Mademoiselle C
The Devil Wears Prada was the launching pad for films about the glamor and absurdity of the fashion industry. It was followed by documentaries such as The September Issue that explored the workings of Vogue magazine and the character of Anne Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue. Mademoiselle C takes another character out of Vogue iconography, in this case Vogue Paris editor-in-chief and fashion stylist Carine Roitfeld, focusing on her move from Europe to launch her own magazine in New York. It features a virtual horde of big name designers and entertainers, with the likes of Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, and Donatella Versace, as well as Beyonce Knowles, Kirsten Dunst, Marion Cotillard … the list goes on and on, but what it all adds up to is a rather vapid celebration of all the lovely, talented and creative people who make the fashion industry the rarified and inexplicable place that it is. While fashionistas might get something out of the slew of interviews the film presents and the behind the scenes footage of great designers at work, those who don’t go limp at the thought of new spring fashions are unlikely to find it either particularly entertaining or informative.
The Signal
Visually captivating and superficially intriguing, The Signal manages to be annoying and disappointing by turns as it sidesteps what at first seems some very considerable conceptual aims in favor of creating a sci-fi mind trip that blends elements of both District 9 and The Blair Witch Project, but fails to achieve its own individuality. Nick (Brenton Thwaites) and Jonah (Beau Knapp) are MIT freshmen with a passion for hacking. They follow hints from a rival hacker that leads them into a terrifying and mind bending confinement at a facility in the middle of nowhere. They have to make sense of what is going on, as indeed, does the audience. Given its relatively small budget and low profile cast, The Signal has some truly noteworthy moments, and while performances are solid, the star of the show is the exquisite visual design. Reality, fantasy and alternative reality meld together in ways that allow director William Eubank to create some surprising twists and turns, and while there is some pleasure in enjoying the director’s technical skill, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that beneath all the sci-fi gloss, there really isn’t a whole lot going on.
Tokarev
Nicolas Cage sure can pick’em. Hard as it is to believe, he has taken a step further down the ladder in the straight-to-video action flick, surpassing even the vapid tastelessness of the Ghostrider movies. Also released under the title Rage, this film tells the story of reformed criminal Paul Maguire (Cage) who has gone legit after making a big haul from highjacking a shipment from the Russian mob. Inevitably, the past comes back to haunt him when teenage daughter Caitlin (Aubrey Peeples) is abducted. Maguire reconnects with old buddies, Kane (Max Ryan) and Danny (Michael McGrady), from the Irish mob to take revenge. It is a bloody business, and director Paco Cabezas seems less interested in telling a story than in showing scenes of extreme violence. Cage’s character is one dimensional, and given that it is difficult to care much about any of the other characters, there is little dramatic force behind the scenes of nasty people doing nasty things to each other. Production values are perfectly adequate, and Tokarev will work well enough with beer and pizza in front of the television.
Gerontophilia
Canadian director Bruce LaBruce has been one of the more notable cinematic provocateurs of the last couple of decades and has garnered his share of notoriety with taboo-busting, sexually explicit films The Raspberry Reich, Otto, Or Up With Dead People and LA Zombie (this last was banned from the Melbourne Film Festival). With Gernontophila, LaBruce remains very much on marginal territory with a central character Lake (Pier-Gabriele LaJoie), an attractive young teen with a close, almost sexual connection with old people, particularly old men. There is a conscious nod to the Hal Ashby’s classic Harold and Maude, and it plays with the same kind of gentle humor, but it is tainted by a strong misogynistic streak that relegates most of the female characters to pathetic figures unable to tap into the male bonding central to the story. In emphasizing the sensual over the erotic, LaBruce seems to be making a play for a more mainstream audience, and the central relationship between Lake and Mr. Peabody (Walter Borden) is full of warmth.
Third Person
In 2006, Paul Haggis became the first screenwriter to write two Best Film Oscar winners back-to-back — Million Dollar Baby (2004) directed by Clint Eastwood, and Crash (2004) which he himself directed. With Third Person, he takes the complexities of Crash to a whole new level, interweaving stories of relationships taking place in Paris, Rome and New York. There is Liam Neeson, who plays a Pulitzer-winning novelist struggling to write a sincere, self-conscious work about Love, Mila Kunis, a failed soap star who consults with a skeptical attorney (Maria Bello) to win back child-visitation rights from her ex-husband (James Franco), and Adrien Brody as a shady corporate thief who meets a beautiful gypsy woman (Moran Atias). It is possible to view Third Person as a rather tiresome game in which the audience gets to spend the entire 136-minute running time trying to guess how these three very different relationships relate to one another. For those who enjoy this kind of thing, one can clearly see the hand of a master in Haggis’ careful piecing together of a complex structure, but the whole thing is so self-consciously put together that the characters sometimes seem little more than elements in a screenwriting masterclass.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
Toward the outside edge of Taichung City, in Wufeng District (霧峰去), sits a sprawling collection of single-story buildings with tiled roofs belonging to the Wufeng Lin (霧峰林家) family, who rose to prominence through success in military, commercial, and artistic endeavors in the 19th century. Most of these buildings have brick walls and tiled roofs in the traditional reddish-brown color, but in the middle is one incongruous property with bright white walls and a black tiled roof: Yipu Garden (頤圃). Purists may scoff at the Japanese-style exterior and its radical departure from the Fujianese architectural style of the surrounding buildings. However, the property
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