When The Man kills his brother, gives black orphans heroin and floods the neighborhood with bad malt liquor, former CIA agent Black Dynamite takes on the bad guys and fights his way from the street to the Honky House.
Logar, the evil commander-in-chief of Planet G.O.R.A, kidnaps a carpet salesman named Arif, who inadvertently becomes a hero when he saves the planet by thwarting Logar’s diabolical schemes.
Movies with plots like these are shunned by most Taiwanese film festivals, but they take center stage at the 2009 Kaohsiung Film Festival (高雄電影節). Since it changed tack in 2007, the festival has made a name for itself as a hip annual showcase for genre cinema, B movies and manga-influenced flicks, although it continues its nine-year-old tradition of screening socially conscious movies on labor and human rights issues.
The main attraction at this year’s fest is the Hero/Antihero section, which features films that subvert the superhero tradition.
Team America: World Police, by the creators of South Park, is a hilarious parody of the “war on terror” with an all-marionette cast that’s reminiscent of the 1960s British television show Thunderbirds. With its story of a battle between the anti-terrorist force Team America and a terrorist organization led by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who is supported by his movie-star friends in Hollywood, Team America plays with cliches and stereotypes in Hollywood action movies and pokes fun at the idea of the US as the world’s policeman.
The genre-bending Stingray Sam is a sci-fi musical that centers on an ex con-turned-singer living on Mars who reunites with prison pal
The Quasar Kid for a mission to rescue a kidnapped girl.
Another sci-fi comedy, Turkish movie G.O.R.A. is a campy parody of such genre classics as Star Wars, The Matrix and The
Fifth Element.
The main event in the Kaohsiung Film Festival’s People Power section is The 10 Conditions of Love, a documentary about exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer. Plans to screen the film drew criticism from Beijing and representatives of Kaohsiung’s tourism industry, who expressed fear that Chinese tourists would be less inclined to visit the city if the film were shown. Earlier this year, the Chinese government pressured the Melbourne International Film Festival to not show the documentary. When Melbourne refused to cave in to its demands, Beijing withdrew five films from the festival and the festival’s Web site was hacked and content replaced with a Chinese flag and anti-Kadeer slogans.
Also showing in the People Power section is Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country. This powerful documentary is comprised largely of footage shot with hidden cameras by journalists from The Democratic Voice of Burma, who risked their lives to document the failed 2007 uprising led by Buddhist monks against Myanmar’s ruling junta.
Among the other highlights at this year’s Kaohsiung Film Festival:
* Black Dynamite, a flashy throwback to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s whose hero, played by Michael Jai White, likes to fight smack without his shirt on.
* Suck, a comedy about a group of aspiring rock stars who trade their souls for fame and fortune. The film features Malcolm McDowell as a vampire hunter who is afraid of the dark, with cameos by Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and Moby.
* A program of films by up-and-coming directors Lee Yoon-ki of South Korea and Yoshihiro Nakamura of Japan.
Lee has made a name for himself on the international film festival circuit in recent years with his subtle and delicate portraits of women in contemporary Korean society.
Nakamura is known for his whimsical, almost fairy-tale-like movies, such as Route 225, in which a 14-year-old girl and her little brother find themselves in a parallel universe where their home is almost the same but where their parents do not exist.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
Most heroes are remembered for the battles they fought. Taiwan’s Black Bat Squadron is remembered for flying into Chinese airspace 838 times between 1953 and 1967, and for the 148 men whose sacrifice bought the intelligence that kept Taiwan secure. Two-thirds of the squadron died carrying out missions most people wouldn’t learn about for another 40 years. The squadron lost 15 aircraft and 148 crew members over those 14 years, making it the deadliest unit in Taiwan’s military history by casualty rate. They flew at night, often at low altitudes, straight into some of the most heavily defended airspace in Asia.
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
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