Author: Jonathan Clements
June 1, 2023 · 1 comment
The Bullet Train
By Tom Wilmot. There’s a bomb on the Hikari 109! Tetsuo Okita (Ken Takakura) and his band of blue-collar bombers attempt to extort money from the government, holding the lives of some 1,500 bullet train passengers to ransom. When the National Railway suggests stopping the train to check for an explosive, they learn that the […]
May 29, 2023 · 0 comments
Summer Ghost
By Andrew Osmond. The name Summer Ghost may sound oxymoronic to British viewers. We tend to associate ghosts with cold, dark months, as with A Christmas Carol and the BBC’s tradition of putting up scary spook stories over Christmas. Actually, Summer Ghost isn’t a frightening film as such, though it deals with fears, intense emotions […]
May 23, 2023 · 0 comments
Books: History of Modern Manga
By Jonathan Clements. “The history of manga,” notes the back-cover blurb for Matthieu Pinon and Laurent Lefebvre’s new book, “is inextricably tied to Japan’s social, economic, political, and cultural evolution.” But the authors neglect to mention the real selling point, which is that their History of Modern Manga actually bothers to point out where those […]
May 20, 2023 · 0 comments
Books: Japanese Film and the Challenge of Video
By Jonathan Clements. Tom Mes’s new book begins in 2022 with Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car winning an Oscar, followed by a flood of gushing articles about how it was going to “change Japanese cinema.” He notes that this relatively minor art-house film was never going to rock any boats in its native Japan, and […]
May 17, 2023 · 0 comments
Future Boy Conan at the Ghibli Museum
By Andrew Osmond. For all fans of Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, we’d like to remind you that Miyazaki’s first anime, the adventure series Future Boy Conan, is available from Anime Limited in standard and Collector’s formats, the latter in 4K. If you want to know what Conan is like (quick answer; like Laputa), there’s an […]