Prima Donna (當家花旦)
A documentary following the preparations for the 15th anniversary performance by the Snow White Entertaining Troupe (白雪綜藝劇團), an amateur troupe that has established itself as a nonpareil of local drag shows. The four men who are at the center of the show, all have daytime jobs, but when it comes to celebrating 15 years behind the footlights, they take every aspect, from the shade of eyeliner to the choreographing of the light show, with the utmost seriousness. The enduring popularity of this drag show provides unexpected insight into normally conservative Taiwan, and although there is something of the behind the scenes concert movie about it, Prima Donna is much more about being, and expressing, who you are.
The Triangle Land (幸福三角地)
A founding figure of Taiwan New Wave cinema, director-cinematographer Chen Kun-ho (陳坤厚) made several important works including Growing Up (小畢的故事, 1983), His Matrimony (結婚, 1985) and Osmanthus Alley (桂花巷, 1987). His most recent film is a venture in nostalgia for a rural Taiwan that is gradually disappearing, telling the story of a young boy growing up in a dysfunctional family who realizes that he must grow up fast if he is to escape the cycle of acrimony and shame that surrounds him and win the love of a new US-born student at his school. Heavy on sentiment and manipulative in manner, the cast list of young celebrities will still draw audiences.
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Beasts of the Southern Wild has elicited words like “wondrous” and “magnificent” from critics, many of whom regard it as one of the best films of 2012. The heroine, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis), is destined to be an icon of young adult culture together with the likes of Kaitness Everdeen of Hunger Games and Princess Mirida of Brave. Hushpuppy lives with her father Wink (Dwight Henry) in a small community at the end of the world. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack, temperatures rise, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. Hushpuppy has to be strong to face these dangers as she embarks on a journey to find her mother. The flood of contemporary hot topics, from climate change to the importance of family might prove too much for some, but the film manages to avoid the worst pitfalls of moralizing tales.
Monsieur Lazhar
Nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 2012 Oscars, Monsieur Lazhar has been sweeping up awards on the art-house festival circuit. The film explores the complex relationship between an Algerian immigrant, who is hired to replace a popular teacher who committed suicide in her classroom, and his students, teasing through the complex and fragile bonds of trust and respect that exist in a classroom. It also looks inward into the title character’s own experience of profound grief. The leading role is taken by Mohamed Fellag, whose performance has won lavish praise from critics for its sensitivity and humor (Fellag is a comedian and himself an exile from Algeria), and the film, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau gains much of its power from not asking specific questions, but rather simply looking at a situation with sympathy and humility.
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
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
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