The 50th Asian Pacific Film Festival handed out its annual medals last Saturday, and crushed the Taiwanese delegates' high hopes of taking the top awards this year. Tsai Ming-liang's (蔡明亮) The Wayward Cloud (天邊一朵雲) was ruled out from the competition section for its explicit sexual content, while veteran actress Yang Kui-mei (楊貴媚) didn't get crowned as Best Female Actress, and only got the Special Jury Award to comfort her broken heart.
As the hostess of the festival's A Night of Taiwan section, Patty Hou (侯佩岑) was criticized by local media for being big-headed. Hou is said to have asked for special treatment and to have made lame excuses for being late for rehearsals.
The situation took a turn for the worse when Taiwanese delegates changed the name of the event from A Night of Taipei to A Night of Taiwan without warning. The organizers got upset and said it was their tradition to use the host city's name in order to tone down politically sensitive issues. Festival member countries then insisted on reversing the name change at the last minute. Everything comes down to politics eventually, it seems.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Opening today in Taiwan, Jackie Chan's The Myth (神話) has already grossed over NT$300 million in Asian countries. However, at a celebration party last week, the box-office hero surprised everybody by slamming Hong Kong's film industry, saying he was frustrated and planned to retire soon because people in the business just couldn't unite to improve Hong Kong movies.
Hong Kong actor Tony Leung (
Hong Kong actress/singer Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) has
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
totally transformed herself after getting together with Dutch boyfriend Jeroen, a plain-looking corporate man who used to be her English teacher. Cheung has not only tried to quit smoking and stop shopping for extravagant clothes, but moved out of her mansion and in to her sweetheart's shabby abode. From a man's point of view, it may be a good thing to be able to tame a wild, beautiful woman. But to women with a sober mind, the question remains: Is it really worth it? And how far is too far?
The local music scene
suffered serious turbulence last week. Mando-pop band F.I.R. (
A fan of extreme sports, rock star Chang Chen-yue (張震嶽) fell off a bike last Friday seriously fracturing his right leg. The doctor said he needed two-months in bed and that his injury would take six months to fully heal. So it will be a while before we witness a bunch of young kids go crazy and wild at the foul-mouthed musician's performances.
This year will go down in the history books. Taiwan faces enormous turmoil and uncertainty in the coming months. Which political parties are in a good position to handle big changes? All of the main parties are beset with challenges. Taking stock, this column examined the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) (“Huang Kuo-chang’s choking the life out of the TPP,” May 28, page 12), the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) (“Challenges amid choppy waters for the DPP,” June 14, page 12) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) (“KMT struggles to seize opportunities as ‘interesting times’ loom,” June 20, page 11). Times like these can
June 23 to June 29 After capturing the walled city of Hsinchu on June 22, 1895, the Japanese hoped to quickly push south and seize control of Taiwan’s entire west coast — but their advance was stalled for more than a month. Not only did local Hakka fighters continue to cause them headaches, resistance forces even attempted to retake the city three times. “We had planned to occupy Anping (Tainan) and Takao (Kaohsiung) as soon as possible, but ever since we took Hsinchu, nearby bandits proclaiming to be ‘righteous people’ (義民) have been destroying train tracks and electrical cables, and gathering in villages
Dr. Y. Tony Yang, Associate Dean of Health Policy and Population Science at George Washington University, argued last week in a piece for the Taipei Times about former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) leading a student delegation to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that, “The real question is not whether Ma’s visit helps or hurts Taiwan — it is why Taiwan lacks a sophisticated, multi-track approach to one of the most complex geopolitical relationships in the world” (“Ma’s Visit, DPP’s Blind Spot,” June 18, page 8). Yang contends that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has a blind spot: “By treating any
One of the biggest sore spots in Taiwan’s historical friendship with the US came in 1979 when US president Jimmy Carter broke off formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan’s Republic of China (ROC) government so that the US could establish relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Taiwan’s derecognition came purely at China’s insistence, and the US took the deal. Retired American diplomat John Tkacik, who for almost decade surrounding that schism, from 1974 to 1982, worked in embassies in Taipei and Beijing and at the Taiwan Desk in Washington DC, recently argued in the Taipei Times that “President Carter’s derecognition
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