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Mark Schilling
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 3, 2013
'R100'
The world premiere of Hitoshi Matsumoto's "R100" in the Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness section must be frustrating for all those Japanese auteurs out there who got rejection letters from North America's most important festival.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Oct 3, 2013
'E no Naka no Boku no Mura (Village of Dreams)'
Director: Yoichi Higashi
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 26, 2013
Actor-director Okuda revisits wreckage of 3/11
Actors see how directors do their job — and not a few imagine they can do it better. But the number of Japanese actors who move successfully into the director's chair is small.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 26, 2013
'Jigoku de Naze Warui (Why Don't You Play in Hell?)'
Even great directors can make turkeys, sometimes without much obvious change in their style or obsessions.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 26, 2013
'Kokuriko-zaka Kara (From Up on Poppy Hill)'
Director: Goro Miyazaki
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 19, 2013
'Soshite Chichi ni Naru (Like Father, Like Son)'
The English and Japanese titles of Hirokazu Koreeda's dual-family drama "Soshite Chichi ni Naru (Like Father, Like Son)" are quite different in meaning, but both express something important about this extraordinary film, winner of the Jury Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 19, 2013
'Casshern'
Director: Kazuaki Kiriya
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 12, 2013
Aoyama looks to the 1980s without nostalgia
Shinji Aoyama is the director as cinephile. That is, while winning awards for his own films, including two prizes at Cannes for his 2000 drama "Eureka," he has long been a serious student of films by others, beginning with his days at Rikkyo University as a disciple of eminent film scholar Shigehiko...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 12, 2013
'Tomogui (Backwater)'
In 1971 the Nikkatsu studio, desperate to stave off bankruptcy, switched production to the then-burgeoning genre of softcore pornography. Made mostly by young directors promoted after their elders fled, the films were hardly intended as high art. Instead their main selling point was simulated sex, often...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 12, 2013
'Minnasan, Sayonara! (See You Tomorrow, Everyone)'
Director: Yoshihiro Nakamura
CULTURE / Film
Sep 5, 2013
'The Wolverine' draws from other Hollywood hits set in Japan
Director James Mangold has claimed Japanese film influences on his Marvel comic adaptation "The Wolverine," including Akira Kurosawa's 1957 film "Kumonosu-jo (The Throne of Blood)." But the film, in which Hugh Jackman's immortal Wolverine character comes to Japan, falls in love with a local beauty and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 5, 2013
Kobayashi film explores Japan's suicide problem
A folk-singer-turned-filmmaker who went to France in 1981 to apprentice under his idol François Truffaut, Masahiro Kobayashi may have failed in his quest (he couldn't work up the courage to press Truffaut's doorbell), but after returning to Japan became a prolific scriptwriter for pinku (softcore...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 5, 2013
'Nihon no Higeki (Japan's Tragedy)'
What is a good death? For certain Japanese Buddhist priests it was sokushinbutsu — self-mummification. As practiced by members of the Shingon sect, it was a decade-long process that culminated with the priest's descent into a stone tomb to meditate in darkness, without food or water, until the final...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Sep 5, 2013
'Kibo no Kuni (The Land of Hope)'
Director: Sion Sono
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 29, 2013
'Soul Flower Train'
Dads, in Japan and elsewhere, never quite believe that their daughters are grown up and gone, do they? On a corner of their desk or in a corner of their mind is a picture of their princess at the school play or the piano recital or just making a goofy 8-year-old face. Yes, there are sternly realistic...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 29, 2013
'Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman'
Director: Various
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 22, 2013
'Natsu no Owari (The End of Summer)'
First published in 1963, Jakucho Setouchi's "Natsu no Owari (The End of Summer)" was the "Fifty Shades of Grey" of its day: a best-selling novel written by a woman that viewed the unconventional love life of its 38-year-old heroine with the sort of matter-of-factness then considered daring. But the story,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 22, 2013
'Kumo no Hitomi (Eyes of the Spider), Hebi no Michi (Serpent's Path)'
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
CULTURE / Books
Aug 17, 2013
Revisiting the works of director Takashi Miike
Takashi Miike is one of the few Japanese filmmakers now working, Takeshi Kitano and Hayao Miyazaki being two others, who enjoy a measure of recognition outside Japan's insular film world. Though hardly a household name in Kansas, Miike has long been a favorite with the international Asian Extreme Cinema...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Film
Aug 15, 2013
Monster-film maker tackles other big menace
Norman England is the world's leading non-Japanese expert on all things Godzilla, if hours logged on the set are any measure. From 1999 to 2004, he spent, by his own estimate, 150 days at Toho Studios watching the king of kaiju (monsters) come to life in film after film, culminating with Ryuhei Kitamura's...

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