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.
Jan. 5 to Jan. 11 Of the more than 3,000km of sugar railway that once criss-crossed central and southern Taiwan, just 16.1km remain in operation today. By the time Dafydd Fell began photographing the network in earnest in 1994, it was already well past its heyday. The system had been significantly cut back, leaving behind abandoned stations, rusting rolling stock and crumbling facilities. This reduction continued during the five years of his documentation, adding urgency to his task. As passenger services had already ceased by then, Fell had to wait for the sugarcane harvest season each year, which typically ran from
It’s a good thing that 2025 is over. Yes, I fully expect we will look back on the year with nostalgia, once we have experienced this year and 2027. Traditionally at New Years much discourse is devoted to discussing what happened the previous year. Let’s have a look at what didn’t happen. Many bad things did not happen. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not attack Taiwan. We didn’t have a massive, destructive earthquake or drought. We didn’t have a major human pandemic. No widespread unemployment or other destructive social events. Nothing serious was done about Taiwan’s swelling birth rate catastrophe.
Words of the Year are not just interesting, they are telling. They are language and attitude barometers that measure what a country sees as important. The trending vocabulary around AI last year reveals a stark divergence in what each society notices and responds to the technological shift. For the Anglosphere it’s fatigue. For China it’s ambition. For Taiwan, it’s pragmatic vigilance. In Taiwan’s annual “representative character” vote, “recall” (罷) took the top spot with over 15,000 votes, followed closely by “scam” (詐). While “recall” speaks to the island’s partisan deadlock — a year defined by legislative recall campaigns and a public exhausted
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
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