The House Bunny
This Anna Faris vehicle looks like junk judging from the trailer, but early reviews are very affectionate. Faris is an uber-dumb Playboy Bunny who gets ejected from Hugh Hefner’s digs and responds by teaching a sorority full of gormless young ladies to triumph over their apparent sexlessness. In turn, she learns that making yourself smarter has its advantages. Sounds like Revenge of the Nerds meets Legally Blonde, which, come to think of it, might be a good thing. And it’s no accident: The latter film and this one share the same screenwriters.
20th Century Boys
Nobody quite embraces the apocalypse and loss of innocence like the Japanese, and here’s another movie sourced from a classic manga to prove it. Childhood friends create a fantasy world — complete with an unsettling symbol — that imagines dreadful events befalling the planet. After reuniting as adults, they discover that their youthful fantasies are becoming reality and that the world faces annihilation at the hands of a cult leader/terrorist called Friend who has accessed their past. The film concludes with spectacular and disturbing scenes of destruction and mayhem, but hope remains: Part 2 is on the way.
City of Ember
An intricate underground city not unlike the one envisioned by the Artilleryman in the book of The War of the Worlds is the setting for this futuristic, family-ish movie. On the surface of the Earth some kind of apocalyptic event has forced humans underground and to accept the challenges that go with it. How else could the city tolerate Bill Murray as its eventual mayor? Two hundred years on, two precocious children find clues that suggest things are looking very bad for the community, not helped by collapsing infrastructure and predatory creatures roaming the outskirts. Also stars Martin Landau and Tim Robbins (who, by the way, played the Artilleryman redux in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds).
Max Payne
No, this videogame-cum-movie is not directed by Uwe Boll. Mark Wahlberg is the title character, out for his own brand of justice after his wife and baby are murdered. Like City of Ember, this movie privileges style and heat over content and light and may delight budding production designers as Max pursues crooks at an evil company that produces a terrifying, unpredictable drug for military purposes. Lots of action for the faithful, but it seems we’ll have to wait until Gaspar Noe directs Grand Theft Auto IV for a truly envelope-pushing movie based on a format that always lent itself to addiction and robotic violence, not real emotion.
Planet B-Boy
A revelatory, wide-ranging documentary on breakdancing, this might be the best release of the week. Those put off breakdancing for life after watching fluff like the Cannon studio’s Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo in the mid-1980s might find themselves converted, despite themselves, after watching this. Superb dancers from around the world strive to reach the finals of the world competition in Germany, with the viewer intimately following five of the crews, including Japanese and South Koreans. Variety points out that the director opted for the dancers to show their moves without the hype of excessive editing or close-ups, which should please dance aficionados.
Dorothy Mills
A French production set in Ireland supposedly based on an incident in the US, the title refers to a creepy-looking girl who is seemingly possessed, while the story has a psychologist attempting to reach her through her Sybil-like battery of sinister multiple identities — but not necessarily to the delight of the Wicker Man-like locals, who may have a vested interest in keeping some nasty secrets buried within her. Not a favorite among the folks at Tourism Ireland, this movie was also released as Dorothy.
If you are a Western and especially a white foreign resident of Taiwan, you’ve undoubtedly had the experience of Taiwanese assuming you to be an English teacher. There are cultural and economic reasons for this, but one of the greatest determinants is the narrow range of work permit categories that exist for Taiwan’s foreign residents, which has in turn created an unofficial caste system for foreigners. Until recently, laowai (老外) — the Mandarin term for “foreigners,” which also implies citizenship in a rich, Western country and distinguishable from brown-skinned, southeast Asian migrant laborers, or wailao (外勞) — could only ever
Sept. 23 to Sept. 29 The construction of the Babao Irrigation Canal (八堡圳) was not going well. Large-scale irrigation structures were almost unheard of in Taiwan in 1709, but Shih Shih-pang (施世榜) was determined to divert water from the Jhuoshuei River (濁水溪) to the Changhua plain, where he owned land, to promote wet rice cultivation. According to legend, a mysterious old man only known as Mr. Lin (林先生) appeared and taught Shih how to use woven conical baskets filled with rocks called shigou (石笱) to control water diversion, as well as other techniques such as surveying terrain by observing shadows during
In recent weeks news outlets have been reporting on rising rents. Last year they hit a 27 year high. It seems only a matter of time before they become a serious political issue. Fortunately, there is a whole political party that is laser focused on this issue, the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (TSP). They could have had a seat or two in the legislature, or at least, be large enough to attract media attention to the rent issue from time to time. Unfortunately, in the last election, Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) acted as a vote sink for
This is a film about two “fools,” according to the official synopsis. But admirable ones. In his late thirties, A-jen quits his high-paying tech job and buys a plot of land in the countryside, hoping to use municipal trash to revitalize the soil that has been contaminated by decades of pesticide and chemical fertilizer use. Brother An-ho, in his 60s, on the other hand, began using organic methods to revive the dead soil on his land 30 years ago despite the ridicule of his peers, methodically picking each pest off his produce by hand without killing them out of respect