On the surface, Stars (星光傳奇), a movie that tracks the fortunes of One Million Star (超級星光大道) pop idol competition contestants, seems nothing short of a commercially calculated attempt to exploit the popularity of a show that took Taiwan’s entertainment industry by surprise last year.
In all fairness, the well-executed documentary, which follows the second season’s hopefuls’ pursuit of fame and fortune, is smooth and pleasant to watch and technically proficient. Glances of the players’ offstage lives save the film from descending into a hollow publicity vehicle — just — and reinforce the plebeian fantasy that any Tom, Dick or Harry could be plucked from obscurity and catapulted to fame and fortune.
Second-season champion Yuming Lai (賴銘偉) is portrayed as swinging between the traditional and the contemporary as a rocker, medium and member of a divine dancing Eight Generals (八家將) troupe.
Rachel Liang (梁文音) steals the show as an orphaned Aborigine, as does Gina Li (李千娜), for being a young single mother of two.
By underscoring the importance of dreams, hope, family values and friendship to the show’s appeal, the movie readily positions itself as an auxiliary product of a successful showbiz commodity.
The documentary’s producer, Chan Jen-hsiung (詹仁雄), said the contests’ power to move audiences lies in the honesty and innocence that the young aspiring singers exhibit.
Veteran producer Wang Wei-chung (王偉忠) concludes that the show’s success comes from the contenders’ unreserved displays of emotion.
Unfortunately, the documentary fails to take a more cerebral look at the mechanisms behind the TV program’s popularity and, therefore, leaves the One Million Star phenomenon largely unexplored.
By the final scenes, the seemingly endless group hugs and tears are enough to wear down even the most cynical of viewers. The formula is a winner, even if the film is not.
Also See: One Million Star Film Notes
Under pressure, President William Lai (賴清德) has enacted his first cabinet reshuffle. Whether it will be enough to staunch the bleeding remains to be seen. Cabinet members in the Executive Yuan almost always end up as sacrificial lambs, especially those appointed early in a president’s term. When presidents are under pressure, the cabinet is reshuffled. This is not unique to any party or president; this is the custom. This is the case in many democracies, especially parliamentary ones. In Taiwan, constitutionally the president presides over the heads of the five branches of government, each of which is confusingly translated as “president”
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
The Venice Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia Wednesday night on the Lido. The opening ceremony of the festival also saw Francis Ford Coppola presenting filmmaker Werner Herzog with a lifetime achievement prize. The 82nd edition of the glamorous international film festival is playing host to many Hollywood stars, including George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Dwayne Johnson, and famed auteurs, from Guillermo del Toro to Kathryn Bigelow, who all have films debuting over the next 10 days. The conflict in Gaza has also already been an everpresent topic both outside the festival’s walls, where
RSS