Taoyuan Nights

One of my friends in Taoyuan has started writing movie reviews on his website as a way of improving his writing skills. He’s only got a couple up so far, but I thought it was worth highlighting a Taiwanese/American film that he recently wrote about. Personally I found this film tedious, perhaps because I’m missing a thousand cultural references to Daoism and Bhuddism - and perhaps because I hate ‘crime investigation’ films - so I gave up about half an hour in. Apparently it gets more interesting towards the middle, and fizzles out towards the end.

From Columbia pictures.

Here’s a quick preview of Pete’s comments on the film:

“Regarding the scariness of the movie; I thought it was not much a horror film, more like an interesting CSI episode held in Taiwan. My wife on the other hand was upset by the movie, and got upset at me for making her sit through such a scary movie. This puzzled me, because I know we’ve watched much scarier movies together than this one, and I was thinking that she was taking her fear of horror movies a little too far. It did intrigue me though, and I decided to ask her why she felt this film was so scary. She explained to me that the film held a lot of underlying Taoist and Buddhist beliefs that would scare a Taiwanese person more than a foreigner - kind of like a black cat crossing our path would make us nervous in the west.”

“I think Double Vision could be considered a one timer for many people in the world, but a must-see if you are a foreigner living in Taiwan.”

Reviews of this film: (Pete’s Site) (LoveHKFilm) (IMDB)