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COMMENTARY / World
Jul 15, 2001

U.S. fear of bilingualism is unfounded

In Quebec, French signs by law have to be twice as big as their English translations. The top spot in the Los Angeles radio market belongs to KSCA-FM, a Spanish language station.
SOCCER / J. League / ON THE BALL
Jul 3, 2001

Time for Japan to take a lesson from Seoul

"Are you from Japan?"
CULTURE / Film
Jun 27, 2001

Bending the rules of noir

The Monkey's Mask Rating: * * * 1/2 Japanese title: Poetry, SexDirector: Samantha Lang Running time: 93 minutes Language: EnglishShowing at Yebisu Garden Cinema Murder mysteries have been set in just about every locale possible, so why not the cloistered world of Australian poetry? That's what director...
CULTURE / Film
Jun 27, 2001

Lang enters the sophomore class

It comes as no surprise to hear that the most inspiring film in Samantha Lang's life was "Hiroshima, Mon Amour." "I saw it when I was 16 and must have watched it at least 10 times," says Lang. "I know that film shot by shot, line by line." Echoes of that film's free-spirited and independent heroine,...
CULTURE / Film
Jun 27, 2001

Stop me if you've heard this one before

Nadie Conoce a Nadie Rating: * * Japanese Title: PuzzleDirector: Mateo Gil Running time: 108 minutes Language: SpanishOpens June 30 at Cine La Sept in Yurakcho At this point in time, we, as an audience, have learned to expect things from the psycho-killer genre: elaborate mutilation; a hip and queasy...
CULTURE / Film
Jun 20, 2001

Things go creep in the night

The Gift Rating: * * * 1/2 Director: Sam Raimi Running time: 119 minutes Language: English Now showing at Tokyu Bunka Kaikan and other theaters After a career in directing splatterific horror and postmodern comic-book flicks ("Evil Dead," "Darkman," "The Quick and the Dead"), Sam Raimi seemed to have...
CULTURE / Books / THE ASIAN BOOKSHELF
Jun 10, 2001

Tanizaki captured in full flow

THE GOURMET CLUB: A Sextet, By Jun'ichiro Tanizaki. Translated by Paul McCarthy and Anthony Chambers. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha International, 2001, 204 pp., 2,800 yen. This is the long-awaited collection of six of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's shorter works, given us by two of the most eminent of Tanizaki's...
CULTURE / Film
May 23, 2001

Women under the confluence

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her Rating: * * * 1/2 Director: Rodrigo Garcia Running time: 110 minutes Language: EnglishNow playing as the late show at Bunkamura Le Cinema in Shibuya "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her" is a sleek omnibus film, with five separate but loosely interwoven...
LIFE / Travel
May 22, 2001

Visiting the Little Prince at Hakone

Breathtaking mountain scenery, a walk through a French village, Provencal cooking and a meeting with the doppelganger of a world-famous author -- sounds like a nice day trip. Especially when you can do it all without leaving Kanto.
CULTURE / Film
May 16, 2001

A true master in our midst

Tokyo Marigold Rating: * * * * * Director: Jun Ichikawa Running time: 97 minutes Language: JapaneseNow showing Film is art, commerce -- and fashion. Actors, directors and even national cinemas are in vogue one year, out the next. Not long ago the British were hot, now it's the turn of the Chinese....
CULTURE / Art
May 2, 2001

Hitchcock and human nature

Alfred Hitchcock is an icon of the film world, like the Beatles are to rock and pop. Often referred to as the greatest director of all time, the English filmmaker produced art for the masses, using avant-garde techniques and character psychology with universal relevance.
CULTURE / Film
Apr 25, 2001

Wake up, it's just a bad movie

The Family Man Rating: * * Director: Brett Ratner Running time: 125 minutes Language: EnglishNow showing This is Kafka's nightmare scenario: One morning, a man wakes up and finds he's turned into a giant bug. He must deal with the inner turmoil that follows. This is writer/director Brett Ratner's...
LIFE / Travel
Apr 24, 2001

A tale of two Thai tribes

BAHN BOON YEUN, Phrae Province, Thailand -- Small, wild-haired figures in ragged clothes move barefoot through the moonlit mango grove. Some carry archaic muskets as long as spears, others squat beside soot-stained shacks murmuring to each other in the darkness. Inside a big wooden house at the heart...
CULTURE / Film
Apr 18, 2001

Journey to the center of the human volcano

HotaruStyle to Kill Rating: * * * Director: Naomi Kawase Running time: 164 min. Language: JapaneseEnds April 20 Rating: * * * * * Director: Seijun SuzukiLanguage: Japanese Now showing In 1997, a young documentary filmmaker named Naomi Kawase won the Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival...
EDITORIALS
Apr 12, 2001

Forty years of flying and dreaming

Forty years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly in to space. It was a short trip: one 108-minute circumnavigation of Earth, but it changed human history. When humankind escaped the bounds of the earth's atmosphere, our views of the world and our place in it changed forever....
CULTURE / Film
Apr 11, 2001

Heartbreak at its finest moment

In the Mood for Love Rating: * * * * 1/2 Director: Wang Kar-wai Running time: 98 minutes Language: CantoneseNow playing A man and a woman sit in a coffee shop, the table between them maintaining the proper distance. Neighbors in the same cramped apartment building, they have agreed to meet away...
BUSINESS
Apr 5, 2001

Matsushita unit sets up lab in U.S.

OSAKA -- Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., said Wednesday it has set up a laboratory in California to develop technologies for broadband distribution of video and digital content.
Events
Apr 3, 2001

Japanese films shown with English subtitles

The Japan Foundation's Kyoto office is holding free weekly screenings of Japanese films for foreigners starting at 2 p.m. each Wednesday this month at its office in Kyoto's Nakagyo Ward.
LIFE / Travel
Apr 3, 2001

Escape to the Victorian age in the town time forgot

SIDMOUTH, England -- If one holds the sepia-tinted postcard and stands in the same spot where the photographer stood at the start of the last century, one is stunned by the changes to the facades of the hotels and shops that line Sidmouth's seafront. There are virtually none.
CULTURE / Books
Apr 1, 2001

Schilling reels in a decade of film

CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE FILM, by Mark Schilling. Weatherhill, 1999, 399 pp., $24.95 (paper). Americans flock to subtitled films the way the Swedes flock to church. That is, hardly ever. So when Asian films make their way into the theaters of U.S. shopping malls, it is no small feat.
CULTURE / Film
Mar 23, 2001

Ins and outs of postfeminist theory

Annabel Chong may not be a household name, but her claim to fame is quick and to the point: This porno actress grabbed a world record in 1995 by shagging 251 men in just under 10 hours.
CULTURE / Film
Mar 10, 2001

A real woman is hard to find

The problem with "women's movies" is this: Too often, they make you think that the world out there belongs to men. Otherwise, how could they keep painting the same old pictures of women struggling to gain self-respect, raise children, find true love, bond witheach other, etc.? In the real world, women...
CULTURE / Film
Mar 2, 2001

Dogmatic 'King Lear' stranded in the dunes

The Dogma '95 film movement, started by a group of Danish filmmakers, is a short-list of 10 rules known as the "vow of chastity" -- a pledge to eschew action, sets, props, soundtracks, lighting, stable camerawork, genre conventions and directorial credit. Like many a radical movement, it is entirely...
CULTURE / Film
Feb 20, 2001

Hollywood cliches without the thrills

Are Asian films ready for prime time -- that is, for the mall cineplexes of America?
CULTURE / Film
Feb 20, 2001

Support for Asian filmmakers

Facing nonexistent government support, meager prospects for private-sector funding and even diminishing turnout at box offices, any aspiring filmmaker in Japan might lose sight of their movie-making dreams.
JAPAN
Feb 16, 2001

Court upholds ban on publishing novel

The Tokyo High Court on Thursday upheld a lower court ruling ordering prizewinning novelist Miri Yuu and publisher Shinchosha Co. to halt publication of a short novel and pay 1.3 million yen to a former friend of Yuu's for violating her privacy.
CULTURE / Film
Feb 10, 2001

One for the guy upstairs

If God was in the mood for a really good movie, chances are he'd flip through the listings and make tracks for "Unbreakable." Everything about it has a huge appeal to the Omniscient: the dynamics of Good and Evil, the fundamental questions of Existence, man's helplessness in the face of accidental fate....
CULTURE / Film
Feb 6, 2001

Trauma in a sepia-tinged Kyushu

It's not easy filming the inner lives of human beings. Novelists can go on at length about their protagonist's stream of consciousness (see "Ulysses") while filmmakers cannot show scene after voiced-over scene of that same stream without inducing audience catatonia. See Joseph Strick's misbegotten 1967...
CULTURE / Film
Feb 3, 2001

Every faulty step you take . . .

Now you see the great Keanu Reeves, now you don't.
LIFE / Travel
Jan 31, 2001

Britain's secondhand bookshop Mecca

Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross may be the book centers of London, but the Mecca for secondhand books in Britain is on the English/Welsh border. With more than 30 secondhand bookshops, tiny Hay-on-Wye bills itself as the "town of books."

Longform

Visitors to Kyoto walk along a street near Kiyomizu Temple in April. A popular tourist spot, Kyoto has seen what locals feel to be an overwhelming amount of tourists in 2024.
Is Japan ready for 60 million tourists?