Machi Action 變身
Directed by Jiu Ba-dao (九把刀), the Internet novelist turned director whose style crisscrosses genres such as fantasy, romance, thriller, black comedy, action and wuxia (武俠), or Chinese martial-art literature. With Machi Action, he taps into the superhero serial, telling a tale of a TV actor who loses his job after 10 years playing a world-saving superhero character. Inevitably the actor, played by Chen Bo-lin (陳柏霖), has a disabled younger brother, who plays into the inspirational theme of the film, and a romantic element handled by Chen Ting-hsuan (陳庭萱). Although a younger actor with more contemporary appeal has replaced Chen’s character on TV, our hero finds that you don’t have to wear spandex tights to change the world for someone else.
To My Dear Granny 親愛的奶奶
Directed by Arthur Chu (瞿友寧), this semi-autobiographical film is an intimate look back over the complex life of a family with deeply hidden secrets. The story is told largely in flashback as the narrator Ah-da, played by Lawrence Ko (柯宇綸) helps his aging grandmother write a letter and gradually delves into his own past, understanding, little by little, the small events of his childhood that shaped the life of his family members. The grandmother is played by Chang Hsiu-yun (張岫雲), a former Chinese opera star who brings enormous presence to the screen.
The Sessions
A very different film about sex. New York Time’s critic Stephen Holden describes it as “a touching, profoundly sex-positive film that equates sex with intimacy, tenderness and emotional connection instead of performance, competition and conquest,” and many have agreed that it serves as a slap in the face of all the either glamorized or salacious content that passes for movie sex. There are outstanding performances by John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, which elevates a potentially tiresome and manipulative story about a man in an iron lung who wants to lose his virginity before his inevitable early death, and who does this with the assistance of a sex surrogate, into realms of deep feeling and, astonishingly, even comedy.
The Last Stand
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rebirth as a Hollywood action hero after his stint in politics enters high gear with The Last Stand, standing out from his crowd of tough-guy cronies of The Expendables to take his rightful place at the head of a rocking and rolling action romp. With South Korean Kim Jee-woon at the helm, who wrote and directed the wacky action hit The Good, the Bad, the Weird, good things can be, cautiously, hoped for. We can only hope that Kim finds his groove with Arnie more effectively than John Woo did when he teamed up with Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target. Trailer releases promise a mix of big-ticket stunts and easy humor, as Arnie plays off his persona as a tough local sheriff, head of a small town police force, who is the only thing that stands between an escaped drug lord and the Mexican border. Cigars, a Gatling gun, a wacky sidekick, and the occasional babe as window dressing. Don’t pretend you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless