Dressed in bright red, Michelle Yeoh (
Yeoh should be happy. For the past two weeks she and her boyfriend and co-producer, Thomas Chung, have been touring China's major cities from Beijing to Wuhan and Chengdu, promoting the film. The result looks satisfying. In the two weeks after its release in China, the film reached a box office tally of 17 million renminbi, which surpassed the Chinese box office sales of Spiderman and Star Wars: Episode II.
"My feelings shifted from being extremely nervous to excited and now I feel really happy and relaxed," Yeoh said at a press conference on Wednesday.
PHOTO: SHEN CHAO-LIANG, TAIPEI TIMES
Standing beside her, Pater Pau (
"She was the typical Chinese woman in Crouching Tiger, repressing her feelings towards her beloved and her anger towards her enemy," Pau said. "In Tomorrow Never Dies, she was too cool and serious." So in The Touch, Pau said the audience will see the true Michelle Yeoh, who likes to laugh and make jokes. There are also kisses with Ben Chaplin in the film.
The Touch is one of the few Hong Kong-produced films with a budget over US$20 million. Investors in the film include Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan. "Chinese filmmaking is now beginning to change its face from small-budget kung fu films to bigger and bigger productions," Pau said. "Touch is among the first ones to make this change," he added.
Helen Huang (黃寶雲), chairperson of Pandasia Entertainment, is the film's Taiwanese investor. Her company put up nearly one-third of the film's budget. "Enterprises in Taiwan do have the willingness and the vision to invest in films with international appeal," she said. "The film is a good example of this."
The Touch sees many former Crouching Tiger actors and crew members, including late Taiwanese actor Lung Sihung (郎雄), who came to fame playing the father figure in most of Ang Lee's (李安) films. The Touch was Lung's last film and perhaps his most difficult as, at age 72, he had to memorize his lines in English. He plays a Tibetan monk in the film.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
The Taipei Times last week reported that the Control Yuan said it had been “left with no choice” but to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the central government budget, which left it without a budget. Lost in the outrage over the cuts to defense and to the Constitutional Court were the cuts to the Control Yuan, whose operating budget was slashed by 96 percent. It is unable even to pay its utility bills, and in the press conference it convened on the issue, said that its department directors were paying out of pocket for gasoline
On March 13 President William Lai (賴清德) gave a national security speech noting the 20th year since the passing of China’s Anti-Secession Law (反分裂國家法) in March 2005 that laid the legal groundwork for an invasion of Taiwan. That law, and other subsequent ones, are merely political theater created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to have something to point to so they can claim “we have to do it, it is the law.” The president’s speech was somber and said: “By its actions, China already satisfies the definition of a ‘foreign hostile force’ as provided in the Anti-Infiltration Act, which unlike
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