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UNKNOWN HOLLYWOOD – Feburary 8

It has been a long time since I have added the post here… On Feburary 8, William Wellman’s pre-code classic, “Night Nurse (1931)” was screened at EIGA 24-KU (Sendagaya, Tokyo) as a part of UNKNOWN HOLLYWOOD series. UNKNOWN HOLLYWOOD is the on-going movie screening events Ryo Tsunoda, a film critic and a writer, and I plan and produce, with the aim to introduce some of the overlooked Hollywood films (- 1952) to Japanese audience. For an each event, we set a theme to emphasize the cinema history, social significance, or cultural background. This time, the theme was “pre-code Hollywood”. After …

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'BOBTAIL' REVIEW / JAPANESE FILMS

Fusen (1956)

Izumi Ashikawa and Tatsuya Mihashi Almost all movies – and stories, for that matter – rely on conflicts. Conflicts between a man and a woman. Conflicts between civilization and nature. Conflicts between love and hate. Between courage and weakness, old and new, mighty and poor etc. These conflicts casually employ archetypes of many sorts, to reorient audience to the familiar path of narrative development. It helps to pose ethical theme, metaphysical theme, something meaningful without going into complex discourse of human interaction. One of the most popular device of conflict is that of generations. Teenagers look and act like bubble-headed …

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'BOBTAIL' REVIEW / DOCUMENTARY FILMS

Digital Amnesia (2014)

 (You can watch the full movie.) Did you have an account at GeoCities? I am quite sure at least you have visited more than dozens of those sites, – personal blogs or hobby exhibition, or maybe just a few pages of family photos – and probably went on to something else, without even noticing the site was hosted at GeoCities, one of the largest hosting service at the time. In 1999, Yahoo! purchased this thriving service at staggering $3.57 billion, but it turned out to be not as lucrative a business as it had hope to be. Exactly 10 years …