Word: nameless
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Jiro Taniguchi's "The Walking Man" ($17; 155 pages) perfectly embodies the precepts of nouvelle manga, taking the low-key activities of everyday life and depicting them in the highly detailed drawing style more commonly associated with European comix. Each of the book's 18 chapters depicts a nameless salaryman on a different stroll through the city and countryside. The first chapter sets the formula for ones following. The man pops out to take a break from moving into a new house. Amidst tableaus of sunning housecats, tall trees and fish swimming under bridges the man happens upon a bird...
...fable from the 3rd century B.C. refracted in modern skepticism, Hero views the birth of the Chinese nation through the murky motives of some of the first Emperor's potential assassins. The plot is a series of tales told by the warrior Nameless (Jet Li) to the Emperor (Chen Daoming). Any or none of the stories may be true; this is Rashomon with a Mandarin accent...
...Nameless has three main adversaries: Sky (Donnie Yen), a master martial artist; Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a calligrapher who is as adroit with a saber as with a brush; and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), Broken Sword's soul mate. Flying Snow has a side skirmish with Moon (Zhang Ziyi), Broken Sword's smitten apprentice. Loyalties are tested, alliances made and sundered. Death is the price for betrayal--of the Emperor or the heart...
...drops of water; soldiers squatting in a circle, caked in clay; lovers curled into each other, sleeping under red silk; a sword fight in a grove of golden leaves that turn red, plum, magenta and fall like fat confetti. In the film's design, color creates context. Each story Nameless tells is draped in a different hue: gray, red, blue, white, green. (In the fifth episode, a lake shimmers like lime Jell-O.) At the end, reality forces a new color on Nameless: black, for death. The cinematographer is Christopher Doyle, who has shot most of Wong...
...fever-dream visions with dark, existentialist gag humor. Beyer takes all the clich?s of the traditional "laugh-a-day" strip and turns them inside out. The typically cute, bourgeois family of the dailies has been replaced by Amy and Jordan, a fear-filled, childless couple who live in a nameless city full of bugs, aliens, dirt and neighbors like Dame Head, who is just a head on a platter. Their Dadaist adventures include having their apartment building dragged out of town by the vermin who live with them. "They couldn't stand the city. But why did they have...