Mark Schilling - The Japan Times

August 15, 2024

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Mark Schilling

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 1, 2012

Remembering Kaneto Shindo

When Kaneto Shindo died Tuesday at age 100, he was not the world's oldest active director — that honor belongs to Portugal's Manoel e Oliveira, at 103 — but he had had an amazingly productive and celebrated career, which started in 1934. Among his best-known films abroad are 1960's "Hadaka no Shima...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

May 25, 2012

'Mada, Ningen (Still Human Beings)'

Young indie filmmakers have it tough everywhere, but in Japan the hurdles they face are only getting higher. The so-called mini theaters (art houses) that once screened domestic indie films have been closing their doors or changing their programming to more populist fare. Meanwhile, a growing number...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

May 18, 2012

'Potechi (Chips)'

Yoshihiro Nakamura is an odd man out among contemporary Japanese filmmakers. All of his films as a director, including his 2009 international breakthrough "Fisshu Sutori (Fish Story)," are intended first and foremost as entertainment, not art. At the same time, they are often philosophical investigations...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

May 11, 2012

'Rentaneko (Rent-a-Cat)'

Japanese films, at both ends of the commercial-indie spectrum, are often about extremes. Deadly disease and violence are rampant. Characters sweat bullets and cry rivers. Viewers, including this one, sometimes wonder if their circuits are being permanently fried from all the over-stimulation.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

May 4, 2012

'Kantori Garu (Country Girl)'

The first time I went to Kyoto, in the mid-1970s, I thought I was in the middle of the biggest school excursion in the country. Thousands of kids from all over Japan were milling about in shopping districts and on temple grounds, and a foreigner such as I was still a sight rare enough for dozens of them...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Apr 27, 2012

'Thermae Romae'

Reading manga can teach you a lot, be the subject wine ("Kami no Shizuku [Drops of God]"), gourmet food ("Oishinbo") or the arcane world of feudal-era concubines ("Sakuran"). But the Japanese bath? Isn't that a subject Japanese are immersed in almost from Day One? Why would they need to read about it...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Apr 20, 2012

'Waga Haha no Ki (Chronicle of My Mother)'

Masato Harada, who once directed Hollywood-style entertainments such as 1989's sci-fi actioner "Ganheddo (Gunhed)" and the America-set 1993 road movie "Painted Desert," has since made a specialty of dramas about Japanese men at work. Based on true events and packed with incident, they made life in a...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Apr 13, 2012

'Momo e no Tegami (A Letter to Momo)'

By the time I entered college, my family had moved house seven times. The process of adjusting to a new place grew harder as I became a teenager, though by the time of our last move I was more accepting — or indifferent, take your pick. The difference between 13 and 17, in other words, was huge.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Apr 6, 2012

"Tetsuo (Tetsuo: The Iron Man)," the 1989 film that made Shinya Tsukamoto internationally famous, was the cinematic equivalent of a jackhammer to the brain: harsh, loud, violent and unrelenting. But this cyberpunk fantasy about a salaryman transforming into a metal monster was also strangely hypnotic...

CULTURE / Film

Apr 6, 2012

Japan's traditional arts held sway over silent era

Japan's silent-film era began with an exhibition of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope film-viewing device in Kobe in November 1896, only about one year after the first-ever public film screening in Paris.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Apr 6, 2012

410,000 attend Okinawa movie fest, but it's still a money-loser

The fourth edition of the Okinawa International Movie Festival, held from March 24 to 31, was a strange beast, combining screenings of 102 films from Japan, Asia and elsewhere with manzai comics and other acts from the powerful Yoshimoto Kogyo agency, which underwrote the entire event, in cooperation...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 30, 2012

'Ano Sora no Ao (Halcyon Skies)'

Tao Nashimoto's "Ano Sora no Ao (Halcyon Skies)," which premiered at this year's Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival, is the type of lyrical, personal, naturalistically acted and elliptically narrated Japanese indie film I used to see by the dozen in the 1990s but is now rather rare. One foreign...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 23, 2012

'Bokutachi Kyuko: A Ressha de Iko (Take the "A" Train)'

Yoshimitsu Morita, who died last December at 61, would seem to be a classic example of a brilliant young independent filmmaker who ends up as a mainstream journeyman, a career path all too common in Japanese films.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 16, 2012

'Bokura ga Ita: Zenpen (We Were There: Part 1)'

Of Japanese movies about star-crossed young lovers there will never be an end. The mostly female audience never tires of them, decade after decade. The genre has hardly gone extinct in the West either, though fans now tend to like their romantic fantasies spiced with everything from moody vampire heartthrobs...

CULTURE / Books

Mar 11, 2012

Dark side of sumo

BIG HAPPINESS: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior, by Mark Panek. University of Hawaii Press, 2011, 320 pp., $18.99 (paperback) Hawaii was once a prime recruiting ground for professional sumo. The pioneer was Jesse Kuhaulua from Oahu's Happy Valley, who entered the sport in 1964 and rose...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 9, 2012

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Hollywood rolled out multiplex-ready films focusing on the events of that tragic day. In the year since the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear catastrophe in the Tohoku region, dozens of Japanese and foreign filmmakers have taken their cameras north,...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Mar 2, 2012

Movie trailers and TV commercials both exist to sell, but unlike ads for toothpaste or instant ramen, trailers offer a direct experience, however manipulated, with the actual product. So websites that post links to trailers are not just shilling for distributors, but also offering their visitors, always...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Feb 24, 2012

'Koun no Tsubo — Good Fortune (Pot of Good Fortune)'

The farce as a genre doesn't get a lot of respect, relying as it does on wacky, paper-thin characters and a story that is just an excuse for knock-about gags. But making one that truly works as a film, not a drawn-out skit, is no easy trick.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Feb 17, 2012

'Afuro Tanaka (Afro Tanaka)'

Japanese comics have been translated into English and other languages by the hundreds, but overseas publishers have long overlooked one of the biggest local genres: gag manga. Their usual excuse is that Japanese humor, which relies heavily on untranslatable wordplay and cultural in-jokes, doesn't travel...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Feb 10, 2012

'Kitsutsuki to Ame (The Woodsman and the Rain)'

In movies as in life, first impressions count. Hence all the money lavished on opening credits, all the thought devoted to opening scenes. Quite often though, the flashy, clever beginning comes to feel like a con, as the formulaic story wends its way to its predictable end.

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

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Sociologist Gracia Liu-Farrer argues that even though immigration doesn't figure into Japan's autobiography, it is more of a self-perception than a reality.

In search of the ‘Japanese dream’

By Thu-Huong Ha

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