Tag: Jonathan Clements
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 14, 2023 · 0 comments
Books: Speaking in Subtitles
By Jonathan Clements. The sub-versus-dub debate was first truly ignited in August 1960, when Bosley Crowther in the New York Times issued a broadside against having to read a film. “It is foolish,” he wrote, “to hobble expression with an old device that was mainly contrived as a convenience to save the cost of dubbing […]
May 8, 2023 · 0 comments
The House of the Lost on the Cape
By Jonathan Clements. “I’m sure lots of us are struggling right now. But even so, let’s unite our efforts and give it our best shot!” These words are put into the mouth of one of the minor characters of Shinya Kawatsura’s The House of the Lost on the Cape but resonate through the years, from […]
April 23, 2023 · 0 comments
Pompo the Cinephile
By Jonathan Clements. Joelle Davidovich Pomponette, or Pompo for short, is a pint-sized producer, grand-daughter of a studio founder, who simply loves making movies. In the fictitious movie capital of “Nyallywood”, she is known for highly-regarded B-pictures – the anime lovingly recreates posters for works such as Guns Akimbo and Zombizarre, alongside her latest horror-from-the […]