Bonjour Paris festival
The Changchun theater in Taipei is hosting this French film festival until New Year’s Eve. The theme is “When love meets literature,” which sounds like 90 percent of the French film industry’s output, but why carp? Toplining is biopic Sagan starring Sylvie Testud (La Vie en Rose, Vengeance) as the turbulent French writer; the film is also opening the French-themed Taipei book festival early next year. The rest is a mixture of titles that (unfortunately) have already had theatrical releases here, including Clara and I, Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert, The Ring Finger, Little Lili from 2003 and Louis Malle’s Damage, among others.
Park Benches
If you’ve seen all these French titles already, there’s another Gallic offering unconnected to the Changchun festival. It’s got as many celebrity actors as the festival’s offerings put together, but that didn’t stop some critics from wondering what all the fuss is about. A well-to-do neighborhood is the setting for a series of tales of quirky and unsettled characters that start then finish all too quickly. Jacques Tati it ain’t — though there is some comedy.
Bombay Summer
An Indian couple living comfortably in Bombay run into an artist/drug dealer who changes their lives — and his own — and not necessarily for the better. Winner of the Best Film, Best Director (Joseph Mathew-Varghese) and Best Actress (Tannishtha Chatterjee) gongs at last month’s MIAAC Film Festival, a New York event for Indian-themed films, it’s something of a miracle that this non-musical is getting a Taiwan release, so those not enchanted at the thought of donning 3D glasses for nearly three hours watching Avatar might consider this adult-friendly trip instead.
Give Me Your Hand
Weird release of the week makes Avatar look like formula. Eurotwin brothers make their way across Europe to attend a family funeral, along the way pouting a lot, finding lust among the locals and getting into wrestling matches over long-dormant rivalries. Pretty as a picture, but narrative meandering and copulation time-outs will remind the viewer why it’s being screened at the Baixue grindhouse in Ximending. Original title: Donne-Moi la Main.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
One of the challenges with the sheer availability of food in today’s world is that lots of us end up spending many of our waking hours eating. Whether it’s full meals, snacks or desserts, scientists have found that it’s not uncommon for us to be mindlessly grazing at some point during all of our 16 or so waking hours. The problem? As soon as this food hits the bloodstream in the form of glucose, it initiates the release of the hormone insulin. This in turn activates a switch present in every one of our cells, which is responsible for driving cell
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