How an international megastar, Zhang Ziyi (章子怡) is riding a crest of Chinese fever in Hollywood and has easily scored two movie deals with big-name producer Harvey Weinstein, with another in the offing. Two confirmed projects will see Zhang play a young woman passing herself off as a man in the well-know Chinese story Hua Mulan (花木蘭) and team up with George Clooney in a remake of Japanese master Akira Kurosawa's 1954 classic Seven Samurai.
Exactly why an American actor has been picked to play the leading samurai role, producer Weinstein didn't say. Casting non-Western actors for all the leading roles would, of course, be asking too much from Hollywood.
Taiwan's pride and joy Ang Lee (李安) is ready to shoot his next project Lust Caution (色戒) based on Eileen Chang's (張愛玲) novel of the same title in September and will return to Taiwan next week for auditions. It was said that more than 30 veteran actors and teen-idols have signed up for the coveted honor of appearing in the movie.
Ang Lee's brother Khan Lee (
According to Khan Lee, Big S (
The leading lady in Hong Kong director John Woo's (吳宇森) Battle of the Red Cliff (赤壁之戰), local supermodel Lin Chi-ling (林志玲) was in Xian (西安), China, last week to attend the extravagant banquet thrown by Longines as the watch brand's celebrity spokeswoman. After paying taxes of some NT$5 million this year, the wealthy lady whined that forking out such a large wedge of cash hurt a little and said she would consider buying expensive watches from now and claim them as tax deductible.
Other local catwalk queens contributed their fair share to the national treasury. Shatina Chen (
Mando-pop queen Jolin Tsai (蔡依林), on the other hand, has lost out on a lucrative deal with Motorola after the mobile-phone maker ditched her.
Spotted by local paparazzi using a mobile phone made by Sharp a couple of months ago, Tsai's treacherous misconduct pissed Motorola off, and prompted the company to sign up members of the four-piece pop/rap outfit Nan Quan Mama (
Tsai suffered another slap in the face last week, this time by Bvlgari. As the brand's celebrity guest at a party, Tsai expressed her keen interest in the brand's luxuries and tried to squeeze two free pieces of jewelry out of the Russian fashion house instead of the one promised by the fashion empire. Bvlgari stuck to its guns and assured the greedy star that one piece of jewelry was more than enough to pay for her brief appearance at the show.
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
This year’s Miss Universe in Thailand has been marred by ugly drama, with allegations of an insult to a beauty queen’s intellect, a walkout by pageant contestants and a tearful tantrum by the host. More than 120 women from across the world have gathered in Thailand, vying to be crowned Miss Universe in a contest considered one of the “big four” of global beauty pageants. But the runup has been dominated by the off-stage antics of the coiffed contestants and their Thai hosts, escalating into a feminist firestorm drawing the attention of Mexico’s president. On Tuesday, Mexican delegate Fatima Bosch staged a
Nov. 3 to Nov. 9 In 1925, 18-year-old Huang Chin-chuan (黃金川) penned the following words: “When will the day of women’s equal rights arrive, so that my talents won’t drift away in the eastern stream?” These were the closing lines to her poem “Female Student” (女學生), which expressed her unwillingness to be confined to traditional female roles and her desire to study and explore the world. Born to a wealthy family on Nov. 5, 1907, Huang was able to study in Japan — a rare privilege for women in her time — and even made a name for herself in the
Taiwan can often feel woefully behind on global trends, from fashion to food, and influences can sometimes feel like the last on the metaphorical bandwagon. In the West, suddenly every burger is being smashed and honey has become “hot” and we’re all drinking orange wine. But it took a good while for a smash burger in Taipei to come across my radar. For the uninitiated, a smash burger is, well, a normal burger patty but smashed flat. Originally, I didn’t understand. Surely the best part of a burger is the thick patty with all the juiciness of the beef, the
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