Giovanni Fazio - The Japan Times

November 22, 2024

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Giovanni Fazio

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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

Apr 5, 2013

Director: Tony Kaye

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 29, 2013

'Anna Karenina" won the Oscar for best costume design this year, and like many a period literary adaptation, you might assume the frocks and greatcoats are the main attraction, the "value added" to what is necessarily a leaner version of an epic novel. Certainly director Joe Wright, who filmed Jane Austen's...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 29, 2013

Oregon's Laika studio, maker of fine "handcrafted animation," was responsible for "Coraline," simply the best stop-motion animated film of the past decade. It follows up with "ParaNorman," another scary, silly and sweet Goth-lite fable that attempts to wrest the territory back from Tim Burton.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 29, 2013

'Watashi no Dorei ni Narinasai (Be My Slave)'

Director: Toru Kamei

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 22, 2013

Director: Kern Saxton

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 22, 2013

I can recall how when "Apocalypse Now" first came out, viewers almost universally loathed the ending. After the forward motion of the first two hours, the film seemed to just run out of steam; Brando's shadowy rambling seemed an anticlimax, and reports that Francis Ford Coppola had agonized for months...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 22, 2013

Surviving Progress

What is progress? The powers that be espouse an almost religious belief in ever-increasing wealth, productivity and technological advances. But what if these things come at the expense of the long-term habitability of the planet? Unlimited economic progress is impossible on a planet of finite resources....

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 15, 2013

'Wreck-it Ralph'

Quick review: This is the zaniest, sharpest animated film I've seen since "The Incredibles." I thought there might be a reason for that, and sure enough, director Rich Moore — like Brad Bird of "The Incredibles" — is a joke-writing alumnus of "The Simpsons" (and "Futurama" as well).

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 15, 2013

'The nature of our immortal lives lies in the consequences of our actions." Thus spake Sonmi-451, a Fabricant, one of many identical cloned slaves in the post-eco-apocalyptic future depicted in "Cloud Atlas," the phenomenal new film codirected by Lana and Andy Wachowski of "The Matrix" and Tom Tykwer...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 15, 2013

It takes some weird alignment of the stars to produce a best picture Oscar-winner that is also No. 1 on my annual Top 10, but Ben Affleck's "Argo" was that flick. There's been a bit of a critical backlash against this film, as if entertaining people were a crime, but Affleck's tale of hostage-taking...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 8, 2013

Oliver Stone's first hit as a director was "Salvador," way back in 1986, which looked at a small Latin American nation's descent into political murder, funded mostly by its larger neighbor to the north. Now, with "Savages," he seems to have come full circle, as Latin America's plague of disappearances...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 8, 2013

'The Messenger'

It's a scene we've seen in so many other movies: Two soldiers, in full dress uniform, arrive on some leafy suburban street and knock on a door. "We regret to inform you ma'am" is usually about how far they get into their message before the dead soldier's loved ones collapse into sobbing heaps. "The Messenger"...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 8, 2013

Plotting director Sam Raimi's unlikely path to Oz

There's a moment in "Oz the Great and Powerful," Disney's much-anticipated prequel to the 1939 MGM classic "The Wizard of Oz," where a character falls to the floor, in the midst of a witchy transmogrification into something evil. Off-screen she remains until suddenly, with a heart-stopping smack, a huge...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 1, 2013

'Django Unchained'

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...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 1, 2013

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.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 1, 2013

Director: Temujin Doran

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Feb 22, 2013

'Martha Marcy May Marlene'

You're fed up with your family, your upbringing, your school, your social class. You don't fit in and are reminded of it. The rules and social norms that other people seem to follow so blindly seem to you phony, trite, suffocating. You develop an attitude, a bit of psychological armor, and step off the...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Feb 15, 2013

'Zero Dark Thirty'

'Money shot' is a term that originally came from the pornographic-movie industry, referring to, ahem, a male actor fulfilling his contractual obligations.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Feb 1, 2013

Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson is one of those directors who, love him or hate him, has been remarkably consistent. Each film, from "Rushmore" right on down, is an artfully constructed and totally hermetic world unto itself, with flawed or absent father-figures, a closet's worth of funky-yet-chic pop-culture knickknacks...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jan 25, 2013

Director Ang Lee's adaptation of author Yann Martel's Man Booker Prize-winning "Life of Pi" feels almost like two films sandwiched into one. In the core, you have the succulent special-effects-driven story of a young Indian survivor of a shipwreck who's adrift in a lifeboat with a man-eating Bengal tiger....

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.

A boom for business tourism in Japan?

By Kathryn Wortley

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