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
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
Nov. 3 to Nov. 9 In 1925, 18-year-old Huang Chin-chuan (黃金川) penned the following words: “When will the day of women’s equal rights arrive, so that my talents won’t drift away in the eastern stream?” These were the closing lines to her poem “Female Student” (女學生), which expressed her unwillingness to be confined to traditional female roles and her desire to study and explore the world. Born to a wealthy family on Nov. 5, 1907, Huang was able to study in Japan — a rare privilege for women in her time — and even made a name for herself in the
RSS