Family dramas are a movie staple, but few have the texture of real family life, in which individual destinies unfold and interact in ways too messy and complex for the usual movie ad copy. What we usually get instead is either melodrama or caricature ...
A prestigious award at a foreign film festival is a grail for many Japanese filmmakers. The desire to embellish one's filmography with a Venice Silver Lion or a Cannes Golden Palm is not limited tothe Japanese, of course, but in this credential-mad society, which ...
Favorite travel fantasies come in many forms -- not everyone dreams of a deserted white-sand beach on Maui. Mine was driving down a long, straight road through the American West, with the speedometer needle leaning far right. The reason should be obvious: The desert is ...
"What I really want to do is direct." This phrase, heard everywhere in Hollywood from interviews with A-list stars to conversations between waiters at Hamburger Inn, has become a joke -- to everyone but the legions of gottabe directors themselves. Among this crowd, scriptwriters ...
I was buying a jar of jam at the sutler's tent when the cannon went off, close enough and loud enough to make my teeth rattle and my eyes widen into an excellent impersonation of fear. The salesman, a stout, bearded fellow in the ...
Each generation has its own way of telling love stories on the screen. What is supremely romantic to one strikes the next as supremely corny (until it begins to fondlylook back, as Meg Ryan's character does in "Sleepless in Seattle," at "An Affair to ...
When I first heard that Studio Ghibli was going to base its next film on Hisaichi Ishii's "Hohokekyo Tonari no Yamada-kun (My Neighbors the Yamadas)" -- a must-read for millions in the Asahi Shimbun" -- I had my doubts.The best gag manga have a ...
Death can do wonders for one's reputation. James Dean was a hot young actor with one hit -- "East of Eden" -- when he crashed his Porsche on a California back road and became an instant legend.Would his admirers have become so devoted -- ...
The Japanese have a huge appetite for animation, as one glance at a TV or — at this time of year — a movie schedule will confirm. Much of that appetite, of course, is fed with junk: endless recyclings of superhero fantasy or schoolyard ...
