author

 
Menu
Search
 
November 21, 2024
 

Today's print edition

Home Delivery
Subscribe for more access

Meta

Mark Schilling
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.
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...
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...
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...
CULTURE / Film
Apr 13, 1999
Death and the maiden filmmaker
Death can do wonders for one's reputation. James Dean was a hot young actor with one hit -- "East of Eden" -- when he crashed his Porsche on a California back road and became an instant legend.Would his admirers have become so devoted -- and in some unfortunate cases, suicidally deranged -- if he had...
CULTURE / Film
Aug 29, 1989
'Majo no Takkyubin (Kiki's Delivery Service)'
The Japanese have a huge appetite for animation, as one glance at a TV or — at this time of year — a movie schedule will confirm. Much of that appetite, of course, is fed with junk: endless recyclings of superhero fantasy or schoolyard humor.
Ishiba delays meeting with Trump, citing legal restrictions
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba waves upon arrival for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, in Callao, Peru, on Friday.
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.
Rising sex tourism exposes loopholes in Japan's anti-prostitution law
While financial misfortunes during the COVID-19 pandemic may have driven some women to work the streets, others simply want more money to spend — or want to pay off their debts — at host clubs.
Japan ranks last in romance satisfaction for second straight year
In a survey of 31 countries, Japan ranked last in terms of those who felt loved, with just 51% of respondents saying so.
Ruling coalition and DPP strike last-minute deal over economic policy
DPP policy chief Makoto Mahaguchi speaks at the party's policy gathering in Tokyo on Wednesday.
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.
Haruki Murakami's 'The City and Its Uncertain Walls' gives deep deja vu
For “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” translated into English by Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami confronts the ghosts who won't leave him alone.
Japanese expats in Asia find community through rugby
The Taiwan Fivewoods celebrate their victory at the 2023 Asian Japanese Rugby Cup in December of last year.
In Fukushima, a weekend of prose, poetry and translation
Aomori-based writer JJ Carter presented on tabletop gaming as creative inspiration for building characters and narratives.
For Dr. Nakamats, aging is just experience in action
Though he didn't win the recent gubernatorial election in Tokyo, the 96-year-old Dr. Nakamats' run was seen as inspirational in Japan's aging society.

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

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

SWCC keeps changing with keyword ‘new challenges’
SWCC keeps changing with keyword ‘new challenges’

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS note

Read more

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER