Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
The original Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs got high marks for innovation, marking new ground both in creative storytelling and technical skill, proving popular with both grownups and children. It wore its sophistication lightly. Not so Cloudy 2, which takes the ideas of the first movie and uses them to set up a simple take on videogame cinema. Flink Lockwood (Bill Hader), whose machine that turns water into all kinds of food was the key narrative driver of the first movie, has had his talent recognized. Cloudy 2 kicks off with the realization that the machine is now creating food-animal hybrids — foodimals — and Flint and his friends set out on a dangerous mission to battle hungry tacodiles, shrimpanzees, hippotatomuses, and other food creatures to save the world. These puns and visual gags, amusing enough at first, become the central comic trope of the movie. Colorful if prodigiously un-innovative entertainment.
Vehicle 19
Starring Paul Walker, probably best known as Vin Diesel’s sidekick in a film that makes Fast & Furious 6 look like a nuanced psychological drama. In Vehicle 19, any pretense of acting is given up, and the screenplay by director Mukunda Michael Dewil explores new realms of clunky, unconvincing silliness. Fortunately, for those who don’t much care about coherent narrative and believable characters, there is plenty of automotive action that is well choreographed, well shot and in its way, quite exciting to watch. It’s just that for the most part, you really don’t care whether the people in the cars live or die, and even at 85 minutes, it is hard to stay involved with the fate of bewildered ex-con Michael who finds himself in a rental van that contains a kidnapped woman, and which is being chased by criminals and the police.
Thanks for Sharing
There is way too much talent on and behind the screens of Thanks for Sharing for it to be an unmitigated disaster, and for some, the mitigation provided by the outstanding performances and occasional bursts of brilliance in the screenplay, will be enough. This is Shame, but as a comedy, and the whole idea is a bit off kilter from the get go, and the best efforts of Mark Ruffalo, Tim Robbins, Gwyneth Paltrow and singer Pink don’t really bring it together. Director Stuart Blumberg, who also has a screenwriting credit on the film, doesn’t seem to be able to settle on the film’s tone, and pathos often drifts into bathos, and laughs into uncomfortable sniggers, making Thanks for Sharing a rather uncomfortable experience.
The Starving Games
Do we really need a Scary Movie type spoof of The Hunger Games? Clearly directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who created the increasingly desperate Scary Movie series, along with Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie, think so. And so we have a range of minor league actors working through the story of The Hunger Games, with occasional references to other recent movies, such as The Avengers, to make something that is clearly supposed to be funny and even clever. Some of the gags might be worth a couple of minutes on Youtube, but you’d have to be desperate to sit through this as a full length cinema feature.
Rigor Mortis (殭屍)
Hong Kong supernatural horror by actor-turned-director Juno Mak (麥浚龍). Starring Chin Siu-ho (錢小豪), best known for his collaboration with Jet Lee in the martial arts classics The Tai-Chi Master and Fist of Legend. Chin plays a former action star whose fame has dwindled, who finds himself in insalubrious housing where he aims to end his life. He meets up with old acquaintances and makes new friends, and faced with an infestation of zombies, Chin’s character must draw on his action hero experience to defeat the threat. Chin’s own star as a cinema actor has been in decline over recent years, and Mak makes a clever play with this for those who follow Hong Kong celebrity culture, but for the most part, Rigor Mortis is a by-the-numbers horror, competently made, but without much originality.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
Institutions signalling a fresh beginning and new spirit often adopt new slogans, symbols and marketing materials, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no exception. Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), soon after taking office as KMT chair, released a new slogan that plays on the party’s acronym: “Kind Mindfulness Team.” The party recently released a graphic prominently featuring the red, white and blue of the flag with a Chinese slogan “establishing peace, blessings and fortune marching forth” (締造和平,幸福前行). One part of the graphic also features two hands in blue and white grasping olive branches in a stylized shape of Taiwan. Bonus points for
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
March 9 to March 15 “This land produced no horses,” Qing Dynasty envoy Yu Yung-ho (郁永河) observed when he visited Taiwan in 1697. He didn’t mean that there were no horses at all; it was just difficult to transport them across the sea and raise them in the hot and humid climate. “Although 10,000 soldiers were stationed here, the camps had fewer than 1,000 horses,” Yu added. Starting from the Dutch in the 1600s, each foreign regime brought horses to Taiwan. But they remained rare animals, typically only owned by the government or
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