One would think that a film opening on New Year weekend would be at least watchable to compete with big holiday blockbuster movies. It is not the case with We Are Family (我們全家不太熟), a college comedy revolving around a group of pals who suddenly break into song and dance in polka-dot costumes.
Writer and director Wang Chuan-tsung (王傳宗) actually fields a solid cast of promising talents and old hands, but even the brilliant Sandrine Pinna (張榕容) cannot save her boring role.
Pinna plays Kaka, an attractive young woman who quits school and returns home from a trip to Australia with a baby boy. The bulk of the story fixates on Kaka trying to hide her illegitimate son from her grandfather (Chen Sung-yung, 陳松勇), who raised Kaka alone. As preposterous as the story is, Kaka enlists help from her old classmates Willy (Chang Shu-hao, 張書豪), Fatty (Hao Shao-wen, 郝劭文) and Yaya (Daniel Chen, 陳大天), who are staying at her grandfather’s apartment.
Photo courtesy of Double Edge Entertainment
The three college buddies, whose world has hitherto been all about skipping classes and playing computer games, now face the seemingly insurmountable challenge of babysitting. This is where the movie tries to be funny, pulling out all the comic stops, including a couple of music numbers, but none of it works. The cameos by seasoned comedians Hsu Hsiao-shun (許效舜) and Lin Mei-hsiu (林美秀) as a loudmouthed couple are embarrassingly dull. Acclaimed thespian Wu Peng-fong (吳朋奉) is thrown into the plot as a self-help instructor for no apparent reason.
Later, when the baby’s biological father comes into the picture the story quickly turns into a bad soap opera, culminating in an ending that will leave people wondering why they came to see the movie in the first place.
As Taiwan’s second most populous city, Taichung looms large in the electoral map. Taiwanese political commentators describe it — along with neighboring Changhua County — as Taiwan’s “swing states” (搖擺州), which is a curious direct borrowing from American election terminology. In the early post-Martial Law era, Taichung was referred to as a “desert of democracy” because while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was winning elections in the north and south, Taichung remained staunchly loyal to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). That changed over time, but in both Changhua and Taichung, the DPP still suffers from a “one-term curse,” with the
William Liu (劉家君) moved to Kaohsiung from Nantou to live with his boyfriend Reg Hong (洪嘉佑). “In Nantou, people do not support gay rights at all and never even talk about it. Living here made me optimistic and made me realize how much I can express myself,” Liu tells the Taipei Times. Hong and his friend Cony Hsieh (謝昀希) are both active in several LGBT groups and organizations in Kaohsiung. They were among the people behind the city’s 16th Pride event in November last year, which gathered over 35,000 people. Along with others, they clearly see Kaohsiung as the nexus of LGBT rights.
Jan. 26 to Feb. 1 Nearly 90 years after it was last recorded, the Basay language was taught in a classroom for the first time in September last year. Over the following three months, students learned its sounds along with the customs and folktales of the Ketagalan people, who once spoke it across northern Taiwan. Although each Ketagalan settlement had its own language, Basay functioned as a common trade language. By the late 19th century, it had largely fallen out of daily use as speakers shifted to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), surviving only in fragments remembered by the elderly. In
Dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s (艾未未) famous return to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been overshadowed by the astonishing news of the latest arrests of senior military figures for “corruption,” but it is an interesting piece of news in its own right, though more for what Ai does not understand than for what he does. Ai simply lacks the reflective understanding that the loneliness and isolation he imagines are “European” are simply the joys of life as an expat. That goes both ways: “I love Taiwan!” say many still wet-behind-the-ears expats here, not realizing what they love is being an
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