Having built a reputation as a articulate genre director through works such as One Nite in Mongkok (旺角黑夜, 2004) and Protege (門徒, 2007), Derek Yee (爾冬陞) returns with Shinjuku Incident (新宿事件), a crime drama about the plight of Chinese illegal immigrants in Japan that has been banned in China for its violent scenes.
Yee’s first collaboration with Jackie Chan (成龍) is being hyped as the action star’s first attempt at serious acting, as Chan plays a character fighting to survive in a dark, grimy and morally complex underworld.
Set in the 1990s, the film begins when Chinese refugees are swept ashore on a Japanese beach. Among them is Steelhead (Chan), a simple, honest mechanic from northern China who has come to find his long-lost love, Xiu Xiu (Xu Jinglei, 徐靜蕾).
Steelhead joins hometown pal Jie (Daniel Wu, 吳彥祖) and other illegal immigrants in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, where they eke out a meager living doing work that Japanese themselves are unwilling to do. After finding out that Xiu Xiu, who now goes by the name Yuko, is married to Japanese gangster Eguchi (Masaya Kato), Steelhead turns to crime to build a better life for himself.
But when Jie gets his hand cut off after inadvertently falling afoul of a Taiwanese gangster (Jack Kao, 高捷), Steelhead throws his lot with Eguchi to protect his friends. Steelhead becomes the leader of a Chinese gang that is the governing force of the underworld in Tokyo’s Chinatown, though he tries to go clean by running legitimate businesses. As rival yakuza syndicate plot against his gang, Steelhead finds himself caught in a web of intrigue, avarice and betrayal.
As with Protege, his film about drug trafficking that shows a deep understanding of the machinations of the criminal underworld, Yee spent years conducting research for Shinjuku Incident. Both movies weave dramatic sentimentality with tight action sequences and sudden spurts of gruesome violence, which in the case of Shinjuku Incident involve a severed hand and disfigured face.
From migrant workers toiling in sewer drains and landfills to the turf wars between rival gangsters, each segment of this bulky narrative is strong and gripping. Overall, however, the film strikes one as a composite of discrete vignettes rather than a cohesive whole. And while Yee is adept at eliciting raw, direct emotions through a melodramatic form of storytelling that he deploys with great skill, he can overdo it. Some of his characters — such as the junkie played by Louise Koo (古天樂) in Protege — come off as overly exaggerated caricatures.
There’s a fine supporting cast that includes veteran Japanese thespian Naoto Takenaka, Hong Kong’s Lam Suet (林雪) and Taiwanese actor Kao, but Chan’s performance is the main point of interest. In this, his first foray into serious acting, Chan puts aside his goofy charm and kung fu stunts and makes a decent stab at acting purely for dramatic effect. But he often seems uncomfortable or perhaps even unable to express nuances of emotion or wear any look on his face other than one of grim stoicism, when so much more is needed for this film and its morally ambiguous lead character.
On Sept. 1, President William Lai (賴清德) said “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [China] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun? Russia is now at its weakest, right?” “You can ask Russia [for the land back] but you don’t. So it’s obvious they don’t want to invade Taiwan for territorial reasons,” he added. Lai was referencing an 1858 treaty under which, along with an 1860 convention, Russia annexed about one million square kilometers of Manchurian Qing territory in Outer Manchuria, including Haishengwei — today known as
This month Taiwan received a brutal Christmas present as the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) passed all three of its desired amendments, making recalls of elected officials more difficult, gutting the Constitutional Court and altering the budgetary allocations to local governments. The nation at present has no ultimate authority to determine the constitutionality of government actions, and the local governments, largely controlled by the KMT, have much greater funding. We are staring into an abyss of chaos. The amendments to the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法), if they become law (as of this writing President William Lai
Dec. 30 to Jan. 5 Premiering on Jan. 4, 1956, Xue Pinggui and Wang Baochuan (薛平貴與王寶釧) unexpectedly packed theaters for the next 27 days. Taiwan’s first 35mm Hoklo-language (commonly known as Taiwanese) movie beat out the top Hollywood blockbuster, Land of the Pharaohs, and the Mandarin-language Peach Blossom River (桃花江) in box office sales, kicking off a craze that lasted until around 1970. More than 800 Hoklo-language films were made despite government attempts to promote Mandarin. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) owned the nation’s three major production houses, mostly creating Mandarin films filled with anti-communist messages and patriotic propaganda. But most
Charges have formally been brought in Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) bribery, corruption and embezzling of campaign funds cases. Ko was briefly released on bail by the Taipei District Court on Friday, but the High Court on Sunday reversed the decision. Then, the Taipei District Court on the same day granted him bail again. The ball is in dueling courts. While preparing for a “year ahead” column and reviewing a Formosa poll from last month, it’s clear that the TPP’s demographics are shifting, and there are some indications of where support for the party is heading. YOUNG, MALE
RSS