Lovers of Chinese films have been holding their breath all week in anticipation of Sunday's announcement of the Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, hoping, of course, that Wong Kar Wai (王家衛) will take the honors for his star-studded sci-fi drama 2046. Speculation in local media that 2046 stands a good chance this year has rested on the fact that Quentin Tarantino, who's serving as president of the festival's jury panel, has long been a fan of Wong's films and that he's been quoted as saying that the only places with full-fledged film industries are the US, India and Hong Kong.
The rest of the hype at Cannes has been over the out-of-competition screening of House of Flying Daggers (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
And no matter how 2046 and Flying Daggers are received in Cannes, Gong Li (鞏琍) will do Chinese film aficionados proud by picking up the Cannes Special Award -- a type of lifetime achievement award -- on Sunday.
In other film news, Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) traveled to Hollywood recently, according to the Apple Daily (蘋果日報), to try out for the lead role in Rob Marshall's film adaptation of the bestselling novel Memoirs of a Geisha, which is due to start filming at the end of the year. Until recently, it was rumored that Maggie Cheung (張曼玉) was cast for the role.
This week in Taipei, Hong Kong bad boy Nicholas Tse (
encouraging.
Earlier this week it looked like Eason Chan (陳冠希) might have usurped Tse on the bad boy throne when it was reported in Hong Kong media that he and friends were involved in a brawl at a nightclub called Dip last weekend. Papers were tipped off anonymously and then ran with the story before figuring out that Eason has never been to Dip and that on Saturday night, when the fight allegedly took place, he had been on the set of a new film, with a title that translates, ironically, as Headline News (頭條新聞).
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
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
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