As another adaptation of Taiwanese illustration book author Jimmy Liao's (
Unfortunately, the film has turned out to be a colorful and beautiful picture that looks like an extended version of a music video. It may be creative in creating characters and plot for the originally thinly-plotted illustration book and the performances are on the whole OK, but the result is less than the sum of its parts.
The original story of Sound of Colors is basically about a blind girl's lonely journey walking aimlessly through different MRT stations. The girl has a rich imagination and "sees" in her heart the colorful wonderland that is the world of the underground.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROTHERS
The blind girl finds love, while a parallel romance takes place in a Shanghai subway station. Basically, fans of Liao's book should not expect a faithful adaptation. Rather, they should see it as a romance comedy with the Liao-style paintbox of bright colors, in which characters are clad with stylish, fluffy sweaters and scarves. The theme songs are in French, to add atmosphere.
Tony Leung (
In another plot line, Chang, an advertising company sales representative in Taipei sends a Christmas card to a girl whom he has a crush on. But the love letter is somehow switched and goes to Shanghai.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROTHERS
His Shanghai client,, Dong Jie, a young business woman replies, revealing that she is also recovering from a failed lover affair. Chang then flies to Shanghai to find her. They meet in the subway, and, naturally enough, they fall for each other.
The romance of the Hong Kong couple, Leung and Yeung, looks more natural, because the details about how they cope with problems are more authentic. But the Shanghai romance is just plain cheesy.
Even more artificial is the character of Wing Fan (
He is the one who secretly matches up the two couples. Somehow his short appearances do not connect too well to the plot and rather than feeling this is a miracle, the overwhelming thought is: this is a bit bizarre.
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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
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It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your