Word: yamashita
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Disney TV-movie hit High School Musical, this one is an earnest, virtually all-girl story about a quartet who hope to win their year-end talent competition with a rendition of the Blue Hearts? 80s hit song that is this movie?s title. The proceedings, under Nobuhiro Yamashita?s sluggish direction, are predictable and hardly worth noting - except for that song, simple and simply irresistible, which neither meditation nor surgery has been able to remove from my head since I saw the movie last year at the Toronto Film Festival. Everybody: "Linda, Linda! Linda Linda...
...says. "You just have to trust your gut." He asked Paul Haggis, who wrote Flags, if he would like to write the Japanese version as well. The writer of Million Dollar Baby and director of Crash, Haggis was overbooked but thought an aspiring young Japanese-American screenwriter, Iris Yamashita, who had helped him research Flags, might be able to do it. She met with Eastwood, and once again his gut spoke; he gave her the job and liked her first draft so much that he bought it. It was she who insisted on giving him a few rewrites she thought...
...Yamashita's script is much more relentlessly cruel. In essence, the Japanese officers compelled the bravery (and suicide) of their troops at gunpoint. Only the Japanese commander, Lieut. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (a mysterious historical figure who fascinates Eastwood), and a fictional conscript, Saigo, whose fate Yamashita intertwines with his commanding officer's, demonstrate anything like humanity as a Westerner might understand it. The lieutenant general, educated in part in the U.S., is respectful of its national spirit (and industrial might) and believes that a live soldier, capable of carrying on the fight, is infinitely more valuable than a dead...
...negotiations he hired Arn Tellem, known in the Japanese press by the oxymoron omoiyari no aru dairinin, "the compassionate agent." It was Tellem who delivered Hideki Matsui to the Yankees for three years and $21 million. "We feel he understands the needs of the Japanese people," says sportswriter Chiho Yamashita...
...Hazy Life, a loving indulgence of slacker society by first-time director Yamashita Nobuhiro, strips away all visual pyrotechnics and simply narrates the relationship between two homeless men who never went to school and whom society cares nothing about. Their one indulgence is to dub and star in adult videos. Nihilistic, simple and moving, it does what the other Asian fare at Hong Kong's festival didn't: it tells a story...