Following the box office success of local horror flick Heirloom (
Falling... In Love (
relationships between men and women who are bound by sexual desire.
PHOTO COURTESY OF GOOD FILM
Fishing Luck (
An award winner at this year's Venice International Film Festival, Falling...In Love is director Wang Ming-tai's (
Alan (played by Lan) is a 27-year-old valet at a love motel who supplements his salary by boxing in underground matches. As a self-abasing, cynical guy Alan doesn't know how to love and tries to run away from his girlfriend Angle (played by Lee) and their tottering relationship.
PHOTO COURTESY OF OCEAN DEEP FILMS
Alan meets a 40-year-old woman who persists in waiting for her mafia boyfriend to return. The two embark on a dangerous affair, finding brief liberation from the daily grind of life in their fiery sexual encounters.
Angle, a 25-year-old hair stylist, is a strong modern woman trapped in her
relationship with Alan. However, she never loses faith in love. Lonely and hurt, she grows close to her new neighbor, Bella, a 29-year-old woman who, while trying to
escape from a broken marriage, also
embarks on an affair with Alan.
Unaware that the subject of their affection is the same man, the two women share their most intimate secrets and try to find the secret of true love.
After having worked in the film industry as a producer, screenwriter and director for over a decade, Wang says he has progressed a great deal from his 2002 debut Brave 20 (
Shot using long close-ups, minimal dialogue and saturated color, his latest release creates a visually astonishing world that successfully portrays the inner states of its protagonists.
Fishing Luck is the first feature film from veteran documentary filmmaker Tseng Wen-chen (
Venturing into drama for the first time, Tseng returns to her favored theme of aboriginal culture. Set on Lanyu island, the film depicts a pure and simple love story between a young woman from Taipei and a local tribesman who leads a tranquil life surrounded by family and friends.
A sophisticated woman from Taipei, Zing (played by Mando-pop singer Linda) visits the island on a business trip to survey the signal coverage of cellular phones in the remote area.
She relies on the cell phone to maintain relations with her boyfriend in Taipei.
Zing accidentally loses her wallet and is left without enough money to pay for her accommodation, or return flight to Taipei. Behong, a young man of the Tao tribe, (played by Aboriginal musician Biung Wang (
Their love gradually blossoms and Zing realizes true love can't be maintained over the telephone.
However, after Zing's wallet is recovered, she returns to Taipei. Upon her departure, Behong gives her a wooden flying fish hairpin as a gift. Time passes, and as the flying fish season looms again Zing and Behong wonder whether they will ever find true love.
Selected for the competition sections by both the Tokyo and Pusan International Film Festivals this year, Fishing Luck successfully juxtaposes a world of innocence and
simplicity against urban life.
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
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