It’s a little late in the day, but it’s still Tuesday which means that I’m still on time with this blog. I like to give myself the whole day to get these done since sometimes I haven’t actually written anything when I wake up on Tuesday morning. This weekend I was so far up North that I didn’t even cell phone reception or an internet connection. You can forgive me if I was more concerned with lounging on a dock in the sun and drinking bourbon lemonade than I was with writing an blog for a few dozen people to read.
Please forgive me.
I beg of you.
Alright, we’re back to things about Taiwan that I wish I knew before getting there. The last time we discussed bringing water with you everywhere, not being afraid to sleep in sex hotels and also that fried chicken in Taiwan is amazing. What further adventures will we have this week?
Taiwan Has Some Cinematic History You’ve Never Heard About
While we were in the Beitou and Xinbeitou to enjoy the hotsprings, we found out about the fact that as Beitou grew in popularity (in large part due to the Japanese interest in the area due to its natural hotsprings, duh) it also became the backdrop for a number of films set in Taiwan. Even a bunch of popular songs in the past hundred years are basically just about how awesome Beitou is. Much like a lot of foreign market cinema with local appeal it seemed that a lot of these movies went for mass appeal and combined genres. So it wasn’t uncommon to have action and romance cross over (and maybe even comedy, without speaking the language it was hard to get a bead on if there was much comedy).
I tried really hard to remember some of the common traits that these movies shared, but I remember that they almost always had a protagonist who left his hometown, was reunited with a long-lost family member (often by discovering that they had matching birthmarks) and a scene where the love interest would pursue the protagonist (even if it meant ignoring all possible logic, like, being able to catch up to a train or something).
I can get behind basically any birthmark related storytelling. That’s really the one that stuck out for me. How common was birthmark related plot development that the people that put together a little display on the history of Taiwanese cinema felt the need to highlight it as an underlying trait of the entire country’s film output? Were audiences just like “oh man, I hope this movie has the old ‘birthmark twist’ in it, we love that one”.
Why don’t more American movies have matching birthmark story-lines? ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
