Bad Girls (女孩壞壞)
A lighthearted action/romance from emerging female director Seven (翁靖廷) that plays with genre conventions of the adolescent movie. A kind of girl’s take on the hugely successful You Are the Apple of My Eye (那些年，我們ㄧ起追的女孩), the film stars Ella Chen (陳嘉樺), formerly of Taiwan girl band S.H.E, as the leader of a pack of girls who have a strong sense of social responsibility and a powerful dislike of the shallow and chauvinistic boys they see all around them. The arrival of a celebrity, played by Mike Ha (賀軍翔), causes sneers of derision, until the inevitable happens. Two very different personalities gradually fall for each other. The film also seeks to appeal to the foodie crowd with a cameo role for Taiwan’s most famous baker, Wu Pao-chun (吳寶春), who has won a host of prestigious international baking awards.
Xin Hai Ge Ming (1911—辛亥革命)
Another big-budget historical drama from China. Action hero Jackie Chan (成龍) does double duty as director and Huang Xing (黃興), a general and statesman who joined the 1911 revolution that shaped modern China. The film is long on big set-piece battles and expositional speechifying, and very short on any real drama. Chan is joined by the likes of Winston Chao (趙文瑄), as Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) and Li Bingbing (李冰冰) as Hsu Zonghan (徐宗漢), a rich widow who took up the revolutionary cause and was closely connected to Huang. Chan is all seriousness in his first fully dramatic role, denying himself, and the audience, his vivacity and physical humor. One of the most interesting things about the film is that it’s Chan’s 100th movie. Quite a record!
Mirror Mirror
Directed by music video maker Tarsem Singh and starring Julia Roberts as the evil queen in this revisionist version of Snow White, Mirror Mirror is proof, if proof were needed, that however good a film looks, there needs to be something going on beneath the surface. The surfaces in Mirror Mirror are impressive, giving a slick contemporary sheen to the venerable tale. Roberts is always a pleasure to watch, and the costumes by Japanese designer Eiko Ishioka are to die for, but all these visuals never quite manage to bring the film to life. This is a splendid piece of window dressing.
Elles
French film about a journalist, played by Juliette Binoche, who is investigating the subject of teenage prostitution. Binoche works hard to track the development of her character, who becomes increasingly shocked by what she learns, and somewhat restive about the sterility of her own existence. Unfortunately, director Malgorzata Szumowska seems intent on providing plenty of voyeuristic titillation for his audience, which makes the film almost as exploitative as the dirty business which it purports to describe.
A Little Bit of Heaven
When filmmakers try and put terminal illness, comedy and romance together, they enter dangerous territory. The laughter-and-tears formula often falls victim to irredeemable shallowness and cynicism. The story of A Little Bit of Heaven focuses on Marley Corbett (Kate Hudson), a vivacious, spirited 30-something who is determined to live life to the full, free of constraints. Diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, she calls on all her resources to look life in the face, and at this most trying time, also discovers true love with her sexy oncologist, Julian Goldstein (Gael Garcia Bernal). Cancer is given the Hollywood makeover, and even going through chemotherapy, Hudson keeps her beautiful complexion and full head of golden locks. While the plot and humor are all very nuts-and-bolts chick-flick material, and competently put together, if you don’t leave the cinema in disgust, you’ll probably be reaching for the tissues.
Titanic
After the considerable success of the Lion King 3D conversion released last year, it is no surprise that a slew of retrofitted back-catalog releases have recently hit the screen. James Cameron was an early critic of post-production conversions, but reports suggest that the director has immersed himself in the technical process to make sure everything gets done right. Those who loved the original may find something more with the additional dimension, but Roger Ebert complains that releasing a 3D version is “a shabby way to treat a masterpiece.”
Dark Flight
The first feature length 3D horror film from Thailand, Dark Flight is directed by Isaara Nadee and stars Marsha Vadhanapanich as a flight attendant with a troubled past who finds herself on an aircraft filled with the ghosts of passengers who have died during airplane accidents. The passengers on the flight spend a good deal of time looking scared, but unfortunately this sense of fright does not transfer to the audience.
The Bird Who Saved the World (什麼鳥日子)
A springboard for singer-songwriter William Wei (韋禮安) into the cinema business, The Bird Who Saved the World falls victim to a case of insufferable whimsy. Wei plays an aspiring singer who is at a crossroads, wondering whether to pursue his career as a musician. At this difficult time, a giant bird enters his life, giving him a new perspective in assessing his future. This fantastic creature, the nature of whose existence we are free to speculate about, builds a strong relationship with the central character, but begins to fade from his life as things fall into place. The larger-than-life bird is rumored to have cost NT$150,000 to build.
The 33D Invader (蜜桃成熟時33D)
Soft porn, cheap humor and even cheaper special effects join forces in this wannabe cult classic from Cash Chin (錢文錡), the director of Sex and Zen II (玉蒲團II — 玉女心經), The Fruit Is Ripe 3 (蜜桃成熟時3 — 蜜桃仙子), The Forbidden Legend: Sex and Chopsticks (金瓶梅) and many other raunchy flicks. In 33D, Chin has brought in Japanese porn legend Taka Kato, who has been nicknamed “Goldfinger” for his skills at digital manipulation (ample details available online), and Akiho Yoshizawa, also from the Japanese hard-core scene. The story revolves around a man from the future who comes to the present time in search of the perfect woman. But no one really cares, as this is basically a sci-fi skin flick with silly special effects.
Love Is Infinity: Romantic and Heartwarming Film Festival (愛∞無限:2012全球浪漫溫馨傑作精選)
A catchall mini film fest that brings together films with a romantic theme from around the world. The program includes The Romantics, Welcome to the Rileys, Leila, Mother and Child, Beloved Berlin Wall, Everything Must Go, Ondine, The Good Guy, The Greatest, City Island, An Invisible Sign, The Open Road, The Winning Season, Then She Found Me, Under the Same Moon, Little White Lies, My Week With Marilyn and Creation. The festival runs until April 27. A special deal of four tickets for NT$796 is available through the distributor’s Web site (catchplay.me) and at 7-Eleven ibon kiosks. All screenings are at SPOT — Taipei Film House (光點台北), 18, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市中山北路二段18號). Detailed information can be found at www.catchplay.com/festival.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
What a gift Werner Herzog offers with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, an inside look at the astonishing Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc — and in 3D too. In southern France, about 644km from Paris, the limestone cave contains a wealth of early paintings, perhaps from as long ago as 32,000 years. Here, amid gleaming stalactites and stalagmites and a carpet of animal bones, beautiful images of horses gallop on walls alongside bison and a ghostly menagerie of cave lions, cave bears and woolly mammoths. As the smooth-handed director of photography Peter Zeitlinger wields the camera, Herzog walks and even crawls for your viewing pleasure. He’s an agreeable, sometimes characteristically funny guide, whether showing you the paintings or talking with the men and women who study them.
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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