Can Harry meet Sally and stay with her because of a “love patch,” which allows one to experience love within seconds? That and other questions on technology are raised in MeimeiWawa Multimedia’s recent bilingual YouTube film, Still Better than Love.
The Veronin sisters, Esther (梁妍熙) and Lara (梁心頤), who graduated from Taipei American School a decade ago, formed MeimeiWawa in 2013 and since then have been pushing the envelope. This film, entered in the 2016 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, is their latest endeavor.
The sisters are by no means strangers in the arts. Esther, who now focuses on production, gave a powerful performance in LAB Space’s 2016 production of Wait Until Dark and Lara, a talented singer and performer, followed as the female lead in A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters. Their YouTube series Meiwa Diaries further present how art and exhibitionism playfully mix and infiltrate their own East-meets-West lives and identity.
photo courtesy of meimeiwawa
However, the focus is on technology in this film written and directed by Diane Kang (康黛安). Often cast as an innocent girl, Lara delighted in the chance to play a woman desperate for love and satisfaction opposite co-star Danny Lee (李博翔) who takes on the “innocent” role this time.
Lara’s chaaracter seeks guaranteed instant love with the “love patch” but at issue, as Lara succinctly puts it, is that “technology can aid our lives but also destabilize traditional life as we know it.”
One could be tempted to dismiss this work as far-fetched soft porn. However other past imaginative technologies of films like 2001 Space Odyssey (1968) and Westworld (1973) are now realities and our world is populated with all sorts of artificial intelligence including androids, drones, virtual reality and Japanese sex robots.
This film raises other tech issues as well. How often do we forego real communication while we seek likes and smiles from tweets, Facebook messages and Photoshopped Instagram images? The technology of social intelligence fosters such and makes it hard to distinguish true value. Thus the film’s crass closing scene with spectators taking photos and selfies of the couple’s passionate sidewalk romp hits close to home.
Still Better than Love makes us question what we settle for.
As for Lara, what’s next? In the fall, she will switch gears to put out a long overdue third album with songs on the many challenges contemporary women face combining career and family, lifestyle, fleeting youth — especially when the biological clock is ticking.
Taiwan’s overtaking of South Korea in GDP per capita is not a temporary anomaly, but the result of deeper structural problems in the South Korean economy says Chang Young-chul, the former CEO of Korea Asset Management Corp. Chang says that while it reflects Taiwan’s own gains, it also highlights weakening growth momentum in South Korea. As design and foundry capabilities become more important in the AI era, Seoul risks losing competitiveness if it relies too heavily on memory chips. IMF forecasts showing Taiwan widening its lead over South Korea have fueled debate in Seoul over memory chip dependence, industrial policy and
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
It took 12 years and months of standing in the same mountain location for director Liang Chieh-te (梁皆得) to capture a few seconds of footage: Taiwan’s largest resident raptor locking talons with its mate and spinning through the air in a courtship ritual. With only about 1,000 left in the wild and very short flight windows, the mountain hawk-eagle remains among Taiwan’s most elusive birds. The species generally produces only one offspring per year. Using forest cameras, the film crew and research teams document the arduous process the monogamous pairs go through for the chick to hatch and grow up, weathering
There is considerable frustration and confusion among many, both in Taiwan and abroad — including in Washington — as to why the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) seems so dead set on using their legislative leverage to slash defense spending and disrupt the ability of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration to function. Are they pawns of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Are they traitors? In reality, there are multiple reasons. In the first column in this series on this subject, “Donovan’s Deep Dives: How and why the TPP and KMT help Beijing” (Sat May 16, page 12), we examined three
RSS