Movie madness

Saw a lot of movies last week here in Taipei. My flatmate Katrina owns a bar that shows movies on Tuesday night so last Tuesday I dropped in to check out a Taiwanese film called the The Wayward Cloud. It won some awards in Germany, but honestly I'm not sure why. The plot revolves around a porn actor and a girl he likes meeting during a water shortage in Taiwan that causes the sale of watermelons and watermelon juice to skyrocket. The film contains a lot of porn and musical numbers, and has very little dialogue. As one person explained it to me, the movie is about how porn and easy sex (watermelons) have become so pervasive in modern society while true love (water) is hard to find. Hmm, yeah, maybe. I would suggest passing on this film should you come across it at your local video store.

On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday it was off to check out some films at the Urban Nomad Film Festival. On Wednesday they showed a homemade Finnish Star Wars parody called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. Unfortunately, the English subtitles weren't working and watching a movie in Finnish with Chinese subtitles isn't very interesting, so I kept falling asleep and headed home early. On Thursday they showed a mini documentary, called Dengue Fever, about an LA band of the same name. The band plays music that is a mix of Cambodian pop and 60's surfer music and the film follows the band's first trip to Cambodia to share the music with the people who inspired it. Cool music and an interesting film.

Friday was a Chinese film called Mei Mei about a gay drag queen of the same name living and performing in mainland China. It was interesting in the sense that it gave a glimpse of how homosexuality is viewed in China, but I didn't find it particularly engaging and left before the end. From there it was off to Barcode, Room 18, and Luxy for a late night at the clubs.

Saturday night a group of us went out to dinner at a Yunnan/Burmese restaurant and then to a club called Underworld to check out a friend's band play. If you've never had Burmese food, I would recommend checking it out. One of my friends knows the owners so we just grabbed a table and ate whatever they brought out - steamed cabbage, fried eggplant sprinkled with vinegar, some sort of marinated pork and pork tendon dish, pickled veggies, a chicken curry, and a dish of sliced liver, tongue, and other assorted meats. My favorite was the eggplant, but it was all pretty good and a nice change from the typical Chinese/Taiwanese fare. As for the band, they were called Blood Orange and I wasn't quite sure what to make of them since hard metal + trumpet is a strange combination. They played some softer songs that I could get into, but the death metal stuff isn't my cup of tea. Anyhow, I headed some around midnight, went to bed, and enjoyed a nice lazy Sunday of drinking tea, doing laundry, and watching a bunch of episodes of CSI.