Mark Schilling - The Japan Times

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Mark Schilling

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Dec 5, 2008

Mamoru Oshii is a world-class animation director, but his films, from the 1995 dystopian SF "Ghost In the Shell" to this year's air-war epic "The Sky Crawlers," are not for the masses. Instead they often explore heavyweight themes that appeal to anime otaku (ultrafans), from the dissolving boundaries...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Dec 4, 2008

An audience with Miyazaki, Japan's animation king

Hayao Miyazaki says he doesn't like giving interviews, but the Oscar-winning, megahit-making animator has strong opinions he isn't shy about sharing, as a packed room of reporters learned when he appeared at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo on Nov. 20.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Nov 28, 2008

'252 — Seizonsha Ari'

Disaster pics have been big in Japan since the days of "Godzilla," the 1954 classic whose title monster served as a rubber-suited symbol for everything from earthquakes (that stomp) and fires (that breath) to atomic bombings (that city-wrecking power).

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Nov 21, 2008

'Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai'

Based on a novel by Tetsutaro Kato, the 1958 TV drama "Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai" ("I Want to Be a Seashell") became a paradigm-shifting hit when it was broadcast on KRT Television, the predecessor to the TBS network.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Nov 14, 2008

Films that purport to go behind the scenes of an industry or institution — with the enthusiastic support of the folks they are supposedly unmasking — are almost by definition PR exercises if not outright recruiting tools.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Nov 7, 2008

'Sakura no Sono'

In 1990, Shun Nakahara — a religion-studies major at the University of Tokyo who later became a porno director — released his first straight feature, "Sakura no Sono" ("The Cherry Orchard"). Based on an Akimi Yoshida manga, the film described the day a drama club at an exclusive girls' school...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Oct 31, 2008

'Homeless Chugakusei'

The homeless in Japan are mostly older men down on their luck, sleeping on cardboard in train stations or under blue tarps in public parks. Some are mentally disturbed or chronically ill, but their image in popular culture is surprisingly positive — ranging from the lovable loser to the ragged...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Oct 30, 2008

Digging deep to find the sparkle in Japanese Eyes

Japan's film industry releases more than 400 films a year, but only 10 screened in the Japanese Eyes section of this year's Tokyo International Film Festival, which ran from Oct. 18 to 26.

CULTURE / Film

Oct 24, 2008

In the director's chair at 90

Born in Tokyo in 1918, Takeo Kimura debuted as an art director in 1945. In the six decades since, he has worked on more than 230 films. His most famous association is with Seijun Suzuki during his 1960s peak at the Nikkatsu studio, when he made 1966's "Tokyo Nagaremono (Tokyo Drifter)" and the next year's...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Oct 24, 2008

'Yume no Mani Mani'

Art directors are known as below-the-line talent in the movie business. That is, they are considered a rank below the director, producer and scriptwriter on the production pecking order, and they are paid accordingly.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Oct 17, 2008

'Makiguri no Ana'

Japanese horror once struck a lot of fans in the West as fresh because it was less about fantastical creatures — say, flesh-eating zombies — than everyday dread. Instead of popping up out of nowhere, fear crept up like sinister fog from apparently mundane places and things — a moldy...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Oct 10, 2008

'Shiawase no Kaori'

Here's an obvious but often neglected rule: Never see foodie movies — films that revolve around the preparation and consumption of scrumptious-looking food — on an empty stomach. Watching Gabriel Axel's Oscar-winning Danish movie "Babette's Feast" (1987) — the "Citizen Kane" of foodie...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Oct 3, 2008

'Achilles to Kame'

Zeno's paradoxes are ancient mind games that undermine common-sense assumptions about reality. In the most famous, "Achilles and the Tortoise," a fast runner and a tortoise start at the same time toward the same goal, the tortoise with a head start — say it must cover 10 meters while the runner...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 26, 2008

Kiyoshi Kurosawa has long been filed under "horror director," though his take on the genre is anything but standard. The villain of "Cure," his deeply creepy 1997 breakout film, is not a maniac with a sharp-edged weapon but a blank-faced drifter who hypnotizes his victims into killing themselves.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 19, 2008

'Kodomo no Kodomo'

Teenage pregnancy has always been with us, but attitudes toward it have changed. A generation ago, the situation of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's daughter — 17, pregnant and unwed — would have inspired conservative tut-tutting. Now it's a cause of conservative celebration.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 12, 2008

'Paco to Maho no Ehon'

Tetsuya Nakashima is being hailed as a genius by the Japanese film world, an epithet that didn't occur to many in the 1990s when his pitch-black comedies, including "Natsu Jikan no Otonatachi (Happy-Go-Lucky)" (1997) and "Beautiful Sunday" (1998), were playing to tiny audiences here and getting little...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Sep 5, 2008

Aculture's attitude toward death is always going to be something of a mystery to outsiders, even ones who try to immerse themselves in the local language and customs. I had my own cultural shock when my wife's father passed away, and I experienced the Japanese funeral process for the first time.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 29, 2008

'Detroit Metal City'

Soichi Negishi (Kenichi Matsuyama) hates what he does for a living. After every night on the job, he can't wait to strip off his work clothes and relax with his favorite light J-Pop tunes. With his pudding-bowl hairdo, goofy grin and foppy gestures, he looks like the younger Japanese brother of Jim Carrey's...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 22, 2008

Omnibus films — collections of segments, usually by different directors — are hard commercial sells, but rarely complete disappointments.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Film

Aug 15, 2008

Nostalgia keeps changing. The music, TV shows and junk food that leaves one generation misty-eyed are regarded by the next as quaint curiosities from a distant past, until they finally pass into that dead, hallowed realm known as history.

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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