Total Recall
The original 1990 Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a perfectly serviceable action flick and one of Arnie’s better efforts as an actor. There seems to be no particular need for a remake other than a dearth of ideas. For all that, the story of a factory worker, Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) who begins to suspect that he is a spy after visiting a company that purports to implant exciting memory experiences, has plenty of potential for Len Wiseman’s (of the Underworld franchise) action-oriented filmmaking. Quaid, inevitably, finds himself on the run, and there are plenty of high-octane sci-fi action sequences. Star Farrell is backed up by a solid cast that includes Kate Beckinsale as Quaid’s wife, minder and potentially his executioner, and Jessica Biel as the love interest.
GF*BF (女朋友。男朋友)
High school romance and coming of age movie from director Yang Ya-che (楊雅?), who made his name with the surprise hit Orz Boys in 2008. GF*BF, is, as the title suggests about boyfriends and girlfriends, buddies and rivals, ideals and the mundane realities of people trying to live together. The film follows its three stars, Kwai Lun-mei (桂綸鎂), Joseph Chang (張孝全) and Rhydian Vaughan (鳳小岳), through the 1980s to the present day, making the most of nostalgia for school room drama and touching on issues related to the student movement of the 1990s. Director Yang is clearly looking to create a big picture about changes in Taiwanese society, sweetened with romance and friendship between his good-looking leads. Solid performances won the film best actor and best supporting actor at the Taipei Film Festival.
Red Lights
The big name cast and clever ideas give Red Lights an initial appeal, but sadly director Rodrigo Cortes lets it all fall apart at the end. This does not necessarily detract from the tightly constructed first three-quarters of the film, in which Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy, as two scientists investigating claims of paranormal activity, create great expectation, but then Robert de Niro, as the villain Silver, a world-renowned psychic who has resurfaced years after his toughest critic mysteriously passed away, takes over the picture with monologues and exposition that leaves the narrative flow floundering. Good enough for an entertaining night with a DVD, but not worth the price of a big screen ticket.
Chicken with Plums
A new film from French-Iranian animator Marjane Satrapi, whose debut film Persepolis, an autobiographical account of a girl’s coming of age against the backdrop of the 1979 Islamic revolution, released in 2007, won plaudits for its effective use of animation to tell an intimately personal story. In Chicken with Plums, Satrapi folds in sections of animation with a predominantly live action drama. The director draws once again on family history to tell the story of her great uncle, a musician who is first inspired and then broken by his ill-starred love affair with a clockmaker’s daughter. The film’s whimsical, magic-realist tone is a rich concoction, full of bittersweet humor, and the overall effect, with its heightened emotions and super saturated colors, can feel a little cloying. For all that, the film is also very clear-eyed about both the beauty and self-indulgent aspects of art, one of a number of themes it explores, and this provides it with a solid core that holds the film together.
Feb. 9 to Feb.15 Growing up in the 1980s, Pan Wen-li (潘文立) was repeatedly told in elementary school that his family could not have originated in Taipei. At the time, there was a lack of understanding of Pingpu (plains Indigenous) peoples, who had mostly assimilated to Han-Taiwanese society and had no official recognition. Students were required to list their ancestral homes then, and when Pan wrote “Taipei,” his teacher rejected it as impossible. His father, an elder of the Ketagalan-founded Independence Presbyterian Church in Xinbeitou (自立長老會新北投教會), insisted that their family had always lived in the area. But under postwar
The term “pirates” as used in Asia was a European term that, as scholar of Asian pirate history Robert J. Antony has observed, became globalized during the European colonial era. Indeed, European colonial administrators often contemptuously dismissed entire Asian peoples or polities as “pirates,” a term that in practice meant raiders not sanctioned by any European state. For example, an image of the American punitive action against the indigenous people in 1867 was styled in Harper’s Weekly as “Attack of United States Marines and Sailors on the pirates of the island of Formosa, East Indies.” The status of such raiders in
On paper, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) enters this year’s nine-in-one elections with almost nowhere to go but up. Yet, there are fears in the pan-green camp that they may not do much better then they did in 2022. Though the DPP did somewhat better at the city and county councillor level in 2022, at the “big six” municipality mayoral and county commissioner level, it was a disaster for the party. Then-president and party chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) made a string of serious strategic miscalculations that led to the party’s worst-ever result at the top executive level. That year, the party
As much as I’m a mountain person, I have to admit that the ocean has a singular power to clear my head. The rhythmic push and pull of the waves is profoundly restorative. I’ve found that fixing my gaze on the horizon quickly shifts my mental gearbox into neutral. I’m not alone in savoring this kind of natural therapy, of course. Several locations along Taiwan’s coast — Shalun Beach (沙崙海水浴場) near Tamsui and Cisingtan (七星潭) in Hualien are two of the most famous — regularly draw crowds of sightseers. If you want to contemplate the vastness of the ocean in true
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