Good Will Evil 凶魅
This strangely titled Taiwanese chiller has nothing to do with Good Will Hunting. A rising politician can’t raise a family because his nightmare-prone wife won’t agree; eventually they agree to adopt because it will benefit his career, but the strange child they pick from an orphanage has a thing for dismembering dolls and other sinister behavior. Like most horror flicks with disturbed children and flawed adults, there’s a horrible secret awaiting to surface. There’s also the requisite red ball bouncing down the stairs in slow motion, though not as slowly as the release for this film (it was made last year).
Be Kind Rewind
Jack Black gets too close to a power station and his magnetic body ends up wiping clean the videos in a rental store where his friend (Mos Def) works. To save the situation before the boss returns, the enterprising lads recreate the library by shooting their own goofy versions of movies that were lost. Critics couldn’t help asking: Have these people never heard of DVDs, or buying ex-rentals online? Taking a break from her Darfur activism, Mia Farrow plays a customer who can’t tell the faked movies from the originals. From Michel Gondry, music video heavyweight and director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers
Offbeat, charming Japanese production features Juri Ueno as a housewife whose absent husband and admiration for her self-assured best friend (Yu Aoi) prompt her, True Lies-style, to seek adventure as a spy. But this is no action film; it’s more a character study and a philosophy of life dressed as quirky comedy. Turtles may be fast underwater, but the movie has taken time to build an audience — and three years to get a Taiwanese release. It screens first in Taipei before swimming to other centers on the west coast.
South Taiwan Film & Video Festival
For movie lovers who despair at the Golden Horse film festival and competition’s political agenda, here’s the perfect alternative. The South Taiwan Film & Video Festival is chock full of exciting Taiwanese and international product that would never get the Horse’s nod, ranging from celluloid features to animation and video productions. This year’s retrospectives include Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), whose debut feature Cape No. 7 (海角七號) has become a bona fide Taiwanese phenomenon, Lin Shu-yu (林書宇), director of Winds of September (九降風), and Hsu Hui-ju (許慧如). The festival is screening at the Ambassador complex in Tainan until Nov. 20, then at the Kaohsiung Film Archive from Nov. 29 to Dec. 7. Chiayi Performing Arts Center will also screen a selection of titles on Dec. 6 and Dec. 7. Some films have English subtitles and there are free screenings. More details are at www.south.org.tw/south2008.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
Institutions signalling a fresh beginning and new spirit often adopt new slogans, symbols and marketing materials, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no exception. Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), soon after taking office as KMT chair, released a new slogan that plays on the party’s acronym: “Kind Mindfulness Team.” The party recently released a graphic prominently featuring the red, white and blue of the flag with a Chinese slogan “establishing peace, blessings and fortune marching forth” (締造和平,幸福前行). One part of the graphic also features two hands in blue and white grasping olive branches in a stylized shape of Taiwan. Bonus points for
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