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P/SUNNY
Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private disco featured not only aspiring showgirls performing striptease acts as sexy nuns and nurses, but one woman dressed up as President Barack Obama and a prominent Milan prosecutor whom the billionaire media mogul has accused of persecuting him, ...
Tonkatsu is comfort food, gourmand grub — not a gourmet delicacy. So what are those hearty, unpretentious deep-fried breaded pork cutlets doing in an elegant little bar-style restaurant above one of Ginza’s temples to high-end consumption? Katsuzen has come a long way from its ...
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
It is a tricky deal being an authorized biographer. Charles Moore’s big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: ...
Unbelievable energy. Splendid self confidence. Never-wavering faith in his abilities or his teammates. Those are ingredients to success for Draelon Burns, the Yokohama B-Corsairs’ super substitute. Burns buried a remarkable three buzzer-beating shots to close out the three final quarters, and his team needed ...
THE CINEMA OF JAPAN AND KOREA, edited by Justin Bowyer, preface by Jinhee Choi. London: Wallflower Press, 2004, 258 pp., 24 b/w photos, £45.00 (cloth), £16.99 (paper). The linking of two national cinemas is, as the editor of this interesting collection of essays points ...
THE FILMS OF YASUJIRO OZU (Box One; Five DVD Discs). Shochiku Home Video, Japanese dialogue, no subtitles, illustrated booklet, 23,500 yen. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), one of Japan’s finest and most influential film directors. Shochiku ...
RECALLING THE TREASURES OF JAPANESE CINEMA: Japanese Film History Studies, edited by Friends of Silent Film Association, supervised by Matsuda Film Productions, preface by Tadao Sato. Tokyo: Urban Connections, 2003, 200 pp., with photos, 1,800 yen (cloth). With movies so ubiquitous it is easy ...
Donald Richie is regarded as the leading Western authority on Japanese film. He first came to Japan in 1947 as a civilian typist for the U.S. Occupational forces — an intelligent, restless 22-year-old in search of purpose. Richie, 78, began his career writing features ...
Now that our shelves contain a lot more than books — CD-ROMs, VHS tapes, DVDs — it is worth reconsidering a question that occasionally interests the resident foreigner: How do you find Japanese films with English subtitles? Heretofore, you didn’t. Few titled film copies ...
THE BENSHI — Japanese Silent Film Narrators, edited by the Friends of Silent Films Association, with essays by Tadao Sato and Larry Greenberg, and an interview with Midori Sawato. Tokyo: Urban Connections, 2001, 172 pp. with photographs, 1,500 yen (paper) Despite its name, no ...
Film critics often have a not-so-secret desire to get behind the camera themselves. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Peter Bogdanovich are among those who made the leap successfully, though Bogdanovich returned to writing after his directing career faltered in the mid-’70s. Even thumbs-up critic ...