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 ...
Elle s’Appelait Sarah,” like so many films these days, uses the device of multiple narratives. First you’ve got a story set in the present, where journalist Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is investigating a bit of repressed French history: the 1942 roundup of Parisian Jews, ...
Hey, did you hear the one about my metastatic tumor? Comedy and cancer may mix about as well as champagne and toilet cleaner, but along comes the film “50/50″ to attempt just that. This may sound like some “South Park”-esque experiment in poor taste ...
Crazy, Stupid, Love” — how could you not love a movie with a title like that? Well, if you’re the film’s distributor, maybe: Warner tamely re-titled it “Love Again” for the local market (just as “Friends With Benefits” was neutered into “Stay Friends”). Clearly ...
Director Martin Scorsese was one of the first to score big with the rockumentary format with his 1978 film “The Last Waltz,” which covered the farewell concert by The Band and their musician friends such as Neil Young and Van Morrison. He’s kept a ...
Cinema imagines the apocalypse on a regular basis, touching on everything from Mayan calendar-related polar shifts to the ever-popular walking dead. Few films, however, dare to deal with scenarios that could actually happen; that’s what makes Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion,” which looks at a deadly ...
Director: Julia Leigh Language: English This hypnotic fable by Australian author-turned-director Julia Leigh falls between Pauline Reage’s “The Story of O” and Yasunari Kawabata’s “The House of the Sleeping Beauties.” Emily Browning (“Sucker Punch”) plays a college student with a self-destructive streak. She’s recruited ...
As the marketing budgets for movies about alien invasions, Nordic gods and talking cars grow exponentially bigger, they increasingly tend to define our notions of what cinema is or could be. This has resulted in a generation or two out there who see little ...
Nearly one in 10 Americans are out of work, about a million homes are foreclosed on each year and the dollar is at historic lows, but you’d never know it from watching American films. In Hollywood, whatever the topic -NYC rom-com, lesbian parents, ape ...
You can be 100 percent sure that “Cowboys & Aliens” was a title long before it ever became a story; this is one of those high-concept ideas that practically writes itself. No doubt someone felt very clever at figuring out how to solve the ...
Given the ongoing popularity of bellydancing in Japan, the signature sound of the Egyptian darbuka drum, has become far more familiar. While it may not have the ubiquitous hippie drum-circle presence of the djembe, this smaller-but-brash hand drum has developed quite a following of ...
