Three years after his autobiographic debut feature Winds of September (九降風), Tom Lin Shu-yu (林書宇) returns to the big screen with Starry Starry Night (星空), an exquisitely crafted rendition of Jimmy Liao’s (幾米) illustrated book of the same title. Like Lin’s first work, the film, which boasts skillfully rendered CG fantasies and a polished fairy-tale look, is about growing up and the loss of innocence, but this time from a teenage girl’s point of view.
China’s Josie Xu (徐嬌) plays 13-year-old Mei, the only child in a family that is on the way toward disintegration as the parents grow increasingly apart from each other. Distressed at home and unable to connect with schoolmates, Mei finds comfort in her doting grandfather (Kenneth Tsang, 曾江), who carves her wooden animals that keep her company when she feels alone.
Jay (Eric Lin, 林暉閔), a transfer student, catches Mei’s attention with his quietness and artistic inclination. Friendship buds and then flourishes between the two lonely souls, but the newly found happiness comes to an abrupt halt when Mei’s grandfather passes away and her parents announce their divorce. Distraught, the two friends decide to run away from their troubles.
To Lin’s credit, the film is a seemingly effortless balance between the real and the imagined. Folded paper animals come to life, and a train flies into Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. With these fantastical visions and Jake Pollock’s exuberant cinematography, Lin adeptly takes audiences on an adventure of childhood innocence and imagination.
The film could easily become a sumptuous void if it let technique prevail over humanity, but fortunately the director grounds the drama in the two young protagonists’ lives, using the fantastic sequences to convey emotions.
Lin is a versatile director, capable of both soberly observing hormone-raging teens in Winds of September and producing a tender portrait of female sensitivity that vividly captures the warmth and melancholy so tangibly evoked in Jimmy Liao’s illustrated world.
The adult cast members — including Guey Lun-mei (桂綸鎂), Rene Liu (劉若英) and Harlem Yu (庾澄慶) — give solid performances, but the film’s true stars are undoubtedly Xu, who made her first big-screen appearance in Stephen Chow’s (周星馳) 2008 CJ7 (長江七號), and Lin, a first-time actor with a natural talent. Together, the two make a convincing young couple having their first taste of love.
As a co-production between Taiwan’s Atom Cinema (原子映象) and the Huayi Brothers (華誼兄弟) of China, Starry Starry Night expanded from an originally planned small indie production to a filmic venture with a budget of US$7 million.
Fortunately, the collaboration did not compromise the filmmaker’s artistry and creativity.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby