Mark Schilling - The Japan Times

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Mark Schilling

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 8, 2013

I once had a promising career as a teacher at a city day-care center in Hollywood (yes, that Hollywood). For one thing, I enjoyed interacting (translation: playing) with my charges, mostly African-American kids aged 9 to 12. For another, I liked making stuff with and for them, including a multi-story...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 1, 2013

'Eiga: Nazotoki wa Dinner no Ato de (The After-Dinner Mysteries)'

Japanese love mysteries, in print and on the screen, but foreigners, by and large, don't take to Japanese mystery movies. For decades, Japanese producers were happy to concentrate on the big domestic market for local whodunit films, while making only half-hearted attempts to sell them abroad to largely...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 1, 2013

'Kurenai no Buta (Porco Rosso)'

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

CULTURE / Film

Jul 25, 2013

There's a royal problem in portraying the ruler

Akira Kurosawa once told me that if he were to make a film about the Emperor, "I would probably be killed. ... Even if the film were highly positive, just the fact that I was using the Emperor as a character would be enough to make (the rightists) mad."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 25, 2013

I used to attract proselytizers, usually some variety of Christian, when I was thumbing around the United States in the early 1970s. Unlike most drivers who offered me rides, they didn't want a captive ear for their personal confessions or rants. Instead they relentlessly quizzed me on the state of...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 25, 2013

'Shokuzai (Penance)'

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

CULTURE / Books

Jul 20, 2013

Paying a price in Japan for showing up authority

After Japan's defeat in World II, its art world fell into the same flux as the rest of the society, as the rules and values that had governed it for decades suddenly vanished. Styles and movements once censored and banned, from Soviet-style socialist realism to surrealism, were now permitted and even...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 18, 2013

'Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises)'

Whenever Hayao Miyazaki, now 72, makes a film, fans and critics weigh it against this anime master's past triumphs — and often find it wanting. Japanese critics, especially, fondly recall the films that Miyazaki directed at the start of his long career as peaks. That is, 1979's "Lupin Sansei: Cagliostro...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 18, 2013

Director: Roland Emmerich

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 11, 2013

'Shanidaru no Hana (The Flower of Shanidar)'

Gakuryu Ishii has made something of a career of confounding fans and critics alike with his big shifts in artistic direction, his long silences and, in 2010, his name change from the unusual, if memorable, Sogo to the pretentious, if still hard-to-forget, Gakuryu (a combination of the kanji for "mountain"...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 11, 2013

'The Garden of Words (Koto no Ha no Niwa)'

Director: Makoto Shinkai

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 4, 2013

Tsuchiya questions what it means to be human

I first met Yutaka Tsuchiya in 1999 when I interviewed him on the release of "Atarashii Kamisama (The New God)," his documentary centering on a rightist punk band and its charismatic lead singer, Karin Amamiya. Despite his left-leaning politics, Tsuchiya was anything but the rigid ideologue; in fact,...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 4, 2013

'Thallium Shojo no Dokusatsu Nikki (GFP Bunny)'

Every once in awhile a movie sees around the corner to where the culture is heading. Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) was released when baby boomers were still baking granola and dreaming of communal peace and love, but its dystopian vision of ultra violence being visited on random strangers...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 4, 2013

'Momo no Tegami (A Letter to Momo)'

Director: Hiroyuki Okiura

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 28, 2013

'Senkyo 2 (Campaign 2)'

In the more than three decades I've lived here, I have progressed (if that is the right word) from irritation at the oddness of Japanese election campaigns to something like curiosity. How, I once wondered, could anyone choose intelligently among candidates whose "dialogue" with the voters was mostly...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 28, 2013

Documenting Japan's 'strange' election campaigns

A native of Tochigi Prefecture and a graduate of the University of Tokyo, where he majored in religious studies, Kazuhiro Soda took an early turn off a conventional career path when he went to New York in 1993 to study filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts. After a stab at fiction filmmaking, which...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 28, 2013

'Chronicle of My Mother'

Director: Masato Harada

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 21, 2013

'Sayonara Keikoku (The Ravine of Goodbye)'

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 21, 2013

'The Complete (Existing) Films of ...'

Director: Sadao Yamanaka

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 14, 2013

'Kiseki no Ringo (Miracle Apples)'

Raised on a small farm in Southern Ohio, my grandfather hunted and grew much of the food we ate at the enormous Sunday dinners my grandmother prepared, from tasty quail and rabbit to fresh sweet corn and tomatoes. The piece de resistance was often apple pie, made from fruit harvested from backyard trees....

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By Tomoko Otake

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