Taiwanese-Canadian director Frank Chen (陳惟揚) definitely took a gamble when he embarked on his four-year journey documenting baseball star Wang Chien-ming’s (王建民) comeback to the American major leagues.
Although Chen told reporters during a screening in Taipei that he had a backup scenario just in case Wang failed, it simply would not have been as gripping and heartwarming as the finished product that premiered in the US in October and will hit Taiwan box offices tomorrow.
His eventual success is vital to the narrative, especially when the film opens with Wang at the lowest point of his career, long removed from his halcyon days with the New York Yankees when he was an elite pitcher with a deadly sinker. Six years after injuries derailed his promising career, Wang is seen driving alone on a road trip, bouncing around the minor leagues looking for a second chance, but he even gets cut by the Southern Maryland Blue Claws, a team probably unfamiliar to even American viewers. At this point, Wang is 35 years old, much older than most of his competition, but he simply does not want to give up.
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Co
Tension builds as Chen juxtaposes scenes from Wang’s best days with his current situation, rekindling memories for those who had stopped paying attention to the “Pride of Taiwan,” or were wondering what happened to him. Actually, he’s never gone away nor quit. It’s a straightforward and polished documentary that has the essential elements of suspense, intrigue and plenty of tender footage of Wang and his family, especially his relationship with his two sons. The film paints a multi-dimensional picture of Wang as a human being and not just a baseball player, even though baseball is the only thing Wang has ever known and is what drives his entire existence.
Despite his accolades, Wang is a quiet and reserved character, which is why some of the sequences are monotonous. It wasn’t a surprise when it was revealed that he was reluctant to participate in the project, especially when his career wasn’t going the way he wanted it to. He’s a gentle giant, a likeable guy — as attested by the many testimonials of his family and colleagues in the film — but that does not make for exciting cinema, unfortunately, as the highs and lows in the movie mirror his personality. Kudos to Chen for staying true to the subject and not embellishing, but some of the editing in the middle of the film could be tighter to hasten the pace.
A sensitive and persistent storyteller is needed to draw out the inner layers of this kind of subject, and fortunately Chen seems to be that kind of director. Besides his baseball skills and height, Wang really doesn’t stand out, but through his sheer inner strength and intimate interactions with people in the film, one does get a good sense of who Wang is by the end. It’s definitely an inspiring tale, and will surely resonate a lot stronger with Taiwanese audiences who see him as a hero. In the US, he’s just another pretty good foreign player who didn’t last long.
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Co
Given this relative anonymity, one can’t help but wonder about the slick production and big-time cinema feel of the documentary, especially when it’s coming from a first-time director about a not-so-mainstream character from a country that many people have heard of but know little about. It turns out Chen had help. Fubon Financial Holding (富邦金控) helped finance the project, while the producer is Taiwanese-American actor Brian Yang, who starred in Hawaii Five-0 and produced the Jeremy Lin (林書豪) documentary, Linsanity.
These transnational partnerships are great for Taiwan as it puts the country on the map for Western audiences. Taiwan is clearly introduced in this film as “a country the size of Maryland and Delaware combined but with a population of 23 million.” Attach it to a poignant story like this — especially one that involves America’s national pastime on its own home turf — and it’s great publicity for Taiwan in a time when it’s most needed.
Photo courtesy of Activator Marketing Co
Late Life: The Chien-Ming Wang Story
後勁:王建民
DIRECTED BY: Frank Chen (陳惟揚)
RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes
LANGUAGE: Mandarin and English with Chinese and English subtitles
TAIWAN RELEASE: Tomorrow
Taiwan’s rapid economic development between the 1950s and the 1980s is often attributed to rational planning by highly-educated and impartial technocrats. Those who look at history through blue-tinted spectacles argue that, for much of the post-war period, the government was staffed by Chinese who fled China after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lost the civil war “who had no property interests in Taiwan and no connections with a landlord class,” leaving “the KMT party-state more autonomous from societal influences than governments [elsewhere in East Asia],” writes Gaye Christoffersen in Market Economics and Political Change: Comparing China and Mexico. At the same
It’s impossible to write a book entirely in the Taokas language. There are only about 500 recorded words in the Aboriginal tongue, whose speakers shifted to Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) generations ago while preserving certain Taokas phrases in their speech. “When I first started recording the language around 1997, I really had to jog the memories of the elders to find anything,” says Liu Chiu-yun (劉秋雲) a member of the Taokas community and a language researcher. The Taokas last month unveiled a picture book, Osubalaki, Balalong Ramut the community’s first-ever commercial publication using the language. The lavishly illustrated book
Certain historical statues have been disappearing in Thailand, but they are not effigies of colonialists or slave owners torn down by protesters. Instead, Thailand’s vanishing monuments celebrated leaders of the 1932 revolution that ended absolute monarchy in Thailand, who were once officially honored as national heroes and symbols of democracy. Reuters has identified at least six sites memorializing the People’s Party that led the revolution which have been removed or renamed in the past year. In most cases it is not known who took the statues down, although a military official said one was removed for new landscaping. Two army camps named after 1932
Jason Ward fell in love with birds at age 14 when he spotted a peregrine falcon outside the homeless shelter where he was staying with his family. The now 33-year-old Atlanta bird lover parlayed that passion into a YouTube series last year. One of the guests on his first episode of Birds of North America was Christian Cooper, a black bird watcher who was targeted in New York City’s Central Park by a white woman after he told her to leash her dog. A video capturing the encounter showed the woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), retaliate by calling the police
RSS