The Heat
Do we really need a female cop buddy movie that falls somewhere between Lethal Weapon and Bad Boys? Probably not, but we have got it anyway, and with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy at the helm, the film manages to hit the funny bone on a pretty regular basis, even if some audiences are likely to find the humor grotesque. The director is Paul Feig, who has a track record in American TV comedy that includes Arrested Development and The Office, and whose 2011 feature Bridesmaids proved that he could span the feature film divide. With The Heat, he has created a crude, low-brow audience-pleaser that plays to the strengths of his two stars. Dialogue is sharp and tightly edited, and is well-synced with the physical humor; the first is often profane, and the second violent to an extreme, but cast and crew give themselves over to the wholesale mayhem of The Heat to create something really quite funny.
Pacific Rim
There are big fighting robots and Godzilla-type monsters, the kind of overblown apocalyptic scenario of Transformers, and the anime absurdity of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. There is an abundance of blockbuster silliness in a story about super robots battling invading aliens coming through a wormhole in the Pacific Ocean. The robots are piloted by twin controllers who are required to enter into a kind of mind-meld, providing a core of pop psychology that takes the place of actual emotional interaction. At the helm of this bizarre story is the creative talents of Guillermo del Toro, who has proven with film’s such as the Hellboy franchise that he can provide both depth and visual impact to fantasy features. It is tempting to think that the visual elements will overwhelm attempts to achieve anything deeper, and the referencing of the kind of boy’s adventure emotions of Top Gun doesn’t do much to alter this, but del Toro is a master of his craft and he may well be able to turn this unpromising material into something more than the sum of its parts.
Casting By
A documentary that looks at one of the most neglected roles in the film industry, that of casting director, and focuses particularly on the work of Marion Dougherty, who not only more or less created that position, but also anchored it as part of the creative process for some of the greatest films to come out of Hollywood. Dougherty helped break the mold of only casting the most handsome or beautiful, and helped to launch the careers of actors such as Robert Duvall and Glenn Close. Her vision helped create the groundbreaking look of such films as Midnight Cowboy, Panic in Needle Park and Taxi Driver. While inevitably a bit of a hagiography, with the good and great of Hollywood speaking about her genius, the film provides a look at how one woman’s commitment changed an important aspect of the Hollywood system. A must see for cinephiles.
The Rooftop (天台)
Jay Chou’s (周杰倫) second attempt at making a feature film, following on from his less than mind-blowing Secret (不能說的秘密) in 2007. Roof Top is a romantic fantasy set in a fictional Asian town that plays to a nostalgia of Taiwan’s “good old days” of innocence and friendship. Chou plays a handsome young man from the slums who has his heart set on Xin Ai (心艾), an emerging entertainment industry star, played by newcomer Li Xinai (李心艾). The two meet by accident and an unlikely romance blossoms, though this inevitably meets with resistance and draws Chou’s character into all kinds of capers. Chou sets aside his celebrity status to play a poor boy with nothing, who teaches his love interest that the outward trappings of celebrity are not worth the candle. Inevitably, the result is somewhat contrived and self-serving.
The Girl with Nine Wigs
Films about beautiful, caring people dying of cancer usually sound all kinds of alarm bells, offering as they do far too many opportunities for a poisonous mix of heavy melodrama and cheap sentimentality. The Girl with Nine Wigs, based on a best-selling German novel by Sophie van der Stap and directed by Marc Rothemund, has, by all accounts, managed to avoid the worst of these pitfalls. It features a strong performance by Lisa Tomaschewsky, who captures the mix of tenacity, vulnerability and confusion in a young woman faced with the horrors of chemotherapy just at the moment when she thought her life was about to really begin. Inspiring and uplifting, if not exactly a bundle of laughs.
Last week Elbridge Colby, US President Donald Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defense for policy, a key advisory position, said in his Senate confirmation hearing that Taiwan defense spending should be 10 percent of GDP “at least something in that ballpark, really focused on their defense.” He added: “So we need to properly incentivize them.” Much commentary focused on the 10 percent figure, and rightly so. Colby is not wrong in one respect — Taiwan does need to spend more. But the steady escalation in the proportion of GDP from 3 percent to 5 percent to 10 percent that advocates
A series of dramatic news items dropped last month that shed light on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attitudes towards three candidates for last year’s presidential election: Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Terry Gou (郭台銘), founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It also revealed deep blue support for Ko and Gou from inside the KMT, how they interacted with the CCP and alleged election interference involving NT$100 million (US$3.05 million) or more raised by the
While riding a scooter along the northeast coast in Yilan County a few years ago, I was alarmed to see a building in the distance that appeared to have fallen over, as if toppled by an earthquake. As I got closer, I realized this was intentional. The architects had made this building appear to be jutting out of the Earth, much like a mountain that was forced upward by tectonic activity. This was the Lanyang Museum (蘭陽博物館), which tells the story of Yilan, both its natural environment and cultural heritage. The museum is worth a visit, if only just to get a
More than 100,000 people were killed in a single night 80 years ago yesterday in the US firebombing of Tokyo, the Japanese capital. The attack, made with conventional bombs, destroyed downtown Tokyo and filled the streets with heaps of charred bodies. The damage was comparable to the atomic bombings a few months later in August 1945, but unlike those attacks, the Japanese government has not provided aid to victims and the events of that day have largely been ignored or forgotten. Elderly survivors are making a last-ditch effort to tell their stories and push for financial assistance and recognition. Some are speaking
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