The first week of the new year seems a quiet one for the Asian film industry, though the fever of Kung Fu Hustle (
Now confronting Kung Fu Hustle are Butterfly (
PHOTO COURTESY OF HWA JAAN FILMS
Butterfly is Hong Kong independent new blood Yan Yan Mak's (
PHOTO COURTESY OF DEEPJOY INVESTMENT LTD
The film this year has toured Venice and Busan, and it received two Golden Horse nominations: Best Supporting Actress (Josie Ho,
The story follows a young married woman coming to terms with her lesbian sexuality. Roughly adapted from Taiwanese writer Chen Hsueh's (
Butterfly is a middle school teacher who has a wealthy and stable life -- a baby daughter and a loving husband. She encounters a 20-something girl, Yeh, a charming drifter with a child-like smile. Butterfly is deeply drawn to the girl and cannot calm her emotions. The narrative then cuts back to Butterfly's youth and to her high school lover Zhen. With Zhen, she spent a wild time hanging in Zhen's huge apartment, smoking, listening to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," playing with her 8mm film camera and making love all day when the parents were away.
It was a young passion accompanied by political passion -- the two girls are involved in students' movements and Hong Kong's support of the Tiananmen Square democratic movement of the 1980s. But the passion died quickly after the girls were caught in bed by Butterfly's mom. Butterfly left Zhen and soon had a boyfriend. Zhen devoted herself to Buddhism and became a nun.
Twenty years later, Butterfly's passion for women is evoked again while being seduced by Yeh. A struggle to find her true desire again troubles her heart. This time her husband, her daughter and her job are all dragged into the spiral of desire.
Of course, the intimate scenes of both female couples (past and present) are
crucial parts of the movie. Director Mak's use of lens is direct, raw and powerful, making audiences -- even those who cannot accept lesbian love -- look straight at the passion. Those can be the most successful parts of the film. The drawbacks of the film, however, are the slow and tedious final 20 minutes of the film, including a weak ending.
Korean romance film A Letter From Mars, comparatively, is more of a "normal" film, perhaps a too normal romance drama that is typical and predictable. It is a story about a man's persistent love for his childhood girlfriend.
Set in a humble mountain village in South Korea, young girl So-hee has a dream to go to Mars because she believes her father did not die, but is traveling on that planet. She tries to send letters to the father in Mars but of course, the letters are all returned. In order to not see the girl disappointed, So-hee's neighbor Seong-jae decides to write fake letters and deliver them to her. A love between the two begins to grow.
After growing up, Seong-jae becomes a mail man, continuing the job of delivering joy to mail recipients. But So-hee has become a businesswoman in Seoul.
The two are separated and the secret of going to Mars seems to be long buried in the snowy mountain, until one day.
Starring Kim Hee-seon, Korean top actress and model, the film may have some attraction to local fans of Korean TV drama. But as far as the movie goes, it is little more than a nicely packaged cliche; after half of the movie, the audience can already guess the melancholy ending of the story.
On Facebook a friend posted a dashcam video of a vehicle driving through the ash-colored wasteland of what was once Taroko Gorge. A crane appears in the video, and suddenly it becomes clear: the video is in color, not black and white. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake’s destruction on April 3 around and above Taroko and its reverberations across an area heavily dependent on tourism have largely vanished from the international press discussions as the news cycle moves on, but local residents still live with its consequences every day. For example, with the damage to the road corridors between Yilan and
May 13 to May 19 While Taiwanese were eligible to take the Qing Dynasty imperial exams starting from 1686, it took more than a century for a locally-registered scholar to pass the highest levels and become a jinshi (進士). In 1823, Hsinchu City resident Cheng Yung-hsi (鄭用錫) traveled to Beijing and accomplished the feat, returning home in great glory. There were technically three Taiwan residents who did it before Cheng, but two were born in China and remained registered in their birthplaces, while historians generally discount the third as he changed his residency back to Fujian Province right after the exams.
Few scenes are more representative of rural Taiwan than a mountain slope covered in row upon row of carefully manicured tea plants. Like staring at the raked sand in a Zen garden, seeing these natural features in an unnaturally perfect arrangement of parallel lines has a certain calming effect. Snapping photos of the tea plantations blanketing Taiwan’s mountain is a favorite activity among tourists but, unfortunately, the experience is often rather superficial. As these tea fields are part of working farms, it’s not usually possible to walk amongst them or sample the teas they are producing, much less understand how the
With William Lai’s (賴清德) presidential inauguration coming up on May 20, both sides of the Taiwan Strait have been signaling each other, possibly about re-opening lines of communication. For that to happen, there are two ways this could happen, one very difficult to achieve and the other dangerous. During his presidential campaign and since Lai has repeatedly expressed his hope to re-establish communication based on equality and mutual respect, and even said he hoped to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) over beef noodles and bubble tea. More dramatically, as explored in the May 2 edition of this column,