The 5th Wave
The latest to ride the wave of post-apocalyptic young adult science fiction adaptations, there’s really nothing in the plot description that makes The 5th Wave stand out. Even the fact that it’s set to become a trilogy follows the golden rule established by the Hunger Games and so on. Anyway, aliens have devastated the world in four distinct waves of attacks, and while people await the fifth one, spunky teen Chloe Grace Moretz teams up with a stranger to save her younger brother who has been captured by aliens. Throw in some budding romance stuff, survival scenes and kids being forced to grow up and fight, and you have the perfect film — for a teenager. Adult alien-invasion enthusiasts should probably wait for this summer’s sequel to Independence Day.
Steve Jobs
If you don’t know what this movie is about after reading the title, just don’t watch it. Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire fame directs this Oscar-hopeful biopic based on Walter Isaacson’s book on the man who co-founded Apple, recruiting a big-name cast of Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen and Jeff Daniels. The book itself is quite impressive — released 19 days after Job’s death in 2011, it is based on extensive interviews with Jobs and more than 100 family members and friends. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who won multiple awards for his similarly-themed The Social Network, has divided the movie into three acts — each marked by a significant Jobs invention. There’s talk that many people featured in the movie and people who knew Jobs have criticized the film as an inaccurate portrayal, so just take it with a grain of salt.
Dirty Grandpa
First Bruce Willis, now Robert De Niro — our iconic stars are aging and fading into insignificance — but at least De Niro still gets the titular role in Dirty Grandpa. Plus, the former tough guy has been venturing into big budget comedy for awhile, not all with bad results. This low-brow comedy is directed by Ali G collaborator Dan Mazer, and has Zac Efron playing De Niro’s straight-laced grandson whom De Niro drags to Daytona Beach for a good time before he gets married to an equally uptight woman. Seems like a terrible idea, but judging from the trailer, it actually could be funny as the characters somehow make it work, especially with Efron being pushed around by De Niro. Warning: there’s a De Niro sex scene in the film.
Black Souls
Francesco Munzi’s crime film that won four Venice Film Festival prizes and nine David Di Donatello awards in 2014 is finally premiering in Taiwan. The story is about three brothers from a Calabrian mafia clan in southern Italy — all living in different places doing different things — who are drawn back home, becoming involved in a re-opened blood feud that goes way back. Most of the film is shot in Africo, a poor, rural town where clan violence, which has been featured in the news several times in the past decade, runs rampant. The ‘Ndrangheta, the mafia family the brothers belong to, is often considered the most powerful in all of Italy — surpassing their Sicilian counterparts. It seems like a more dramatic, slow-paced piece that explores the ties of kinship and honor and how they can drive generation after generation to reenact the never-ending violence.
Son of Saul
Another multiple award-winning European film is making its local premiere this week: Son of Saul, which won the Cannes Grand Prix and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, the first Hungarian film to do so. Impressively, it’s both director Laszlo Nemes’ and lead actor Geza Rohring’s debut feature. Rohring is Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando — concentration camp prisoners who were forced to help the Nazis in leading other prisoners to the gas chambers and disposing of the bodies afterward. Things change when Saul sees a body of a young boy that he claims is his son, and embarks on a mission to give the boy a proper Jewish burial. It’s one of the more morally dark takes on the holocaust, one where prisoners are forced to turn on others just to prolong their lives for a few months. The entire film is shot from the perspective of Saul, which should make this grim story even more powerful.
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
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
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,
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