In his Olympic year, Oscar Pistorius steadily became an avid firearms collector, joining a gun-collecting club and purchasing a collection of firearms that included a .500 Magnum pistol and a civilian version of a military assault rifle.
When it comes to gender equality, Japan has never failed to disappoint.
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, ...
Manchester United's Shinji Kagawa is back with a bang, becoming the first Asian player to score a hat trick in the English Premier League.
Way back in 1992 there appeared a hot new indie flick called “Reservoir Dogs” by a then-unknown video-rental clerk turned director called Quentin Tarantino. This newcomer’s knack was to take a classic genre movie — the heist flick — and pump it full of ...
Yonkoma manga, or four-cell gag comics, are popular here with both sexes and all ages, but they account for relatively few of the many hit live-action films made from manga. For one thing, it’s not so easy to string all those gags together into ...
Be prepared for the most terrifying flying experience you’re ever likely to encounter, expertly created by Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump,” “Back to the Future”) and engineered on-screen by Denzel Washington. “Flight” may put you off air travel for a while, but on the other ...
If you’ll excuse the pun, Andrea Riseborough is a star on the rise. In her home ground of Great Britain she’s famed for her role in 2010′s “Brighton Rock,” and in the U.S. she turned heads last year with her performance in Madonna’s “W.E.” ...
Todd Solondz never makes comfortable films, and “Dark Horse” is no exception, featuring as its protagonist an overweight, overbearing 30-something nebbish named Abe (Jordan Gelber) who’s a toy-collector nerd and still living at home with his parents. Classic comedy-loser material, in other words, but ...
Plenty of Japanese directors make films about socially awkward or marginal guys: Given all the on-screen examples (as well as their many real-life inspirations), it seems that the onetime country of the samurai has become the land of the otaku and freeter (unemployed or ...
Sometimes life falls off its dreary grid and takes on the texture and flavor of strawberry chiffon cake. That’s kind of what happens when watching “Silver Linings Playbook”: The more this romantic comedy-drama about an ex-teacher with mental-health problems and the people around him ...
You’re fed up with your family, your upbringing, your school, your social class. You don’t fit in and are reminded of it. The rules and social norms that other people seem to follow so blindly seem to you phony, trite, suffocating. You develop an ...
Beginning with 2001′s “Ichiban Utsukushi Natsu (Firefly Dreams),” a Yasujiro Ozu-esque drama about a friendship that develops between a rebellious teenage girl and an elderly former actress in the countryside, John Williams has been directing films in Japan with Japanese talent that do not ...
"Money shot" is a term that originally came from the pornographic-movie industry, referring to, ahem, a male actor fulfilling his contractual obligations.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if you had to see yet another 20th-century action star, alive and well and kicking ass for the benefit of the over-40s crowd — and that star is Bruce Willis, whom you can remember as having ...
This hard-core adaptation of the long-running British sci-fi comic should largely erase memories of Sylvester Stallone's abominable 1995 version.
