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Giovanni Fazio

Giovanni Fazio has been The Japan Times' resident film crank since 1993. When not at the movies, he is busy recording and playing live with his band Makyo and running the independent electronica label Dakini Records.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 24, 2009

'The Baader Mienhof Complex'

Crowds of people take to the street to protest a dictatorship. Despite gathering peacefully, they are set upon by the police and gangs of thugs, who beat them mercilessly. A student, never having attended a demonstration before, is shot and left for dead by the cops. Official media falsely blames the...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 17, 2009

'Miracle at St. Anna'

Spike Lee has made so many didactic movies in his career that it wouldn't have surprised me if his latest — "Miracle at St. Anna," which looks at a squad of black G.I.s fighting the Nazis in World War II — was yet another. What did surprise me, though, was that this time around Spike decided...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 10, 2009

'Wallace & Gromit in 'A Matter of Loaf and Death''/'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince'

It's summertime, and the livin' is easy; cicadas are chirping and skirts are riding high. And we all know what that means for the cinema: a wave of sequels and franchise movies to last us until there's a chill in the air once again. The "Transformers" sequel is already out there, proving that the fanboy...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 3, 2009

'Monsters vs. Aliens'

The ultimate tribute to cheesy 1950s science fiction — with its flying saucers, ray-guns and little green men — already exists and it's called "Mars Attacks." Tim Burton's homage to a duff genre was so wonderfully over-the-top, it's pretty hard to imagine anyone topping it, but Dreamworks...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 26, 2009

'Vicky Cristina Barcelona'

Director Woody Allen was interviewed on the radio program Fresh Air (American National Public Radio) the other day, and repeatedly insisted that, whatever his fans may think, the characters in his films bear no resemblance whatsoever to the real him. His own marriage to a woman 34 years his junior, or...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 19, 2009

He's mad, he's an animal, and he's cool

Philippe Petit, just shy of his 60th birthday, still has a twinkle in his eye, still trains three hours a day, and — remarkably — is still wire-walking. Unlike every other interviewer who's met Petit, I did not ask him if he was scared when he did the WTC walk, on the assumption that a scared...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 19, 2009

The hallic urge to build towers — from the mysterious "round towers" of ancient Ireland through the Crusaders' Krak des Chevaliers and hypercapitalist monuments like the Shanghai World Financial Center — as concrete symbols of power and virility, has been equalled only by the opposite, castrating...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 12, 2009

'Terminator Salvation'/'Almaz Black Box'

"Terminator Salvation," the fourth installment in the sci-fi franchise that began way back in 1984, has just about everything you'd expect from a "Terminator" film: gleaming metal robot exoskeletons that implacably pursue their human prey, human-looking robots sent to infiltrate mankind's domain. . ....

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media

Jun 7, 2009

Director Tran talks of moving from violence to Murakami's famed 'Norwegian Wood'

Born in Vietnam and raised in France from age 12, Tran Anh Hung made an indelible debut as a filmmaker in 1993 with "The Scent Of Green Papaya." A delicate, sensual film, where the patter of rain on garden leaves or the rustle of wind on mosquito netting was as prominent as its story of a servant girl...

CULTURE / Film

Jun 5, 2009

Darren Aronofsky, with three out-there arthouse films to his credit, hardly seemed the ideal candidate to helm a grittily realistic movie on that most lumpen of sports, pro wrestling. But there you have it: Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" tackles an aging pro wrestler — played by 1980s star Mickey Rourke,...

CULTURE / Film

Jun 5, 2009

Getting a grip on Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky burst onto the scene in 1998 with "Pi," the most bizarrely original debut since David Lynch's "Eraserhead," and a film he self-funded by hitting up an extended circle of family and friends for small donations. He confirmed his talent with "Requiem For A Dream," a visually inventive adaptation...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

May 29, 2009

'Chandni Chowk to China'

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

May 22, 2009

"The Soloist" is a film that easily could have sucked, so it's almost shocking how good it actually turned out to be. I mean, just take the premise: calloused, professional journalist, used to filing his "human interest" stories and moving on, meets a funky, fuzzy-brained homeless dude who's also a musical...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

May 15, 2009

'State of Play'

There's a scene in "State of Play" where an unkempt, hard-nosed veteran reporter (Russell Crowe) — you know, the type who drink their whiskey straight, out of a paper cup — meets his new colleague, a younger, perkier journalist (Rachel McAdams) who bangs out gossipy blogs for their newspaper's...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

May 8, 2009

Some things don't require a lot of explanation. If I were to tell you I was planning a barbecue in my kitchen, filled my sink with kerosene and reached for a lighter, you wouldn't need to stick around to guess what happens.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Stage

May 8, 2009

Pop impresario turns Arab dance belly up

There surely aren't too many people out there who can talk about hanging out with The Sex Pistols in one breath and taking calls from then-United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the next. Miles Copeland, however, is one such person.

CULTURE / Film

May 1, 2009

'Burn After Reading'

"I know what you represent," sneers John Malkovich, playing an ex- CIA operative confronting one of his blackmailing tormentors in the Coen Brothers' latest, "Burn After Reading" — "you represent the entire idiocy of today!"

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Apr 24, 2009

You can take Clint Eastwood out of the "Dirty Harry" movies, but you can't take Dirty Harry out of ol' Clint. So it would seem upon viewing "Gran Torino," an Eastwood-directed film in which the 79-year-old plays a tough retiree who goes vigilante to take on gangbangers terrorizing his neighborhood.

CULTURE / Film

Apr 24, 2009

You can take Clint Eastwood out of the "Dirty Harry" movies, but you can't take Dirty Harry out of ol' Clint. So it would seem upon viewing "Gran Torino," an Eastwood-directed film in which the 79-year-old plays a tough retiree who goes vigilante to take on gangbangers terrorizing his neighborhood.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Apr 17, 2009

Director Gus Van Sant's recent forays into European-inflected art-minimalism have met with much critical acclaim, but there's something about those films that still bugs me. With movies like "Elephant," about the Columbine High massacre, or "Last Days," exploring the death of Nirvana singer/guitarist...

You can often see generations of families enjoying performances together at Fuji Rock Festival.

Japan’s summer music festivals are feeling the heat in more ways than one

Akiko Trush says her experience with the neurological disorder dystonia left her feeling like she wanted to chop her own hand off.

The neurological disorder that 'kills culture'

By Tomoko Otake

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