Review: IF | philipbrasor.com
Though the title of this family fantasy stands for "imaginary friends," the purport of the conditional conjunction lends the film a wistful character that suits its dramatic purposes more adequately. By rights, the plot is a downer. Twelve-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming) lost her mother some..
Future shock | Cat Foreheads & Rabbit Hutches
We've written extensively about Tokyo's current condo boom without really addressing what it will lead to in the long run. Most commentators seem to expect a burst bubble, like the one that happened in the early 90s following a similar over-valuation of properties in the late 80s. However,..
Review: Mr. Nelson on the North Side | philipbrasor.com
The Japanese distributor of this 2021, 68-minute documentary obviously picked it up to release it theatrically in Japan on Prince's 65th birthday, which is June 7. You'd be hard pressed to find much information about it on the internet, despite the high-powered caliber of the talking-head ..
Review: Challengers | philipbrasor.com
Though much of the talk about Luca Guadagnino's popular tennis movie is about how sexy it is, I found myself fixating on those elements that spoke to the characters' class and wealth—or lack thereof. A number of reviewers have said that while Guadagnino tends to pile on the luxury accoutre..
Review: Drive-Away Dolls | philipbrasor.com
The Coen brothers' films always seem to flirt with pastiche without actually going the distance, so it's interesting to watch Ethan Coen, working with his partner and editor, Tricia Cooke, rather than Joel, go deep into not just one genre but several. Drive-Away Dolls is a comic put-on of ..
Review: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry | philipbrasor.com
Often attendant information about a movie that has nothing to do with its content will alter one's outlook of it. My misgivings about this heartfelt but unconvincing British melodrama were alleviated somewhat when I learned it was based on a Booker-longlisted novel that the author herself adapt..
Media watch: Residential streets finally recognized as war zones by the police | philipbrasor.com
Last month, the National Police Agency announced it would halve vehicular speed limits on so-called seikatsu doro, meaning residential streets. In particular, the new limits would cover roads that pass through residential neighborhoods and which don't have center lines or sidewalks. Typically, ..
Media watch: Japan contends with the consequences of a sellers’ job market | philipbrasor.com
A front page story in the May 25 print edition of the Asahi Shimbun reported that the overwhelming recruitment rate for new graduates continued this spring, with 98.1 percent of people graduating from universities in 2024 securing work, the highest rate since the labor and education ministries start..
Review: The Zone of Interest | philipbrasor.com
By now everyone knows how director Jonathan Glazer keeps the horrors of the Auschwitz death camp out of sight in his movie about the commandant of the camp, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his family, who live in well-appointed digs right next door. The purpose, of course, is not to show how th..
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..
