Well, since I have so many entries in my Chinese site, and using categories alone cannot provide a fine-enough search results, most times it still give out dozens of pages and you have to walk through the titles to have the final result. If Pixnet could provide a in-site search engine, then everything will be solved. But the problem is, they don’t.

So after a bit of thoughts, I decided to make my own, since the BSP don’t provide it.

Well, what I mean by “make my own” is not like the “make my own” of those geeks…I don’t build one from scratch, instead I try to use Google…XD

Oh yes, since we are in the age of internet for years already, and there has been a existence called Google, which literally stands for “what you have thought about and will thought about has already been implemented by us and it’s free” XD, I can just use their service. And not to mention that they are still the one most powerful business in the searching area! What I’m looking for now is a search box, isn’t it?

So I applied my google account to “google custom search”, and followed the instructions for settings, after that paste the generated code onto the sidebar of my blog. Bah, it’s done. Though it’s not totally perfect(google sometimes indexed onto the trackback page instead of the entry page), it’s useful and better then nothing…

So there it is, the search box powered by google.

This excerpt actually comes from the same issue of TIME magazine as previous excerpt article. It’s actually because of this article that attracted me to pickup the magazine.

This article is about a German director, Werner Herzog, and is written by Richard Corliss.

Well, first let me speak of my understanding toward Werner Herzog.

I actually know not much about Herzog, his only two films that I have seen is Wheel of Time(2004) and The Wild Blue Yonder(2005). The former one was seen in 2004 on that year’s golden horse film festival, the latter one was seen 2005, also at golden horse film festival. Wheel of Time is a rather stable documentary about a Tibetan Buddhism ritual, he Herzog in the film acted as the narrator who is about to explore the myth of Tibetan Buddhism with the audience. Also he explains how does the Tibetan people think of time, space and life.

About the 2005 film, The Wild Blue Yonder…it’s a whole another story…orz I don’t know what to say about this film, it’s so…wild. Well, let me copy the film description from the festival guide first:

A group of astronauts are in a spacecraft circling the earth, which has become uninhabitable. The crew has to find a more hospitable place to live. A visitor from a far-off ocean planet called the Wild Blue Yonder shows how humans’ attempts to find a new home somewhere in space is doomed to failure. The space fantasy uses music and images to create an imaginary scenario that tells us to protect our most precious and irreplaceable possession – our planet.

(well, while I am reading through the 2005 festival guide book, I found that many of the films I’ve seen seems so unfamiliar…I just can’t recall what had been shown on the screen…)

…okay, so who can tell me what the film will be like after reading this “description”? I guess no one can. Anyway, this is a very…”special” film, if it has to be categorized, it probably will be a “sci-fi” film, yet it literally used no SFX at all, and no artificial set either. It is a very “realistic” sci-fi film…orz More precisely speaking, this film is more like Herzog’s fantasy dream. He uses a arbitrary way to nominate characters and places shown in the film, despite it might be another thing in the real life…Okay, so do you start to understand what he has done in this film? I think I will tell a little more…

(spoilers below)

Basically in this film, The Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog just had one person standing in front of camera and started to tell the story, saying that the man is actually an alien from outer space, and some wreckage to be “the alien outpost on earth”…They came to earth wishing to find a place for immigration, but it failed, and the person standing in front of the camera is said to be the last alien on earth. And then, the camera turns to the memoir of that alien’s home planet, the Wild Blue Yonder. But here what Herzog actually shown on the screen is some underwater footage…video recordings of divers in deep ocean under ice, pretending that the ice is the cloud on Wild Blue Yonder, blue water is the air, and sea floor is the ground…And describing “the diver leaves the sea” as “an alien leaves its planet”…Arghhhhhhhhh! As the screening is over, everyone walking out of the theater looked weird…and bothersome…what one can only say is “Wow.”

(end of spoiler)

Well, this is my shallow understanding of Werner Herzog. And none of the films I saw is his representing work! Anyway, from these works, I realized that he is a person who can do serious documentaries like Wheel of Time, yet can overcome the circumstantial obstructions with outrageous ways…only to tell a story. So if one wants to categorize him, Herzog will definitely be a ununderstandable master.

Okay, so here is the TIME excerpt:

THE BIG PICTURE: Too Risky for Hollywood.

Werner Herzog, the world’s most dangerous director, makes his first studio film in two decades.

by Richard Corliss

Directors like to think of themselves as adventurers: taking big-budget risks, leading actors and technicians into the artistic unknown, often shooting in faraway locations. But no filmmaker can match Werner Herzog for inspiring recklessness. The German director’s movie sojourns take him not just to remote corners of Peru, Alaska and Thailand but also to the uncharted interior of man’s highest, most lunatic dreams. In a 46-year career of great fiction films(Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Heart of Glass; Nosferatu; Fitzcarraldo) and in a string of amazing, hallucinatory documentaries(The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, The White Diamond, Grizzly Man), Herzog, 64, has trekked into the emotional wilderness to capture on film humanity’s heart of darkness, heart of hope.

His stature as his generation’s most daring, most distinctive filmmaker and one of its signature eccentrics does not automatically endear Herzog to Hollywood. Though estimable actors from Claudia Cardinale to Tim Roth have graced his films and through in the late ’70s he had a project (Fitzcarraldo) that was to be produced by Francis Ford Coppola and star Jack Nicholson, Herzog knows that in the U.S. the big-money guys are as averse to risk as he is addicted to it.

So it’s a treat to see that his latest film, Rescue Dawn, has a kind-of star and a real actor, Christian (Batman) Bale, in the lead role and is being released by MGM/UA. The financing came from an unusual source: a company headed by NBA power forward Elton Brand and a nightclub impresario. Not exactly the most experienced cadre of producers.

But the chances Herzog takes on finances are nothing compared with his directorial appetite for catastrophe. Telling him something’s impossible is like inviting Paris Hilton to a party. He’ll be on the next flight to Doomsville, as when he read that a volcano was to erupt on Guadeloupe; off he went to tempt death and came back with the spectacular documentary La Soufrière. On the Amazon epic Fitzcarraldo, he took his crew hundreds of miles from the nearest city and has them lug a 290-ton riverboat overland and up steep hills. He found a suitably lush location on the Amazon and ran into the longest dry spell in the region’s history. “I souldn’t make movies anymore,” he said in Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams. “I should go to a lunatic asylum. This i not what a man should do with his life.”

But he keeps doing it, and keeps demanding nearly as much of his actors as of himself. He hypnotized the actors in Heart of Glass. He cast Bruno S., who had spent decades in mental institutions, as the star of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek. When Nicholson backed out of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog got Jason Robards, who contracted amoebic dysentery and was forced to quit the shoot. (Mick Jagger, another member of the cast, also had to leave.) Herzog wound up with Klaus Kinski, an actor so extreme and unruly, he was his own volcano. They made five films together; Herzog’s memoir movie about Kinski is called My Best Fiend.

Bale isn’t nuts like Kinski, but he has the insane dedication Herzog asks of his performers; he lost 15 kg for his role in Rescue Dawn. The movie is a remake, in a way, of Herzog’s 1997 documentary Little Dieter Loves to Fly, about a German boy, Dieter Dengler, whose home in the Black Forest was bombed by U.S. planes; he caught a glimpse of the pilot, “like a vision … like an imaginary being,” and decided that he wanted to fly–a theme in many Herzog docs. Dengler went to the U.S., joined the navy and was shot down over Laos in 1966. He endured dreadful torture as a POW, escaped with a friend (played by Steve Zahn) and was finally rescued.

Rescue Dawn hasn’t quite the intensity or veracity of Little Dieter. Somehow, hearing Dengler testify to the atrocities he survived is more vivid than watching an excellent cast re-enact them. But he Herzog team’s devotion to the horror of the story, and to Dengler’s unkillable spirit, is gratifying. Rescue Dawn is a tale of heroism untainted by political skepticism. In an age when U.S. soldiers are seen as villains or victims, the movie offers a GI who bravely, or madly, simply refuses to die.

Herzog is another of those extraordinary creatures. He wants to fly blind and see clearly. That way a man can make art as strange or twisted or ennobiling as the lives of the people he puts into his remarkable moves.

for reference:
Chinese version of this article

I originally write this kind of articles out of a thought that to broaden the view and mind of my Chinese blog’s readers in Taiwan, since most of them are too lazy to read in English thus will not read international news media like Reuters, TIME or Wall Street Journal, yet local news media are poor on international stories. They care only about local news, as a small country media should be, most newspapers have only 1 page of international coverage, not to mention the blood-lust news channels that only reports bizarre or so-called “soft” news.

So after some time point, I started to translate some interesting stuff I read on these international media, mostly TIME magazine, into Chinese, for my Chinese blog readers. So for what I am doing now is actually total redundant, since all people who visit this site could perfectly read through the paragraphs on those international media sites, having the articles excerpted again will hardly improve the views of my readers here. Not to mention that I might violate the copyright laws, haha.

But at last I decided I will still do a English version of such articles. Since having these stuff excerpted will let my readers know what kind of things interest me, and for what do I care about. So here is this weeks briefing excerpt, from 2007.7.16.’s TIME magazine:

[1]
Media Watch: Good Morning, Tehran

WATCH OUT, CNN? On July 2, Iran launched Press TV, an international satellite-news channel in English. The Station will present newscasts–with an Iranian spin, no doubt– and reports from its 26 correspondents in cities like Beirut and Gaza City as well as New York, Washington and London. Newcomers to the 24-hour English-language news market since 2005 include Russia Today, France 24 and al-Jazeera International.

[2]
Artifact: Gandhi’s Last Lament

THE MISSIVE Mohandas Gandhi’s final letter before his 1948 murder was to be auctioned off in London on July 3.

A NATIONAL TREASURE? After delicate negotiations, the document will instead be heading home to a national archive in India.

PLEA FOR UNITY The letter, written to an Indian newspaper, begs Indians to eschew religious violence and warns that the millions of Muslims who still called India home could “become aliens in their own land”– a concern as pressing now as it was six decades ago.

[3]
Lexicon

commute

DEFINITION
v: To reduce a criminal penalty

CONTEXT
Instead of going for a full-fledged pardon, President Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence, leaving the fines and criminal record intact but keeping him out of prison.

USAGE
Commutations often have qualifiers. Nixon reduced Jimmy Hoffa’s jail term in 1971, provided the Teamster didn’t run the union for 10 years.

pardon

DEFINITION
v: To completely forgive a crime

CONTEXT
Cliton notoriously issued 140 pardons on his last day in office, including one to tax evader Marc Rich–whose lawyer at the time just happened to be Scooter Libby.

USAGE
Bush’s father has given the fewest pardons since Franklin Pierce, but W. isn’t far behind, with 113 in two terms.

[4]
World Spotlight: Hamas’ Next Move

The photo op of Hamas leaders with a free and smiling Briton–BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, released after 114 days of Gaza captivity–is, among other things, a huge publicity coup for Hamas and its leaders, Ismail Haniyeh. It allows the embattled Haniyeh to show he can deliver positive results in his new role as the top authority in the Gaza Strip and to say, with some legitimacy, that he can bring stability back to Gaza’s lawless streets.

Johnston’s release was won through strong-arm tactics. A senior Hamas militant told TIME that Johnston’s kidnappers, the Army of Islam, were made an offer they couldn’t refuse: either they let the Briton go, or they would be hunted down and killed. The group, linked to the powerful Gaza Dogmush clan and its coterie of gunrunners and criminals, had its compound surrounded by 6000 Hamas gunmen in the 48 hours before Johnston’s release.

Freeing Johnston, say Palestinian analysts, may help pave the way toward the release of another Gaza hostage, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, because the Army of Islam is among the militant groups that helped kidnap Shalit a year ago. But he would probably be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, and Israeli officials must first overcome their aversion to dealing with Hamas, a group they still brand as “terrorists.”

One reporter who most likely will not be there to cover a possible Shalit release is Johnston, who plans on taking a much deserved “break” from Gaza. Says Johnston: “I literally dreamt many times of being free and always woke up back in that room. And now it really is over, and it really is indescribably food.”

by Tim McGirk

for reference:
chinese version of this article: [0728] 本週的 TIME 簡報

Though I’m in a lag right now, but on last Saturday, which is June 16th, the animated film that I have written the longest review for, “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time”(時をかける少女 / tokiwokakerushoujo), has won this year’s Annecy animation award, the biggest animation film festival and award.

The feature film distinction award goes to tokikake!!!
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat!!!!!!!!!

This probably means that I can see tokikake again in this year’s Taipei International Animation Festival, lol.

P.S. The film “Free Jimmy”, which attended last year’s golden horse film festival, also wins best feature in Annecy, congratulations too.

And finally, entries like this cannot be pressed without a “totoro style” ending, that is, pictures of frontpage girls. (LOL) But…I don’t have any on my hand so…let’s just use the ones of film director, Mamoru’s instead…orz Well at least, we can see Makoto there in the background…

Extended Reading:(Japanese content)

ゆるーく台湾写真、あとアヌシー出品とか(Contains photographs shot by people from Kadokawa Heritage Film in Taiwan about Tokikake)
アヌシー、賞もらった！(追記あり)
アヌシーの写真いろいろ

Review Reading:(Chinese content)

A blue tale of youth with laugh and tears: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

Well, the long awaited (umm, maybe nobody except me longed XD) template update has finally be done!

After yesterday’s “vibrant writings” on our photographic society’s annual exhibition, I found that it seems my “writing mode” has been switched on. While I should start focusing on writing my thesis proposal, I opened Firefox and logged onto this very blog again, trying to add an analytic script / program to it, due to the inability for wordpress.com blogs to be added into Google Analytics……

So, well, I have done some surveys ahead, on which counter should be used. And from some google searches that it turns out the seemingly most popular hit-counter / analytics hybrid, SiteMeter‘s analyzer will include a third-party code which is not intended for collecting analytic report data. Some sites reports this as “SiteMeter has become SpyMeter”. Well, since I use AdBlock Plus in my Firefox, so if this is case, SiteMeter will not be an option.

So what’s the second choice? Someone suggested that StatCounter might be an alternative choice. So I registered it, and successfully installed it onto my wordpress.com sidebar, with the W3C compliant option on. Though the recent 500 detailed visits log seemed to be too small (for my pixnet site), yet my wordpress.com site (the one will be using this analytic tool) has only 300 pageviews over one month. Seems the 500 quota is not a problem for this site.

And then, I recalled that knight has another kind of statistical counter on his blog, it’s called “SEO-Stats”. Compared with other tools like Google Analytics or StatCounter, this one does not need you to install any javascript into your page. Instead, it calls to a php file on SEO-Stats’ page, which makes this analysis simpler yet safer. No registration needed, and it remembers your all-time visitor numbers! But it has only one problem, the abbreviations. This SEO-Stats is written by a Japanese fellow and does not contain any further information about the abbreviations he used in the statistics in English. It’s all Japanese. So for who cannot read Japanese, all these abbreviations without explanation should be confusing. Thus to whom may concern, I guessed the abbreviations in the SEO-Stats box out from the Kanji and Katakana in SEO-Stats site. They stood for the following:

GIP: Google Indexed Pages
GBL: Google Back Links
YIP: Yahoo! Indexed Pages
YBL: Yahoo! Back Links
MIP: MSN Indexed Pages
MBL: MSN Back Links
TUV: Today’s Unique Visitors
TPV: Today’s Page Views
YUV: Yesterday’s Unique Visitors
YPV: Yesterday’s Page Views
AUV: All-time Unique Visitors
APV: All-time Page Views

So that is the story of the new badges and counters on my sidebar now. Along with the PageRank checker and feedburner subscriber buttons installed earlier, they now are in a quite harmonious state, and looks nice also. Besides that, I registered del.icio.us and added the del.icio.us widget, and tag cloud at the bottom.

Okay, so now my sidebar looks “okay”, and my header starts to be “not okay”. But since I’m so lazy a person, and this site is content-oriented (under my definition…), I do not want to write my CSS from scratch. And since K2-lite is a good theme, I’ll just keep it. If it’s possible I won’t even change the font’s colors! So I started looking for anything looked blueish in my photo archive…and fortunately, I found several in my recent works. Thanks Matt that wrote a crop tool in wordpress.com, I just simply uploaded the image and done a perfect crop on-site. No photoshop needed :p

So this is the end of this page-long narration. All I wanna say is, doesn’t this site looks much more better now? XD

Yes, it has. And it has already begun for days……

The original idea for this year’s exhibition title is something like “the other part is desire”, and yet it is formulated in Chinese in the first place. So even though “the other part is desire” is more intuitive and accurate, our official title is something like “Lust <- Complementary” or “Lust, Counterpart”, in order to be more rhetoric and formal. And it looks much cooler too, ha!

Well, in fact the official opening time for this exhibition is Monday, June 11th, but due to the all-time same old “tradition” of photoclub, the schedule delayed and delayed and delayed. So the “real” opening time (i.e. when the artworks are really ready to be shown) is last Friday, June 15th. Yet my last year’s works are not even reviewed and picked, not to say be printed out or finely framed…orz My consecutive record of joining the annual exhibition from 2002 seems coming to an end, quite pitiful though. But umm, if loosely speaking, in this year’s “common creation zone” (I cannot recall precisely from which year we started this, but probably from the year mari was the curator of the exhibition), we have two large scale installations, one of them is my idea, the other one is partially mine also. And I also supervised the actual construction too. (the labor work is done by others) So since I got my ideas in it, by loose definition(i.e. not constrained to photograph), I joined this year’s exhibition…

Anyway, murmuring is over. This year, because of our co-advisor, Ya-Ying Cheng, wishes the exhibition to be presented in a more formal way, so I take quasi-MOMA/MOCA standards for exhibition hall arrangement. The first most thing I regard is the name tag of the artworks. So as I consider these two gigantic installations as my “children”, I personally wrote the following statements for each work:

***

Photographic Society

Lust, Counterpart (1)
June, 2007

Mirror, curtain, paper frame installation

People, human body and brain are the origin and bearer of lust and desire. No matter what kind of lust it is, strive for survive, gluttony, impulse to shop, sex and love, everything comes from man itself. In this large installation, the artists tried to transform the eigen part of this exhibition hall, which is the large mirror, into an installation. The space confined by the black curtains comprised literally nothing, i.e. it is inorganic. Yet if an audience enters this space, it would immediately contain one and only one organic body, the audience himself, which has the capacity to spring and carry (out) lust. Being inside this installation, the audience could only see the image of himself in the mirror. Through the paper frames, the viewer is framed and becomes a part of this installation. The viewer became the viewed, and the lust being originated and carried deep inside the body (of the viewer), just as it recalled the title of this exhibition—“Lust is the Counterpart”.

(Ideas & description by Albert Yi-Ming Chou)

***

Photographic Society

Lust  Counterpart (2)
June, 2007

Bed, torn pornography, white paper with framed photographs installation

Sex is the basal lust incorporated in our instinct to live. Without sexual intercourse, man could not reproduce and will become extinct. But in the Bible, Old Testament, Catholic doctrine describes non-reproductive and non-marital sex as one of the 7 sins. Thus “sex” is repressed. And in most cultures, manners and etiquettes require people not to talk or do sex, this elemental desire, in public. Neither can do it without embarrassment nor feel awkward. This makes man being estranged from one’s very own body. And bed, being the furniture which people mainly sleep on, is the major place where sexual actions occur. As these two actions (sex and sleep) often take place at same location, the word “sleep” itself become synonymous to sexual intercourse under most circumstances. Base on this like between sleep and sex, bed itself became a symbol for sexuality. This installation is an implementation of this metaphor, artists separates the space within the four pillars and outside with yellow tapes. Within, one half of the floor is covered by white papers and the other part is covered with pornographies torn from magazines. These two parts strongly contrasts with each other both in vision and implication―white paper stands for pureness and pornography represents lust. This contrast becomes confrontation when the two different parts meet under the bed: though the bed is seemingly peaceful, underneath is actually very contentious. Besides, this white part also represents emptiness, which could be viewed as the counterpart of “the other part”. And it’s empty so whoever the viewer is, one can fill in the correct “this part” for himself. Above the bed are the dedicated common works from photographers to this exhibition. The lust described earlier gathered from the floor, through the bed, and eventually ascend into the air.

(Description written by Albert Yi-Ming Chou)

***

On typeface choosing, I selected Kai for Chinese, Palatino Linotype for English. (this is actually the same typeface used in Art Institute of Chicago name tags) Bold for artist’s name, italic for artwork name. Except for the descriptions are 11pt. in size, I used 12pt. size typeface elsewhere.

It is of course all-bilingual (which give the MOMA/MOCA feel XD), for Chinese introductions please refer to this article.

Well, the Chinese ones were done in minutes, but I got stuck on “translating” into the English version. It’s mostly because I don’t know the English accordant part of the Chinese phrases used in cultural studies, yet I did not prepare for GRE, so I know nothing about those bypath words…without those rhetorics, one cannot write a so-called “good” cultural study essay. Anyways, I switched back and forth between Word window and online dictionary, considering which word is more proper more precise for the context. After 6 hours of work, I finally stitched up the pieces and done the translation…so tiresome…It seemed translating from English into Chinese is easier for me = =”

Supplementary Reading:

Chinese version(zh-TW) of this article.

Oh no, the “Tinky Winky is brilliant and bright” we are talking about here has absolutely no connection with this article nor this site. XD

This “Tinky Winky is brilliant and bright” is basically a news brief, or more precisely, a verbatim from this issue(June 11, 2007) of Time magazine. The original excerpt is like this:

‘I noticed [Tinky Winky] has a lady’s purse, but I didn’t realize he’s a boy.’
Ewa Sowinska, Poland’s government-appointed children’s rights watchdog, announcing plans to investigate whether the Teletubbies promote homosexuality. The plan was dropped a day later.

Basic Knowledge:(may contain Chinese characters)

Showing off!!!PS3 Hands-on!!!
What actually has “Big-Site-Tinky-Winky” done?

Comments in viewing order:

1. Clerks 2: traditional American plot, happy ending.
2. Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema: well-made stable documentary.
3. The Ring Finger: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes without ornamental scenes.
4. Digital Shorts Competition C: (n/a)
5. Linda Linda Linda: popular & predictable plot, Kashii Yuu & songs are GREAT.
6. Scent of Thai Male: totally experimental. rated X only because genital scenes.
7. Mind Game: early Mushi-Production style; unclear ending; causality scene to dense.
8. Cream Lemon: runaway part is weird.
9. Ramblers: Japanese style ordinary; structure & narration highly finished; powerful ending.
10. Waiter: Good(but not perfect) metaphysical plot. eeeee part is so good, and so does the Japanese; Leading actor not doing much acting.
11. The Caiman: bravo! viva Nanni Moretti. A harsh left-wing critic. He still can’t resist having a role.
12. Princess: A high level monk’s revenge.
13. The Postmodern Life of My Aunt: lively characters: good script & good actors.
14. Klimt: 120% stream of consciousness; imaginary dialog with self; viewing need clear concentration.
15. A Comedy of Power: Chabrolish film; script not as powerful as The Flower of Evil; no beginning nor ending.
16. Miss Little Sunshine: pure emotion that sells well.(this is what Hollywood does) conventional American popular plot, yet structurally & narratively mature; grandpa is good.
17. Love Sick: unclear & confusing on brother’s part.
18. This Film is Not Yet Rated: Great! should dig out more info, file a law suit or so.(like Michael Moore)
19. Fear X: Is Peter real or just imaginary?
20. Pingpong: bravo incest!!(both hands up)
21. Free Jimmy: fairly stable story line.
22. The Journey: first half: very primitive narration, not until the latter half it became more modern; music is undispensible in India films, thus too purposely.
23. Hazy Life: flat life glimpse.
24. Last Days: sleeping. Very Gus Van Sant: an acted documentary.
25. Su-Ki-Da: perfect in composition, but scored 0 in plot. a so slow love story, yet not as slow as Bela Tarr’s attempts. not to the extreme caused its failure.
26. Suite Dreams: nice multi-character comedy: the most important thing for watching movies is fun.
27. Time: every normal film has to have an abnormal character.(neo European films excluded)
28. Paprika: cannot understand ending, else fairly good.
29. Scrap Heaven: hentai enough. wanna punch Odagiri Joe badly. viva Kuriyama Chiyaki!!
30. The Minder: final climax is GOOD.
31. Tough Enough: somewhat ordinary & flat teenager film.
32. A Curtain Riser: a talkative dialectic.
33. Dans Paris: slept over 2/3 … similar to Francois Ozon films.
34. Shortbus: traditional growing-up film plot. happy ending. theatrical metaphor(blackout) rethink the life you’re living. about what’s really the truth beneath.
35. Days of Glory: Good Job. French version of Band of Brothers, Save Private Ryan Good start for understanding racial problems in France.
36. Allegro: animated parts are good. narration is similar with previous film, but did not surpass it.
37. Frozen City: wanna punch the neighbor and his wife. does every northern European film has to be this blue? suicide predictable but its failure unpredictable.
38. Lunacy: half animation half movie; full of madness; half truth is a lie. cutie meats.
39. Breakfast on Pluto: a lovely drag-queen queer cinema.
40. The Bothersome Man: Good Job. both good and bad for the ending; mayor of hell is interesting, and so is killing oneself on the rail.
41. Always–Sunset on Third Street: tear-making popular plot. even making tears with very first music.(and I can recognize Ueno Station…)
42. The Science of Sleep: so cute! animations’ good.
43. Taxidermia: why pig? meat scene is in par with Lunacy; last scene shocking, taxidermizing self is cool!
44. Candy: too orthodox(about drug) but realistic. predictable A-B-C structure.

Yes, it is, the Taipei Film Festival is coming again.

The focusing city this year is Copenhagen, Denmark, so we could expect a lot of Danish film this year. Speaking of Danish films, they always give me some sort of sense that “all northern Europe people are nuts”…since the northern European films that I saw these two years nearly all of them are heavy, and extremely silent to some extent. Not only the film itself oppresses the audiences, characters within the film are also under immense pressure. It’s like that they are all deeply sunken to the bottom of a heavy borderless sea of pressure. So it is not surprising at all that literally all characters in these films are “weird”, or shall I say, mad. They are all crazy within, every smear of smile you see on their face are somewhat skewed, lean toward another end. Strangeness. You don’t know why someone did something, and you don’t know what he will do next, mostly horrible things, ones that will make your scalp tingle. Yet northern Europe has the most stable and richest society / social system on the world, maybe it is this peacefulness that caused the very bottom human nature has no room to breath, therefore people became not human. Being distorted, human are not human anymore…

But, well, after watching some Canadian movies last year also in the Taipei Film Festival, I started to suspect that whether living beyond some latitude will make you strange…orz since there are also similar freaking distortions seen in Canadian films.

They are all just people around us, but they are doing freaking, horrible thing that only nuts would ever do.

***

As the head of department of culture affairs changed from Liao Hsien-Hao to Lee Yong-Ping, I really don’t have much faith in the Taipei Film Festival afterwards…but anyway, films will be shown this year is more likely to be dealt long before Lee Yong-Ping gets her job, so I don’t think there would be much interference. Also, according to historical experiences, who had more influence would be the chairman or the member of the festival committee, i.e. people like Yu Huei-Jen or Wen Tien-Hsian.

Another thing just come into my mind is that it seemed that department of culture affairs of Taipei city government wanted to make Taipei “the movie city of Taiwan”, or some kind of cultural metropolis with the notion that “Taipei equals movie”. But according to some *keyman*, Taipei as the largest city in Taiwan, along with Taipei county, they possess 1/3 of Taiwan’s population, such populational metropolis must be cultural plural. Thus, Taipei could have many impressions, but it can never “equals to something”, since it’s so immense and plural. If you want to build this “A equals B” impression on some city, it must not be a big one. Only a small place could achieve this, like Hsinchu to be equated with IT industry and Edinburgh to be equated with its art festival. If it’s possible, I want Hsinchu to be the movie city here in Taiwan…this is just another story.

Anyways, I decided to go for the festival passport this year, since I have seen more then 20 films last year. With a festival passport, one can “cash-in” 4 tickets per day, and this is very good deal for movie freaks like me. BUT!!! BUT!!! the only place that sells this festival passport is Eslite bookstore Dueng-Nan store, the No.1 battlefield of Goldenhorse Film Festival, place filled of literate man. Nonetheless, the festival passport is a limited release…only 150 passes are issued.

So, please wish me luck.

I will have to depart tomorrow 6:30 in the morning…and estimated arrival on Dueng-Nan Eslite is 8am, an whole day stay is expected = =”

UPDATE: 23:03

After all, I went out at 7am, and arrived at Dueng-Nan Eslite at 8:30. It turned out that I ranked around 170-180…
So I got NOTHING. If I went out as I planned, I might have gotten the last pass…it’s such a pity.
(and I went to buy single tickets, it cost me near 5000 TWD, almost 2.5 times expensive…)

Supplemental:

Taipei Film Festival Official Blog(it is even richer in content than theOfficial Website…the official website looks like being abandoned while only half constructed）

Last Sunday, as Mother’s Day, we went to lunch for celebrating my grandma’s Mother’s Day. Me, my mom, my dad and 2 of my uncles all came. After we finished our meal, one of my uncles found a small lemon tree planted by the place we parked, and there were several 1 or 2 instar caterpillar of Papilio xuthus(pdf) on it.

The actual colors of the insect were not as dark as the colors seen on the photograph, probably because it was at the middle of the day. The sun was so shiny that the camouflage colors became lighter, somewhat near orange. With a little white spot in the middle, it’s such a cutie little worm.

My uncle picked a lemon leaf with a caterpillar on it off, and asked me: “Do you wanna have a swallowtail butterfly?” I didn’t really think much, but a question “so where should I find lemon leaves to feed them?” once flashed by my mind, yet it did not persist. My mom even made a paper box for the lemon leaves and the caterpillar. Although the paper box seemed not quite “right”…since she did not make one for years, and forgot how to make one. But anyway, under this kind of circumstances, I took the worm, and even picked 3 leaves as for its dinner.

There are even one 5 instar big caterpillar on that small lemon tree. This reminds me the one that I found on my citrus. It did not have the chance to get metamorphosis and got blew off the roof by mad wind. My uncle touched that 5 instar caterpillar with a leaf, and it stretched its red osmaterium badly for releasing smelly odor.

That night after I went home, I found the little bug is gone. What I only saw is a bunch of tiny excrements lying on the paper box, but no trace for the bug itself. Finally, I saw him lying on the edge of the paper box. I firstly thought that it traveled there only because that he did not want to eat what I gave him, but eventually I found out that it seemed to be his habit to rest on something’s edge, vertically.

And two days went by.

I was so busy these two days, so what I have only done was that looking that whether the little bug had escaped form the paper box, and it didn’t. I only *acknowledged* that although it traveled form this side of the box to that side, it did not eat the lemon leaves I picked for him on the other day. Without noticing that the lemon leaves had already dried out due to the enormously hot weather, it has now become so dry and hard so that this little worm cannot have a bite in any way.

But not until tonight, I have not really being conscious of this. It is just a worm before 2 instar. So after consulting one “expert”, I was introduced to another expert, who told me that I can find some leaves of family Rutaceae for it. From his knowledge there are several Tetradium glabrifolium individual behind the Humanity and Social Science building, right beside the “butterfly pathway”. I hurried up there, with only a small flashlight in my hand, I searched and searched on the muddy road back there. It was raining, so there were so many giant African snails crawling on the road. I stepped on one when I was trying to find the entrance to the pathway, I can only comfort myself with “giant African snails are bad for our eco-system…it’s bad it’s bad it’s bad…orz” and tried not to step on any else more since that. After calling “the expert”, confirming that I was definitely on the pathway, I started to walk step by step, carefully ahead.(have you ever walked in the woods alone in the dark?) Through trees not so dense that you cannot see through, I arrived at the target small bridge, and found the two individual Tetradium glabrifolium proximately. The other expert said that I should take a part of the branch back home and soak it in the water so it will last longer, and also longer the small worm can have it. So I carefully picked two new shoots, and another larger younger-looking leaf. Carefully took them off the plant, and put them into my pocket. Promptly getting the leaves, I headed back home, and still watching out for the giant African snails on the road…

Back home, I put the little guy onto the new leaves I just brought in. He sniffed and sniffed, waving his head around the new leaf, seemed that he will start a feast, but he did not. He just didn’t eat. Stood still. “What should I do…?” I had no idea. Although yet another expert said that plants from Citrus genus should be all over the campus, and founding one should not be hard at all. But for a person like me who scores zero in plant identification, it such a hard task to find one during the middle of the night…So till this point, there was only one thing that I can do.

So I drove the worm back his original home at 2:40 in the morning.

Though it looked sleepy and not in the mood of moving right now, so I cannot relocate him to the back of the leaves, the only thing that I can do was to have him on the leaf I had at that time, and put that leaf onto one of the lemon branches. Hoping that tomorrow after he wakes up, he will find the long-accustomed lemon leaf smell is just beside him, and starts to have a feast. Also, hoping him not to be spotted by an early bird, nor being blow off to the ground, since there are so many ants around.

Hoping you might someday become a butterfly, having a lot of babies, and our babies could see your babies too.

So it comes to an end of the story of the small swallowtail butterfly.

After that, I went back to school. I was trying to find the so-called “easy to find” Citrus genus tree around the food court, but I failed. Seeing nothing ever near the characteristics described by the other expert…And finally, after I gave up, I went standing by the poster wall and looked the posters newly posted on it.

There is the graduation photo of class ’07.

I looked carefully, class after class. Ones that I am familiar with, ones that I am not. Wish, Sarah, don’t forget to wind up a little bit. The 2 classes that I am familiar with, I looked at the faces so carefully as I was going to identify something out. I was so afraid that I missed any of them. Mari, machare, kido. Symthie, thankwei and persephone. There are so many that I cannot bear to miss. The photo of Humanity and Social Science department was just above Life Science department, I just want to steel that part home, though the way Yao looked was so awkward. I just don’t want to let you go, really, don’t want to let you go.

I saw you came, and now seeing you go. I promised myself that I shall not cry, but now my tears are just about to fall.

I loved you so much, don’t leave. Please.