The superstar triumvirate in House of Flying Daggers -- Takeshi Kaneshiro, Zhang Ziyi (
Anticipation for the movie runs high, but some questions were raised this week when Fox Films failed to organize a press screening of the movie until the last minute and somehow forgot to notify members of the media. One of Hollywood's sneakier and well-known tricks is to suppress pre-release screenings of total dud flicks so that the studios can at least squeeze maximum profit from the opening weekend before word gets out that the movie in question actually stinks. So, reporters on the beat in Taipei were left wondering this week if Hollywood's stealth maneuver was being applied to this movie or if Fox Films is just incompetent. It looks like we'll have to see the movie to find out.
Speaking of incompetents, Jacky Wu (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Jay Chou (
Other good news came for Jackie Chan (
Chan did find time in his busy schedule to donate HK$1 million to Taiwan for the victims of floods caused by Tropical Storm Mindulle. That money should go some way to repairing his damaged reputation in Taiwan after he made jokes about the recent presidential election that were received here with very few laughs.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Money will also be raised for the flood victims by A-mei (
Last week, Pop Stop mentioned the second coming of pop singer Wen Lan (
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
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