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
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
RSS