Mark Schilling - The Japan Times

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Mark Schilling

Japan Times

JAPAN / Media

Oct 3, 2010

India's expanding film industry boasts more than just Bollywood

Everyone knows Bollywood — the film industry centered in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay, hence the "B" in Bollywood) whose singing and dancing entertainments are shown throughout the country — and now the world.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Oct 1, 2010

'Nanase Futatabi: The Movie (Nanase Again)'

Some genres of Japanese movies are hard to "place" for Westerners, since they have no precise Hollywood equivalent. The ero guro (erotic and grotesque) genre, for example, is often lumped into the horror category by overseas festivals and DVD distributors, but the films are usually less about jack-in-the-box...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 24, 2010

'Jusannin no Shikaku (13 Assassins)'

Takashi Miike's rise is complete: This one-time director of cheapo shock pics — which he churned out like sausages and were beloved by foreign Asian Extreme fans — is now a proven hit-maker and recognized auteur, with his new samurai swashbuckler "Jusannin no Shikaku (13 Assassins)" screening...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 17, 2010

'Kimi ga Odoru, Natsu (The Summer You Danced)'

Melodramas have been a staple of Japanese film for decades, proving over and over the observation that Japanese audiences, more than anything else, love a good cry. I've gone to screenings where the women sitting around me take out their handkerchiefs even before the lights go down. The men start blubbing...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 10, 2010

Yukihiko Tsutsumi's band drama "Beck" is being hyped as one of the big Japanese movies of the year for the usual reason: The manga on which it's based, by Harold Sakuishi, has sold 15 million copies. Distributor Shochiku justifiably expects monster box office numbers, no doubt thinking of "Nana," another...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 3, 2010

'Kaidan Shin Mimibukuro: Kaiki (Tales of Terror: The Bizarre)'

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 27, 2010

'Tokyo-jima (Tokyo Island)'

It's a common fantasy — being the only guy on an island of beautiful women. But to be the only woman on an island of men, including the good, the bad and the ugly? Somewhat different, isn't it?

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 20, 2010

Pearl-diving sirens return

The castaway on a deserted tropical isle has inspired everything from "Robinson Crusoe" to innumerable New Yorker cartoons — but it was no joke to Kazuko Higa, the young wife of an assistant plantation overseer living on the small Pacific island of Anatahan in the closing days of World War II.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 20, 2010

Japan's first film nude still radiant decades after getting skirty

Arranging an interview with Michiko Maeda took nearly a month — she has long been media-shy — but when she finally agreed to meet film writer Yoshiaki Suzuki and me at a Tokyo beer hall, she epitomized kimonoed grace and charm, while saying this would be her final interview.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 20, 2010

One of the iron rules for Hollywood scriptwriters is that the audience must root for the hero. Character flaws and bad behavior are permitted, but, in the final analysis, the hero should not be a jerk.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 13, 2010

Radical director of porn and politics delivers yet again

Koji Wakamatsu is living proof that a lifelong rebel can thrive in Japan's go-along-to-get-along film industry. Today he is celebrated as not just another '60s survivor — he helped pioneer the pinku (pink, or soft porn) genre in that era, mixing in radical politics and experimental aesthetics with...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 13, 2010

Once an enfant terrible, who as a young filmmaker challenged censors and outraged conservative critics with everything from surreal S&M sex to sympathetic portrayals of Palestinian radicals, Koji Wakamatsu has not mellowed so much as ripened.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 6, 2010

'Kinako — Minarai Keisatsuken no Monogatari (Kinako — The Story of an Apprentice Police Dog)'

Animal movies are a thriving genre of Japanese films that foreign critics, scholars and viewers by and large cordially detest. It's similar to the typical gaijin reaction to natto (fermented soy beans) — i.e., disgust at a humble, but beloved, made-in-Japan specialty.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 30, 2010

'Nihon no Ichiban Nagai Natsu (Japan's Longest Summer)'/'Ishii Teruo: Eiga Tamashi (Teruo Ishii: The Soul of Film)'

August is the season in Japan for a never-ending stream of films and TV programs about World War II. Quite naturally, from the Japanese perspective, most of this outpouring examines the war's closing days, particularly the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some outsiders (including this one)...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 23, 2010

'Chonmage Purin (Chonmage Pudding)'

Yoshiro Nakamura is a rare bird among Japanese directors today. Though he has worked at the top of the industry, where the TV networks and Toho rule, he has so far avoided making the usual Japanese commercial film based on a hit manga, game or TV drama.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 16, 2010

'Kari-Gurashi no Arrietty (The Borrowers)'

Studio Ghibli is often assumed to be the animation house that Hayao Miyazaki built, but Miyazaki has directed only nine of its 17 features to date. Four were made by studio cofounder Isao Takahata and four by four different directors. These latter four, however, are all immediately identifiable as Studio...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 9, 2010

'Surely Someday'

The seishun eiga (youth movie) is an important, long-established genre in Japanese films with no exact parallel in the West. The difference is not the theme as such — films about teenagers are hardly rare in Hollywood — but rather their numbers and angle of approach. The Japanese industry...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jul 2, 2010

'Lost Crime Senko (Lost Crime — Flash)'

"Director's jail" is Hollywood-ese for the limbo in which film directors find themselves after a flop or two. Movie reviewers have their own versions of this, though they tend to be more tolerant of their favorite directors than are Hollywood producers, whose own necks are on the line when a film tanks...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 25, 2010

It is safe to bank on this hard-boiled man

Eiji Okuda doesn't fit into any of the usual boxes for actors in Japan — or anywhere else for that matter. He's had his share of leading roles over a three-decade career, often as a world-weary cop or gangster, but he's not what the local industry considers a star.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Jun 25, 2010

Directors steal from each other constantly — sometimes out of love, sometimes envy, sometimes a tangle of motives. The results range from Brian De Palma's famed "Odessa Steps" sequence in "The Untouchables," which thrillingly referenced the Sergei Eisenstein silent classic "The Battleship Potemkin,"...

You can often see generations of families enjoying performances together at Fuji Rock Festival.

Japan’s summer music festivals are feeling the heat in more ways than one

Akiko Trush says her experience with the neurological disorder dystonia left her feeling like she wanted to chop her own hand off.

The neurological disorder that 'kills culture'

By Tomoko Otake

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