Word: oshima
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama and Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence are both expected to earn their distributors about $4 million. So is The Makioka Sisters, directed by Kon Ichikawa from Junichiro Tanizaki's novel about an upper-class family just before World War II. Masaki Kobayashi's Tokyo Saiban, a grueling, 41/2-hour documentary of the Tokyo war-crimes trials, is a surprise success that should earn rental fees of $ 1.6 million...
...only the second time since 1954, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival went to a Japanese film: Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, an elemental and unsentimentahzed portrait of Japan's mountain people in the 1880s. The same festival also showcased Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a P.O.W. melodrama set in Java in 1942 starring David Bowie and two popular Japanese performers, Singer-Songwriter Ryuichi Sakamoto and the TV comic Takeshi. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is scheduled to open this fall in New York as the spearhead of an Oshima retrospective...
...Imamura and Oshima films are neither flukes nor mutants," says Tadao Sato, a respected Japanese film critic, of their success. "They are part of a new tendency among Japanese directors to visualize the 'irrational' elements of the Eastern world through Western-style intelligence. Once, when a Westerner looked at Japanese movies-at Kurosawa's kamikaze-type warriors in The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, or Ozu's gentle heroines in Tokyo Story and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, or Mizoguchi's evocations of Kabuki drama in Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff-he, could tell...
...financed and completed, there are few places to show it, since most moviehouses are owned by the major studios, which naturally want to keep the market cornered." Directors must become studio outlaws, raising money from independent sources, and this demands as much ingenuity as planning and shooting a film. Oshima financed his last three films with help from producers in France, Britain and New Zealand. Other directors may receive grants from the Art Theater Guild, which in the past 20 years has helped launch the careers of Oshima, Susumu Hani and Masahiro Shinoda. "If Japanese cinema hasn't become...
...plays perfectly into Bowie's plans, as well as his mystique. Eno's new ways of listening to music in 1976 are by 1983 new ways of watching it. No one looks better on rock video, or makes better tapes. Like some stalwart stepchild of Roeg and Oshima, Bowie works hard on his video outings. He sketches out each shot, consults with the director on everything before stepping in front of the camera. The results, startling and often funny, are more than musical presentations. They are essential refractions of the songs. Concert personas are thus definitely superfluous. Bowie can become...