After his feature debut Night Market Hero (雞排英雄), which grossed NT$140 million in 2011, blockbuster maker Yeh Tien-lun (葉天倫) returns with Twa Tiu Tiann (大稻埕), a film that aims to be grander and much larger in scope. The movie mixes fantasy and history to tell the story of a young man travelling back in time to 1920s Taiwan which was then under Japanese colonial rule. It is a melodramatic comedy punctuated with big emotions, and through its well-rendered time-travel conceit, the film delivers a rare portrait of Taipei as a city with a long history, affording its residents time travel into the past when one could bump into Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水), an important figure in Taiwan’s resistance to Japanese colonial rule, while walking down a Dadaocheng (大稻埕) street.
The film opens in present-day Taipei, where college student Jack, played by television show host-turned-actor Chris Wang (宥勝), whiles away his days chasing girls and hanging out with friends. To the gang of young lads, the history lessons taught by Professor P (Chu Ko Liang, 豬哥亮) couldn’t be more different from their easygoing lifestyle.
One day, during a field trip to a museum in western Taipei’s Dadaocheng area, Jack notices a painting on display. It is Festival on South Street (南街殷賑), a painting of iconic Dihua Street (迪化街)) by Kuo Hsueh-hu (郭雪湖), a pioneer of modern art in Taiwan. Encouraged by Professor P, Jack takes a photograph of the work. Suddenly, everything in the painting comes to life, and Jack finds himself transported back to 1920s Dadaocheng, which at the time was a major trading hub for tea, textiles, herbal medicines and many other goods.
Photo Courtesy of Swallow Wings
Bewildered, Jack is taken in by Ginger (Sonia Sui, 隋棠), a sassy Manchu woman who fled to Taiwan after the Qing Dynasty crumbled and has since run a textile shop in the area. To his surprise, Jack finds among Ginger’s helpers his history professor, who discovered the painting’s portal back in time and has been returning to the past constantly to court Ginger.
Jack’s eagerness to return to the 21st century dissipates when he meets young Taiwanese geisha Rose (Jian Man-shu, 簡嫚書). While love blossoms between Jack and Rose, they befriend Chiang Wei-shui (Lee Li-jen, 李李仁) and are drawn into the campaign for democracy led by Chiang and other Taiwanese civil rights activists. Soon Jack, Professor P and their friends become involved in Chiang’s effort to petition the colonial government for the creation of an elected representative body in front of the Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito, who visited Taiwan in 1923.
Over the two-hour screening time, Yeh delicately weaves Taiwanese history into a work of holiday entertainment packed with romance and humor. The plot involving the lead character coming to terms with the present through his reconciliation with the past serves as an eloquent metaphor and is passably carried out by rising actor Wang. The star of the show, however, is Taiwanese comedian Chu Ko Liang, who appears genuinely funny with his offbeat humor and makes a surprisingly lively pair with model-turned-actress Sui.
Photo Courtesy of Swallow Wings
Unfortunately, the movie is largely let down by sloppy and lazy scriptwriting. Sufficient details, motivation and narrative coherence are often absent. Embarrassingly cliched characters abound; a speech by Chiang is lifeless in its excessive sentimentality. The absence of a film studio in Taiwan, along with the needed infrastructure and talent to produce period films, is also apparent in this movie as portraits of historical grandeur are sometimes reduced to the scale of a television drama.
An aspect of Twa Tiu Tiann worth mentioning is the playful rendition Moving Forward (向前行). Though the uplifting mood of the song, recorded in 1990, is hardly in tune with the sentiments of present-day Taiwan, it makes a fitting accompaniment to the movie’s sanguine, if not overly saccharine, vision.
Photo Courtesy of Swallow Wings
What was the population of Taiwan when the first Negritos arrived? In 500BC? The 1st century? The 18th? These questions are important, because they can contextualize the number of babies born last month, 6,523, to all the people on Taiwan, indigenous and colonial alike. That figure represents a year on year drop of 3,884 babies, prefiguring total births under 90,000 for the year. It also represents the 26th straight month of deaths exceeding births. Why isn’t this a bigger crisis? Because we don’t experience it. Instead, what we experience is a growing and more diverse population. POPULATION What is Taiwan’s actual population?
For the past five years, Sammy Jou (周祥敏) has climbed Kinmen’s highest peak, Taiwu Mountain (太武山) at 6am before heading to work. In the winter, it’s dark when he sets out but even at this hour, other climbers are already coming down the mountain. All of this is a big change from Jou’s childhood during the Martial Law period, when the military requisitioned the mountain for strategic purposes and most of it was off-limits. Back then, only two mountain trails were open, and they were open only during special occasions, such as for prayers to one’s ancestors during Lunar New Year.
A key feature of Taiwan’s environmental impact assessments (EIA) is that they seldom stop projects, especially once the project has passed its second stage EIA review (the original Suhua Highway proposal, killed after passing the second stage review, seems to be the lone exception). Mingjian Township (名間鄉) in Nantou County has been the site of rising public anger over the proposed construction of a waste incinerator in an important agricultural area. The township is a key producer of tea (over 40 percent of the island’s production), ginger and turmeric. The incinerator project is currently in its second stage EIA. The incinerator
After Jurassic Park premiered in 1993, people began to ask if scientists could really bring long-lost species back from extinction, just like in the hit movie. The idea has triggered “de-extinction” debates in several countries, including Taiwan, where the focus has been on the Formosan clouded leopard (designated after 1917 as Neofelis nebulosa brachyura). National Taiwan Museum’s (NTM) Web site describes the Formosan clouded leopard as “a subspecies endemic to Taiwan…it reaches a body length of 0.6m to 1.2m and tail length of 0.7m to 0.9m and weighs between 15kg and 30kg. It is entirely covered with beautiful cloud-like spots
RSS