Archive for all posts in 2002
Spirited Away 2002-12-10 16:22:18-05:00
Hayao Miyazaki has directed only eight feature-length films in his lifetime, all of them animated and all of them featuring hundreds of thousands of his own key drawings. Almost none of them [as of 2002] have been released properly for...
Avalon 2002-11-27 15:37:39-05:00
The most popular video game for the PC right now is a game called The Sims, where people get to play people doing ordinary things in ordinary settings -- instead of fighting monsters or conquering countries, they're battling with leaky...
Lancelot (Walker Percy) 2002-11-11 15:00:00-05:00
Walker Percy was one of the few truly philosophical American novelists: he didn’t just have his characters playact out ideas, but had them embody them. Not all of his books hit the mark, but the ones that do are among...
The Eel 2002-11-11 01:23:00-05:00
The Eel is a very confused movie that has the best of intentions, but it’s a shame about the script. It's saddening, since The Eel was not made by some tyro but by Shohei Imamura, one of Japan's best directors...
Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya ichi) 2002-10-10 16:24:26-04:00
Ichi the Killer is the movie of Frederic Wertham's nightmares. The psychologist who railed against violence in TV, movies and comic books and is responsible to this day for the notion that media violence begets real-world violence (ignoring just about...
The Brotherhood of the Wolf 2002-10-10 15:48:10-04:00
A sure sign of ongoing cultural cross-pollenation is when a French filmmaker freely hijacks his own cultural history and crossbreeds it with Hollywood and Hong Kong cinema conventions. The end result here is Brotherhood of the Wolf, a movie that's...
Koyaanisqatsi 2002-09-23 23:28:43-04:00
It is forbiddingly hard to write about movies sometimes, because movies are images, not words; and Koyaanisqatsi is made of some of the grandest and most haunting imagery captured by a camera. It is a truly experimental movie, because you...
Versus 2002-09-09 23:45:08-04:00
A movie like Versus is immune to detailed criticism. Not because it's such an outstanding piece of timeless moviemaking—it isn't—but because it is so damn fun that docking it for being unoriginal or repetitive or what have you just doesn't...
God and Hair (Ya Ho Wha 13) 2002-09-08 14:32:52-04:00
In the liner notes to Nurse With Wound’s first album Chance Meeting..., there is what has come to be called The List. The List is a long, shapeless, possibly apocryphal roster of musicians and bands that Steven Stapleton admired, took...
JSA (Joint Security Area) 2002-08-08 23:00:11-04:00
Without a doubt, Korea is becoming the brightest new country in the Asian filmmaking world. Between Shiri, Whasango, and JSA, they have put out three of the liveliest and most interesting movies released in all of Asia in the past...
Whasango (Volcano High) 2002-08-08 15:00:00-04:00
A movie like Whasango, you either dig it or you don't. Of course I dug it: this is a cross between a manga, a wuxia movie and a Final Fantasy-style video game come to life. It's not perfect, and anyone...
Chaos (Kaosu) 2002-08-08 01:13:21-04:00
Chaos is a diabolically ingenious thriller, about as close to a perfect textbook example as you could get for this sort of thing. The director, Hideo Nakata, gave us the genuinely terrifying and highly influential Ring in 1999; here, a...
The Man Who Stole The Sun 2002-07-07 23:46:26-04:00
When Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb appeared in theaters, there were more than a few critics who hated the movie on principle; after all, nuclear war was nothing any sane person could...
Sakuya Yokaidan 2002-07-07 21:32:27-04:00
I wonder if there are cosmic laws about entropy that extend into movies, keeping certain ones from ever becoming too good. Think of how many movies begin with one wonderful rush of inspiration only to degenerate into another shipment of...
Gift (The Sisterhood) 2002-06-06 17:50:59-04:00
There is, as we all know, a secret history of popular music. There are records that manage never to remain completely discovered by the mass market, but which exert an influence far beyond their original reach, even up to the...
Legend 2002-05-05 16:56:22-04:00
This was a murdered movie, cut to pieces by its own studio and all but abandoned. It has been brought back to life in a magnificent DVD edition that restores almost everything that was hacked out of it and brings...
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade 2002-04-04 22:50:31-05:00
A miasma of great sadness and anger hangs over Jin-roh: The Wolf Brigade. Here we have a violent but also heart-rending modern-day fable that takes "Little Red Riding Hood" as one of its themes and turns it into a grim...
Salò: or the 120 Days of Sodom 2002-03-06 21:41:03-05:00
The sleep of reason breeds monsters.—Goya The quote has multiple interpretations. One, which seems the most likely and obvious, is that without reason mankind is damned to the netherworlds of irrationality and vice. The other and more incendiary interpretation is...
Rashōmon 2002-03-03 23:33:58-05:00
Few works of art have become synonymous with an understanding of the subjective nature of reality. There are Philip K. Dick's novels, maybe some of Lawrence Durrell's works (where he explored the same story from four different angles), and a...
Akira 2002-03-03 15:00:00-05:00
I am writing this review from the relative safety of my house, while half a world away a whole swath of countries are convulsing with violence. Small wonder some people look to total destruction for answers to difficult problems. If...
Children of God (The Swans) 2002-03-03 12:48:07-05:00
His name was Michael Gira and when he was fourteen he ran away from his father while they were on a business trip in Germany. He spent the next several years of his life panhandling his way across Europe, getting...
Rays of Beauty (C.M. von Hausswolff) 2002-02-02 12:57:33-05:00
I have probably picked up the most interesting records in my collection on a whim. One of the greatest joys is to find an artist you know nothing about, buy one of their records, and discover something you can’t get...
Zipang 2002-02-02 00:15:33-05:00
When Loaded Weapon 1 came out, I read a review that criticized the movie on the following grounds: The Lethal Weapon movies are already parodies of themselves, so why make fun of something that's already self-lampooning? You can't kid a...
Tokyo Flashback 2: P.S.F. Psychedelic Sampler 2002-01-01 13:07:12-05:00
When I made a list not too long ago of the best record labels ever, P.S.F. figured somewhere in the top 10, along with Motown and the Ahmet Ertegun-era Atlantic Records. In the last ten to fifteen years, P.S.F. (“Poor...
Mark-Almond (Mark-Almond) 2002-01-01 12:58:43-05:00
AOR stands for Album-Oriented Rock—the Seventies genre that gave bands like the Eagles (and most of the rest of California rock of the era) legitimacy. One of the largely forgotten kingpins of AOR was the Mark-Almond band—so named for its...
Gojoe (Gojoe reisen-ki / Gojoe: Spirit War Chronicle) 2002-01-01 11:19:08-05:00
Gojoe was the film that awakened me to the full possibilities of modern Japanese cinema, an epic with both eye-filling spectacle and a thoughtful story. The first time I saw Gojoe I was a little too overwhelmed, and had to...
