Each weekend in early spring, thousands of tourists converge on the farms around Bamboo Lake for the annual Zhuzihu Calla Lily Festival
By Ho Yi
In a sea of calla lilies, young couples banter while picking bunches of the white, long-stemmed flowers. Grandparents take a tea break on shady patios and watch moms and dads chase after their children. The Calla Lily Festival has made its annual return to Zhuzihu, or Bamboo Lake (竹子湖), in an event that routinely draws huge crowds to the secluded valley to pick lilies, enjoy a pot of tea or coffee, and eat local produce while admiring the fields of white blossoms.

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By Noah Buchan
Combine a cantankerous manager and mischievous cooks with frenetic drumming and furious cutting, and what do you get? Nanta, an entertaining spectacle that blends traditional Korean percussion with contemporary musical theater in a fast-paced performance. The show makes its third Taiwan appearance beginning tonight at the Taipei International Convention Center and will run until Sunday.

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Compiled By Ian Bartholomew
For basketball star Sam Ho (何守正), A-Mei’s (張惠妹) absence while she is in Tokyo rehearsing for a part in a Japanese production of Turandot hasn’t made his heart grow fonder. The Taiwan Beer basketball team player has, reportedly, found consolation elsewhere. The new woman in his life, air hostess and wannabe singer Lin Pei-yao (林佩瑤), is hardly a match for the nation’s premier diva, but as Next magazine points out, she’s 10 years younger and is the proud owner of 32D cup breasts, compared to A-Mei’s 32B mammalian protuberances.

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By Ho Yi
When demolition teams, escorted by police offices, were deployed to flatten the Sanying Aboriginal Community (三鶯部落) last month, social activists, human rights groups, independent media, students and academics quickly mobilized to work with the displaced Amis Aborigines who have lived on the banks of the Dahan River (大漢溪) under the Sanying Bridge (三鶯大橋) for more than two decades.

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By Alita Rickards
It can be difficult to track down members of a successful band for an interview. Especially when the band has a video on MTV. But two musicians from indie-rock group Neon made it much easier by opening - and working at - popular downtown sandwich bar Toasteria.

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By Tom Leeming
Primo is quite possibly the future of clubbing in Taiwan.

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By Blake Carter
Bottles of liquor you can sign your name on and finish the next time you come. A karaoke machine on wheels. A real-lfe Sichuanese boss: Chuanwazi (川娃子) seems to have it all.

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By Ian Bartholomew
The word "authentic" in a restaurant's name should set alarm bells ringing for anyone who is familiar with the cuisine that the establishment purports to serve. Little Penang Authentic Colonial Coffeestall is first of all not a coffee stall. Secondly, its huge menu, with dishes that range in provenance from China's Yunan province to Indonesia, has Penang and the colonial experience merely as a base note on which an inescapably Taiwanese dining experience is built. This isn't to say the food is bad; in fact, Little Penang has many dishes that are quite excellent. But for people who know Singapore and Malaysia, it is advisable to keep culinary expectations in check.

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If 'Horton Hears a Who!' offers a showcase of the visual inventiveness and technical flair that characterizes Hollywood-financed children's animation these days, it also shows some of the limitations of the computer-animation, talking-animal genre
By A.O. scott
What distinguishes Horton Hears a Who! from the other recent Dr Seuss film adaptations - How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat, in case you need reminding - is that it is not one of the worst movies ever made. That's faint praise, I know, and I'm even willing to go a bit further. There are aspects of Horton, directed by Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino under the auspices of the 20th Century Fox animation unit responsible for the Ice Age movies, that are fresh and enjoyable, and bits that will gratify even a dogmatic and orthodox Seussian.

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Its script is more than a little contrived as well as over-emphatic, but 'Closing the Ring' has a warmth and mature insight that older members of the audience are likely to find extremely moving
By Philip French
Richard Attenborough made his movie debut as a naval rating in Noel Coward's wartime morale-booster In Which We Serve, served in the RAF himself as a gunner cameraman and like many of his generation has lived his life in the shadow of World War II. In the 60-odd years since his demobilization he's appeared in numerous war movies, most famously perhaps in The Great Escape, and beginning with Oh! What a Lovely War has directed a succession of pictures with wartime settings. So it's not surprising that he was attracted to Closing the Ring, the first script by playwright and TV writer Peter Woodward in which events in the present are connected to those in World War Two, and septuagenarians in Ireland and America look back to the war and reveal their experiences to a younger generation.

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Will Ferrell's latest star vehicle is a raunchy goof that finds the sweet spot between sports melodrama and parody
By Matt Zoller Seitz
A throwaway scene in Semi-Pro, a comedy starring Will Ferrell as Jackie Moon, the owner, coach, promoter and star of a struggling 1970s-era basketball team, boils Ferrell's macho man-child persona down to a sentence.

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Technically accomplished and eloquently scripted, Singing Chen's allegorical account of contemporary Taiwan will appeal to both movie buffs and general audiences
By Ho Yi
Eight years after her critically acclaimed debut Bundled (我叫阿銘啦), director Singing Chen (陳芯宜) returns with her second feature, God Man Dog (流浪神狗人), an allegorical tale of contemporary Taiwan told through a mosaic of characters.

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AGENCIES
Producers have pulled a drama from the Hong Kong International Film Festival because it hasn't been cleared by Chinese censors, an incident highlighting China's growing influence over Hong Kong cinema.

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COMPILED By Martin Williams