A new classic of so-bad-it's-good cinema has emerged from Taiwan
Bad movies have become big business, but that wasn’t always the case. It took decades of cable repeats and a friggin’ documentary for fans to fully appreciate the transcendence of Troll 2. And, despite what The Disaster Artist might tell you, The Room’s cult fandom unfolded slowly, across multiple years. Now, with those films as guideposts, we as a culture are more attuned to the nuances of the bad movie, waiting with bated breath for each new Neil Breen joint. While we’ve been waiting, a new so-bad-it’s-good classic has emerged on the other side of the world. Called Story In Taipei, Huang Yin-xiong’s pile premiered in just three Taiwanese theaters last year, but subsequently went on to make $5,000,000 in New Taiwan dollars and play for 38 days. That may not sound like a lot, but, as this Popula piece points out, it outperformed the The Great Wall, then the most expensive Chinese film ever made.
Just as Tommy Wiseau sought to make The Room throb “with the passion of Tennessee Williams,” Story In Taipei seeks to tell an ambitiously sprawling story about life in Taipei from the perspective of non-Taipei natives. This sets it in contrast to Edward Yang’s 1985 masterpiece Taipei Story, a well-regarded example of the Taiwanese New Wave that, coincidentally, received a 4K restoration in 2017. Popula posits that the pair make curiously resonant bedfellows:
“In a strange sort of way, then, the film almost seems the perfect counterpoint to the Taiwanese New Wave—masterful, complex depictions of Taipei life from Taipei residents themselves, versus the garbled, incomprehensible, and fantastical depiction of Taipei life from outside the capital, as seen in Story in Taipei.”