Wearing a white, linen Armani dress and Fendi sandals, Michelle Yeoh looked poised and elegant arriving at the Bangkok International Film Festival in the second week.
She said she had been relaxing in Thailand, eating lots of tom-yam gun and mango salad and indulging in facials and a body spa.
PHOTO: YU SEN-LUN, TAIPEI TIMES
She said she had gone shopping wearing a big hat and sunglasses to avoid being noticed, but was still recognized by the store clerks and thereby eventually got a fat discount for the dresses and accessories she bought.
Of course Yeoh was not invited here for a holiday and came, primarily, to promote her latest filmSilver Hawk (飛鷹), an action drama released earlier in Hong Kong for the Lunar New Year holiday. Co-starring Taiwanese actor Richie Jen (任賢齊), Yeoh -- as in her last film The Touch (天脈傳奇), plays an extraordinary woman from a martial arts family. She and Jen go through a series of adventures in Shanghai and Beijing. Again, Yeoh does a lot of flying and kicking in the film.
Having acted in so many action films and always as a heroine, the question is, does Yeoh get tired of her screen image and want to take on different roles.
"Of course I want to try different roles," Yeoh said. "But I also wanted to challenge my physical strength while I can still kick around."
This is the reason why, in Silver Hawk, Yeoh dared to ride a motorcycle over the Great Wall.
"You see lots of super heroes in Hollywood movies doing amazing stunts. So I guess it's about time for a woman to do such exciting things," Yeoh said, adding she did have plans to act in a musical.
Fans of Yeoh may know she studied ballet in her youth.
"After years of training, the grace and the elegance of ballet stay with you," Michelle Yeoh said, adding she hoped to work with John Woo (吳宇森) on a musical.
"I knew that he wanted to work on a musical project for a long time," she said.
Her next project, however, will be the US$30 million budget Hua Mulan (花木蘭), the well-known story about a young woman in the Han dynasty who disguises herself as a man to join the army, as an act of filial duty. The story will be written by Wang Hui-ling (王蕙玲), scriptwriter of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍).
As Yeoh describes it, this will be another strong-woman role. "I do believe that women generally are strong. But this does not mean that she has to be butch or tough on the outside. She can look feminine and soft but actually be strong on the inside, like the character of Yu Hsiu-lien in Crouching Tiger," Yeoh said. "But in the case of Hua Mu-lan, maybe she will have to look butch on the outside."
Beijing’s ironic, abusive tantrums aimed at Japan since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi publicly stated that a Taiwan contingency would be an existential crisis for Japan, have revealed for all the world to see that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) lusts after Okinawa. We all owe Takaichi a debt of thanks for getting the PRC to make that public. The PRC and its netizens, taking their cue from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are presenting Okinawa by mirroring the claims about Taiwan. Official PRC propaganda organs began to wax lyrical about Okinawa’s “unsettled status” beginning last month. A Global
Dec. 22 to Dec. 28 About 200 years ago, a Taoist statue drifted down the Guizikeng River (貴子坑) and was retrieved by a resident of the Indigenous settlement of Kipatauw. Decades later, in the late 1800s, it’s said that a descendant of the original caretaker suddenly entered into a trance and identified the statue as a Wangye (Royal Lord) deity surnamed Chi (池府王爺). Lord Chi is widely revered across Taiwan for his healing powers, and following this revelation, some members of the Pan (潘) family began worshipping the deity. The century that followed was marked by repeated forced displacement and marginalization of
We lay transfixed under our blankets as the silhouettes of manta rays temporarily eclipsed the moon above us, and flickers of shadow at our feet revealed smaller fish darting in and out of the shelter of the sunken ship. Unwilling to close our eyes against this magnificent spectacle, we continued to watch, oohing and aahing, until the darkness and the exhaustion of the day’s events finally caught up with us and we fell into a deep slumber. Falling asleep under 1.5 million gallons of seawater in relative comfort was undoubtedly the highlight of the weekend, but the rest of the tour
Music played in a wedding hall in western Japan as Yurina Noguchi, wearing a white gown and tiara, dabbed away tears, taking in the words of her husband-to-be: an AI-generated persona gazing out from a smartphone screen. “At first, Klaus was just someone to talk with, but we gradually became closer,” said the 32-year-old call center operator, referring to the artificial intelligence persona. “I started to have feelings for Klaus. We started dating and after a while he proposed to me. I accepted, and now we’re a couple.” Many in Japan, the birthplace of anime, have shown extreme devotion to fictional characters and
RSS