Help Me, Eros (幫幫我,愛神) the new film by Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) protege and emerging art-porn director Lee Kang-sheng (李康生) is scheduled for release on Jan. 11, building on the wave of hot and sweaty sexuality set up by Ang Lee's (李安) Lust, Caution (色,戒). (See Page 15 of today's Taipei Times.) If the acrobatic antics of Tang Wei (湯唯) and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (梁朝偉) were insufficient titillation, Eros moves into even more improbable regions of acrobatic lovemaking to spice up things up. There has already been much discussion about the “paper clip” coital position that featured in Lust, Caution, and now Eros has upped the ante with an “upright 69er,” which is receiving almost as much attention as a proposed one-on-four group session that had the girls of F4, the much maligned girl band, doing what they reportedly do best.
Lee's ambitious plan, which was to have him tied up in knots with co-star Ivy Yi (尹馨), and Stacy (周均諺), Tiffany (謝宜蓁) and Fanny (劉鄀婷) from F4, was torn apart when Yi decided, according to Next, that she was not going to be getting into any girl-on-girl action with the lesser celebs from F4. Fanny too had second thoughts about joining the coital scrum and so Lee is left only with two young ladies with whom to get it on (or off).
Pop diva A-Mei (張惠妹) has been quick to see that shaking booty is simply not enough to bring the punters in these days and her much anticipated pre-Christmas Star Tour at Taipei Arena — her first live Taipei show in five years — featured a bevy of buff male dancers in boxer shorts and not much else. The crew provided a good demonstration of various situations that might be found in the advanced chapters of a sex manual. Rumor has it that A-mei's current beau, baseball star Sam Ho (何守正), was a little hot under the collar when he watched the show — possibly because he had been banished from A-mei's side as she geared up for the big event.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Related gossip reported in the Apple Daily Wednesday had Ho already finding consolation from his enforced banishment with One Million Star (超級星光大道) finalist Tseng Pei-ci (曾沛慈), who is more than 10 years younger than A-mei and a world away from Taiwan's “Queen of Pop” in terms of celebrity and talent.
TV shows have been quick to get on the bandwagon, and TVBS-G's Super Model No. 1 (決戰第一名) already has contestants posing in various acrobatic postures as part of the contest. Apple Daily reported on contestant He Wan-ting (何宛庭), now dubbed Little Tang Wei (小湯唯), who was so successful in demonstrating a “meat scissor” (人肉剪刀) position that her male partner started bulging in all the wrong places. It is good to see that TVBS continues to produce quality family entertainment for the masses.
It is only Jet Li (李連杰) who seems not to be having multi-partner on-screen sex. In fact, the bedroom sequence shot for The Warlords (投名狀, see Page 16 of today's Taipei Times), which opens today, was so bad that director Peter Chan (陳可辛) cut it right out of the film. According to Next, this was a great disappointment to Takeshi Kaneshiro (金城武), who had been giving Li tips on how to play the accomplished lover. Co-star Xu Jinglei (徐靜蕾) is quoted in a report posted on the Xinhua News Agency Web site (新華網) last month as saying that when it came time to getting physical, Li was like a block of wood and she had to take the lead.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The talent show One Million Star continues to grab headlines with the success of Season One celebrity Aska Yang (楊宗緯), who will be releasing his new album Dove (鴿子) early next month. According to a 7-Eleven spokesperson quoted in the Apple Daily, preliminary orders of the CD, which will not be available until Jan. 19, are already sold out.
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby