Mark Schilling - The Japan Times

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Mark Schilling

For Mark Schilling's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

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 hallways of an American high school with his every thought and feeling on display.

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 film buffs, while plotting comebacks that never quite materialize.

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 change reels. Whatever the quality of the play or performances, the result was a filmed experience of stupendous tedium.

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 Roger Ebert once ventured a screenplay, for "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." Wrote friend Mike Royko after a screening: "Every young man is entitled to one big mistake."

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 chipper and bright, with never a negative thought crossing their unfurrowed brows. Idols are permitted a bit of naughty sexuality -- the pouting of Ryoko Hirosue or the booty-shaking of Morning Musume -- but they are essentially wish projections of ideal youth.

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 the living, it helps to believe, in your worst nightmares if nowhere else, that all this stuff about otherworldly entities might be for real. In other words, no scare in the filmmaker, no scare in the audience.

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 before. When I met him on the set of "Kairo" last spring, he was nearing the end of the shoot and was in a receptive mood, if decidedly eager to get to his lunch.

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 taboos rule, ancient enmities live and the dreams of a middle-aged spinster are disturbed by visions of the child she had with her own brother.

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 film of Joyce's classic for an example.

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, but you'd hate to live there.

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. Narration in English to foreigners wearing headphones works fine for kabuki, but even the most fluent, dulcet-toned interpreter would find it hard, if not impossible, to get across the punch line of a rakugo story.

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, I do catch it.

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 sold in one high concept line. The rare director, such as Robert Altman, who tries to put the whole enchilada on the screen may be commended for bravery, but gets tagged as difficult -- the commercial kiss of death.

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.

CULTURE / Film

Apr 11, 2000

Lessons learned from the master

"What I really want to do is direct." This phrase, heard everywhere in Hollywood from interviews with A-list stars to conversations between waiters at Hamburger Inn, has become a joke -- to everyone but the legions of gottabe directors themselves. Among this crowd, scriptwriters have traditionally been among the most successful in making their directing dream a reality, as the careers of Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Oliver Stone, John Sayles and a multitude of others prove.

LIFE / Travel

Aug 18, 1999

Re-enactors make history come alive

I was buying a jar of jam at the sutler's tent when the cannon went off, close enough and loud enough to make my teeth rattle and my eyes widen into an excellent impersonation of fear. The salesman, a stout, bearded fellow in the woolen blues of a Union soldier, barely blinked. As he handed me my credit card, I could read his thought _ a greenhorn!

CULTURE / Film

Aug 10, 1999

Strangers on the crossroads of life

Each generation has its own way of telling love stories on the screen. What is supremely romantic to one strikes the next as supremely corny (until it begins to fondlylook back, as Meg Ryan's character does in "Sleepless in Seattle," at "An Affair to Remember" and other genre classics).

CULTURE / Film

Jul 20, 1999

'Neighbors' move from paper to screen

When I first heard that Studio Ghibli was going to base its next film on Hisaichi Ishii's "Hohokekyo Tonari no Yamada-kun (My Neighbors the Yamadas)" -- a must-read for millions in the Asahi Shimbun" -- I had my doubts.The best gag manga have a pinch of comic acid that often gets leached away in the transition from the page to the screen, leaving only harmless whimsy.

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

When trying to trace your lineage in Japan, the "koseki" is the most important form of document you'll encounter.

Climbing the branches of a Japanese family tree

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

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