Tag: 2010
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FLOWERS (Japanese Film Festival 2010)
If there is a meme running through the 14th Japanese Film Festival, and indeed throughout the history of Japanese cinema, it is the changing nature of family with each generation. Opening night film About Her Brother drew on the traditions of the great Ozu by touching on the impact of family throughout several generations, yet…
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Hanamizuki (Japanese Film Festival 2010)
We’ve had a variety of inspirations for this year’s entries in the Japanese Film Festival – a novel (Feel the Wind), a manga (Solanin), a true story of calligraphy performance (Shodo Girls) and a 1960s Kon Ichikawa film (About Her Brother) – but Hanamizuki may be the first film based on a pop song. At…
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Japanese Film Festival 2010: Opening Night
On a steamy spring night in Sydney town, the 14th Japanese Film Festival officially opened at the Regent on George Street. As we were reminded in an opening address, this festival keeps growing every year, from the humble beginnings of 5 films and 500 guests to this year’s 21 films and almost 10,000 guests around…
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Solanin (Japanese Film Festival 2010)
REVIEW: Too young to hold on, and too old to just break free and run
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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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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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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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Easy A
Judging from the cinematic output of the United States, the national pastime of the school populace is either trying to lose one’s virginity, talking about losing it or having lost it. Over the last decade or so, from the smash hits of the American Pie series to just about anything with Michael Cera in it…
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