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.
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 Legislative Caucus First 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
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
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
Last month, media outlets including the BBC World Service and Bloomberg reported that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently flat or falling, and that the economic giant appears to be on course to comfortably meet Beijing’s stated goal that total emissions will peak no later than 2030. China is by far and away the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, generating more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. As the BBC pointed out in their Feb. 12 report, “what happens in China literally could change the world’s weather.” Any drop in total emissions is good news, of course. By
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