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 gabby and intensely quotable dialogue, multiple ...
Quentin Tarantino, whose film plots are often fueled by a mania for vengeance, has struck again with the Oscar-winning “Django ...
Since its start in 2009, the Okinawa International Movie Festival has been more than its name implies. It has the ...
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 ...
Director: Temujin Doran Language: English Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who left the New York Times after it censured him for voicing opposition to the Iraq war. “Open,” a documentary based on Hedges’ book “Death of the Liberal Class,” is composed of ...
Director: Sion Sono Language: Japanese (subtitled in English) Third Window Films of the U.K. has released a region B Blu-ray of “Ai no Mukidashi (Love Exposure),” Sion Sono’s 2008 four-hour black-comic epic about a pure-hearted Catholic (Takahiro Nishijima) who becomes an up-skirt photographer to ...
Director: Steven Soderbergh Language: English Check this out on DVD at a rental shop near you, or just go buy it — “Haywire” may turn out to be a keeper. Consider the tough and gritty Mallory Kane (mixed martial artist Gina Carano) in director ...
They are the climax of Hollywood’s awards season, the 85th Academy Awards — except officially they’re not. This year, they’ve been rebranded as “The Oscars.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which organizes Tinseltown’s biggest awards, did not confirm the change ...
Bollywood star and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan has called for “immediate” action to protect women in India following the fatal gang-rape of a student that horrified the country. The vicious attack by a group of drunken men on a 23-year-old medical student ...
Tomorrow morning can simply tune into The Oscars. Or you can watch them with the peanut gallery on Twitter. While Hollywood parades in tuxedos and gowns, grandly celebrating itself, a freewheeling cacophony of quips and sarcasm — something like a digital, million-times multiplied version ...
Donald Richie was a scrupulous writer who paid finite attention to language and content. The following are 10 outstanding choices — titles that should be on any discerning readers’ bookshelf. “Tokyo: A View of the City” (1999) Here Richie manages to give the impression ...
Nowadays, the name of the Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is known throughout the world. But it wasn’t always like this — and it might never have been, without the efforts of Donald Richie. After Ozu’s masterpiece “Tokyo Story” was released in 1953, ...
