Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Looney Tunes short, the 1939 Wise Quacks, starring Porky Pig and Daffy Duck and directed by Bob Clampett.
An alternate design for Daffy, designed by Charles Thorson, is introduced here, where he is drawn with more slanted eyes and a big grey face surrounding his eyes. It was scrapped a year later.
You would be forgiven if you wanted to take a break from the news. The staff of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour, not surprisingly, likes to have a cocktail now and then, which helps get through the days (we are not recommending day drinking, although it's always 5 pm somewhere.) We thought you'd like to watch, with us, Alton Brown get quite drunk, tasting 20 different drinks -
Two things: first, given my love of martinis, I’ve been an adult for a very long time; second, there should be a law against getting a tattoo while drinking. Plenty of tattoos are acquired after a few drinks - but getting one during? That should never happen.
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the 1989 Taiwanese drama A City of Sadness (AKA Beiqing Chengshi) directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. and starring Tony Leung, Sung Young Chen, and Wou Yi Fang. A City of Sadness focuses on the complex history of 20th-century Taiwan during the turbulent period in Taiwanese history between the fall of the Japanese Empire in 1945 and the establishment of martial law in 1949.
It is the first Taiwanese film to broach the subject of the most traumatic experience in the nation’s history, the February 28 Incident. This was a 1947 massacre by the Nationalist Party that resulted in 18,000 to 28,000 deaths. Using a family as a matrix through which to filter the historical events at the moment of the founding of the nation, Hou re-presents Taiwanese history in both micro and macro perspectives.
Please find a comfortable chair, dim the lights, and join us here at the ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch this tragic drama: A City of Sadness.
The original premise of this film is the reunion of an ex-gangster (which Hou Hsiao-Hsien intended to cast Chow Yun-fat for the role) and his former lover (supposedly played by Yang Li-Hua, the top Taiwanese Opera actress in real-life) in 1970s. Hou and Chu then extended the story to involve substantial flashbacks of the calamity of the woman's family in late 1940s (where the woman was the teenage daughter of Chen Song-Yong's character). They then abandoned the former premise and instead focused on the 1940s' story.
Demand Euphoria!
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