The seabed stone formations discovered in the 1980s off Japan's Yonaguni Island, 111km directly east of Taiwan, have aroused controversy. Are they, as some theorists from the Morien Institute claim, the remains of an ancient culture? Or simply the work of natural processes? For filmmaker Tsui Hark (徐克), the mysterious structures provide a backdrop for Missing (謎屍), a romantic thriller starring Lee Sin-je (李心潔).
Despite a big-name cast, star director and enigmatic setting, the film suffers from a flabby storyline and vacillates unconvincingly between the romance and horror genres.
Lee plays Gao Jing, a psychologist living in Hong Kong who hits it off with underwater photographer Dave Chen (played by China's Guo Xiaodong, 郭曉冬).
PHOTO COURTESY OF STAR GROUP
Romance ensues, and Chen takes Gao on a diving trip to visit Yonaguni Island where he plans to propose to his true love.
But tragedy strikes on a dive when Chen loses his head. Literally.
Heartbroken and traumatized, Gao turns to hypnotherapy to retrieve the buried memories of what actually happened during the fateful dive.
PHOTO COURTESY OF STAR GROUP
Meanwhile, Chen's younger sister, Xiao Kai (Isabella Leong, 梁洛施), returns from Taiwan carrying a human head that she believes to be her deceased brother's and becomes possessed.
Gao's life spirals out of control when one of her patients, Simon (Chang Chen), convinces her of the existence of spirits. The psychologist finds it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between drug-induced visions, apparitions or illusions, as did this reviewer.
Missing opens with a promising premise but rapidly descends into convoluted plot devices with few genuine moments of horror, preventing viewers from suspending disbelief. There are unconvincing spirits, half-baked characters and an overwrought love story. Missing's end credits roll several anticlimaxes too late.
Taiwanese actor Chang Chen is one of the film's few pleasant surprises as he takes a break from his usual reticent leads to play an amusingly wacky sidekick.
Lee Sin-je, on the other hand, doesn't deviate from her usual scream queen expressions, and the deadpan Chang Chen-yue (張震嶽), who plays a marine archeologist, could have been left on the editing room floor without affecting the film's overall appeal.
Inspired by a documentary about the ancient underwater structures, Tsui reportedly spent three years and NT$300 million on Missing, which required advanced underwater cinematography equipment as well as a highly trained production team capable of underwater filmmaking. Though the effort involved is commendable, the results are not, which means the behind-the-scenes story of how the movie was filmed could be more enjoyable than the film itself.
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
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
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