Neighbors
Mean, nasty, tasteless, gross, lewd and loud are all words that can be applied to the latest comedy from Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and star Seth Rogen. What it is, nevertheless, is uproariously funny. The gross out jokes come fast and furious, and although the pacing is sometimes a bit wobbly, there is a level of visual inventiveness that makes Neighbors refreshing. With a running time of just 96 minutes, the film is a miracle of tight scripting and editing, and there is a depth to the characters that is unusual in this type of movie. Rogen and Rose Byrne are Mac and Kelly, new parents who go to war against the college fraternity that have moved in next door. They have great chemistry as the thirtysomethings anxious to do right by their daughter, look cool in front of the kids and still get invited to party like they used to. Head of the frat pack is Zac Efron as Teddy, a sweet-natured lunk who just loves to party, and the conflict of prank and counter prank is both amusing and awful, and if you don’t walk out in disgust, you will probably be paralytic with laughter.
Kill Your Darlings
Even if the Beat generation and the poets and intellectuals who led the movement are not your cup of tea, Kill Your Darlings, with its sumptuous presentation of period detail ranging from the clothes to the ideas, is still a hugely appealing adventure. It starts out as a murder mystery, and the fundamentals of a thriller are all in place, but at the same time, it seeks to explore the value of the Beat ideology. Unlike Walter Salles’s recent adaptation of On The Road, it does not take the genius of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs for granted. There are some splendid performances, most notably by Daniel Radcliffe as a young Ginsberg, who has well and truly put the world of Harry Potter behind him and shows real fire in creating the character of the idiosyncratic poet. The debut feature by John Krokidas, the film is inclined to flail and trash about in coming to grips with its themes, but the vibrant energy of the story seems to echo the jazz-inflected and freewheeling notes of Beat poetry and transcend the usual biopic limitations to tell a bigger story.
One Minute More (只要一分鐘)
Based on a novel by the Japanese author Harada Maha, One More Minute is the second venture between producer Khan Lee (李崗) and director Chen Weiling (陳慧翎), following on the success of The Moonlight in Jilin (吉林的月光). The duo are perfectly happy with heavily melodramatic material, but while Moonlight had some dramatic heft, here they allow the drama to degenerate into sloppy sentimentalism. The story centers on Wanchen (played by Janine Chang, 張鈞甯), an ambitious editor at a fashion magazine who inadvertently adopts a labrador puppy. The dog takes up more and more of her affection until the opportunity of her dream job brings a sharp jolt of reality. Her relationship with her boyfriend (played by Peter Ho, 何潤東) is tested, and when the dog becomes ill, the filmmakers want the audience to be reaching for the kleenex. Both leads are veterans of TV and film, but the story and treatment are all overly indulgent. The cuteness of the canine might make up for this among animal lovers.
A Lady in Paris
A mousy, middle-aged caretaker travels from the Baltics to Paris to look after a cantankerous old woman in Estonian filmmaker Ilmar Raag’s A Lady in Paris. This intimate film about the relationship between two women, one a prickly, elderly Estonian (Jeanne Moreau) who doesn’t want anyone to look after her in her adopted home country, much less a woman from her long-abandoned place of birth, the other a carer who both transforms herself and her charge during the course of the film (Laine Magi). It has only the thinnest of storylines, and is carried mainly by Moreau’s immense charisma. The two leading ladies build up an interesting chemistry, and Raag maintains a classic formality in the gradual revelations about Moreau’s character, particularly why she seeks a self-imposed exile away from Estonia, but these a too slight to make much impact. Finely crafted, A Lady in Paris can be enjoyed for the technical perfection of its construction, but provides little in the way of dramatic power.
Transcendence
Debut feature by Wally Pfister, a veteran cinematographer who has worked closely with Christopher Nolan and has a track record that includes such groundbreaking work as Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception. Transcendence has echoes of Inception in its blurring of reality and fantasy, though it never quite manages to be as dynamically involving, despite, or because of, an often annoying Johnny Depp and a script that is so mind-bogglingly clunky that even an outstanding supporting cast that includes the likes of Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman cannot save it. The concept of the film is fascinating, centered on the character of Will Caster (Depp), who is working toward his goal of creating an omniscient, sentient machine and becomes the target of a radical anti-technology organization. Unfortunately, this man vs machine drama feels more mechanical than human.
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
Not long into Mistress Dispeller, a quietly jaw-dropping new documentary from director Elizabeth Lo, the film’s eponymous character lays out her thesis for ridding marriages of troublesome extra lovers. “When someone becomes a mistress,” she says, “it’s because they feel they don’t deserve complete love. She’s the one who needs our help the most.” Wang Zhenxi, a mistress dispeller based in north-central China’s Henan province, is one of a growing number of self-styled professionals who earn a living by intervening in people’s marriages — to “dispel” them of intruders. “I was looking for a love story set in China,” says Lo,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
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