Romancing in Thin Air (高海拔之戀II)
After last year’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (單身男女), a blockbuster aimed at China, Hong Kong director Johnnie To (杜琪?) returns to the big screen with yet another romance. This time, Louis Koo (古天樂) and Sammi Cheng (鄭秀文), who makes a handsome comeback to the silver screen with this finely executed flick after a three-year hiatus, head the cast. Set in the Himalayas in China’s Yunnan Province, where Shangri-la is supposedly located, the film begins with Hong Kong superstar Michael (Koo) escaping to the mythical place to heal his wounded heart after his bride runs away on their wedding day. There he meets hotel proprietor Sue (Cheng), who has been in mourning since her husband disappeared into the nearby forest seven years previously. Friendship and then love bud between the two heartbroken souls. Though the film has its fair share of overwrought plot devices and contrived characters, director To and writer Wai Ka-fai (韋家輝) show their ingenuity by creating a film within a film that blurs the boundary between art and life.
The Lucky One
Based on a work by best-selling author Nicholas Sparks, the tone and direction of The Lucky One will be familiar to people who have enjoyed other adaptations from his books, such as Nights in Rodanthe, The Notebook, and Message in a Bottle. If those films did it for you, The Lucky One, directed by Scott Hicks, who made Shine, and starring Zac Efron, is likely to prove just as effective. Efron is an appealing screen presence, and if the predictability of the story and the sweetness of the romance don’t make you feel ill, then you are likely to slip into the warm, cozy and bitter-sweet world of romantic love that Sparks is such an expert at conjuring up.
The Raid
Action movie fans are in for a treat with The Raid, a no-holds-barred slugfest featuring extensive use of the Indonesian martial arts technique called pencak silat. The story is simple: a SWAT team is tasked with taking out a ruthless mobster who is ensconced at the top of a tower block. They fight their way up floor by floor, and once the violence begins, it is unremitting. There is some suggestion that relations within the SWAT team are not as simple as they might seem at first, but this is really a relatively insignificant digression from the action. Directed by Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans with a mostly Indonesian cast. Although the film is spoken in Indonesian, the dialogue is limited and mostly self-explanatory.
Goodbye First Love (Un amour de jeunesse)
Romantic drama by Mia Hansen-Love, whose Father of My Children was released here last year. That film dealt with a family trying to come to terms with a suicide. In Goodbye First Love, Hansen-Love turns her lens on the development of young love, telling the story of Camille (Lola Creton), who falls head over heels in lust for Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), a slightly older boy. When Sullivan drops her to travel the world, Camille discovers another kind of relationship with a much older man, which promises intellectual fulfillment and material stability. Of course, when Sullivan returns, the old fire is once again ignited.
The Kick
South Korean/Thai coproduction about a family of taekwondo experts who relocate to Thailand to set up a gym. They only become an accepted part of the martial arts community in their new home after they help foil a bunch of bank robbers. Needless to say, this scenario provides plenty of opportunities for martial arts action. The fact that one member of the family has ambitions to be a pop star provides an opening for a nice soundtrack as well.
The Wings of the Kirin and Keigo Higashino Fest
The screening of The Wings of the Kirin, which will open in cinemas today, generated such local interest by fans of the best-selling whodunit novels of author Keigo Higashino that the distributor managed to obtain two other films based on his work for a one-day triple feature. The two other films are Before Sunrise and The Hovering Blade. The Wings of the Kirin is a feature spin-off of a popular TV series featuring detective Kyoichiro Kaga (Hiroshi Abe). An intricately crafted plot with plenty of twists and turns keeps the audience engrossed to the end. The triple feature film fest is today at the Ambassador Theater Spring Center (國賓影城長春廣場), 176 Changchun Rd, Taipei City (台北市長春路176號).
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,
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