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.
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