The Raid: Berandal
The original movie, The Raid: Redemption set the bar on extreme violence at a very high level, but with the sequel, this Indonesian martial arts action flick takes the art of close combat to a whole new level of artistry, as well as brutality. If you don’t like watching people getting their faces burned off in a deep fat fryer, skulls crushed by baseball bats and bodies ripped apart by the claw bars of a household hammer, then this is unlikely to be a movie you will enjoy, for combat in one vicious form or another accounts for a very significant chunk of the film’s 150-minute running time. Unlike Redemption, which really didn’t have anything that could be described as a plot, director Gareth Evans has incorporated a flimsy story of gangland politics into Berandal. It’s a bit of frippery, and even if you can make sense of it, it really does not get you very far. All you really need to know is that undercover cop Rama (played by Iko Uwais, a specialist in the Indonesian martial art of pencak silat) is pure, true and loyal, and everyone else is cannon fodder. Even serious critics have commented with admiration on the awesomely accomplished choreography and cinematography of the fight sequences, so while The Raid: Berandal may not tell much of a story, fight fans will undoubtedly be entertained.
Grace of Monaco
Yet another film about a princess caught between her personal needs and the demands of her role as a royal personage. Many thought that we had seen the last of this genre after the numbingly bad Diana, but director Olivier Dahan has achieved the seemingly impossible feat of making a film that is even worse. And this is not due to the lack of on-screen talent. We have Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly, the Hollywood star who gives up everything for the love of Monaco’s Prince Rainier III (Tim Roth), but find that she has to sacrifice rather more than she bargained for in the deal. There are even some nice cameos, including Derek Jacobi as Count Fernando D’Aillieres, who provides moral support, and Roger Ashton-Griffiths as Alfred Hitchcock, who sets the whole teary melodrama going when he tries to lure Kelly back for a role in his new film. But one critic at Cannes said the films was “so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk,” and much blame has be put on Arash Amel, who is so in awe of his subject that he never gets round to making her human. Still, the costumes and the scenery are all very pretty, and the film undoubtedly does some important work as a tourism feature to promote Monaco as a desirable holiday destination.
A Million Ways to Die in the West
This is a Seth MacFarlane movie: he is director, writer, producer and star. The setting is moved back in time to the days of the Wild West, but that is about all that is different from his oeuvre. This movie about a cowboy who loses his courage but finds it again to get the girl of his dreams (Charlize Theron), who is the wife of a notoriously mean gunfighter (Liam Neeson), is really just a setup for a string of bawdy jokes and buckets of expletives, but the cast carry the film on its merry and often entertaining way. There is an amusing subplot with Giovanni Ribisi playing a shy man engaged to the town whore (Sarah Silverman), who provides detailed descriptions of her client’s sexual activities. There are plenty of laughs if you like this sort of thing, for MacFarlane is surely a contemporary master of this kind of material, but really it is little more than a variation on the well-worn theme of nerds getting the hot chicks, and an effort to push the envelope on sexual and toilet humor.
Iceman (急凍行者)
Three warriors from the Ming Dynasty have awoken from a state of suspended animation and find themselves in contemporary Hong Kong. One is He Ying (Donnie Yen, 甄子丹), who teams up with Xiao Mei (Huang Shengyi, 黃聖依), a hooker with a heart of gold, to find the Golden Wheel of Life so he can fulfil an ancient prophecy. Two other warriors who follow him out of the deep freeze are bent on settling a 400-year-old grudge. The whole thing is based on a vastly superior movie The Iceman Cometh (急凍奇俠) from 1989, and is in fact an elaborate set up for a second movie already in production. The film is in 3D, and so much of the action is obliged to complement the technology, so there is far too much flying glass, fists and in a new low for 3D, feces. Iceman is no more silly than many Hong Kong action flicks which hit the screens with monotonous regularity, but it gets caught in an uncomfortable no-man’s-land between comedy and drama. Director Law Wing-cheong (羅永昌) is never quite certain whether he wants the audience to laugh or gasp at the action, and as a result it generally does neither.
Spinning Plates
A documentary about three restaurants and the people who make them what they are. Sure its a food movie, but unlike some of the more tedious and self-absorbed documentary films that focus on the personality of the chef as an artist such as Noma, My Perfect Storm about Rene Redzepi or El Bulli about Ferran Adria, Spinning Plates looks at three restaurants in terms of family and community. One of the restaurants, in Chicago, stands at the apex of contemporary gastronomy, and uses high-tech tools to create edible abstractions. Another is a venerable, regionally celebrated pillar of its tiny Iowa community. The third, in Tucson, Arizona, is humble, ethnic and struggling to survive. What they have in common are their stories of food, identity and survival, which comes so unexpectedly out of a format that, more often than not, gets bogged down in matters of artistry, the rigor of restaurant service, and the general superficialities of luxury dining. While its selection may seem random, it has at its heart the theme of all great food movies: food as something that brings people together.
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
RSS