Vanishing on 7th Street
A solid little indie horror flick by Brad Anderson, Vanishing on 7th Street is quick on its feet and the director proves adept at creating some real scares on a stripped-down budget. Although there are some strong performances, notably from John Leguizamo, the quality of the cast is uneven, and the script fails to take the audience all the way through the picture, which loses its way badly and often finding itself marooned in cheap, thoughtless genre territory and culminates in a vastly disappointing denouement.
Amalia
A story based on the life of Portuguese singer Amalia Rodrigues, an exponent of fado, a kind of Portuguese flamenco. It never does justice to its wonderful material. Director Carlos Coelho da Silva goes for a glossy portrayal of Amalia’s mostly unfortunate romantic entanglements through the 1950s and 1960s, with only a passing concern for her enduring musical legacy, which both revived the traditional fado form and defined how it should be performed. Pretty pictures, including the beautiful Sandra Barata Belo as the title character, and snippets of Amalia’s music almost make this film worthwhile.
The Music Never Stopped
Based on Oliver Sacks’ essay The Last Hippie, this movie by first-time director Jim Kohlberg fails to realize its very considerable potential as a meditation on the power of music in our lives. A story about a boy who walks out on his family and is rediscovered two decades later suffering from a brain tumor that prevents him from forming new memories. Father (JK Simmons) and son (Lou Taylor Pucci) need to find a way of bonding. Enter a music therapist played by Julia Ormond, and an inspirational (and oddly drug free) Grateful Dead concert, and The Music Never Stopped sinks into a gelatinous goo of nostalgia for a time when rock ’n’ roll mattered.
Passion Play
After his wonderful comeback in The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke continues to demonstrate his massive talent for picking turkeys. In Passion Play he co-stars with Megan Fox and Bill Murray, one of the oddest lineups for some time. Rourke is a jazz musician, inevitably on the fringe, who meets an angel, the improbably cast Fox. Mobster Murray wants a piece of the action. The possibility of some mildly entertaining B-movie titillation is utterly destroyed by writer/director Mitch Glazer’s pretensions that he is another Wim Wenders.
May 18 to May 24 Pastor Yang Hsu’s (楊煦) congregation was shocked upon seeing the land he chose to build his orphanage. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, and the only way to access it was to cross a river by foot. The soil was poor due to runoff, and large rocks strewn across the plot prevented much from growing. In addition, there was no running water or electricity. But it was all Yang could afford. He and his Indigenous Atayal wife Lin Feng-ying (林鳳英) had already been caring for 24 orphans in their home, and they were in
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Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
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