For those who are interested in East-meets-West stories, this is one of the more amusing films of the year. But following on the success of Oscar-winner Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (
In this contemporary comedy, Donald Sutherland plays world-famous director Don Tyler who has always been fond of Chinese culture. In the fantastic Forbidden City of Beijing, Tyler is surrounded by hundreds of costumed extras, trying to make a mega-budget re-make of The Last Emperor. He suffers such a creative block on the film set that he hardly knows where to place the camera.
Yo Yo is a cynical Chinese cameraman with who was hired by Asian-born, Western-educated Lucy, Tyler's personal assistant, to shoot footage for Tyler. Yo's unlikely friendship with Tyler helps relieve the depression Tyler feels over his creative block, but not for long. Tyler falls in a coma and his last wish is that Yo Yo throw him a wacky "comedy funeral."
PHOTO COURTESY OF BUENA VISTA
The story takes a rollercoaster ride through satire and absurdity as Yo Yo turns to best friend King, who has grand business ambitions but poor taste, to help him organize the funeral. As King intends to make the funeral a world-wide televised extravaganza, the costs become uncontrollable and the only thing Yo Yo and King can do is open bids to place advertisements in the funeral. An Italian brand of furniture supplies the bed for Tyler to lay on and Cozy Cola, Obituary Bird and other of Tyler's "close friends" take part as well. But in the midst of the unbridled craze for commercial placement, Tyler wakes up.
Director Feng excels at satirizing two things, the stereotyped Chinese fantasy and the entrepreneurial zeal which has begun sweeping through China. To make these two aspects work, Feng uses non-stop jokes and self-mockery during the advertising auction, focusing on China's rampant piracy problem and the mixed feelings towards Asian Americans. Ge You and Ying Da do a good job at making the most of these jokes.
Ying Da represents the upstart businessman with nothing but self-boasting and tackiness. And Ge You represents the jobless Beijing dweller suddenly disoriented by the wave of Westernization.
Strictly speaking, the plot transitions are not quite coherent and the ending is too predictable. But this hasn't stopped Big Shot's Funeral from becoming the best-selling local-made film ever in China, with box office receipts over 35 million renminbi (US$4.2 million), a number any Taiwanese director would envy.
Whether or not the film can cross over to Western audiences remains to be seen. Although the script has a Western context and there is the huge talent of Donald Sutherland, many of the jokes are delivered in Mandarin. The Mandarin voice and expressions of the actors are part of the comedy, making it is hard for non-Chinese viewers to appreciate. Some of the jokes are even based on Chinese word play and cannot be translated. The film's foreign distributors have their work cut out for them.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would