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September 18, 2024
 

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Mark Schilling
CULTURE / Film
Apr 25, 2001
Gambling with reality, double or nothing
Doubles Rating: * * * 1/2 Director: Satoru Isaka Running time: 90 minutes Language: JapaneseNow showing The title of Satoru Isaka's new film, "Doubles," is ironic, but appropriate. Its two heroes -- a middle-aged locksmith (Kenichi Hagiwara) and young computer nerd (Kazuma Suzuki) -- are unlikely partners...
CULTURE / Film
Apr 18, 2001
Journey to the center of the human volcano
HotaruStyle to Kill Rating: * * * Director: Naomi Kawase Running time: 164 min. Language: JapaneseEnds April 20 Rating: * * * * * Director: Seijun SuzukiLanguage: Japanese Now showing In 1997, a young documentary filmmaker named Naomi Kawase won the Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival...
COMMUNITY / THE PARENT TRIP
Apr 13, 2001
English as a father tongue
You are living in Japan in a bicultural, bilingual relationship (meaning that you can deal with the dry-cleaning guy in Japanese). Little Tomu or Tommy, your first, has gone from goos and gurgles to words and even sentences. How cute! Kawaii! You, who have struggled so hard to master Nihongo (or at least...
CULTURE / Film
Apr 11, 2001
Comical Sturm und Drang , all in the family
Rendan Rating: * * * * Director: Naoto Takenaka Running time: 104 minutes Language: JapaneseNow playing "What does woman want?" Freud famously asked -- a question that is just as famously unanswerable. At the dawn of the modern feminist era, however, many women seemed to want what Anais Nin, in a 1974...
CULTURE / Film
Apr 4, 2001
The genius boy in a bubble
My mother used to say that she could read me like a book. A compliment? At the age of 15, I didn't think so -- I didn't want anyone "reading" me, let alone dear old Mom. Worshipping at the altar of cool, I wanted to be an inscrutable, unflappable James Bond, not a hapless innocent walking down the pitiless...
CULTURE / Film
Mar 27, 2001
When justice looks the other way
Directors, as they age, usually must either move with the times or find themselves waiting by a silent phone. Since the days of D.W. Griffith, Hollywood has been full of once lordly directors who, having fallen out of fashion, are relegated to telling anecdotes about their glory days to deferential young...
CULTURE / Film
Mar 20, 2001
Takeout that fails to deliver
The first Japanese filmmakers, like first filmmakers almost everywhere, thought of their new medium as an extension of still photography: a way of recording reality. Thus the early films of kabuki plays, in which the camera was planted squarely in front of the stage and left there, with pauses only to...
CULTURE / Film
Mar 13, 2001
Our dreams are made of this
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...
CULTURE / Film
Mar 6, 2001
Kyon Kyon's leap in the dark
Pop idols are not only a Japanese phenomenon -- Britney Spears sells from Zurich to Zimbabwe -- but Japan produces more idols, of both sexes, than anywhere else in the world and has refined the idol aesthetic to an extreme. Japanese idols must be not only cute enough to make your teeth hurt, but everlastingly...
CULTURE / Film
Feb 27, 2001
Ghosts that lurk in the machine
Someone, perhaps John Carpenter, once said that to make a good horror film, it helps to be a bit of a sadist. True enough, if your idea of horror is whacking teenage girls with a cleaver. But if, like "Kairo (Pulse)" director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, you're making a film about the dead invading the world of...
CULTURE / Film
Feb 27, 2001
Unearthly entertainment
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is God's gift to film journalists. He speaks slowly and distinctly, in a rumbling baritone, weighing each word -- and giving even the most fumble-fingered reporter time to get everything down. He is also patient with questions that, after the 20th media interview, he has heard 20 times...
CULTURE / Film
Feb 20, 2001
Hollywood cliches without the thrills
Are Asian films ready for prime time -- that is, for the mall cineplexes of America?
CULTURE / Film
Feb 12, 2001
Into the heart of darkness
What is it about deeply rural places and deeply strange religion and sex? In the United States, one has the stereotype of the hills of Appalachia as refuges for snake-handling preachers and cousin-marrying hillbillies. In Japan, one has the mountains of Shikoku in Masato Harada's "Inugami," where ancient...
CULTURE / Film
Feb 6, 2001
Trauma in a sepia-tinged Kyushu
It's not easy filming the inner lives of human beings. Novelists can go on at length about their protagonist's stream of consciousness (see "Ulysses") while filmmakers cannot show scene after voiced-over scene of that same stream without inducing audience catatonia. See Joseph Strick's misbegotten 1967...
CULTURE / Film
Jan 30, 2001
Otaku loose in a noirish world
Dark future movies are, by now, as established an SF subgenre as creature features or space operas. Their world view is usually a cross between an Orwellian nightmare and a Jean Paul Gaultier fashion show: grim, oppressive and dangerous but sexy, radical and cool. In other words, you wouldn't mind visiting,...
CULTURE / Film
Jan 23, 2001
Lock, stock and instant noodles
Here's a word association game for you. What comes to mind when you hear "Thai cinema?" A blank? Don't worry -- in Japan, you're hardly alone.
CULTURE / Film
Jan 16, 2001
A living, dancing tradition
Stories may be universal, but story-telling, as a performance art, just doesn't travel well. Kabuki is universally known among the educated in the West, at least by name, while rakugo remains obscure to all but scholars and a handful of devotees. This is an unfortunate, but seemingly intractable position....
CULTURE / Film
Jan 9, 2001
A peep inside the otaku cocoon
Writing about Japanese films in English, I am usually flying below the radar of the local industry -- I can skewer a director's latest triumph on this page and meet him laterat a party secure in the knowledge that he has not the foggiest idea of what I've said about his movie. Once in a while, though,...
CULTURE / Film
Jan 1, 2001
Yang offers up portrait of 'real' family life
Family dramas are a movie staple, but few have the texture of real family life, in which individual destinies unfold and interact in ways too messy and complex for the usual movie ad copy. What we usually get instead is either melodrama or caricature -- i.e., something that can be easily packaged and...
LIFE / Travel
Jun 14, 2000
On the open road to Tucson
Favorite travel fantasies come in many forms -- not everyone dreams of a deserted white-sand beach on Maui.
'Shogun' becomes first non-English-language winner of best drama Emmy
Japanese actress Anna Sawai, winner of the outstanding lead actress in a drama series award for "Shogun," and Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada, winner of the outstanding lead actor in a drama series award for the show, pose in the press room during the 76th Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday.
Chris Broad's new bar puts cocktails first, YouTube second
A self-proclaimed lover of great cocktails, YouTuber Chris Broad says his new Shibuya watering hole is more a place to get yourself a solid drink than it is anything related to his social media career.
Yamaha Motor president slashed with knife by daughter
Yamaha Motor said it would not comment on an alleged knife attack on its president as it is a private matter and the investigation is ongoing.
Japan set to hold rates steady as yen rallies and LDP candidates stump
The Bank of Japan is holding its policy board meeting this week.
How Intel lost the Sony PlayStation business
Intel in 2022 lost out on a contract to design and fabricate the chip for Sony’s next-generation PlayStation 6.
‘Shogun’ and the painstaking art of ‘getting it right’
Hiroyuki Sanada and the cast and crew of "Shogun" accept the award for best drama series at the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California.
Japan’s schools battle to keep kids cool, with or without AC
Students sit under a misting system during recess at Hikarigaoka Haru no Kaze Elementary School in Nerima Ward, Tokyo, on Sept. 6.
Chris Broad's new bar puts cocktails first, YouTube second
A self-proclaimed lover of great cocktails, YouTuber Chris Broad says his new Shibuya watering hole is more a place to get yourself a solid drink than it is anything related to his social media career.
In LDP presidential poll, three kingmakers hold all the cards
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks at the Liberal Democratic Party headquarters in Tokyo in January as former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga (left) looks on.
How China’s dominance of solar and batteries is impacting Japan’s energy transition
Solar panels and wind turbines at a power plant in Hami in China's Xinjiang region. The U.S. and other countries have described China’s actions against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, a key cog in the cleantech supply chain, as a genocidal campaign aimed at erasing an entire culture.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

A store clerk tries to cool things down in front of their shop by spraying a hose.
Is extreme weather changing the way Japan shops?
By Alex K.T. Martin

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