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.
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
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