Director Takeshi Kitano, who also works under the name Beat Kitano, has a very personal style as both a director and an actor, and has never been afraid of confounding expectations. He has a passion for portraying the violent lives of men living on the fringe, but with his latest feature, Achilles and the Tortoise (Akiresu to Kame), he turns his gaze to the world of modern art.
Kitano is a practicing artist himself, which might explain this blackly comic rendering of the art world that would be absurd if its consequences for the characters involved where not so terrible. For Kitano, the world of modern art is as full of viciousness and chicanery as the lowest yakuza dive, and while the violence is more psychological than physical, Kitano ensures that plenty of people still get dead.
The title Achilles and the Tortoise is taken from the famous paradox of the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea. An explanation of the paradox is given in an animated sequence that preludes the film. The film itself is a vastly expanded portrayal of the concept of the paradox. Achilles in the film is Machisu Kuramochi, a young boy from a wealthy family who loves nothing better than to draw. His tortoise is some kind of meaningful fulfillment, which the film suggests will be found in art. But however Kuramochi chases it, fulfillment remains out of reach.
This is a life story laid out as a mathematical problem, and it is the inevitability of the math that drives the story forward. Kuramochi makes one futile attempt after another to become an artist and win the appreciation of his peers. His work is constantly denigrated, but often finds its way onto the market in the hands of unscrupulous dealers, though Kuramochi gets no cash or credit, and he works increasingly frenetically to find a style that will sell.
The early section of the film shows Kuramochi as a youth, depicting a childhood of privilege stripped away by family disintegration. His only pleasure is in making primitivist paintings with the village idiot, before his own insistence on working from life gets the man killed as he tries to sketch a moving bus. This is but one of many of Kitano’s jibes at art theory in the course of the film.
In adolescence, similar disasters, also fatal, follow. At art school, abstract expressionist paint splashing exercises lead to the death of a student who rams a paint-laden truck into a huge canvas. When the waitress at the local canteen offers to pose for Kuramuchi nude, the singularly ugly Fauvist inspired work he produces is the source of hilarious confusion.
In middle age, Kitano himself takes over the role of Kuramuchi, but continues these little satiric sketches of various modern art movements. Needless to say, Kuramuchi is always one step behind the curve, creating endlessly derivative work in an accelerating frenzy of activity. He does find time to marry and have a daughter, but both become victims of his obsessive determination to come to grips with his art.
Kitano and the two actors who play Kuramuchi as a child and an adolescent play the role straight, letting the humor of the situations develop around them. It is perfectly effective, Kitano is a fine performer, and some of the scorn poured on modern art and the people involved in it is hilarious. Unfortunately, Kitano lets the film run on too long, and the joke begins to wear thin. The fact that this monotony seems to be what Kitano is consciously aiming for does not make the spectacle more enjoyable. Toward the end of the second hour, even as the situations become increasingly absurd, it is harder and harder to keep rooting for Achilles.
You’ll have to watch the movie to find out whether Achilles ever does catch the tortoise, but by that stage you might not really care.
Oct. 27 to Nov. 2 Over a breakfast of soymilk and fried dough costing less than NT$400, seven officials and engineers agreed on a NT$400 million plan — unaware that it would mark the beginning of Taiwan’s semiconductor empire. It was a cold February morning in 1974. Gathered at the unassuming shop were Economics minister Sun Yun-hsuan (孫運璿), director-general of Transportation and Communications Kao Yu-shu (高玉樹), Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) president Wang Chao-chen (王兆振), Telecommunications Laboratories director Kang Pao-huang (康寶煌), Executive Yuan secretary-general Fei Hua (費驊), director-general of Telecommunications Fang Hsien-chi (方賢齊) and Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Laboratories director Pan
The consensus on the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair race is that Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) ran a populist, ideological back-to-basics campaign and soundly defeated former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), the candidate backed by the big institutional players. Cheng tapped into a wave of popular enthusiasm within the KMT, while the institutional players’ get-out-the-vote abilities fell flat, suggesting their power has weakened significantly. Yet, a closer look at the race paints a more complicated picture, raising questions about some analysts’ conclusions, including my own. TURNOUT Here is a surprising statistic: Turnout was 130,678, or 39.46 percent of the 331,145 eligible party
The classic warmth of a good old-fashioned izakaya beckons you in, all cozy nooks and dark wood finishes, as tables order a third round and waiters sling tapas-sized bites and assorted — sometimes unidentifiable — skewered meats. But there’s a romantic hush about this Ximending (西門町) hotspot, with cocktails savored, plating elegant and never rushed and daters and diners lit by candlelight and chandelier. Each chair is mismatched and the assorted tables appear to be the fanciest picks from a nearby flea market. A naked sewing mannequin stands in a dimly lit corner, adorned with antique mirrors and draped foliage
The election of Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) as chair of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) marked a triumphant return of pride in the “Chinese” in the party name. Cheng wants Taiwanese to be proud to call themselves Chinese again. The unambiguous winner was a return to the KMT ideology that formed in the early 2000s under then chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) put into practice as far as he could, until ultimately thwarted by hundreds of thousands of protestors thronging the streets in what became known as the Sunflower movement in 2014. Cheng is an unambiguous Chinese ethnonationalist,
RSS