In the downbeat, sufficiently unsettling Hide and Seek, Robert De Niro rises to a formidable challenge: he holds his own against a scene-swiping 10-year-old.
As a bereft widower, David Callaway, De Niro turns out to be more than well matched by Dakota Fanning, who plays his young and only child, Emily.
One of the most actively employed child actors in the movie business and one of the most gifted, Fanning has both chops and a preternaturally intense screen presence. Even when you don't believe the setup, you tend to buy what she is selling.
That's a good thing when it comes to a film like Hide and Seek, which needs all the help it can get from its actors. The movie begins as if in a dream. A New York City shrink, David is married to Alison (Amy Irving), a somnolent type whose obvious affection for her daughter can't disguise her restless unhappiness.
Soon after the story starts, violence descends on the Callaway family, splintering it into pieces, and David and Emily move to the country for some healing. Once there, things go from lousy to worse as Emily starts staring blankly into the surrounding woods and palling around with a sinister invisible friend called Charlie. Blood drips into the story as if from a leaky faucet; then, it pours.
Under the spell of Stanley Kubrick at his most audience-friendly and The Sixth Sense, though without the delights these influences promise, the director John Polson keeps the underwritten screenplay by Ari Schlossberg moving at a steady, deliberate clip.
In short order it becomes clear that all is not right in this depopulated country corner, where David and Emily's next-door neighbors (Robert John Burke and Melissa Leo) always seem to be lurking with anxious, guilty eyes.
Among the story's other, more approachable passers-by are David's former student (Famke Janssen) and a friendly local (Elisabeth Shue) who wears big smiles and low-cut dresses that please David but not his increasingly moody daughter. Less attractive but no less welcome is Dylan Baker as the town's somewhat vinegary sheriff.
Hide and Seek hinges on a creepily unpleasant last-minute twist, which attentive students of the horror-thriller hybrid will probably see long in advance. Polson -- whose last directorial outing was the laughably over-ripe high school-horror movie Swimfan -- delivers the genre goods well enough in this new movie but is not in possession of a discernable style.
The tropic of cancer bisects the city of Chiayi (嘉義). The morning heat is, predictably, intense. But the sky is blue and hued with promise. Travelers brave the heat to pose for photos outside the carriages lined up at the end of platform one. The pervasive excitement is understandable. HISTORIC RAILWAY The Alishan Forest Railway (阿里山森林鐵路) was engineered by the Japanese to carry timber from the interior to the coast. Construction began in 1906. In 1912, it opened to traffic, although the line has been lengthened several times since. As early as the 1930s, the line had developed a secondary function as
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) National Congress tomorrow will potentially be one of the most consequential in the party’s history. Since the founding of the DPP until the late 2000s or early 2010s, the party was riven with factional infighting, at times getting very ugly and very public. For readers curious to know more about the context of the factions and who they are, two previous columns explore them in depth: “The powerful political force that vanished from the English press,” April 23, 2024 and “Introducing the powerful DPP factions,” April 27, 2024. In 2008, a relatively unknown mid-level former
July 22 to July 28 The Love River’s (愛河) four-decade run as the host of Kaohsiung’s annual dragon boat races came to an abrupt end in 1971 — the once pristine waterway had become too polluted. The 1970 event was infamous for the putrid stench permeating the air, exacerbated by contestants splashing water and sludge onto the shore and even the onlookers. The relocation of the festivities officially marked the “death” of the river, whose condition had rapidly deteriorated during the previous decade. The myriad factories upstream were only partly to blame; as Kaohsiung’s population boomed in the 1960s, all household
In Taiwan there are two economies: the shiny high tech export economy epitomized by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and its outsized effect on global supply chains, and the domestic economy, driven by construction and powered by flows of gravel, sand and government contracts. The latter supports the former: we can have an economy without TSMC, but we can’t have one without construction. The labor shortage has heavily impacted public construction in Taiwan. For example, the first phase of the MRT Wanda Line in Taipei, originally slated for next year, has been pushed back to 2027. The government