Word: cinema
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There couldn't have been a more promising year for the Hong Kong Film Festival. Cinema is in full bloom throughout Asia. Post-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese films are probably the world's hottest?and Hong Kong is Chinese cinema's incandescent crucible. The good news is that the festival was a smorgasbord of experimental work from China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and the Philippines, much of it shot in video format, with an ultra-tight focus on youth and their contradictory (and sometimes tragic) need to belong in society and simultaneously forge individual identities. The unhappy news...
...similar descent takes hero Kakihara, (Japanese renaissance everyman Tadanobu Asano) to a blissful death in Ichi the Killer; in the modern Japanese cinema, death seems the only way out. This all-star gathering of evildoers unites ultraviolent comic artist Hideo Yamamoto, from whose manga the film was created, and screen violence helmer Miike Takahashi, who created last year's cult sensation Audition. Kakihara is a sado-masochistic punk gangster caught up in an underworld where dysfunction speaks louder than love. When his yakuza boss mysteriously disappears, Kakihara hunts for his abductor. In the process, he turns a mansion into...
...Italian media have dubbed him the butcher of Genoa. Friedrich Engel, now a frail 93, is accused of ordering the execution of 59 Italian inmates from a Genoa prison in May 1944 in retaliation for a bomb blast at a cinema that killed five German marines. Engel, who was a member of the Nazis' élite Waffen SS security service, admits he took part in the executions. "Yes I was involved, but I don't feel entirely guilty," he told German television last year. "They were all partisans, terrorists who participated in earlier actions against Germans." Now Engel is being...
...pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, is using a depressingly familiar defense: he was just following orders direct from Adolf Hitler. Such claims have been used - almost always without success - by countless accused Nazis since the end of World War II. Engel claimed that after the cinema blast, an angry Hitler issued an order to "repay attacks resulting in death" by executing 10 people for every German who died. "For me to have resisted would have been impossible," he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. "Imagine, if you can, how you would have resisted the personal wishes...
...perhaps the best single attraction may be found in more modern times: Italy's National Museum of Cinema. Located inside the Mole Antonelliana - a 167.5-m-high, architecturally eclectic tower that is the symbol of Turin - offers a memorable winding tour up the circular walkway where visitors can see film clips, original screenplay sheets, rare posters and otherwise entertaining snapshots of more than a century of cinematic history. The museum is worth an entire afternoon. For a singular view of the city and the surrounding mountains, take the elevator...