Our Times 我的少女時代
Yet another “youthful days” movie out of Taiwan, this film’s exaggerated dialogue and mannerisms of the characters make it appear to be just another cutesy high school flick — albeit set in the main character’s memories of the 1990s. But high school is high school, no matter what the era is. There’s the super handsome guy on the basketball team that the entire school’s female population is in love with, including the plain-looking female protagonist, who is then befriended by an (also handsome) delinquent who enlists her to help him get with the school’s most popular girl. You can guess what happens from there. The trailer bills the film as “a gift for ordinary girls,” and with phrases like “always remember the courage of youth,” this film will either make you squirm or warm your heart. Oh, there’s a cameo by megastar Andy Lau (劉德華).
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
British filmmaker Guy Ritchie takes a stab at remaking the popular US spy action series from the 1960s. Unlike many recent remakes that try to modernize the film, this one is still set at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, and it does pay homage to the era with its shooting style, fashion choices and jazzy soundtrack. The story focuses on two United Network Command for Law and Enforcement (U.N.C.L.E.) agents (one is CIA, one is KGB and they don’t like each other) and their mission to escort a German nuclear scientist’s daughter to find her father, who is being forced to build a nuclear bomb for evil forces. Many critics say that the film has plenty of swagger and style, is beautifully produced and makes for light-hearted, fast-paced entertainment, but that it lacks substance — most point to the lack of chemistry between the two protagonists, which should have been the film’s main driving force.
Latin Lover
Featuring several big-name European movie stars, this Italian comedy marks the last big screen appearance of “Italian Goddess” Virna Lisi, who died at age 78 in December last year. The story begins when the 10th death anniversary celebration of fictional movie star Saverio Crispo turns into a giant family reunion. The event is held in Crispo’s hometown, where his first wife and daughter live. Eventually, all the women in Crispo’s life are gathered: two wives and four daughters from four different women in four different countries. A fifth daughter later appears, and there’s plenty of drama and laughs to be generated from these characters hanging around the house. This film also serves as an ode to the heyday of Italian cinema, with Crispo’s legacy revealed in fictional television bits that allude to the careers and lives of some of Italy’s biggest heartthrobs of the past.
Song of the Reed 蘆葦之歌
Today is International Memorial Day for Comfort Women, and also marks the release of Song of the Reed, a documentary on Taiwan’s comfort women, who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Army before and during World War II. The trailer opens with one of these women barely containing her emotions as she talks about how she was looked down upon because of what she was forced to do. While it’s a somber subject, the film doesn’t just portray sadness and hardship. It’s also about being strong and living on, as you also see these women, in their old age, laugh and dance and attend exhibits and events about the subject through a series of workshops put on by the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (台北婦女救援基金會) to help them deal with the past. As much as it highlights the brutality these women endured, it also shows that letting go of and healing is just as important.
Tokyo Fiancee
Based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Belgian writer Amelie Nothomb, Tokyo Fiancee tells the story of a romance between 20-year-old Amelie a Japanese college student while she worked as a French tutor in Japan. Amelie was born in Japan and lived there until she was five, and longed to return (“I wanted to be Japanese, that was my only goal,” her older self says in a voiceover in the trailer). With any cross-country romance, cultures clash in many ways and Amelie realizes that “becoming Japanese” isn’t as easy as she thought, especially with the various social codes of Japanese society. The film is updated to modern times, as the book was set in the 1990s but the Fukushima nuclear disaster happens in the film. Light hearted and punctuated with surreal sequences of Amelie’s imagination, we see Tokyo through her free-spirited eyes as she gradually comes of age.
The Taipei Times reported last week that housing transactions fell 15.3 percent last month, to under 20,000 units. However, the market boomed for the first eight months of the year, and observers expect it to show growth for the year as a whole. The fall was due to Central Bank intervention. “The negative impact of credit controls grew evident for the third straight month,” said Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) research manager Tseng Ching-ter (曾敬德), according to the report. Central Bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) in October said that the Central Bank implemented selective credit controls in September to cool the housing
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
It’s a discombobulating experience, after a Lord of the Rings trilogy that was built, down to every frame and hobbit hair, for the big screen, to see something so comparatively minor, small-scaled and TV-sized as The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The film, set 183 years before the events of The Hobbit, is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists. Rohirrim, which sounds a little like the sound an orc might make sneezing, is perhaps best understood as a placeholder for further cinematic
The results of the 2024 US presidential election rattled the country and sent shockwaves across the world — or were cause for celebration, depending on who you ask. Is it any surprise then that the Merriam-Webster word of the year is “polarization?” “Polarization means division, but it’s a very specific kind of division,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large, in an exclusive interview ahead of Monday’s announcement. “Polarization means that we are tending toward the extremes rather than toward the center.” The election was so divisive, many American voters went to the polls with a feeling that the opposing candidate was
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