Based on Kanji Kunieda’s 1931 novel Utamaro o meguru onnatachi, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna is delicately “split,” a fiction about an actual person: Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), the Tokugawa Era woodblock portraitist. Mizoguchi, who trained as a painter, himself identified with Utamaro’s dedication to his art. From the outset, however, Mizoguchi posits […]
Monthly Archives: January 2012
“Look, imagine this horse, if it was your whole life, your whole livelihood, and if your horse doesn’t work anymore, you die with the horse, because your life is gone and everything is over. These words: allegories, metaphors—it’s none of that. It’s just a simple horse.” — Béla Tarr When dance critic and cinéaste Mindy […]
Frank Capra won his third directorial Oscar for the zany, frequently hilarious social comedy You Can’t Take It with You, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Robert Riskin wrote the film, which also won the best picture Oscar, to neutralize the tart Leftist politics of the original and […]
Although it lays claim to a few genuinely funny bits, 50/50 is an excrutiatingly bad comedy about a 27-year-old writer’s bout with spinal cancer—he got it from a bad mattress, he quips to a bar pick-up—that (he learns from the Internet) gives him little hope of survival. Since Adam, who works for National Public Radio, […]
In 1998, successive attempts to forcibly expel Semira Adamu from Belgium led to her death at the hands of police officers. Adamu had fled Nigeria to evade a forced marriage to a man 45 years her senior who already had four wives. She also feared being beaten to death by her family, which had arranged […]
Dennis Grunes 