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.
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
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
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would