| OTHER RELEASES | |
| Klimt John Malkovich plays yet another talented but troubled character, this time Austrian artist Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). Klimt is famous for nude portraits and a lifestyle that defied social norms; both feature in this loose biopic by hardworking director Raul Ruiz. Critics were largely dismissive of this effort, though more or less united in their praise for its visual beauty and honorable intentions. Alas, the version showing in Taiwan seems to be the shorter — and inferior — producer's cut that was released in the US. |  |
| The Valet Yet another Parisian romance to hit Taiwanese screens this winter, this comes from director Francis Veber, who wrote the original La Cage Aux Folles and a bunch of other films later remade in Hollywood. More comedy of errors than manners, the luckless parking attendant of the title is called on to pretend to be in a relationship with the mistress of a wealthy businessman after the latter two are caught in a reasonably compromising position. Fans of farce should enjoy this. French title: La Doublure |  |
| Kung Fu Fighter (功夫無敵) A number of actors from Kung Fu Hustle (功夫) turn up in a cheap knock-off that is also set in Shanghai in the 1930s. But Stephen Chow (周星馳) is not one of them. Vanness Wu (吳建豪) of F4/JVKV fame tries to locate his father as romance blossoms and triads close in. The trailer alone reveals a lack of Chow's visual flair and his ability to mingle the spectacular with the bizarre. Chow’s many fans instead need to wait until Jan. 31, which is when his new big-budget film CJ7 opens in Taiwan. |  |
| The House If you didn't get your fill of Thai horror flicks last year, the new year offers this entry. A reporter connects the dots in a series of grisly deaths at a haunted house, only to discover that she might be next in line. The House is getting more publicity than normal for a Thai horror opus, possibly because it performed quite well at the Thai box office. Decent production values may not appease those looking for a little more originality, however. Director Monthon Arayangkoon also made last year's The Victim, which did well here, and 2004's Garuda, about a monster in the Bangkok subway. |  |
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
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