Review: The Teachers’ Lounge | philipbrasor.com
You have to hand it to the Germans. Their capacity for self-examination, which often leads to self-condemnation, seems almost limitless, and can lead to inadvertent injustices, as seen by the way the country's strict definition of antisemitism has recently affected the free speech rights of art..
BM_OneLove_JP
#ボブ・マーリーONELOVE
Review: Bob Marley: One Love | philipbrasor.com
In some ways, this movie about reggae legend Bob Marley, which takes in the years 1976-78—after he had already become a superstar—relies on narrative notes that one doesn't usually find in big budget biopics. It seems more interested in capturing the vibe that gave Marley his distinctive sound ..
Media watch: Mayor of town on front line of possible Taiwan dispute demands constitutional revision | philipbrasor.com
Location of Yonaguni Island On May 3, which is Constitution Day in Japan, prominent right wing pundit Yoshiko Sakurai held a symposium in Tokyo on the Constitution, which she wants to amend in order to establish the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) as a full-fledged national military body and remove any re..
Review: Anyone But You | philipbrasor.com
In its own super-contrived way, the plot dynamics of Will Gluck's rom-com, Anyone But You, should offer assurances to those of us who have always appreciated the genre for the way it's challenged good screenwriters to come up with witty sexual banter. Essentially, it's about two beaut..
johnlennonLW
#ジョン・レノン失われた週末
Review: The Lost Weekend: A Love Story | philipbrasor.com
In 1973 and 1974, John Lennon lived apart from Yoko Ono during a licentious interlude that Lennon himself dubbed his "lost weekend." His companion was May Pang, a Chinese-American woman who had become Lennon and Ono's personal assistant sometime before the breakup. It's fairly we..
Counter intuitive | Cat Foreheads & Rabbit Hutches
Is it or isn't it? Last week the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) finally released its latest survey of the Japanese housing situation. We say "finally" because the survey is conducted every five years and the last one came out in 2018, so we'd been waiting f..
Review: Honey Sweet | philipbrasor.com
Yoo Hae-jin is one of those movie stars who would seem to flourish as a character actor but somehow is flourishing as a leading man; though, granted, the people he plays are not what you would normally think of as leading man material. And yet he might be the most versatile male actor in Korean&hell..
Review: Green Border | philipbrasor.com
As up-to-the-minute filmmaking goes, Agneiszka Holland's take on the migrant crisis in northern Europe exudes a professionalism that tends to overwhelm its harrowing themes. Though the moral and humanitarian stakes are never in question, it's easy to fall into the action-flick rhythms that..
Not what they paid for | Cat Foreheads & Rabbit Hutches
In December, the Chiba city office of East Japan Railways (JR East) announced a change in the timetable for the Keiyo Line that would start in March. The Keiyo runs from Tokyo Station parallel to the Tokyo Bay shoreline south to Soga Station in Chiba city. It is the train line that services Tokyo Di..
Review: System Crasher | philipbrasor.com
With her debut film, German director Nora Fingscheidt demonstrates unequivocally that she isn't fooling around. The title is a kind of inside joke among social workers in Germany, as it refers to a case that basically breaks the carefully wrought procedures that have been put in place to addres..
Review: Evil Does Not Exist | philipbrasor.com
Almost deceptively, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest film initially comes across as a conventional story about a big, bad corporation invading a rustic village for profit. The simplicity of the premise is what works for me, since I love stories that explain in detail situations involving labor and commerc..
Review: 20 Days in Mariupol | philipbrasor.com
While many people have opinions about director Jonathan Glazer's allusion to the current state of affairs in Israel/Gaza at the recent Oscars ceremony, fewer have remarked on Mstyslav Chernov's equally powerful remarks when he accepted the Best Feature Documenary award for 20 Days in Mariu..
Review: Kidnapped | philipbrasor.com
Given his prodigious output over a career that started in 1965, it should be surprising that director Marco Bellocchio doesn't have more of an international following, but it may have something to do with the parochial nature of his work, which is not just thematically handcuffed to his native ..
Media watch: Five years in, how does Naruhito stack up to his father? | philipbrasor.com
On March 22, Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako visited victims of the New Year's Day earthquake that struck the Noto Peninsula on the Japan Sea coast. It was the couple's second visit to a disaster area since Naruhito ascended to the throne in 2019, but this time there was chatter online..
Review: Youth (Spring) | philipbrasor.com
Wang Bing's latest documentary may not, at 215 minutes, be one of his typically longer works, but it is probably his most vivid. He spent 6 years recording the lives of young textile workers in the city of Zhili and fashioned three films from the footage. Youth (Spring), itself the first of thr..
Review: Manticore | philipbrasor.com
At its most sensitive, Spanish director Carlos Vermut's fourth film is about a burgeoning love affair between two lonely but very different people. Julian (Nacho Sanchez) is a modeler for a video game company who specializes in weird, terrible creatures. He is the most engaged when working alon..
Review: All of Us Strangers | philipbrasor.com
I've only seen two of Andrew Haigh's previous movies, but Lean on Pete and, especially, 45 Years gave me the impression he is a director who has little use for conventional sentimentality, no matter how much the material warrants it. His new one, however, exudes an emotional earnestness th..
Media watch: Mainstream press again decides Koike’s possibly fraudulent c.v. isn’t news | philipbrasor.com
Toshiro Kojima (Tokyo Shimbun) Back in 2020, shortly before Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike ran for a second term, a journalist named Taeko Ishii came out with a book about Koike called Jotei (Empress) that became an instant best-seller. Ishii included an interview with a woman who said she was Koike�..
Review: No. 10 | philipbrasor.com
The title of Alex van Warmerdam's latest feature is meaningless in terms of describing the film. It is called No. 10 because it is van Warmerdam's tenth film, nothing more and nothing less; and, in fact, given the slippery nature of the plot, it sort of makes sense to give it a numeric mar..
Review: Priscilla | philipbrasor.com
In terms of verisimilitude, Sophia Coppola's dramatization of the relationship between Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley (nee Beaulieu) is much more convincing than Baz Luhrmann's Elvis biopic, which was an obvious fantasia. Based on Priscilla's own 1985 memoir, the new film necessa..
Review: Infinity Pool | philipbrasor.com
As a chip off the old block, Brandon Cronenberg lacks his father's ability to connect a viewer emotionally to the outrageous images he conjures up, unless you consider disgust an emotion. Whereas David Cronenberg's patented body horror has something to do with the imagination, Brandon'..
Review: The Iron Claw | philipbrasor.com
To those of us who do not follow professional wrestling, it's often difficult to separate the athletics from the theatrics, and one of the strengths of Sean Durkin's feature about the real-life Von Erich family, who were stars of the sport from the late 70s to the early 90s, is how it brin..
Review: She Came to Me | philipbrasor.com
There's an air of lofty criticism drifting through Rebecca Miller's new film that feels at odds with its production design. Though the decor of the sunny, expansive Brooklyn flats where it's set convey the kind of aspirational fantasy evident in all of Woody Allen's work, it main..
Review: Past Lives | philipbrasor.com
Celine Song’s debut feature, which didn't win any Oscars despite being the most acclaimed indie movie of 2023 in the U.S., may be the purest cinematic distillation of the Korean emigrant experience, even more so than Minari. Centered on a woman whose family moved from Seoul to Canada when she w..
Review: Godland | philipbrasor.com
There's a scene about halfway through this disturbing but frustrating Icelandic film that puts everything before and after in such plain perspective that it threatens to upend the whole meaning of the production. A young Danish clergyman, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), charged with building a ch..
seikouotakujp
#成功したオタク
ATBATB_jp
#美と殺戮のすべて
Review: Fanatic and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed | philipbrasor.com
Fanatic Oh Seyeon's Fanatic is definitely a student project, since she was still studying film at university when it was first shown at Korean film festivals in 2021. As such it's also a deeply personal film. Oh explores the mystery of fandom, especially the downside, and takes off from he..
Ghostbusters_JP
#ゴーストバスターズフローズン・サマー
Review: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire | philipbrasor.com
Having passed through the original Ghostbusters craze phase unscathed and unenlightened, I came to the fractured franchise late and never quite got its blend of winking gross-out humor and imaginative but tame scares. There was always something under-cooked about its premise of a professional squad ..
Review: Oppenheimer | philipbrasor.com
It was inevitable that Christopher Nolan's multiple Oscar-winning biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, would play in Japan despite some earlier reports that no local distributor would touch it because of Hiroshima/Nagasaki; though it remains to be seen if it's as..
