Jack Kao

Quote:
A Complex Taiwan Tale Needs a Key
In a series of eloquent, dazzling and demanding films, the director Hou Hsiao-hsien has depicted the history of Taiwan through individuals with deeply moving life stories. The island itself — a Japanese colony before World War II, then controlled by the Nationalist Chinese with violent repression during the cold-war years — has come to seem his most treasured character. “City of Sadness,” shown at the New York Film festival in 1989, tells Taiwan’s story as a family saga. The poetic “Puppetmaster,” shown at the festival two years ago, layers Taiwan’s history with the biography of an aged puppet maker.Read More »

Nick Schager – Lessons of Darkness wrote:
As the new millennium dawns, Vicky (Qi Shu) balances separate love affairs with abusive, drug-smoking Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan) and paternal petty gangster Jack (Jack Kao) in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s exquisite Millennium Mambo. Narrated (in hindsight) by Vicky from the year 2011, the film’s splintered, flashback-heavy narrative nominally concerns Vicky’s tumultuous two romances, though the storyline is – even more than usual for Hou – largely inconsequential. Supposedly part of a trilogy about Taiwanese youth culture, Millennium Mambo is similar to Hou’s superior Goodbye South, Goodbye in that both chart small-timers’ aimless search for money, love, or, at least, some fleeting feeling of genuine human connection.Read More »

Synopsis:
The eldest daughter of a broken and troubled family works to keep the family together and look after her younger siblings, who are slipping into a life of crime.Read More »