Based on short stories penned by director Pang Ho-cheung (彭浩翔), Trivial Matters (破事兒) is a series of vignettes on love, sex, friendship and as the title suggests, all the Trivial Matters in life. Entertaining, witty and sometimes downright absurd, the seven segments assemble several of Hong Kong's pop idols, who seem - from the delivery of the project - to be having a big, A-list ball.
A video recording of a couple talking about their sex life opens the film with Hong Kong entertainer Jan Lam (林海峰) starring as an off-screen therapist. The reenactment of the couple's bedroom activities by two other actors adds a comic punch to the otherwise "she says, he says" routine.
In the wake of Edison Chen's (陳冠希) sex photo scandal (in which hundreds of images featuring female Hong Kong stars in erotic poses with Chen were posted on the Internet), the segment offers a poignant comparison with real life: The star plays a dandy picking up girls at a nightclub.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF GROUP POWER
Ah Wai - The Big Head, one of the most developed segments, stars Gillian Chung (鍾欣桐) and her real-life boyfriend Juno Mak (麥浚龍). It portrays friendship not as an expression of loyalty and love but as a hodgepodge of selfishness, pride and carelessness.
The subject of love is affectionately tackled in Recharge starring Chapman To (杜汶澤) as an actor who is addicted to paid sex. Junior, on the other hand, is a charming example of director Pang's absurd humor that stars Chinese director Feng Xiaogang (馮小剛) as a PR representative from an assassination firm and Shawn Yue (余文樂) as a hitman-in-training who enjoys smoking pot with his target.
The vignettes fluctuate between engaging viewers and drifting off, but still show Pang as a rising star who dares to produce something different from Hong Kong cinema's mainstream fare.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
By far the most jarring of the new appointments for the incoming administration is that of Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) to head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). That is a huge demotion for one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tseng has one of the most impressive resumes in the party. He was very active during the Wild Lily Movement and his generation is now the one taking power. He has served in many of the requisite government, party and elected positions to build out a solid political profile. Elected as mayor of Taoyuan as part of the
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Moritz Mieg, 22, lay face down in the rubble, the ground shaking violently beneath him. Boulders crashed down around him, some stones hitting his back. “I just hoped that it would be one big hit and over, because I did not want to be hit nearly to death and then have to slowly die,” the student from Germany tells Taipei Times. MORNING WALK Early on April 3, Mieg set out on a scenic hike through Taroko Gorge in Hualien County (花蓮). It was a fine day for it. Little did he know that the complex intersection of tectonic plates Taiwan sits