Word: thirteen
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There's an old chestnut that says Japanese society is based on shame while Western society is grounded in guilt. Japanese people do the right thing, the theory goes, out of fear of social censure; Westerners navigate by a moral compass guided by absolute standards. The Thirteen Steps, a thoughtful new film by director Masahiko Nagasawa, shows that Japan is not so easily pigeonholed. Based on an award-winning detective novel by Kazuaki Takano, The Thirteen Steps wrestles with the thorny issues of capital punishment, personal redemption and the value of human life. Its heroes are driven by the quandary...
...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...
...American movie stars has visited the island gulag to mug with its Communist bully. Danny Glover, Kevin Costner, Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio and Steven Spielberg have all made pilgrimages southward to express their groupie-like adoration for Castro. Costner said watching the premiere of his film “Thirteen Days” with the despot was “the experience of a lifetime,” while Spielberg called his November 2002 dinner with Castro “the eight most important hours of my life.” To these Hollywood icons, the Cuban leader...
...with “Thirteen,” members said each art form was on equal footing, interacting and responding to the others—entirely improvised...
While their initial trial represents a picture of the legal system at its worst and most dangerous, Hernandez and Cruz were only two of the thirteen Illinois death row inmates who were later exonerated; the reversals of these convictions—and 11 others—prompted Ryan to impose a moratorium on capital punishment in Jan. 2000, to the joy of anti-death penalty activists everywhere...