Japan
Saskia Baron
A man is caught up in a storm at sea; giant waves like Hokusai crests throw him onto a deserted tropical island. Over the next 80 minutes, his struggle to survive occupies the screen. Curious crabs provide a little company, but not enough to stop him trying to make a raft only to have his attempts at escape thwarted. While he is eventually blessed with some human companionship, there is no dialogue throughout the film, just music and sound effects.The Red Turtle features many beautiful sequences set in bamboo forests and thrilling underwater scenes, but it's a slow watch and at a couple Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” says a woman in “Scheherazade”, one of the most intriguing of the seven stories in Men without Women - it was previously published in the New Yorker, as were four of the others in the collection. Murakami is at his best when describing the extraordinary in his precise, simple prose (translated brilliantly by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen) and making it feasible. Scheherazade – the name given her by Habara, the mysteriously imprisoned man she looks after and has sex with – not only remembers her previous life as a lamprey – “fastened to a rock, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is a very welcome 4K digital restoration of Juzo Itami's extremely tasty Japanese comedy from 1985. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Tampopo ("dandelion" in Japanese), a widowed café owner with a small son. She dishes up bowls of ramen noodles to local trade but business is not good. A passing trucker (Ken Watanabe in Clint Eastwood mode) takes pity on her and rounds up a gang of misfits to help her perfect the recipe. Interspersed with their slapstick adventures – breaking into kitchens, rummaging through rival establishments’ bins, tracking down gourmets living in a hobo jungle – there are Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
New global sounds this month include tracks from the scintillating new album from Malian diva Oumou Sangaré, electro-Sufi grooves, Afro-folk from Koral Society, the soundtrack from They Will Have to Kill Us First (about the struggle of Malian musicians against extreme Islamicists) and classic Cuban nostalgia from Celina González and Estrellas de Arieto. Not to mention some contemporary Japanese composition and São Paulo Frippertronics. TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW CLICK HERE 1. Quantic feat Nidia Góngora – “E Ye Ye”2. Tinariwen – “Tiwayyen”3. Oumou Sangaré – “Bena Bena”4. Read more ...
David Nice
"È un'immensa pietà" - "it's heartbreaking," rather than "it's a huge pity" - sings consul Sharpless of "Butterfly" Cio-Cio San's fatal belief that her American husband will return to her. Heartbreak is what we expected from Ermonela Jaho after her lacerating performances as Puccini's Suor Angelica at the Royal Opera and Leoncavallo's Zazà at the Barbican, and heartbreak is what we got in the most nuanced of interpretations. How much richer it was, though, in perfect accord with Antonio Pappano, who knows and conducts this most beautiful and, ultimately, most devastating of scores better than Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Japanese Ghost in the Shell phenomenon is celebrating its 25th birthday, and already has a long history in manga cartoons and animated movies. Now Hollywood has clambered aboard, though this live-action version, finally helmed by British director Rupert Sanders, has taken 10 years to reach the screen.There’s been some controversy about the casting of Scarlett Johansson as the central character, The Major, with some onlookers contending that it’s an outrage to hire a Caucasian superstar instead of a Japanese actress. Others (including Mamoru Oshii, who directed the 1995 Japanese anime Read more ...
David Nice
Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics; Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam; NHKSO Tokyo. Would you have thought of putting the Japanese orchestra in the same league as the top Europeans? I certainly wouldn't, at least not until last night. While there isn't the same blended warmth, the sound is never clinical or cold; and the revelation is an incisiveness unlike any other, no doubt encouraged by Chief Conductor Paavo Järvi's digging deep in the amazing march-mania at the heart of the finale in Mahler's Sixth Symphony.The ocular proof of that hard work could be seen in the physical movement and Read more ...
David Nice
Now at the very top of his game and master of sundry great orchestras around the world, Paavo Järvi is the conductor students of the art like to follow for his perfect technique. Time was when he seemed like the cooler version of his peerless father Neeme; now, if he can still at times come across as more cerebral than his impetuous but also excellent younger brother Kristjan, he often seems touched by the kind of inspiration Neeme maintains in his 80th year.They work together under Utopian circumstances every summer with the superband Estonian Festival Orchestra and the promising trainees of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s rich irony in the timelining of 1940s Chinese blockbuster The Spring River Flows East. Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli’s melodrama dates its 14-year timespan – events unroll from 1931 to the end of the war in 1945 – with reference to the Chinese revolution of 1911 (titles read, “20 years after” etc), but the film’s social commentary is so acute that it’s no surprise that another, more far-reaching turmoil would hit the country, transforming it into the Communist People's Republic, just two years after the film's 1947 release. With hindsight, they should have been dating it in terms of “ Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Mixing up your yakuzas and your triads can be a bloody business, as Takashi Miike’s films show in the goriest detail. The title of the earliest work in his “Black Society” trilogy, Shinjuku Triad Society from 1995, says it all – a Chinese criminal gang at the heart of Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho nightlife district, the traditional turf of Japan’s own deeply entrenched native criminal element. But Miike’s work – at its best when it’s most unsettling, and that's something that goes beyond the sometimes cringingly unforgettable violence – is about bringing all sorts of other different things Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In the extras on the DVD release of The Wailing, South Korean director Na Hong-Jin says, “Every genre of film has its own strengths and weaknesses. By combining many genres you could say that I was able to build and emphasise the strengths, while diminishing the weaknesses.” And indeed, over its monumental 156 minutes, The Wailing attempts to meld comedy, an overt homage to The Exorcist, zombie movie tropes and social commentary. Unfortunately, the different stylistic elements play off against each other instead of melding into a cohesive whole, making The Wailing lack consistent tension.The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After doing his time in the Hollywood wilderness, Mel Gibson is back with a bang – a cacophony of bangs, frankly – with Hacksaw Ridge. With six Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, it's enough to tempt a man to risk a celebratory tequila.Not that Gibson, as director, is doing anything very different to what he's always done. Hacksaw Ridge is a story of religious faith under pressure, and of imperturbable heroism in the face of extreme violence. Gibson's telling of the real-life story of Desmond Doss, who refused to handle firearms but served heroically as a Read more ...