a government vehicle was highly inappropriate. If this story were told to anyone living in the golden era of swaggering gangsters, flashy nouveau riche businessmen, and corrupt “black gold” politics of the 1980s and 1990s, they would have laughed.
In an interview posted online by United Daily News (UDN) on May 26, current Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) was asked about Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) replacing him as party chair. Though not yet officially running, by the customs of Taiwan politics, Lu has been signalling she is both running for party chair and to be the party’s 2028 presidential candidate. She told an international media outlet that she was considering a run. She also gave a speech in Keelung on national priorities and foreign affairs. For details, see the May 23 edition of this column,
RSS