A feature debut by director Cheng Hsiao-tse (程孝澤), Miao Miao (渺渺) is the latest addition to the adolescent romance genre that has become a staple of contemporary Taiwanese cinema. What sets it apart from the pack is its big-name production team — Jet Tone Films (澤東電影), founded by Wong Kar-wai (王家衛), producers Stanley Kwan (關錦鵬) and Jacky Pang (彭綺華), editor William Chang Suk-ping (張叔平) and cinematographer Kwan Pun-leung (關本良).
The payoff of working with the heavyweights is a piece of well-executed, technically polished pop art that should prove popular with the youth market.
Ai (Sandrine Pinna), a sassy high school girl, meets Miao Miao (Ke Jia-ya, 柯佳嬿), the new exchange student from Japan, and is immediately attracted to the quiet, gentle newcomer. The two become best friends, palling around after school, sharing each other’s secrets and baking cakes together. Life is sweet, for a little while.
It doesn’t take long for Miao Miao to find first love in the form of sullen record store owner Chen Fei (Fan Chih-wei, 范植偉), who shuts out the world with a pair of headphones. Miao Miao enlists Ai’s help in stealing into the taciturn man’s life and winning his affections. Jealous and frustrated, Ai finds her feelings for her best pal go beyond friendship.
Miao Miao tells a solid story about friendship and first love. The well-cast Ke and Eurasian actress Pinna are keys to the film’s authenticity, as the rapport between them feels real and heart-felt. Pinna particularly stands out with her seemingly effortless performance. The sole male lead, Fan, however, struggles with a role that requires nothing more than a sulky face.
On the technical side, Chang’s smooth editing means the narrative structure is sound and clean-cut. The tasteful cinematography by Kwan Pun-leung (2046 and The Postmodern Life of My Aunt, 姨媽的後現代生活) lends a glossy look with an atmospheric palette of greens, purples, oranges and yellows. The urban landscapes of Taipei appeal lyrically, are saturated and rich in detail and stand in pleasing contrast to the clear and transparent hues of suburban life.
The script, however, doesn’t live up to the big names behind the film. Plot cliches are cloyingly overused and narrative devices intended to develop the characters sometimes feel manufactured and forced. And the film’s occasional tone of literary pomposity eats away at the realism generated by the “slices-of-life” acting and dialogue.
In other words, when the leads start citing Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Little Prince, the goose bumps the audience gets aren’t the kind the scriptwriters intended.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS