After his feature debut Night Market Hero (雞排英雄), which grossed NT$140 million in 2011, blockbuster maker Yeh Tien-lun (葉天倫) returns with Twa Tiu Tiann (大稻埕), a film that aims to be grander and much larger in scope. The movie mixes fantasy and history to tell the story of a young man travelling back in time to 1920s Taiwan which was then under Japanese colonial rule. It is a melodramatic comedy punctuated with big emotions, and through its well-rendered time-travel conceit, the film delivers a rare portrait of Taipei as a city with a long history, affording its residents time travel into the past when one could bump into Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水), an important figure in Taiwan’s resistance to Japanese colonial rule, while walking down a Dadaocheng (大稻埕) street.
The film opens in present-day Taipei, where college student Jack, played by television show host-turned-actor Chris Wang (宥勝), whiles away his days chasing girls and hanging out with friends. To the gang of young lads, the history lessons taught by Professor P (Chu Ko Liang, 豬哥亮) couldn’t be more different from their easygoing lifestyle.
One day, during a field trip to a museum in western Taipei’s Dadaocheng area, Jack notices a painting on display. It is Festival on South Street (南街殷賑), a painting of iconic Dihua Street (迪化街)) by Kuo Hsueh-hu (郭雪湖), a pioneer of modern art in Taiwan. Encouraged by Professor P, Jack takes a photograph of the work. Suddenly, everything in the painting comes to life, and Jack finds himself transported back to 1920s Dadaocheng, which at the time was a major trading hub for tea, textiles, herbal medicines and many other goods.
Photo Courtesy of Swallow Wings
Bewildered, Jack is taken in by Ginger (Sonia Sui, 隋棠), a sassy Manchu woman who fled to Taiwan after the Qing Dynasty crumbled and has since run a textile shop in the area. To his surprise, Jack finds among Ginger’s helpers his history professor, who discovered the painting’s portal back in time and has been returning to the past constantly to court Ginger.
Jack’s eagerness to return to the 21st century dissipates when he meets young Taiwanese geisha Rose (Jian Man-shu, 簡嫚書). While love blossoms between Jack and Rose, they befriend Chiang Wei-shui (Lee Li-jen, 李李仁) and are drawn into the campaign for democracy led by Chiang and other Taiwanese civil rights activists. Soon Jack, Professor P and their friends become involved in Chiang’s effort to petition the colonial government for the creation of an elected representative body in front of the Japanese Crown Prince Hirohito, who visited Taiwan in 1923.
Over the two-hour screening time, Yeh delicately weaves Taiwanese history into a work of holiday entertainment packed with romance and humor. The plot involving the lead character coming to terms with the present through his reconciliation with the past serves as an eloquent metaphor and is passably carried out by rising actor Wang. The star of the show, however, is Taiwanese comedian Chu Ko Liang, who appears genuinely funny with his offbeat humor and makes a surprisingly lively pair with model-turned-actress Sui.
Photo Courtesy of Swallow Wings
Unfortunately, the movie is largely let down by sloppy and lazy scriptwriting. Sufficient details, motivation and narrative coherence are often absent. Embarrassingly cliched characters abound; a speech by Chiang is lifeless in its excessive sentimentality. The absence of a film studio in Taiwan, along with the needed infrastructure and talent to produce period films, is also apparent in this movie as portraits of historical grandeur are sometimes reduced to the scale of a television drama.
An aspect of Twa Tiu Tiann worth mentioning is the playful rendition Moving Forward (向前行). Though the uplifting mood of the song, recorded in 1990, is hardly in tune with the sentiments of present-day Taiwan, it makes a fitting accompaniment to the movie’s sanguine, if not overly saccharine, vision.
Photo Courtesy of Swallow Wings
Anyone who has been to Alishan (阿里山) is familiar with the railroad there: one line comes up from Chiayi City past the sacred tree site, while another line goes up to the sunrise viewing platform at Zhushan (祝山). Of course, as a center of logging operations for over 60 years, Alishan did have more rail lines in the past. Are any of these still around? Are they easily accessible? Are they worth visiting? The answer to all three of these questions is emphatically: Yes! One of these lines ran from Alishan all the way up to the base of Jade Mountain. Its
The entire saga involving the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and its Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) continues to produce plot twists at such a rapid pace that fiction publishers would throw it out for being ridiculously improbable. This past week was particularly bizarre, but surprisingly the press has almost entirely ignored a big story that could have serious national security implications and instead focused on a series of salacious bombshell allegations. Ko is currently being held incommunicado by prosecutors while several criminal investigations are ongoing on allegations of bribery and stealing campaign funds. This last week for reasons unknown Ko completely shaved
The only geopolitical certainty is that massive change is coming. Three macro trends are only just starting to accelerate, forming a very disruptive background to an already unsettled future. One is that technological transformations exponentially more consequential and rapid than anything prior are in their infancy, and will play out like several simultaneous industrial revolutions. ROBOT REVOLUTION It is still early days, but impacts are starting to be felt. Just yesterday, this line appeared in an article: “To meet demands at Foxconn, factory planners are building physical AI-powered robotic factories with Omniverse and NVIDIA AI.” In other words, they used AI
The rhythms of bustling, working-class Mumbai are brought to vivid life in All We Imagine as Light. The stunning narrative debut of filmmaker Payal Kapadia explores the lives of three women in the city whose existence is mostly transit and work. Even that isn’t always enough to get by and pay the rent. One of the women, a widow, recently retired from working her whole life at a city hospital, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), is even facing eviction. The other two, roommates and co-workers in the maternity ward are in different parts of life. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) has a husband from an
RSS