Melody’s Smile
A deceptive title, this; the original French title is La Chambre des Morts, which gives viewers a much better idea of what’s in store (the Chinese translates as “Sample of a Smile,” which is somewhere in between). The Hollywood Reporter raved about this “horror classic,” in which single mother and detective Melanie Laurent closes in on a duo of sick puppy lesbian kidnappers as a ransom goes missing. The multiple viewpoint style of Rashomon collides with The Silence of the Lambs in this depiction of the worst and best that humanity has to offer.
Always: Sunset on Third Street 2
A sequel to the 2005 original, this film is essential viewing for anyone who has lived in Tokyo. Following several story strands, Part 2 mixes good-natured neighborhood and family melodrama with another widescreen presentation of unusually detailed and moving special effects that recreate the Japanese capital of the late 1950s. Variety and the Japan Times disagreed on the accessibility of this film for those who didn’t see the first one; that debate is quickly shut down by a quick trip to the DVD store.
One Piece The Movie: Episode of Alabaster — The Desert Princess and the Pirates
Part 8 in Japan’s One Piece theatrical saga has Princess Vivi of Alabaster and our trusty band of Straw Hat Pirates travel once again to the scorched kingdom. This time it’s to do battle with a formidable crocodile who heads a criminal network and who has designs on the kingdom’s subjects, and is prepared to use the most nefarious means to take power. Lots of fight scenes for the faithful.
4bia
In case you don’t get the pun, this film is also listed as Phobia. Four of Thailand’s better suspense directors deliver short pieces for this “portmanteau horror film,” but with titles like Happiness, Tit For Tat, In the Middle and Last Fright, it may seem more like Twilight Zone: The Movie than Creepshow; the last episode even takes place on an aircraft. Still, ghostly images on a cellphone, curses, ghost stories that come true and animated corpses should please fans of the latter minor classic.
The Love of Siam
This pastel-shaded Thai youth film pits female fans of a boy band frontman against his unstoppable desire for another young gentleman who has reentered his life, all the while coping with dysfunction in the latter’s family. Amid military coups and the protests of an autocratic middle class, Thailand keeps churning out gay and ladyboy-themed flicks such as this to the delight of local audiences, a phenomenon one would be hard pressed to find anywhere else. Variety says the film courts gay audiences and their straight friends; one could add to this list undiscriminating fans of boy-band music.
Winds of September PLUS The Pain of Others
With local productions Cape No. 7 and Orz Boyz doing splendidly at the box office, the producer of Winds of September, a coming of age drama set in Hsinchu, is re-releasing the film to boost its modest haul. There are two more incentives this time around to see it. The first is a cut price ticket of NT$150; the second is a bonus, award-winning short film from 2005 by Winds director Tom Shu-yu Lin (林書宇), The Pain of Others, a drama about military service. Screening exclusively at Xinyi Vieshow.
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
The centuries-old fiery Chinese spirit baijiu (白酒), long associated with business dinners, is being reshaped to appeal to younger generations as its makers adapt to changing times. Mostly distilled from sorghum, the clear but pungent liquor contains as much as 60 percent alcohol. It’s the usual choice for toasts of gan bei (乾杯), the Chinese expression for bottoms up, and raucous drinking games. “If you like to drink spirits and you’ve never had baijiu, it’s kind of like eating noodles but you’ve never had spaghetti,” said Jim Boyce, a Canadian writer and wine expert who founded World Baijiu Day a decade
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