Shiang-chyi Chen

  • Ming-liang Tsai – Ni na bian ji dian AKA What Time is it There? (2001)

    2001-2010ArthouseDramaMing-liang TsaiTaiwan

    When a young street vendor with a grim home life meets a woman on her way to Paris, they forge an instant connection. He changes all the clocks in Taipei to French time; as he watches François Truffaut’s “Les 400 Coups,” she has a strange encounter with its now-aging star, Jean-Pierre Leaud.Read More »

  • Cheng-sheng Lin – Fang lang AKA Sweet Degeneration (1997)

    Cheng-sheng Lin1991-2000ArthouseDramaTaiwan

    Quote:
    Chuen-Sheng is a young man fresh out of military service with dreams of making it as a musician. His sister Ah Fen, unhappily married, nurses a secret incestuous passion for him. While Chuen-Sheng steals money from his father and squanders it on roach-infested hotel rooms and cheap hookers, Ah Fen decides she can’t face her life any more and runs away.Read More »

  • Ming-liang Tsai – Hei yan quan AKA I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone [+Extras] (2006)

    2001-2010DramaMalaysiaMing-liang TsaiQueer Cinema(s)

    Forest fires burn in Sumatra; a smoke covers Kuala Lumpur. Grifters beat an immigrant day laborer and leave him on the streets. Rawang, a young man, finds him, carries him home, cares for him, and sleeps next to him. In a loft above lives a waitress. She sometimes provides care and attention. More violence seems a constant possibility. They find another man abandoned on the street, paralyzed. They carry him. While no one speaks to each other, sounds dominate: coughing, cooking, coupling, opening bags; music and news reports on a radio, the rattle and buzz of a restaurant. It’s dark in the city at night. We see down hallways, through doors, down alleys. Who sleeps with whom?Read More »

  • Ming-liang Tsai – Tian bian yi duo yun AKA The Wayward Cloud [+Extras] (2005)

    2001-2010DramaFranceMing-liang Tsai

    Quote:
    Hsiao-Kang, now working as a pornographic actor, meets Shiang-chyi once again. Meanwhile, the city of Taipei faces a water shortage that makes the sales of watermelons skyrocket.Read More »

  • Edward Yang – Du li shi dai AKA A Confucian Confusion (1994)

    1991-2000AsianComedyEdward YangTaiwan

    Quote:
    When I first came across ‘A Confucian Confusion’, I expected nothing much. I was wrong, very wrong. It turned out to be a great movie. On one of your ‘average’ days, go to a video store, then rent and watch it. I guarantee it will be the best thing on your day. (‘Average’ here means the rest of the days when you don’t win lotto or have a date of your life)

    The film looks at a sample of modern Taiwanese life. Edward Yang the director, who won some awards for his later film ‘Mahjong’, focuses at a different part of the taiwanese society. If in ‘Mahjong’ he tells the story through the darker gangsters-like fraction of the population, here he puts a light above a ‘whiter’ group of people, mid to upper class men and women trying to cope with the fast living in the money-driven, ever growing Taipei. And that’s all the film’s about, a window to some Taipei lives in particular and modern taiwan in general. A society as a result, not necessarily an effect, of the very old Confucian philosophy.Read More »

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