Nebraska
The director of About Schmidt and Sideways, not to mention the more recent Oscar-winning The Descendants, Alexander Payne has a fine eye for human frailty and a big heart that encompasses the many and varied flaws of his characters. In Nebraska, an aging, booze-addled father (Bruce Dern) makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son (Will Forte) in order to claim a million-dollar Mega Sweepstakes prize. The thing is a scam, but a perfect setup for a road movie that explores the humor and sorrow of small lives and big dreams. The odyssey combines, quite effortlessly, prickly combat between father and son and a stirring exploration of Woody’s past, for which he harbors little fondness. Shot in black and white and with photography that evokes the American Gothic of Grant Wood, Nebraska is beautiful and often funny. We know that Dern’s character has not won any money, and that his life won’t change in any material way, but the dream of riches, and the expectation that others have of sharing this wealth, reveals the dark and often confused souls of lead characters and bit players alike. The real winner from all of this is the audience.
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
The first Paranormal Activity was released way back in 2007 and its minimalist, found-footage style with plenty of shaky camera, weird angles and bad light was still able to provide some excitement, if not exactly scares. But six years and three movies later, there just isn’t that much mileage in that kind of treatment anymore. So what do you do? You go big budget and plunge into serious occult maximalism; but then you keep bits of shaky cam and other pseudo low-budget effects. Performances are actually above par here, and director Christopher Landon, who was the screenwriter for all the Paranormal Activity films except the first, and who produced Paranormal Activity three and four, is at home with the genre. Teenager Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) is playing around with a camcorder and captures images from strange doings in the flat below. Then he gets a strange mark on his arm, develops superpowers and seems to be targeted by demons. Landon tries for some twists and turns in the plot, but these only manage to make an already inarticulate story even more confused.
The White Storm (掃毒)
This is a pulse-pumping Hong Kong action thriller from director Benny Chan (陳木勝), who has set the bar impossibly high for similar genre films in 2014. At its center, The White Storm is the story of three friends, all DEA types, whose mutual love, respect and dependency upon each other has enabled them to survive and navigate the dangerous world of the Golden Triangle’s drug trade. When a big operation goes terribly wrong, their careers and friendship are put under intolerable strain. The action is top draw, as Chan looks to outdo the grand scale and outlandish bombast of films such as Dante Lam’s (林超賢) The Viral Factor (逆戰), and mix in themes of loyalty and honor that hark to the 1980s heyday of John Woo. Massive amounts of gunfire and some truly gut-wrenching close-up violence ensure that audiences get their money’s worth of action, and Lau Ching Wan (劉青雲), Nick Cheung (張家輝) and Louis Koo (古天樂) all provide solid performances that gives some spirit to a messy, sometimes bloated storyline.
Firestorm
Explosions, firefights, powerful weaponry, cars and trucks crashing into each other, and more explosions. That is pretty much what Firestorm is about. Oh, there is also some ridiculous macho posing in between. The story, as far as it goes, is about a tough by-the-book cop, Lui (Andy Lau), who is brought in to deal with a wave of crime inflicted on Hong Kong by a group of ultra-violent thieves armed with heavy weapons. Written and directed by Alan Yuen, the film shows little interest in Lui’s character and simply delights in letting the straight-laced cop unravel so that he can catalyze a whirlwind of carnage. The publicity material gleefully informs the public that in Firestorm, Hong Kong gets turned into a battlefield, and Yuan has certainly upped the ante for complex action sequences staged in the dense urban environment of Hong Kong. These are often spectacular and almost worth the price of admission.
Last week saw the appearance of another odious screed full of lies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian (肖千), in the Financial Review, a major Australian paper. Xiao’s piece was presented without challenge or caveat. His “Seven truths on why Taiwan always will be China’s” presented a “greatest hits” of the litany of PRC falsehoods. This includes: Taiwan’s indigenous peoples were descended from the people of China 30,000 years ago; a “Chinese” imperial government administrated Taiwan in the 14th century; Koxinga, also known as Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功), “recovered” Taiwan for China; the Qing owned
In Taiwan’s politics the party chair is an extremely influential position. Typically this person is the presumed presidential candidate or serving president. In the last presidential election, two of the three candidates were also leaders of their party. Only one party chair race had been planned for this year, but with the Jan. 1 resignation by the currently indicted Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) two parties are now in play. If a challenger to acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) appears we will examine that race in more depth. Currently their election is set for Feb. 15. EXTREMELY
Jan. 20 to Jan. 26 Taipei was in a jubilant, patriotic mood on the morning of Jan. 25, 1954. Flags hung outside shops and residences, people chanted anti-communist slogans and rousing music blared from loudspeakers. The occasion was the arrival of about 14,000 Chinese prisoners from the Korean War, who had elected to head to Taiwan instead of being repatriated to China. The majority landed in Keelung over three days and were paraded through the capital to great fanfare. Air Force planes dropped colorful flyers, one of which read, “You’re back, you’re finally back. You finally overcame the evil communist bandits and
They increasingly own everything from access to space to how we get news on Earth and now outgoing President Joe Biden warns America’s new breed of Donald Trump-allied oligarchs could gobble up US democracy itself. Biden used his farewell speech to the nation to deliver a shockingly dark message: that a nation which has always revered its entrepreneurs may now be at their mercy. “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms,” Biden said. He named no names, but his targets were clear: men like Elon Musk
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