It makes no sense to expect Mojin — the Lost Legend (尋龍訣) to make sense. The latest production by Chinese director Wuershan (烏爾善) is an adventure-fantasy movie designed to thrill and entertain, depicting a bunch of action heroes braving zombie armies in search for a stone with magic power. Based on Chinese writer Zhang Muye‘s (張牧野) immensely popular adventure series, Ghost Blows Out the Light (鬼吹燈), this is a precisely-crafted work of entertainment featuring a star-studded cast and stunning CGI effects, showing that China is catching up with Hollywood in manufacturing blockbuster entertainment.
The film opens with three adventurers entering a subterranean mausoleum. Through off-screen narration by Wang (Huang Bo, 黃渤), we learn that they are Mojin Xiaowei (摸金校尉), an ancient school of tomb raiders once commanded by Chinese emperors.
The story cuts to New York City in the late 1980s, where Wang and his two partners, Hu (Chen Kun, 陳坤) and Shirley (Shu Qi, 舒淇), now live, having retired from tomb raiding. Tired of hawking “Chinese treasures” in the city’s backstreet, Wang returns to his old trade by taking on a mission for a mysterious, wealthy businesswoman (Liu Xiaoqing, 劉曉慶), who wants an ancient meteorite called the Equinox Flower, which has the power to resurrect the dead and is believed to be buried in an ancient tomb of a Khitan princess in Inner Mongolia.
Photo courtesy of Vievision Pictures
The mission brings Wang’s mind back to 20 years ago, when he and Hu joined a communist youth group traveling through the vast steppes of Inner Mongolia, where Wuershan grew up, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Here, the country’s communist past serves as a source of ridicule and laughs, humorously rendered in a sequence in which the communist youths, determined to rid the masses of superstition and old customs, go on trashing whatever is deemed traditional and end up being slaughtered by an army of dead Japanese soldiers-turned-zombies in a crypt.
The expedition leads the heroes back to the exact site where the bloodshed took place two decades ago, where they will find out what awaits them in the crypt.
Knowledge of the Cultural Revolution is not required to enjoy Mojin, as the movie is made to engage a global audience. Cultural particulars are turned into plot gimmicks as Chinese emperors’ mausoleums become the playground for the modern action heroes, who use Bagua (八卦), or the eight trigrams, to solve mysteries and hunt treasures.
The movie is lavish, packed with eye-dazzling action and fantastic plots, making it feel right at home among the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider films. Wuershan’s visual panache renders the whole film a pure spectacle, especially with the underground mausoleum, where the bulk of the story takes place.
There are doses of gore and thrill thrown in, as the zombies look vivid and fearsome but quickly crumble when being hit as if they had stepped out of The Mummy series.
Shu makes a gorgeous action heroine. She is athletic, agile and plays it cool most of the time. But her love-hate pas de deux with Chen’s character is stiff and tiresome. The occasional outburst of whining and pouting makes her not quite up there with Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft.
Chen is cut out for a dashing action hero, albeit a rather indistinct one. Huang ends up stealing much of the attention with his strong presence, offering hyperactive comic relief along with his sidekick, played by Xia Yu (夏雨). The latter, however, carries a zaniness so overbearing that one wishes a zombie could knock him out and keep him unconscious till the end credits roll.
On a hillside overlooking Taichung are the remains of a village that never was. Half-formed houses abandoned by investors are slowly succumbing to the elements. Empty, save for the occasional explorer. Taiwan is full of these places. Factories, malls, hospitals, amusement parks, breweries, housing — all facing an unplanned but inevitable obsolescence. Urbex, short for urban exploration, is the practice of exploring and often photographing abandoned and derelict buildings. Many urban explorers choose not to disclose the locations of the sites, as a way of preserving the structures and preventing vandalism or looting. For artist and professor at NTNU and Taipei
March 10 to March 16 Although it failed to become popular, March of the Black Cats (烏貓進行曲) was the first Taiwanese record to have “pop song” printed on the label. Released in March 1929 under Eagle Records, a subsidiary of the Japanese-owned Columbia Records, the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) lyrics followed the traditional seven characters per verse of Taiwanese opera, but the instrumentation was Western, performed by Eagle’s in-house orchestra. The singer was entertainer Chiu-chan (秋蟾). In fact, a cover of a Xiamen folk song by Chiu-chan released around the same time, Plum Widow Missing Her Husband (雪梅思君), enjoyed more
Last week Elbridge Colby, US President Donald Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defense for policy, a key advisory position, said in his Senate confirmation hearing that Taiwan defense spending should be 10 percent of GDP “at least something in that ballpark, really focused on their defense.” He added: “So we need to properly incentivize them.” Much commentary focused on the 10 percent figure, and rightly so. Colby is not wrong in one respect — Taiwan does need to spend more. But the steady escalation in the proportion of GDP from 3 percent to 5 percent to 10 percent that advocates
From insomniacs to party-goers, doting couples, tired paramedics and Johannesburg’s golden youth, The Pantry, a petrol station doubling as a gourmet deli, has become unmissable on the nightlife scene of South Africa’s biggest city. Open 24 hours a day, the establishment which opened three years ago is a haven for revelers looking for a midnight snack to sober up after the bars and nightclubs close at 2am or 5am. “Believe me, we see it all here,” sighs a cashier. Before the curtains open on Johannesburg’s infamous party scene, the evening gets off to a gentle start. On a Friday at around 6pm,
RSS