Word: akira
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Anime is kids' cartoons: Pokemon, oh, yes, and Sailor Moon, a TV series about intergalactic Spice Girls that airs in a heavily edited version on the Cartoon Network. But it's also post-doomsday teen fantasies (Akira), futuristic fly-boy films (The Wings of Honneamise), schizo-psycho thrill machines (Perfect Blue), sex-and-samurai sagas (Ninja Scroll)--the works. "If you want to see a story told as fast as the most exciting comic book," McCarthy says, "but with amazing movement, music and dialogue, that's what you get from anime...
...kung furiosity of prime Jackie Chan and the heroic bloodshed and long coats of John Woo movies; the Hollywood-Hong Konglomeration has never meshed so suavely as in this film's fight scenes and wire-work aerobatics. Never seen the mega-imaginative, ultraviolent Japanese cartoons known as anime (Akira, Ghost in the Shell)? Now you have--in whirling live action...
...says he likes to make "messy, really human, Japanese, unsettling films," and Dr. Akagi fills Imamura's bill. The plot--a family doctor (Akira Emoto) dedicates himself to fighting a hepatitis epidemic in the last days of World War II--might suggest solemn hagiography. But Akagi boasts the loopy zest and daringly shifty tones of Preston Sturges' medical comedy-drama, The Great Moment. Akagi is aided by a morphine-addict doctor and a semi-reformed whore (smart, sensuous Kumiko Aso). This movie has it all: whales, A-bombs and some prime sexual kink. Forty years into directing, Imamura says this...
...virtuoso, and Shaham was up to the task, flawlessly tossing off harmonics, contorted chords, astronomically high melodies and endless strings of fast-paced arpeggios. The piece is interesting in that the final raucous section marked "Fast and Brilliant" also highlights the piano, and at Friday's concert Akira Eguchi, a well-known accompanist and performer in his own right, also rose to the occasion, fulfilling effortlessly his much under-appreciated role...
...Akira Kurosawa, who died on Sept. 6, was one of the towering figures of world cinema. His work--31 movies made over 50 years--is one of the great treasures of film history. Kurosawa introduced Japanese cinema to the West in 1950 with Rashomon, a work of tremendous moral and cinematic force whose influence on Western filmmakers is immeasurable. This was the first in a series of masterpieces from Kurosawa in the '50s and '60s, one more startling than the other: Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, High and Low; in his work, the CinemaScope...