Melody’s Smile
A deceptive title, this; the original French title is La Chambre des Morts, which gives viewers a much better idea of what’s in store (the Chinese translates as “Sample of a Smile,” which is somewhere in between). The Hollywood Reporter raved about this “horror classic,” in which single mother and detective Melanie Laurent closes in on a duo of sick puppy lesbian kidnappers as a ransom goes missing. The multiple viewpoint style of Rashomon collides with The Silence of the Lambs in this depiction of the worst and best that humanity has to offer.
Always: Sunset on Third Street 2
A sequel to the 2005 original, this film is essential viewing for anyone who has lived in Tokyo. Following several story strands, Part 2 mixes good-natured neighborhood and family melodrama with another widescreen presentation of unusually detailed and moving special effects that recreate the Japanese capital of the late 1950s. Variety and the Japan Times disagreed on the accessibility of this film for those who didn’t see the first one; that debate is quickly shut down by a quick trip to the DVD store.
One Piece The Movie: Episode of Alabaster — The Desert Princess and the Pirates
Part 8 in Japan’s One Piece theatrical saga has Princess Vivi of Alabaster and our trusty band of Straw Hat Pirates travel once again to the scorched kingdom. This time it’s to do battle with a formidable crocodile who heads a criminal network and who has designs on the kingdom’s subjects, and is prepared to use the most nefarious means to take power. Lots of fight scenes for the faithful.
4bia
In case you don’t get the pun, this film is also listed as Phobia. Four of Thailand’s better suspense directors deliver short pieces for this “portmanteau horror film,” but with titles like Happiness, Tit For Tat, In the Middle and Last Fright, it may seem more like Twilight Zone: The Movie than Creepshow; the last episode even takes place on an aircraft. Still, ghostly images on a cellphone, curses, ghost stories that come true and animated corpses should please fans of the latter minor classic.
The Love of Siam
This pastel-shaded Thai youth film pits female fans of a boy band frontman against his unstoppable desire for another young gentleman who has reentered his life, all the while coping with dysfunction in the latter’s family. Amid military coups and the protests of an autocratic middle class, Thailand keeps churning out gay and ladyboy-themed flicks such as this to the delight of local audiences, a phenomenon one would be hard pressed to find anywhere else. Variety says the film courts gay audiences and their straight friends; one could add to this list undiscriminating fans of boy-band music.
Winds of September PLUS The Pain of Others
With local productions Cape No. 7 and Orz Boyz doing splendidly at the box office, the producer of Winds of September, a coming of age drama set in Hsinchu, is re-releasing the film to boost its modest haul. There are two more incentives this time around to see it. The first is a cut price ticket of NT$150; the second is a bonus, award-winning short film from 2005 by Winds director Tom Shu-yu Lin (林書宇), The Pain of Others, a drama about military service. Screening exclusively at Xinyi Vieshow.
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS