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.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
The Taipei Times last week reported that the Control Yuan said it had been “left with no choice” but to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the central government budget, which left it without a budget. Lost in the outrage over the cuts to defense and to the Constitutional Court were the cuts to the Control Yuan, whose operating budget was slashed by 96 percent. It is unable even to pay its utility bills, and in the press conference it convened on the issue, said that its department directors were paying out of pocket for gasoline
On March 13 President William Lai (賴清德) gave a national security speech noting the 20th year since the passing of China’s Anti-Secession Law (反分裂國家法) in March 2005 that laid the legal groundwork for an invasion of Taiwan. That law, and other subsequent ones, are merely political theater created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to have something to point to so they can claim “we have to do it, it is the law.” The president’s speech was somber and said: “By its actions, China already satisfies the definition of a ‘foreign hostile force’ as provided in the Anti-Infiltration Act, which unlike
RSS