Critic’s Notebook: Casting Light on Taiwanese Cinema

 

That country was even represented at the multiplex, where “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” from the Taiwan-born Ang Lee, was becoming the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history. (Unless you count “The Passion of the Christ.”)

But the moment didn’t linger. Mr. Yang, who died in 2007, never made another movie. Mr. Hou and Mr. Tsai remained famous all over the festival circuit, while Mr. Lee made most of his movies in the United States. A domestic box-office slowdown in Taiwan that began in the mid-1990s lasted well into the new century.

Taiwan Stories, through May 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater, is an attempt to shine some light on this vital national cinema, which has operated in the shadow of Hong Kong, China, Japan and, more recently, South Korea and Thailand. Of the 20 movies in this series nearly half are from the 1960s and ’70s (including the martial-arts blockbuster “A Touch of Zen,” made in Taiwan by the Hong Kong-based director King Hu), while a handful represent the commercial resurgence of the domestic film industry during the last three to four years.

The biggest attraction, though, is the selection from the New Wave filmmakers, which avoids the familiar, benchmark works of Mr. Yang, Mr. Hou and Mr. Tsai in favor of earlier movies that are less known and rarely screened in America. Here you can see them working out a hybrid of kitchen-sink naturalism and moody, romantic melodrama that each would take in his own direction in years to come.

The film with the most historical interest, especially for cinephiles, will be “In Our Time” (Thursday, 1 and 6:15 p.m.), a four-director omnibus considered one of the earliest examples of the New Taiwan Cinema; it was released in 1982, around the time of the first stirrings of political reform in what had been a repressive, totalitarian state.

The second segment of that film, about a teenage girl and her interest in the college student who rents her family’s spare room, was Mr. Yang’s debut as a writer and director. It’s a period piece, like many other 1980s Taiwan films, made when commenting directly on contemporary life or politics was a dangerous business. The girl’s older sister listens to the Beatles (“Hello Goodbye”) on her transistor radio, and the presence of twangy British and American pop on the soundtrack is another New Wave trope.

“In Our Time” has some style, but it’s a long way from the Altman-like complexity and assurance of “Yi Yi.” By 1985 Mr. Hou’s fifth feature, “A Time to Live and a Time to Die” (Sunday, 4:15 p.m.), was a complete realization of the early New Wave style: the slow pace, the distant camera, the way the most dramatic or pertinent parts of the story are often conveyed indirectly, as anecdotes or passing remarks.

Mr. Hou’s story, an autobiographical tale that begins shortly after the main character’s family is cut off from the mainland in 1949 by the Chinese civil war, is suffused with the feelings of dislocation and grief, of bewildering exile, that run through Taiwanese film. Its style is sufficiently pronounced that perfectly reasonable viewers can find it profoundly moving or profoundly slow and boring, but anyone should be able to appreciate Mr. Hou’s craftsmanship: a kind of meticulous fluidity that gives a sudden close-up tracking shot of the young protagonist at the end of the movie a joyful, kinetic charge.

Mr. Tsai is represented by his first feature, the 1992 “Rebels of the Neon God” (May 17, 6:15 p.m.), a contemporary story of disaffected Taipei youth that’s rougher and more vital than his later work. (It is an obvious precursor to “Unknown Pleasures,” the breakthrough film of the Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke.)

Lacking a famous director but packing in a lot of pleasure, guilty and otherwise, is Chang Yi’s 1985 “Kuei-Mei, a Woman” (Thursday, 3:45 p.m.; Saturday, 5:45 p.m.). Stylistically it’s of a piece with the other new wave films, and it shares their mood of intense nostalgia, but it’s resolutely traditional — or Hollywood-like — in its unabashed four-handkerchief, women’s-picture plot. Among the challenges surmounted by Kuei-Mei, a spinster from the mainland pressured into a bad marriage, are a gambling and philandering husband, an ungrateful stepdaughter, an evil boss and a typhoon.

“Kuei-Mei, a Woman” is a classicist’s melodrama, a dry-eyed tear-jerker, because of its restrained direction and the impressively controlled, realistic star performance of Yang Huey-sian. When Kuei-Mei goes into labor in a gambling den while holding a kitchen knife to her husband’s throat, Ms. Yang shows an aplomb that would have done Joan Crawford proud.

Among the recent films in the series are two big box-office successes, the love story “Cape No. 7” and the gangster story “Monga,” as well as artsier fare like “The Fourth Portrait” and the Shakespeare-inspired (but not Shakespeare-worthy) trilogy “Juliets.” The Government Information Office of Taiwan, a sponsor of the series, would probably be very happy if you went to see these newer films, but the greater rewards of the series still lie in the feel-bad films of the 1980s, which feel just as bad as real life.

Taiwan Stories runs through May 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater; filmlinc.com.

 

Advertising: Casting Yourself in a Wild, Forgotten Night

Now, in a Web promotion reminiscent of the movie, Hotels.com is encouraging people to cast themselves in their own hotel misadventures by substituting their faces and the faces of friends for those of actors in provocative videos.

On a site for the campaign, TripYourFace.com, a user can upload a photo from a Facebook profile and profile photos of up to three friends. After choosing the actors to superimpose the faces onto, users crop uploaded faces, adjusting brightness and color to match those of the actors, and then are taken to a screen that features a hotel room in New York, Las Vegas or Paris.

As in “The Hangover,” each features a tableau of unconscious characters in a room in disarray. In Paris, for example, feathers are strewn all over a room where four blindfolded musicians, in formal attire, are slumped over their instruments, a fencer in a white outfit and mask is asleep in a chair, and Dennis Rodman, the retired basketball player, is passed out shirtless in a bed along with two lingerie-clad women.

Clicking one of three play buttons in the scene prompts a video “flashback” that helps piece together the scene: for Paris, one clip shows the two women in a pillow fight, then tearing off Mr. Rodman’s shirt as he sprays the room with Champagne.

But with the face substitutions, one actress ripping off Mr. Rodman’s shirt can instead be a Facebook user’s friend. And a segment of the video, starring that unwitting friend, can be posted directly to her Facebook profile, which Hotels.com of course hopes will prompt her to visit the Trip Your Face site and subsequently engage other friends in the campaign.

The videos lack the verisimilitude of, say, the special effects that substituted the face of Natalie Portman for that of a professional ballerina in some dancing sequences in “The Black Swan.” But it is more technologically sophisticated than earlier campaigns in which consumers uploaded their faces into two-dimensional situations like Elf Yourself, a viral OfficeMax campaign first executed during the holiday season in 2006, which was two-dimensional and low-tech, resembling “South Park.”

The Hotels.com campaign is by Y&R Chicago, part of Young & Rubicam, with the production company B-Reel. The Las Vegas hotel room situation features another celebrity, the rapper Vanilla Ice, while the New York option has no celebrities.

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“We wanted to produce something where people could put their faces into live action, which I don’t think has been done in a campaign before, and it certainly hasn’t been done in our category,” said Vic Walia, senior director for North America brand advertising at Hotels.com, which is owned by Expedia.

“Since they are a digital company and digital brand it’s important for them to invest in new and emerging technology, not just for the e-commerce site but also for the way in which they market and brand themselves,” said Matthew Witt, director of digital production at Young & Rubicam.

The campaign aligns with how people use Facebook, said Sonya Grewal, a vice president and creative director at Y&R Chicago.

“People post vacation photos on Facebook, so we thought of Facebook as kind of helping us seize this idea,” Ms. Grewal said. “We thought, ‘How cool would it be if you created these videos that happened in hotel rooms, and you are a part of it and so are your friends?’?”

While traffic for the online travel agent category was down 9 percent in March compared with a year ago, according to comScore, Hotels.com traffic rose 9 percent, to 4.9 million unique visitors.

Hotels.com, which declined to reveal the budget for the new campaign, has cut ad spending in each of the last three years, sliding to $31.4 million in 2010 from $70.5 million in 2007, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

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After visiting a preview version of the site, Brian Morrissey, editor in chief of Digiday, an online publication that covers digital marketing and media, said it lacked a critical element of successful campaigns like Elf Yourself: simplicity.

Because users are prompted to make numerous cropping, lighting and color adjustments, it can take about five minutes to upload a single photograph, with that time multiplied by the number of friends the user adds. In all, the process can entail dozens of mouse clicks.

“Every click comes with a price, and I expect they’re going to have a very high drop-off rate,” Mr. Morrissey said, referring to users who may give up and leave the site. “If you’re going to ask someone to go through all those steps, the payoff better be huge.”

For his part, Mr. Morrissey was underwhelmed.

“To me the experience was like a long walk for a small beer,” he said.

Mr. Walia, of Hotels.com, said many users would come to the site having already seen their faces in a video shared by friends through Facebook and, because they “know what the payoff is,” will navigate through the uploading process willingly.

“This is taking it up a notch and saying we can make this look more realistic and more lifelike,” Mr. Walia said. “The bar is higher now, and consumers are more and more tech-savvy and we need to give them credit in that area.”