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.
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
As a different column was being written, the big news dropped that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) announced that negotiations within his caucus, with legislative speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT, party Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chair Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) had produced a compromise special military budget proposal. On Thursday morning, prior to meeting with Cheng over a lunch of beef noodles, Lu reiterated her support for a budget of NT$800 or NT$900 billion — but refused to comment after the meeting. Right after Fu’s
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
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