Taiwan goes all out for New Year's
Fireworks at Taipei 101, a beach party near Taitung and a floating theater in Kaohsiung are just a few of the activities planned to welcome 2008
By Ho Yi
New Year's Eve is just around the corner. There's so much to do, and so little time to do it. From fireworks displays and star-studded concerts to festivities spiked with local flavors, Taiwan will be full of events where you can watch the ball drop without dropping the ball.
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Only a few days until New Year's Eve. Do you know where your party is?
By Ron Brownlow
Dec. 31, 2007. We know the score. You're going to stop doing whatever it is you shouldn't be doing in 2008. Like waiting until the last minute to decide where to party on New Year's Eve. Don't worry. We've done the hard work for you. Here are a few recommendations for nightspots that are guaranteed to be hopping on Monday night.
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Farcical farewells to 2007
By Bradley Winterton
Die Fledermaus (or “the bat”) is the kind of thing genuine opera-lovers love to hate. All the musical profundity and exalted spirituality they hear in Mozart or Wagner is betrayed by this silly, frothy, sexually-repressed bourgeois farce. “This isn't opera!” they protest. Instead, it's operetta, the ancestor of the dreaded American musical, and should, they believe, be banished from the sacred precincts of the Temple of Art altogether.
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Back to the future
By Ian Bartholomew
Taiwan Drama Performance (臺灣戲劇表演家劇團) will be coming to Taipei this week to wind up its nationwide tour of The Time Travel (我是你爸爸), the Chinese name of which translates literally as “I am your father.”
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[POP STOP]
COMPILED BY Ian Bartholomew
Help Me, Eros (幫幫我，愛神) the new film by Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) protege and emerging art-porn director Lee Kang-sheng (李康生) is scheduled for release on Jan. 11, building on the wave of hot and sweaty sexuality set up by Ang Lee's (李安) Lust, Caution (色，戒). (See Page 15 of today's Taipei Times.) If the acrobatic antics of Tang Wei (湯唯) and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (梁朝偉) were insufficient titillation, Eros moves into even more improbable regions of acrobatic lovemaking to spice up things up. There has already been much discussion about the “paper clip” coital position that featured in Lust, Caution, and now Eros has upped the ante with an “upright 69er,” which is receiving almost as much attention as a proposed one-on-four group session that had the girls of F4, the much maligned girl band, doing what they reportedly do best.
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Top Five Mandarin Albums
BY TAIPEI TIMES STAFF
DEC. 14 to DEC. 20
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Flying solo
By Ron Brownlow
Sometime after 11pm tonight at Bliss, Pat Reid will strum his first guitar chords, lean into the microphone and start singing. Most of his audience will be holdovers from the night's first act, rock 'n' roll cover band The Originals. Wired and maybe a bit drunk, more than a few will have trouble shifting gears for his thoughtfully earnest acoustic rock. Will he grab their attention? Moments like these show the measure of the man as a performer, but Reid isn't worried. "It's gonna be a bit tough since I think I'm playing after a rock band," he says. "But I'm confident in what I do and I think I can hold my own."
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[THE VINYL WORD]
By Queen Bee
It's time to raise your hands in the air to countdown to 2008. From Taipei to Kaohsiung, here are the eight hottest New Year's bashes that Taiwan has to offer. Here it goes:
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'Eros' in the streets of Taiwan
By Mike Kearney
To help promote their latest film, Help Me Eros (幫幫我愛神), Lee Kang-sheng (李康生) and Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) have taken to the streets - they've embarked on a tour around Taiwan, giving lectures at universities that are free and open to the general public.
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[RESTAURANT REVIEW] Forkers (佛客)
By Ron Brownlow
Andrew Lunman had a dream. Like many long-term foreign residents who have grown tired of teaching, he wanted to open his own restaurant. So he started Bongos, a low-key North American-style place in Gonguan. That did pretty well, so last year he opened Coda, a slightly more upscale Italian-American restaurant in the same neighborhood. Business there hasn't been bad either. So now Lunman has taken on a new project and is helping Joe Hodgson with Hodgson's new gourmet burger restaurant, Forker's, which opened last month in an alley behind the California Fitness Center on Zhongxiao East Road.
[ FULL STORY ]
[RESTAURANT REVIEW] Maple's
By Noah Buchan
Maple's is a non-descript restaurant located a one-minute jaunt south of Da-an Forest Park (大安森林公園). Owner-manager Tristan Newman hails from Vancouver and has four years experience of working at upscale restaurants in Canada's most multicultural city under his belt. He took over from Sub Zone, the first - but definitely not the last - Subway franchise in Taipei to break away from the US corporation and continue operations under a different name.
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Familiar faces with a digital makeover
It was, perhaps, only a matter of time before the ’munks were reprised for an outing using 21st-century technology
By Andy Webster
Hollywood continues its tired milking of old television properties with Alvin and the Chipmunks, a slick updating of the musical-cartoon franchise created by Ross Bagdasarian Sr. in 1958. Remodeled over the years on television and recordings, the ’munks have been given a digital coat of paint this time out, but the movie doesn’t skimp — lasso those nostalgic parents! — on the memories of old.
[ FULL STORY ]
SPOT festival nets the ones that got away
By Ian Bartholomew
SPOT — Taipei Film House (台北光點) has been instrumental in bringing lots of wonderful movies to Taipei, and its latest project, Underground Heaven, expands the theater’s mandate of showcasing what the mainstream wishes to ignore. This is a self-confessed mishmash of films from the edge of the cinematic fringe. Nevertheless it contains nuggets of gold.
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The sweet smell of success has a bouquet of blood and sweat
In ‘American Gangster,’ the lethal pursuit of the American dream is not restricted to families — the Sopranos, say, — but located in a network of warring tribes
By Manohla Dargis
Greatness hovers just outside American Gangster, knocking, angling to be let in. Based in rough outline on the flashy rise and fall of a powerful 1970s New York drug lord, Frank Lucas, the film has been built for importance, with a brand-name director, Ridley Scott, and two major stars, Denzel Washington as Lucas, and Russell Crowe as Richie Roberts, the New Jersey cop who brings him down. It’s a seductive package, crammed with all the on-screen and off-screen talent that big-studio money can buy, and filled with old soul and remixed funk that evoke the city back in the day, when heroin turned poor streets white and sometimes red.
[ FULL STORY ]
Jet Li goes to war
Could the martial arts costume drama 'The Warlords' herald a new direction in big budget Chinese-language flicks? One can only hope
By Ian Bartholomew
Peter Chan's (陳可辛) big-budget costume drama The Warlords is something of a revelation after the succession of recent Chinese history flicks that have tried to rival Hollywood and been found wanting.
[ FULL STORY ]
[REEL NEWS]
The countdown to the Oscars got underway on Wednesday as nomination ballots for February's Academy Awards were mailed to the 5,829 voters who will decide the US film world's winners and losers for this year, a statement said.
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