Jolin Tsai: Play (2014)

Jolin Tsai is a hugely popular Taiwanese recording artist, whose career has been peppered with smash hits, sold-out concert tours and constant Madonna-style image reinventions. As is often the case with North Asian celebrities, Tsai has expanded her performing career to incorporate modelling, consumer goods promotion, and acting - most recently providing the voice of Judy Hopps in the Chinese edition of Disney's Zootopia.

Play, released in 2014, is her most recent album to date. It is a collection of bright, superficial pop songs that was a huge success in her own country.

Given the right melody I can really engage with sugary, superficial pop music, and I had particularly enjoyed Tsai's earlier 2012 album Muse. Sadly Play does not match up. There are a few too many songs here that simply lack that ear worm quality that makes for great pop music. Asides from one highlight it is all just a bit too ordinary and disappointing.

Sleaze: A Glass of What Reminds Me of Lovesick Potions (2012)

Sleaze is a five-piece independent rock band from Taipei. Their debut album was released in September 2012, with a title that translates from Chinese into English as A Glass of What Reminds Me of Lovesick Potions. I assume that the band is now defunct: their Facebook page has not been updated in more than two years, and there doesn't seem to be any sign of a follow-up album or recent tours online.

If true, it's a real shame. This is a hugely enjoyable and inventive rock album that weaves together a broad range of styles and influences. It's certainly on the heavier side of rock music and regularly edges towards classic metal forerunners from the early 1970s, but then it also regularly throws in surprising elements including reggae and psychedelic rock. It throws all of these elements in together, sort of roughly blends them, and winds up with a distinctive tone of its own.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)

A run-down Taipei cinema screens its final movie: King Hu's legendary wuxia film Dragon Inn. While the film plays the cinema's disabled cashier (Shiang-chyi Chen) slowly goes about her work, young gay men awkwardly use the theatre as a place to hook up, and the cinema itself may be populated by ghosts.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a 2003 drama by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang. It is an odd little piece, told with a real minimum of drama and narrative. At the same time it is oddly compelling, like you are stepping into someone else's real life and not really being told a story at all. There's a concept in dining known as 'slow food', in which local ingredients and cooking methods are encouraged in defiance of the commercialised 'fast food' culture that dominates dining around the world. It makes me wonder if there is such a thing as 'slow cinema': a kind of film that wallows in its own local culture, and really takes its time to immerse into it rather than rush around telling a story with characters and a driving narrative. If there is such a thing, I think Goodbye, Dragon Inn might be a potential poster child.

Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above (2013)

There seems to be a specific sub-genre of documentary film dedicated to rolling aerial vistas of landscapes. Slow drifting shots of mountains and fields, crashing oceans, lush forests, and so on. They are usually edited together with rich musical scores, often-times ones based around world music. These films can be quite pretty to watch, but also relatively hollow and vacuous.

In a few months I am travelling on a holiday to Taiwan, and seeing there was a documentary feature titled Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above I figured I could get a head start in seeing what parts of the Taiwanese landscape would be worth visiting myself. The film opens pretty much exactly how one would expect it to: beautiful vistas of Taiwan's mountain ranges and thick forests. Lakes, rivers and waterfalls. Soporific orchestral music backs it as the helicopter-mounted camera captures the idyllic landscape, and a soothing voiceover waxing lyrical about the beauty of the natural world. Yes?

No!

Thunderbolt Fantasy: "Code of Umbrellas"

Dan Fei runs through the storm with her brother Heng. A group of swordsmen ambush them - they are after a legendary sword Fei carries - and while her brother is killed Fei manages to escape. She next runs into a travelling stranger, Bu Huan, who reluctantly defends her when the Xuan Gui Zong clan return to take the sword once and for all.

Thunderbolt Fantasy is a rather surprising new anime series. This 13-part series is a Japanese-Taiwanese co-production, one written by noted author and script writer Gen Urobuchi (Black Lagoon, Psycho Pass, Fate/Zero). It tells a typical Chinese wuxia adventure full of super-human sword-wielding vigilantes, rich and extensive back stories, and lengthy speeches and narration. It is full of portent and gravitas - so much, in fact, that it is often difficult to treat this first episode seriously.

Oh, and it's also performed in live-action with glove and rod puppets.

The Assassin (2015)

Yinniang (Shu Qi) was taken from her home at the age of ten and trained to become a master assassin. Now an adult, she fails to undertake her latest mission when she sees her target cradling his infant son. As penance she is ordered to the distant province of Weibo to kill its chief minister Tang Ji'an (Chang Chen) - a man to whom she was once betrothed.

Every few years a wuxia film breaks out internationally and becomes a critics' darling across Europe and North America. It started with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, which was soon followed by the likes of The House of Flying Daggers, Hero and The Curse of the Golden Flower. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin is the latest such acclaimed film, having been awarded Best Director at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. It is also the first new feature film from Hou in eight years, which has led to much pent-up demand for new work from one of Taiwan's most beloved directors.

The Assassin is an excellent film but, I suspect, a divisive one. Certainly anybody tempted in its direction by the promise of another Crouching Tiger is going to walk away deeply disappointed. It approaches the wuxia genre on its own terms, and tells its story in its own way.

Dragon Inn (1967)

At the height of the Ming Dynasty, the emperor's eunuch Tsao (Pai Ying) has executed his political rival General Yu, and exiled Yu's children from China. He then has second thoughts and, fearing a future reprisal from the children, sends a large contingent of his secret police to assassinate them. Tsao's men wait at the isolated Dragon Gate Inn, where their arrival coincides with that of three itinerant master warriors.

Dragon Inn is a 1967 Taiwanese wuxia film directed by King Hu. It remains quite a difficult film to find on home video, although Eureka Video in the UK is thankfully releasing a bluray edition this September. For many viewers it's sadly less well known than its two remakes: New Dragon Gate Inn (1992) and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate (2011). This is a deep shame, as Dragon Inn is not only a satisfying wuxia picture in its own right but also one of the most influential films ever made in the genre. If you have ever seen a Chinese period film with a master swordswoman, a fight in a roadside tea house, or a powerful and manipulative eunuch villain, then you pretty much have Dragon Inn to thank for it.

Cha Cha for Twins (2012)

Mini and Poni are twin sisters enrolled in their senior year of high school. They're both star players on the basketball team. When Mini begins to be pursued by one of the boys in their school, and then by a second who's confused Mini for Poni, Poni begins to crave a life for herself outside of her sister's shadow.

Cha Cha for Twins is a 2012 Taiwanese teen drama. It seems to get pitched mostly as a comedy, which I dispute: while there are plenty of laughs - okay, smiles - in the first half, it all gets rather melodramatic and serious by the end. It's best thought of as drama with light-hearted moments, rather than as a full-blown laugh riot.

Huang Pei-Chia does a sensational job playing both Mini and Poni. She's so good, in fact, that I was not aware while watching the film that one actor played both roles. The film is technically marvellous as well then, since the incorporation of both sisters into so many scenes and shots is done seamlessly. More surprising is that this was apparently the acting debut for Huang, who had previously only worked as a fashion model.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000)

In 2000, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon exploded across international movie screens like a firecracker, winning numerous awards and widespread critical acclaim, and earning US$213 million in the process. For many viewers it was their first (and in most cases I suspect only) glimpse of wuxia cinema, that specifically Chinese genre combining historical fiction, fantasy, martial arts and super-heroic swordplay.

It's been almost 15 years since its release, and the film impresses just as much as it did the first time around. This isn’t simply a great film, and it isn’t even just the most creatively successful wuxia film of all time – Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is one of the all-time best films in the history of world cinema.

The film focuses on two separated couples: in one case they are separated by class and distance, in another by an overwhelming fear of rejection.

Bad Girls (2012)

Teenage tomboy Ah Dan (Ella Chen) is an aggressive defender of young women throughout her rural town, beating senseless any man or boy she sees bullying or disrespecting girls. When Asia's most popular heartthrob chooses to shoot his latest romantic film at Dan's school, a string of mishaps sees Dan accidentally injuring the film's female lead and forced to take her place.

Bad Girls is a 2012 Taiwanese teen romantic comedy directed by Weng Jing-ting and starring Ella Chen and Mike He. As far as I'm aware it isn't available on home video in Australia - I reviewed it via a Hong Kong DVD.

Oh good grief this is a terrible movie, yet for some reason I couldn't stop watching it and enjoyed it immensely all the same. There are bits of the film that do genuinely work, and there are other bits that fail so profoundly that they make the jump from bad to excruciatingly bad and all the way to so-bad-it's-actually-perversely-good. Basically, if you're wondering whether or not it's worth tracking down and watching Bad Girls, answer this simple question: do you think it's likely you will enjoy a Taiwanese teen romantic comedy starring pop stars as high school students? If the answer is yes, then give it a shot. If the answer is no, or even an unenthusiastic 'maybe', then you should probably give Bad Girls a wide berth.

Life of Pi (2012)

I have not read Life of Pi, the widely acclaimed and bestselling 2001 novel by Yann Martel. I have, however, now seen its feature film adaptation of the same name, released in late 2012 and directed by Taiwan's Ang Lee. It is a superlative achievement in filmmaking. It takes a novel broadly claimed to be unfilmable and not only successfully films it but does so with aplomb.

It is a deliberately ambiguous film too. Basically what you get from Life of Pi largely depends upon what you bring to it yourself, and I think that makes it a very special motion picture indeed. To explain why that is, I shall have to discuss the movie's ending - keep that it mind if you continue reading but have not seen the film or (I assume) read the book.