Mark Schilling - The Japan Times

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Mark Schilling

CULTURE / Film / Wide Angle

Oct 4, 2018

Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia's mini party is worth a little look

Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia, which selects a qualifying short film for the Academy Awards every year, will present its Autumn Screening from Oct. 5 to 12 at two locations in Tokyo.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film / Wide Angle

Oct 3, 2018

'Dare to Stop Us': Japanese cinema's bad boy as seen by one of the women who worked with him

In the 1960s Koji Wakamatsu was Japanese cinema's enfant terrible: A real-life outlaw — he once joined a yakuza gang and served time in prison — he made pioneering "pink" (softcore porn) films such as "The Embryo Hunts in Secret" (1966) and "Go, Go, Second Time Virgin" (1969), whose extreme sex and...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Oct 3, 2018

'You Are the Apple of My Eye': A missed chance at romance isn't a bad thing

"You Are the Apple of My Eye," a teen romance by writer and director Giddens Ko in 2011, became a hit not only in his native Taiwan but across Asia. Seeing it at the Udine Far East Film Festival, I was struck by the raunchiness of the humor, starting with a classroom masturbation contest, and the originality...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 26, 2018

'My Dad is a Heel Wrestler': A body-slamming celebration of a spandex brotherhood

Movies about pro-wrestling seldom star actual pro wrestlers. Instead we get Mickey Rourke ("The Wrestler") or Ryuta Sato ("Gachi Boy: Wrestling with a Memory"). But the ascent to Hollywood stardom of Dwayne Johnson, who wrestled professionally as "The Rock," has inspired New Japan Pro-Wrestling, Japan's...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 19, 2018

'The Hungry Lion': A nuanced account of the social media nightmare we all fear

Teenagers take chances that, to the adults in their lives, are sheer idiocy (as I know first-hand from both sides of the teenager-adult divide). These days anything they do or say can also end up on social media, which can instantly turn an adolescent goof into a mass roasting by thousands of strangers....

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 5, 2018

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Cannes submission tackles the difficulties of relationships

It has been more than two decades since Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hirokazu Kore-eda began collecting major festival invitations and prizes as the leaders of Japanese cinema's 1990s new wave. Since then younger directors have struggled to crack this "4K" establishment to gain...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 5, 2018

'Asako I & II': Things are vague in this girl-meets-boy-meets-boy's doppleganger tale

"There will never be another you" goes the old song. Then again, some people believe in doppelgangers, doubles to living humans who are ghostly in form and malign in intent.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 29, 2018

'The Miracle of Crybaby Shottan': It's never too late to make your move

Chess pops up in a surprising number of feature films. Just look at all the documentaries and dramas about the outrageously gifted Bobby Fischer. Shogi, or Japanese chess, is a different and smaller story, though "Satoshi: A Move for Tomorrow," a 2016 film about prodigy Satoshi Murayama, garnered awards...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 22, 2018

'Sunny': The gang reunites for some 1990s nostalgia

Compared to today's Tokyo, where teenagers quietly curate their Instagram feeds in Starbucks and tourists happily snap selfies from the middle of Shibuya Crossing, the 1990s were a wilder, freer time.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 15, 2018

'Killing for the Prosecution': A complex crime drama stuffed with exposition

Once a maker of Hollywood-style sci-fi ("Gunhed," 1989) and noir ("Painted Desert," 1993), Masato Harada has become a director of films about fact-based, character-testing group missions, be it police routing radicals from a Karuizawa villa ("The Choice of Hercules," 2002) or samurai fighting the biggest...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 8, 2018

'The Exorcist Nurse': Horror hits the hospital for some summer chills

Summer was once the peak season for horror in Japan, part of the local custom of beating the heat with chills from scary stories.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 1, 2018

'Sensei Kunshu': Looking for love in all the wrong places

Student crushes on teachers are a pop culture staple (ask any Van Halen fan). In real life, they're a minefield, with trip wires becoming ever more sensitive.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 25, 2018

'Bleach': Easy entry into an action-packed manga world

Marvel and DC may rule the North American multiplex, but that doesn't mean their fans have read the source comics. In Japan the opposite is true: The manga comes first and foremost in a media chain that eventually leads to anime, games and, at the end, live-action films.

CULTURE / Film

Jul 18, 2018

'Boy Soldiers: The Secret War in Okinawa': Gripping stories told by Okinawans provide a firsthand account of war

By documenting the tales of those who lived through the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, filmmakers Chie Mikami and Hanayo Oya question the island's current role as a military stronghold.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 18, 2018

'Still Life of Memories': An erotic drama that perpetuates the male gaze

Hitoshi Yazaki goes slightly overboard with visual innuendo in an otherwise artistic film.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 10, 2018

'The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine': A sumo subplot stands out in a crowded film

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. I'm not sure if Takahisa Zeze knows this phrase but it applies to the heroes of his new film, "The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine," an overly long, high-energy passion project that languished in development hell for nearly two decades.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 4, 2018

John Williams presents a made-in-Japan take on one of Kafka's classics

Written at the start of World War I and published in 1925 after its author's untimely death, Franz Kafka's "The Trial" is one of those novels everyone knows by reputation (or, in my case, from a fevered reading in high school).

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 4, 2018

'You, Your, Yours': Goofball gags that'll go over well with goofball guys

Love can drive you nuts. One recent illustration of how can be seen in the American TV show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," about a successful New York lawyer who runs into her teen crush one day, and soon after quits her job and moves to California to be near him. That is, she becomes his stalker, but would...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 28, 2018

'Japan's grandmother' Kirin Kiki has defied conventions throughout her long film career

Now 75, Kirin Kiki is everyone’s favorite Japanese grandmother, a role she has been playing for years now on big screens and small. But she has also never been anyone’s stereotype of quietly suffering, nobly self-sacrificing Japanese womanhood.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 27, 2018

'The Name': Ren Komai's performance raises a multilayered drama

What's in a name? On one level, it's how you identify yourself to yourself (as in dorky name, dorky self-image). On another, it's your social calling card, your link to family, going back generations (or not, if an ancestor decided to exchange one name for another).

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

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.

Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.

By Tomoko Otake

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