Word: akira
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...original Matrix opened in Japan in September 1999, the Wachowskis floated the possibility of producing an anim? homage, based on the Matrix world, as an appendix to the films. Top directors?including Shinichiro Watanabe, creator of the hip Cowboy Bebop, and Koji Morimoto, who worked on the seminal Akira?signed on immediately. The brothers wrote four of the nine shorts themselves; the rest were penned by the directors under Wachowski supervision. "The Animatrix was like being invited to the brothers' house," says Watanabe. "We got to play in their huge backyard?but we had to remain within the yard...
...first director to emerge from any country is usually taken as a spokesman for that nation's spirit. It's not until later we discover that, say, Akira Kurosawa was the least Japanese of Japanese auteurs, that Satyajit Ray's films had little to do with India's giddy musical movies. Now comes Kaurismaki, a foreign-film Oscar nominee. How Finnish is he? Do the locals really smoke and drink so much? Are they this dour and deadpan funny...
...depiction of Nango, The Thirteen Steps resembles Akira Kurosawa's 1952 classic Ikiru, which tells the story of a cancer-stricken bureaucrat who tries to redeem his stuck-in-the-mud existence by building a neighborhood playground. Like Ikiru's Kanji Watanabe, Nango is in a race against time to make amends for a lifetime of dutiful work by which he now feels poisoned. But compared to Kurosawa's characters, these protagonists are less deftly rendered. Nango's fanatical devotion to the case makes him the personification of a guilty conscience rather than a flesh and blood character...
DIED. JAMES COBURN, 74, rugged and rakish Academy Award-winning actor whose menacing screen presence defined a new type of tough guy in classics such as The Magnificent Seven (1960), an American version of Akira Kurosawa's Japanese epic The Seven Samurai, and The Great Escape (1963); in Los Angeles. Coburn, who rose to fame as the secret agent in the James Bond spoof Our Man Flint, was largely confined to minor roles during his career. While battling debilitating arthritis, however, Coburn won an Oscar in 1998 for his powerful performance as the abusive alcoholic "Pop" Whitehouse in Affliction...
Warren Professor of American History Akira Iriye spearheaded a drive by two dozen prominent historians who sent a letter last week to the chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY) protesting the system’s decision not to reappoint Robert David “KC” Johnson...