Author: Richard Gray
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Shodo Girls (Japanese Film Festival 2010)
The thing that has always excites me about cinema is that I am constantly learning new things. Prior to Shodo Girls, I had no idea that there was such a thing as competition performance calligraphy. Yes, the gentle art of fancy lettering is a no-holds-barred bloodletting that gets pretty fierce. Plus, it’s all based on a…
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Feel the Wind (Japanese Film Festival 2010)
“Through the training and the experience, each member finds their inner strength and the joy of feeling the wind.”
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Fair Game
In 2003, the formerly classified CIA operative Valerie Plame was outed in a Washington Post article. Her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, went on record in various media outlets as saying that the outing was the direct result of his formally contradicting the US position on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq in…
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Machete
Nobody could ever accuse Robert Rodriguez of sticking to a single genre. After getting his start on the low-budget indie flick El Mariachi, documented in his autobiography Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player, Rodriguez has gone on to direct a variety of genre pics including horror flick…
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Lebanon
The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, ostensibly in search of Palestinian guerillas, is known by many names. Commonly referred to as the Lebanon War, Israel’s then Prime Minister Begin called it “Operation Peace for Galilee”. In Arabic, it is simply referred to as Al-ijtiyāḥ or “the invasion”. Regardless of what it is called, it was a seminal…
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The Social Network
Some of you may have heard of Facebook. It’s something about 500 million of you use apparently. Even we’ve got a page there. The social networking site perfectly captured the zeitgeist when it was unleashed onto an unsuspecting public in 2004, with predecessor’s My Space and Friendster already on the scene. Starting out as a…
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Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary
Last night, I had the distinct pleasure of watching Back to the Future with a packed house as part of Popcorn Taxi’s 25th Anniversary screening of the film. First of all, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I may have seen this film in excess of 100 times. I first saw this back…
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