Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
Jeremy Renner has been getting a lot of screen time recently, but he is not going much out of a very narrow comfort zone of playing the reserved tough guy. This worked wonderfully in The Hurt Locker, but is being cheapened by repetition in The Avengers, The Bourne Legacy and now Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters. This twist on the fairytale has Hansel (Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) as gun toting, crossbow firing, sword-wielding bounty hunters taking out evil witches in a medieval fantasy world. They have a secret past and they face a new kind of evil which puts their witch killing chops to the test. The film has a rather derivative feel, with the trailer suggesting something of a cross between Hellboy 2 and Mr and Mrs Smith.
The Last Tycoon (大上海)
Big budget Hong Kong movie set in the decadent Shanghai of the 1930s. The Last Tycoon is directed by Wong Jing (王晶) and stars Chinese movie royalty Chow Yun-fat (周潤發) and Sammo Hung (洪金寶), and veterans Francis Ng (吳鎮宇) and Monica Mok (莫小棋). The film pays tribute to crime epics like Once Upon a Time in America and Goodfellas, spanning many decades, telling the story of a young man who is framed by his mother’s lover, goes to prison, and finds himself on the first step of the ladder in the mob hierarchy. He rises through the ranks, his mixture of ambition, skill at negotiation, and loyalty making him one of the most respected crime bosses in Shanghai. Eventually he gets caught between a devious government secret service and Japanese imperial ambitions, a situation that is complicated by his meeting up once again with his first love.
Killing Bono
A nice concept goes awry. Killing Bono is based on a semi-autobiographical book by journalist Neil McCormick that tells the story of two brothers in Dublin aspiring to rock stardom. They can only look on in horror and dismay as a bunch of school friends go on to international success as the band U2. The film, which has some similarities to Nowhere Boy in taking a fictionalized look at the early growth of an important band, tries to do too many things, and while the picture it paints of the 1980s music scene is rich with comedy, the film is overstuffed with subplots and trite character arcs.
Dinotasia
David Krentz and Erik Nelson’s computer-animated look at the age of the dinosaurs refuses to falsify its subject by ascribing human motives to its players, a source both of the film’s strength, but also of its fatal weakness. Portraying a repetitive, senseless and brutal struggle for survival, all of which takes place in the shadow of a pending asteroid-based apocalypse, the film has some exciting moments. These are given thematic heft in a narration by director Werner Herzog, who finds his own species of pleasure in the oncoming destruction of the dinosaur world, and discourses in doom-laden tones on the Earth’s cycles of life and death, chaos and order. The animation is reasonably good, though looks a little cheap if you take something like Avatar as the gold standard for this kind of work.
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam in 1979, following a year of increasingly tense relations between the two states. Beijing viewed Vietnam’s close relations with Soviet Russia as a threat. One of the pretexts it used was the alleged mistreatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Tension between the ethnic Chinese and governments in Vietnam had been ongoing for decades. The French used to play off the Vietnamese against the Chinese as a divide-and-rule strategy. The Saigon government in 1956 compelled all Vietnam-born Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship. It also banned them from 11 trades they had previously
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
Jan. 12 to Jan. 18 At the start of an Indigenous heritage tour of Beitou District (北投) in Taipei, I was handed a sheet of paper titled Ritual Song for the Various Peoples of Tamsui (淡水各社祭祀歌). The lyrics were in Chinese with no literal meaning, accompanied by romanized pronunciation that sounded closer to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) than any Indigenous language. The translation explained that the song offered food and drink to one’s ancestors and wished for a bountiful harvest and deer hunting season. The program moved through sites related to the Ketagalan, a collective term for the
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