Greece's powerful Orthodox Church called on its faithful Thursday to boycott the upcoming movie Da Vinci Code which will be released in Taiwan on May 18, newspaper reports said.
Greece's Holy Synod said it would issue pamphlets ahead of the movie's Greek premiere warning citizens not to go see the movie to "protect the Christian tradition."
The church, which represents about 97 percent of Greece's 11 million population, did not rule out the possibility of calling on Greeks to protest outside of theaters.
Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou star in Ron Howards's movie, taken from Dan Brown's controversial bestseller The Da Vinci Code.
Lost sales from pirated DVD movies and Internet downloads are higher than previously thought, a report in the Wall Street Journal said on Wednesday.
A study showed the industry was losing US$6.1 billion annually in global wholesale revenue, about 75 percent higher than earlier estimates, it said.
Losses came not only from fewer ticket sales, but also from fewer DVD sales, considered one of the industry's biggest profit centers, the report cited unnamed sources as saying.
The newspaper said some in the US movies industry sought to suppress the report.
According to the report, losses in the US alone totaled almost US$1.3 billion.
John Malkovich's new film has him playing an Englishman who pretends he is Stanley Kubrick in what is billed as a "true-ish" story about a conman who duped dozens of people into thinking he was the reclusive director.
Colour me Kubrick, showing at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, has already drawn comparisons to Being John Malkovich because of its cerebral approach to questions of identity and celebrity.
But it is essentially a comedy that gives Malkovich the chance to revel in outlandish accents, behavior and costumes, from stockings and stilettos to oversized pajamas and foppish suits and cravats. The soundtrack echoes Kubrick's own films, including the famous theme from 2001: Space Odyssey.
Alan Conway, an alcoholic and small-time swindler, managed to pass himself off as the famously publicity-shy Kubrick for years until he was unmasked by a newspaper. Even then he convinced psychiatrists he was mentally ill, escaping prosecution for duping dozens of gullible victims into parting with their cash and sometimes their virtue.
"Everybody believed it," said Michael Fitzgerald, who produced the film written by Kubrick's personal assistant Anthony Frewin.
"Stanley Kubrick's wife still gets letters from parents of young men who were, what's the word, `pleasured' by him, regretting his death, but saying he had done unspeakable things to their children," he said.
With his debonair look, eccentric outfits and gift of the gab, Conway takes in everyone from the local pharmacist, to the managers of a heavy metal band, to a comedian played by British star Jim Davidson.
The biologist in Randy Olson cringed at news reports of evangelical Christians challenging the teaching of evolution to schoolchildren in places such as Kansas on the grounds it was just a theory.
But the filmmaker in him feels just as strongly that scientists have done a lousy job explaining their side of the debate.
The result is Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus, a humorous and entertaining documentary that premiered at New York's Tribeca Film Festival this week.
The film shines a spotlight on "intelligent design," a school of thought that says many of the seemingly miraculous and complex elements of nature must be the work of an intelligent designer -- namely God.
The controversy is raging in the US as intelligent design proponents face off in court with scientists who say evolution is supported by fossils and other evidence. So far, courts have struck down teaching intelligent design in science classrooms as a violation of the wall between church and state.
Other films that premiered at the festival include Fat Girls by the youngest film director at this year's event, 21-year-old Ash Christian. Christian is living proof that being a chubby gay kid from Paris, Texas, doesn't mean you can't direct and star in a movie. Fat Girls is a semi-autobiographical comedy about awkward Texas teenager, Rodney, and his friend, Sabrina, who is so fat that in a moment of passion with her boyfriend in a car, her rear end gets stuck in the steering wheel.
Donald Sutherland has played plenty of bad guys in his time and in his new film Land of the Blind he gets to explore the roots of evil and how the victim can become the tyrant and torturer. The political satire, which had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, stars Sutherland as an imprisoned playwright who convinces a soldier, played by Ralph Fiennes, to help assassinate a tyrannical dictator in an unnamed country.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby