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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
Oct 5, 2012
'Casino Jack' / '4:44 Last Day on Earth'
As late-stage capitalism enters its terminal phase, democracy sees an epic fail, giving way to a kind of corporate plutocracy. The problem is all too clear: Government, in just about every country you can think of, has been bought and sold.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 28, 2012
'Iron Sky'
Watching "Iron Sky", it felt like the entire point of this film was to include a scene where a slack-jawed New Yorker points to the sky, eyes wide with terror, and screams: "Space Nazis!"
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 21, 2012
'Rock of Ages'
The "jukebox musical" has been around on the big screen for a while now — ranging from 1978's "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" to 2008's "Mamma Mia!" — and they all face the same existential problem: how to shoehorn a fistful of well-known pop songs into something resembling a story line....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 14, 2012
'This is Not a Film'
I met Iranian director Jafar Panahi back in 1996, shortly before his debut feature film "The White Balloon" picked up the Gold Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival — one of many prizes that film garnered. My interview has been lost to the sands of time (hard to believe, but there was a...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 14, 2012
Les Lyonnais
Director: Olivier Marchal
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 7, 2012
'The Dictator'
Sacha Baron Cohen is back, and after skewering white-boy hip-hop poseurs (Ali G), unwittingly offensive "foreigners" (Borat) and ridiculously camp gay fashionistas (Bruno), his newest target is a timely one: pompous, pampered, preening Middle Eastern tyrants.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 31, 2012
'Marley' / 'Carlos'
You say you want a revolution? Well, there are two ways to go about it, with the flowers or the guns, and this week cinema offers us a case study in extremes. On the one hand is "Marley," a well-researched documentary exploring the life of Jamaican musician-cum-activist Bob Marley who — like John Lennon...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 24, 2012
'Prometheus'
My high school English teacher once assigned an essay on Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." She was pushing the idea that the novel was one big Jesus allegory, with its hero McMurphy dying for the salvation of the other patients, but I couldn't agree. Kesey had worked in a mental institution,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 17, 2012
'The Avengers'
I saw the best actors of my generation destroyed by B-movie superhero madness, slumming crummy costumed, dragging themselves through the digital streets of universe Marvel, looking for a super-size paycheck, empty-headed hipsters burning for the ancient mythic connection to the star-system dynamo in...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 10, 2012
'Total Recall'
This is going to sound crazy, but I have this memory ... It's faded, like so many from the acid-house era, but I can clearly see Arnold Schwarzenegger playing this blue-collar kinda guy who comes home one day and finds his loving and beautiful wife, played by Sharon Stone, suddenly trying to kill him....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 3, 2012
'7 Días en La Habana (7 Days in Havana)'
Just last week this column trotted out the movie industry's defense — post-Colorado "Batman" shootings — that films don't influence actual behavior. Now along comes "7 Días en La Habana (7 Days in Havana)," a raucous compendium film that features scene after simmering scene of people getting righteously...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 27, 2012
'The Dark Knight Rises'
Jean-Jacques Beineix, the director of "Diva" and "Betty Blue," once told me that "when fiction and reality collide, you have a problem." Beineix was talking about his 1992 film "IP5," in which beloved French actor Yves Montand dies from a heart attack in the film, and actually died from one just after...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 20, 2012
'God Bless America'
Warning: if you think "American Idol" is, like, totally the best thing in American music today, that far-right talk-show host Glenn Beck is a prophet and that "Jersey Shore" is about the most fabulicious people evah, the following movie is not, repeat not, for you.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 20, 2012
'3D Sex & Zen'
Billed as the world's first 3-D erotic film, "3D Sex & Zen" certainly features in-your-face 3-D — watch out for the flying horse penis — but it's too silly to be considered even remotely erotic, despite plenty of disrobed Asian beauties.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 13, 2012
'The Lady' / 'Betty Blue'
In cinema, as in music, micro-trends come and go: Will anyone remember "mumblecore" a decade from now? Yet the '80s French movement known as le cinema du look, based on three brash young French directors, has aged remarkably well. Jean-Jacques Beineix ("Diva"), Luc Besson ("Subway"), and Leos Carax ("Mauvais...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jul 6, 2012
'The Rum Diary'
America's infamous outlaw journalist Hunter S. Thompson was, like many of his generation, a bone-deep admirer of author Ernest Hemingway, so much so that he even typed out word-for-word two of Hemingway's novels — "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell To Arms." Thompson wanted to feel the rhythm of...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 29, 2012
'Crazy Horse' / 'This Must Be the Place'
I knew a dancer back in the States who worked with the Washington Ballet ... by day. Some nights, under a different name, she performed as a stripper in a seedier part of town. While recognizing the need for secrecy, she herself had no problem with moonlighting as a peeler, and in fact enjoyed it. I...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 22, 2012
'Attack the Block' / 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'
When unarmed teen Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in Florida by paranoid neighborhood-watch vigilante George Zimmerman in February, the usual flurry of American media debate ensued. One of the more heated tangents came when celebrity newscaster Geraldo Rivera stated — on Fox News, naturally — that...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Jun 15, 2012
Remix Film Festival questions the future of copyright law
Sampling, mashups, ripping and remixing — in an age of infinitely accessible and increasingly malleable digital audio, the question of who's allowed to do what with someone else's original music is becoming ever more heated. If you use a piece of software such as Traktor to ironically suture "Singing...
CULTURE / Film
Jun 15, 2012
Shortcut to success: Four little films that could
Short films are often regarded as test runs for directors, but that doesn't mean they have to look shoddy. Here are a few examples of shorts that not only launched careers, but remain as good as anything their creators have made since:
Two of America’s biggest debt holders are dumping Treasurys
The U.S. Treasury building in Washington. Investors in Japan and China sold a pile of U.S. debt in the last quarter, just before the U.S. presidential election.
Tokyo Metro’s overseas efforts begin in earnest with London deal
Tokyo Metro will soon have a role in the running of London's Elizabeth Line, a major train route serving the U.K.’s capital city and environs.
Russia fired experimental ballistic missile at Ukraine, Putin says
Ukrainian firefighters work on a spot following an airstrike in Dnipro on Thursday.
Ex-yokozuna Kitanofuji dies at 82
Yokozuna Kitanofuji enters the ring during the May 1970 grand sumo tournament in Tokyo.
Man charged with murder allegedly made victim date other men for money
A car carrying suspect Ryotaro Masuda, who was indicted for allegedly beating his 25-year-old girlfriend to death, leaves the Shibuya Police Station in Tokyo on Thursday.
Shohei Ohtani wins National League MVP award
Shohei Ohtani celebrates after hitting a three-run home run against the Padres during the National League Division Series at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles last month.
The slow-burn success of ‘A Samurai in Time’
A 19th-century warrior gets struck by lightning and wakes to find himself in 21st-century Kyoto in Junichi Yasuda’s surprise hit “A Samurai in Time.”
Around a quarter of Japan married couples in their 20s met through dating apps
A survey released by an organization promoting “Good Couples Day” shows that 24% of couples in their 20s met their marriage partner through a dating app.
'Tokyo Swindlers': Get deep into the minds of real estate con artists
In Ko Shinjo's "Tokyo Swindlers," a group of con artists manipulates real estate giants into falsified deals within the highly competitive, quick market.
Japan, U.K. and Italy discuss inviting more countries to joint fighter project
A new concept model of a next-generation fighter jet to be jointly developed by Japan, Britain and Italy is on display in Farnborough, Hampshire, in July.

Podcast

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

Longform

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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