Paranoid Park There are shades of Ken Park — without the explicit sex — in this film by Gus van Sant, whose recent stylish essays on disaffected youth (Elephant, Last Days) apparently missed theaters here despite their topical themes (respectively, the Columbine High School massacre and the death of Kurt Cobain). This one won the 60th Anniversary Prize at Cannes, which may explain its Taiwanese release. The story sees a skateboarder trying — or not trying — to make sense of his role in the grisly death of a security guard. A risky, experimental film that will challenge audiences, it was cast using the MySpace network, while Taiwan film buffs should note it was co-shot by the amazing Christopher Doyle (杜可風), who started his film career here. Van Sant and Doyle also did the 1998 remake of Psycho. |
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A Day for an Affair South Korean actress Kim Hye-su, whose Tazza: War of Flowers played here in September, is starting to turn heads beyond the Korean Peninsula with her sharp, full-blooded performances. In this smart sex comedy, she plays one of two women brought together by their infidelity over a raunchy series of scenes. Don’t be put off by the poster, which rips off Kim’s image from Tazza and features her female companion holding melons in front of her breasts. The film aims to please and deserves a better theater than the grotty Baixue grindhouse in Ximending. It also boasts a stylish Web site at www.baram2007.co.kr.
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Cursed Hair More grindhouse fare at Ximending’s Caesar theater, the Chinese title for this hirsute yarn is desperately selling it as a sequel to the South Korean horror opus The Wig. But Cursed Hair is an unrelated B movie from Thailand, grafting imagery from Ringu onto long-dead plot devices from The House on Haunted Hill. For the patient viewer, however, it does eventually offer graphic scenes of dumb teenagers chomping on hair and wearing fangs. Mistake this movie for the Japanese Exte: Hair Extensions at your peril. |
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