The Other Woman
A chick flick revenge comedy, with some pretty hot chicks, making this a film with wide appeal. The Other Woman is predictable, absurd, not as clever as it thinks it is, but bubbly enough to keep you entertained. Cheating husbands and boyfriends getting their comeuppance has pretty solid appeal, and Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann and Kate Upton are appealing as the cheated-on women who first become friends and then hatch an outlandish plot to bring the Lothario (Mark, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones) to book. The three female characters are drawn in broad strokes, but the cast carries the flat characterization. The comedy is often pretty broad, and there is plenty of eye candy to sweeten the pill of the less than flattering portrayal of philandering men. Mark suffers various types of humiliation, but once the tables are turned, director Nick Cassavetes has trouble keeping the comedy alive and The Other Woman begins to come apart at the edges.
The Butler
Director Lee Daniels is bold, fearless even, in handling complex emotional and social issues. This was what made his Oscar-winning film Precious work. It was what made the movie that followed it, The Paperboy such a catastrophe. In The Butler, Daniels has found some middle ground, lacking the inspiration of Precious, but dialing down the excess. Still, Daniels is not a man who has much need of subtlety, and his film, based on the experiences of Cecil Gaines, a black man who serves eight presidents during his tenure as a butler at the White House, and who inevitably gained a remarkable perspective on a slice of American history, is often heavy handed. The cast is loaded down with big names, with Forest Whitaker playing Gaines. He plays against Oprah Winfrey as Gloria Gaines, and a host of major stars have minor roles in this tapestry of Americana. Fine performances help to balance out Daniels’ unashamed manipulativeness in pushing the audiences’ buttons.
Cheap Thrills
A thriller with brains and guts that still manages to be thoroughly objectionable due to the sheer nastiness of the violence in which the characters engage. Cheap Thrills follows Craig (Pat Healy), a struggling family man who loses his low-wage job and is threatened with eviction. He heads to a local bar where he meets up with an old friend (Ethan Embry) and the two are drawn into a series of drinking games by a charismatic and wealthy stranger (David Koechner) and his mysterious wife (Sara Paxton), who push the duo into performing increasingly disturbing dares in exchange for money. This is a small picture basically based on a gimmick, but it uses its committed cast to lift the material into something more. Whether that more is something you want to stomach is another matter entirely.
The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box
“Never underestimate the power of buried treasure,” says the voice of Michael Sheen in The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box. Certainly the producers thought they saw a hit with yet another period fantasy to follow in the wake of Pirates of the Caribbean. Despite the presence of Sheen, along with Sam Neill, Lena Headey, Ioan Gruffudd and Keeley Hawes, who all soldier away manfully, the buried treasure does not successfully exercise its power to fascinate audiences. The film is intended as the first in a film franchise based upon the Mariah Mundi novels of G. P. Taylor. As with the Narnia series and His Dark Materials in which outstanding source material failed to make the transition to the screen, it is more than possible that franchise ambitions will gradually evaporate as the film fails to bring the source material alive.
“Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Comes to US With a Message Straight Out of Beijing” read a May 31 headline in the Wall Street Journal. Top US administration officials and members of Congress almost certainly read the WSJ, and if there was a bullet point takeaway that people in Washington should absorb ahead of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) arrival in DC on June 9, that headline is it. The last few columns have discussed this very topic, and the timing is not coincidental. While those top officials likely do not read the Taipei Times, judging by the number
With weighty, anxiety-inducing geopolitical topics dominating the headlines, checking in on the wild and weird state of local politics can take some of the edge off. This November’s elections will determine who will be in charge of fixing potholes in your neighborhood, not the potholes in Taiwan’s complicated geopolitical space. Recently, after an online interview with a Taipei-based journalist, I commented that Taipei journalists never go further than the MRT can take them. He laughed and agreed. Naturally, the Taipei mayoral race is eating up much of the press attention. TAIPEI CITY Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) has
In December of 2008 Lee E-tin (李乙廷), a Miaoli county legislative hopeful, was convicted of vote-buying. Rather than buy votes retail, voter by voter, in the usual manner, Lee had done it wholesale, in a commendably efficient manner: he had visited local temples and made donations to gain their support. Because he did not normally make donations to temples, the court ruled he was attempting to improperly influence voter behavior. The case indicates how important temples are in influencing political life. Both judge and politician appeared to see them in the same way. Beijing sees them that way as well. Democratic Progressive
Audiences in Leicester, Cardiff, London and Sheffield will this month gather to watch a series of black-and-white Taiwanese-language films made more than 70 years ago. On the surface, these screenings commemorate the seventieth anniversary of taiyupian (台語片) — Taiwanese-language cinema. Yet the significance of these events extends far beyond nostalgia or film history. They represent a remarkable chapter in Taiwan’s ongoing effort to recover, preserve and reinterpret a cultural heritage that was once thought to have largely disappeared. The centerpiece of the program is the Ho Chi-ming (何基明) directed Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan (薛平貴與王寶釧), a film produced in 1955 and
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