The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
There is plenty of comic talent on show in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, with Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi taking the central roles of two magicians who try to freshen up their show after a street performer’s daring stunts make their own act seem stale. The story of two incompetents trying to prove themselves and getting into all kinds of humorous trouble is well-worn, and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone does little to freshen it up. A cameo by Alan Arkin as an old magician who is the inspiration for the Burt Wonderstone of the title is one of the best things about the picture. A serviceable comedy with a few laugh-out-loud moments, but far too often you are left trying to work out where you last saw a particular gag.
Mystery 浮城謎事
A Un Certain Regard entry at Cannes last year, Mystery gets off to a good start with a dark, intense opening sequence and the introduction of intriguing and well-handled relationship-drama elements. Director Luo Ye (婁燁) hit the international scene with the success of his offbeat romance Suzhou River (蘇州河) in 2000, and has been an innovative presence in Chinese cinema ever since, but his attempts to combine thriller elements with domestic drama are less successful in Mystery, with a couple of unnecessary subplots that do nothing more than complicate the story to no real dramatic effect.
I Give It a Year
Written and directed by Dan Mazer, who produced and has writing credits in films of Sacha Baron Cohen, including Ali G, Borat and Bruno. The style of humor reflects this background, and Mazer manages to get considerable mileage from a story about a couple experiencing a rocky first year of marriage. The couple, Josh (Rafe Spall) and Nat (Rose Byrne), are incompatible to begin with, and then there are bickering relatives, a tactless best man, a marriage guidance counselor, an ex-girlfriend and a charming businessmen, who all help to make things worse (and more amusing). The basic blueprint for the story is old and despite some good laughs, the whole things moves forward in a predictable way, and the fact that Josh and Nat are neither believable real people, or totally off the wall, makes the whole concoction rather bland.
Celeste and Jesse Forever
Balancing a little heartache with breezy humor and sharp dialogue is never easy, but Celeste and Jesse Forever, co-written and starring Rashida Jones, is a class act and provides one of the best new movies opening this week. The film, which also stars Andy Samberg, has plenty of heart, but for some tastes, the dialogue is a little too self-consciously clever. That does not alter the fact that this is a movie with real heart, and it is willing to replace the usual rom-com cliches with some painful truths about the uncertainty and complexity of modern relationships.
Trance
Danny Boyle never provides the expected, and with films from Trainspotting to Slumdog Millionaire he has altered, or at least broadened, the cinematic landscape. With Trance, he tries to put his stamp on the mind-bending thriller, though instead of amnesia (as in Memento) or dreams (as in Inception), Boyle has found his inspiration in hypnotism. Starring Rosario Dawson as the shapely hypnotist Elizabeth, who has been hired by a criminal gang to explore the brain of Simon (James McAvoy), an art auctioneer who may be the only person who knows the whereabouts of a artwork lost during a heist gone wrong. With Simon wandering through his own imagination, it is hard to keep track of what’s conscious and real, and what is unconscious and merely imagined. For most, the mind tease pays off.
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25 In 1933, an all-star team of musicians and lyricists began shaping a new sound. The person who brought them together was Chen Chun-yu (陳君玉), head of Columbia Records’ arts department. Tasked with creating Taiwanese “pop music,” they released hit after hit that year, with Chen contributing lyrics to several of the songs himself. Many figures from that group, including composer Teng Yu-hsien (鄧雨賢), vocalist Chun-chun (純純, Sun-sun in Taiwanese) and lyricist Lee Lin-chiu (李臨秋) remain well-known today, particularly for the famous classic Longing for the Spring Breeze (望春風). Chen, however, is not a name
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