Fans of director Robert Altman might have been expecting his Oscar-nominated Gosford Park to come to Taiwan theaters for some time now, after seeing most all the other films of last year's Oscars. The latest news about the film is, "in September," according to Sinomovie (
Other recent acquisitions made by Sinomovie are the Indian comedy-drama Monsoon Wedding, a Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival, Roman Polanski's The Pianist, which won a Golden Palm two months ago at Cannes, and also Cannes' winner of the Jury's Grand Prize, A Man Without a Past by Aki Kaurismaki. Rock documentary Super 8 Stories and Hong Kong director Ann Hui's (
"It's not just art films. We are interested in movies that open our eyes to different cultures," said Hou, who has spent recent years involved in aspects of Taiwan's film industry other than his own directing career.
Two years ago, he established Sinomovie, which runs a movie Web site and film production workshop and has held several short-film festivals. Now he is entering the film distribution business.
In April this year, Hou started the Taiwan Film and Culture Society (
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
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