Hercules: The Thracian Wars
Greek mythology is getting a heavy workout in Hollywood these days. As yet, apart from the visual inventiveness of Zack Snyder’s 300, this sub-genre of the swords and sandals epic, enhanced with massive quantities of CGI, has produced no particularly good movies. And it is not for want of trying. The character of Hercules features in two movies this year alone, and Hercules: The Thracian Wars, starring that outstanding specimen of prime beefcake, former WWE wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, should not be confused with The Legend of Hercules, starring Kellen Lutz, whose main claim to fame is playing the buff Emmett Cullen in the Twilight franchise. Johnson is a perfectly acceptable screen presence, and has been effective in various supporting roles movies such as The Mummy Returns and Luke Hobbs in the Fast and Furious series. Sadly, he is not really up to a leading role, and despite support from the likes of Ian McShane and John Hurt, as well as a host of scantily clad beauties, Hercules: The Thracian Wars is utterly silly and not very engaging. The script is clunky, often undermining the epic tone it seeks to achieve, and occasionally stumbling in unintended humor. It has none of the cheekiness that made films such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early Conan movies so much fun.
Cruel and Unusual
Weird psychological fantasy from Canada by Merlin Dervisevic in his debut feature film. The story centers on a shabby everyman named Edgar (David Richmond-Peck) who may, or may not, accidentally have killed his Filipina wife (Bernadette Saquibal), and who then finds himself in a group therapy session in which he is forced to relive the murder for eternity. Through the process of endless confession, a kind of murderous Groundhog’s Day, he realizes that it may actually have been his wife who was trying to kill him. It is all quite cleverly constructed, and Richmond-Peck does an outstanding job of portraying the bemused protagonist struggling toward some understanding of his situation. For all its qualities, Cruel and Unusual has a self-serious earnestness that drags the whole thing down, drawing it toward film school territory and making this relatively compact package (running time 95 minutes) into something of a drag.
7500
The sort of horror flick that deserves to go straight to DVD and then into the trash. 甀 is devoid of scares, and its attempts at creating character and exploit psychological thrills falls flat. Flight 7500 departs Los Angeles International Airport bound for Tokyo. As the overnight flight makes its way over the Pacific Ocean, the passengers encounter what appears to be a supernatural force in the cabin. But do we care about what happens to the cardboard cutouts on the flight? Do we discover why they are there in the first place, or how the snippets of backstory enhance the audience experience of their plight? Do we ever jump out of our seats? The answer is a uniform no. If you must watch people have a bad time on an airplane, watch the DVD of Snakes on a Plane instead.
A Thousand Times Good Night
English-language film by Norwegian director Erik Poppe tells the story of a female war photographer passionately committed to her dangerous profession and caught up in her family’s fear that her job, which brings her to some of the most dangerous locations on the planet, will almost certainly get her killed. The film is anchored by a strong performance from Juliette Binoche, who plays photojournalist Rebecca, who has a compulsion to make others see what she sees through her photographs. The story focuses more on her inner compulsion rather than conflicts of journalistic values as in such Hollywood classics with a similar set up as Under Fire. Binoche is ably supported by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (from Game of Thrones) as Rebecca’s marine biologist husband, and Lauryn Canny as her daughter, who is torn by the abandonment consequent on her mother’s work, and the vocation, or addiction, it represents. Deftly sidestepping both melodrama and family-values messaging, director Poppe, who worked as a photojournalist in the 1980s, imbues the film with enormous emotional resonance.
The Ghost Festival (盂蘭神功)
Written, directed and starring Hong Kong cinema’s tough man Nick Cheung (張家輝), The Ghost Festival sports a veteran cast that includes Carrieng Wu (吳家麗) and Taiwanese-Canadian actress Annie Liu (劉心悠). With Cheung at the helm, the film has garnered considerable press attention, and its mix of regular horror tropes with a story set against the operation of a Chinese opera troupe ensures that there is a strong element of the exotic to flesh out a horror story that follows genre conventions without too much imagination. Cheung plays a businessman who has returned from China to Malaysia after a failed venture and is forced to take over his father’s opera company, as well as manage the intense family feuding with his younger sister. With the advent of Ghost Month, strange things begin to happen, and the installation of a CCTV system reveals that this paranormal activity seems closely related to the troupe’s star performer. Production values are above average and Cheung elicits some committed performances from his cast.
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
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