Victor Frankenstein
What, another Frankenstein movie fresh off the heels of last year’s I, Frankenstein? (Yeah, we’re pretending that Frankenstein vs the Mummy never existed.) While the former featured the monster as the protagonist, this one has Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy teaming up to tell the origin story of the film’s eponymous scientist who strived to create life from death. What is there new to tell about this way, way overtold story? Okay, so it’s told through the eyes of Igor — Frankenstein’s assistant — played by Radcliffe, who makes an appearance in the official trailer to make sure people know that it’s a “new twist on a kind of legendary tale.” Judging from the rest of the trailer, there doesn’t seem to be anything we don’t know, except for more action and explosions. Aside from the rehashing, it does have potential to be entertaining, and we can only hope that Radcliffe delivers on his promise. This film takes home the cake for the most uninspired title translation ever: guaiwu (怪物, which simply means monster).
Our Brand is Crisis
Why would two rival Bolivian politicians hire two rival American political consultants (especially when they’re played by Sandra Bullock and Billy Bob Thornton) to help them best each other in the upcoming presidential election? Because it actually happened in 2002, when Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada hired Greenberg Carville Shrum to help him defeat Evo Morales. These events are chronicled in the 2005 documentary of the same name, upon which this George Clooney-produced fictionalized comedy version is based on. Of course, the Hollywood version can’t just be about Bolivian politics, so it reinvents itself to focus on the bickering Americans and their funny journey to self discovery — and they just happen to be in Bolivia during turbulent times, a convenient backdrop to throw in some ethics and morality to make the whole affair more noble. In real life, after taking office, Sanchez didn’t turn out to be such an awesome dude, which makes us wonder how the movie version of him is like.
Kidnapping Freddy Heineken
Just two weeks after the release of Legend, we have another movie that’s based on a book about true criminal events. Anthony Hopkins plays Freddy Heineken (yes, of the beer fame), who was nabbed in front of his Amsterdam office along with his driver in November 1983. Dutch journalist Peter de Vries wrote the book from actual interviews with the kidnappers, and even went as far as tracking down in 1994 another one of the masterminds who had escaped to Paraguay. But this movie isn’t about de Vries, whose life probably warrants a movie of its own — it’s simply about the crime, where honestly not much seems to transpire if you are familiar with the incident (which is probably why the film is only 95 minutes long). Well, at least there’s Hopkins. Just four years ago, a Dutch film was released about the same incident (starring Rutger Hauer, who sort of resembles Hopkins and starred alongside him in The Rit). The kidnappers filed an injunction to block that film from being shown, but failed. They probably didn’t try to mess with Hollywood.
Clearstream Affair
The local version of the movie poster adds a Taiwan-shaped trace of blood behind the man in the foreground, so it cannot be any more obvious that the country is featured in the film. It’s about the 2001 Clearstream affair, which involved shady bribery and money laundering between a French defense company and Taiwan’s military. It’s locally considered the biggest scandal in Republic of China Navy history and is linked to the murder of captain Yin Ching-feng (尹清楓), still unsolved today. The murder is featured in the film and the captain is played by Yin Chao-de (尹昭德), the late captain’s … wait, they’re not related. Enough about Taiwan, as the film is mostly based in France, and the focus here is hard-nosed investigative journalist Denis Robert, who revealed the affair in his book, Revolution$. We all know what wealthy, evil corporations are capable of doing to people who have wronged them, and Robert is about to find out.
Asphalte
French director Samuel Benchetrit, who grew up in housing projects, weaves an amusing, slice-of-life comedy featuring three separate stories with six downtrodden characters who all live in a run-down apartment block. Two of the stories came from Benchetrit’s semi-autobiographical book, Asphalt Chronicles. The film seems to be focused on human interaction, and despite its depressing setting, the stories each feature two lonely people striking up unlikely interactions with each other. This is heartwarming stuff, prompting one to feel that the projects aren’t so bad after all. Benchetrit’s son Jules plays Charly, the Parisian teenager who is the protagonist of the book and appears in one of the film’s stories. Oh yeah, there’s also Isabelle Huppert, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Michael Pitt, who plays an astronaut.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
In our discussions of tourism in Taiwan we often criticize the government’s addiction to promoting food and shopping, while ignoring Taiwan’s underdeveloped trekking and adventure travel opportunities. This discussion, however, is decidedly land-focused. When was the last time a port entered into it? Last week I encountered journalist and travel writer Cameron Dueck, who had sailed to Taiwan in 2023-24, and was full of tales. Like everyone who visits, he and his partner Fiona Ching loved our island nation and had nothing but wonderful experiences on land. But he had little positive to say about the way Taiwan has organized its
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
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