Confucius 孔子: 決戰春秋
Casting Hong Kong’s enduringly charismatic Chow Yun-fat (周潤發) as the most famous Chinese thinker of all was bound to divide Chinese-speaking audiences, though Beijing gave him and his colleagues a boost by kicking Avatar out of theaters to make room for them. In Taiwan, however, the market rules and the toothy one will have to stand on his own two feet. Purists might ask why a film about a philosopher would place so much emphasis on battle scenes worthy of a biopic of Sun Tzu (孫子); romantics will mourn the apparent excision of love scenes between Chow and Zhou Xun (周迅) to satisfy neo-neo-Confucianists in Beijing and elsewhere. Still, director Hu Mei (胡玫) seems to have delivered a respectful and respectable production that might attract a modern international audience to the timeless Analects.
14 Blades 錦衣衛
Donnie Yen (甄子丹) headlines in another actioner bound to increase his already considerable fan base. He plays the head of the titular Praetorian Guard-like bodyguard unit to the Chinese emperor. Lots of combat in this one, and its traditional settings are bound to impress those who love their fisticuffs and weapon-bearing on exotic-looking sets.
From Paris With Love
In recent years, for every Old Dogs John Travolta comes up with a movie like From Paris With Love. In this one he’s a scary-looking CIA agent who takes no nonsense from his prey, or from his apprentice-of-sorts, a Paris-based diplomatic assistant (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, from Bend It Like Beckham) who has higher aspirations. Lots of the crew on this one worked on the Liam Neeson action feature Taken.
Phantom Pain
The title is more intriguing than the set-up: A terrible accident leaves a German cyclist permanently disabled — but also gives him the chance to show that he has true grit. You’ve heard this story before, but star Til Schweiger has a large number of admirers and, hey, everyone has to see an against-all-odds sporting redemption epic at some point. It’s also based on a true story, which helps.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
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