AP A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this ...
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
It’s somewhat depressing to think that the two best films on offer this summer, by far, were made over three decades ago. Robert Altman’s epic “Nashville” came out in the torrid summer of 1975, while Terrence Malick’s sophomore film, “Days of Heaven,” was released ...
Given enough money, almost any filmmaker could deliver a big, loud, silly popcorn movie about giant alien robots beating the living crap out of each other, but it takes the special talent of director Michael Bay to make such a movie totally repellent. Bad ...
James Gunn wrote the screenplay for 2000′s “The Specials,” a low-budget indie comedy that mocked superheroes, showing them kicking back, whining about their action figure deals or bloviating about their origin stories, but never once engaging in actual crime-fighting. Now that he’s directing films, ...
As we approach the eighth and final installment in the “Harry Potter” series, what can I say? You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind’s blowing. The fans are already getting their tickets, while the less-committed have long since departed, especially ...
As Hollywood films become ever more breathless — with special effects sidelining nearly all plot and character development, and digital-editing abuse leading to few shots that last beyond a second — art cinema has moved just as extremely in the opposite direction, with slow, ...
Any serious drinker knows that feeling of waking up in the morning so desperately hungover you feel like a reanimated corpse, and the groaning, quivering vow to never touch the stuff again. That resolve usually only lasts until your dehydrated brain has forgotten the ...
What would happen if Megadeath decided to record an emo album? The answer may be something like “Hesher,” which features an almost Cro-Magnon sort of misanthropic metalhead hero who likes nothing but shredding, shagging, smoking dope and smashing things, but who, it turns out, ...
Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” released in 1960, famously terrified audiences to the point where a generation was checking the door locks before taking a shower. Stephen Spielberg’s “Jaws,” released in the baking summer of 1975, kept many people on the beach and out of the ...
It couldn’t have been more than five minutes into “The Disappearance of Alice Creed” when my girlfriend leaned over and asked: “What kind of a movie did you say this is?” It was just at the point where Gemma Arterton was tied spread-eagled to ...
“The Adjustment Bureau” is the latest Philip K. Dick adaptation to be brought to the big screen, and it’s more faithful to the spirit of the author than most. Dick was always trying to lace grand metaphysical themes into the pulpy genre requirements of ...
