Captain Phillips
Director Paul Greengrass is an acknowledged master of the action thriller, with two of the greatest films of that genre, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum to his credit. With Captain Phillips he takes a story based on an actual incident in which Captain Richard Phillips and his ship, the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, were boarded by Somali pirates. He was subsequently rescued in a daring operation by Navy Seals. Anchoring the movie are two fine performances by Tom Hanks as the captain of the title, and Barkhad Abdi as the head of the Somali pirates, who face off through a number of tense days as the pirates try to escape with their prize. Hanks and Abdi develop a complex human drama even as Greengrass pushes the action into overdrive. There are many edge-of-seat action sequences, handled with Greengrass’ usual finesse, which are given emotional traction both by the characters and the complex context of piracy in the modern age.
The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman
A crime romance starring Shia LaBeouf, Evan Rachel Wood and Mads Mikkelsen looks promising at the beginning, and even LaBeouf looks like he might be tolerable as a young traveler who finds himself thrown together with a woman (Wood) who is claimed by a violent criminal (Mikkelssen). The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman shows plenty of enthusiasm by director Fredrik Bond, and LaBeouf, who remains indelibly associated with the appalling Transformer franchise, throws himself into his role with a degree of emotional recklessness that is disarming, disconcerting, and which may have been effective if the script gave him any kind of help at all. It doesn’t, and once again LaBeouf comes across as a hopeless dweeb who it is impossible to sympathize with. Mikkelssen does the kind of cold evil that is one of his specialties, but it is a dialed-in performance, and all Bond’s cinematographic whizz-bang used to create the seedy criminal world in which Charlie Countryman finds himself fails to make the film interesting.
Haute Cuisine
A foodie film that is light on drama but is tantalizing enough to have foodies salivating at the delicious food brought to the table. Directed by Christian Vincent, Haute Cuisine tells the story of Hortense Laborie, a celebrated chef living in the Perigord region who is appointed as private chef to the French president. For a while, she manages to impose herself on the presidential kitchen despite the jealousies she arouses among the other chefs in the presidential kitchen, She insists on stylish and authentic cuisine, and Vincent clearly has an eye for presenting culinary art on screen. But while the food might excite, the drama between Laborie and her male-dominated kitchen is pretty lightweight. Foodies will have their eyes on the glories of French culinary art, and the insubstantial content will probably be forgiven.
Baby Blues (詭嬰)
A 3D horror movie from director Leung Po-chi (梁普智) and starring singer Raymond Lam (林峰). The main selling point of Baby Blues is the big-budget 3D effects that publicists boast brings Asian 3D filming a major step up toward the best Hollywood product. The story itself does not break any new ground. A young couple moves into a new house. A doll is found there and kept. Lam plays a successful musician who just after moving to the house composes an eerie song; bad things happen to people who listen to it, though; and as can be expected, the doll comes to life and gets up to all kinds of mischief. Have we seen these things before? Of course, but the project has a number of big names from the Hong Kong music industry involved, and the visual effects and score are likely to prove a major draw.
Mida (夢見)
Animated fantasy by local director Chang Yung-chang (張永昌) has big ambitions to tell a story about the power of dreams. The story is about a high-school girl who has particularly vivid dreams of terrible events to come. She meets with a dream therapist Mida who has the power to enter her dreams and even link the dreams of different people. Mida’s work attracts the attention of government authorities who want to harness her power for their own ends. Mida finds herself in terrible danger, but also meets a kindred spirit, and the two must fight to preserve their freedom. The quality of the animation and visual design is rather crude, as is the storytelling, never achieving either a science-fiction slickness of something like Akira or the dreamlike whimsy of the works of Hayao Miyazaki.
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that would limit semiconductor
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
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
“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
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