Friday, May 31 2013
Nikolai Leskov Gets His Due in This New Collection, ‘The Enchanted Wanderer’
Translating Leskov's delightfully 'slippery ventriloquism' is the latest project of indefatigable translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose renderings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have effectively become the new standards over the past two decades.
Wednesday, May 29 2013
‘no one has to die’ Tells the Story of Death in Video Games
The magic of video games is that save points, continues, and respawns offer the promise of inevitable resurrection, an unending experience even after we have lost all three of our lives.
Wednesday, October 26 2011
Dead Again: Notes on the Impermanence of the Virtual Body
In video games, dying becomes useful, functional, pedagogical. In some games, it is consequential. However, such pain ironically can magnify the pleasure of play.
Friday, August 26 2011
‘High and Low’: This Is Not Your Typical Mindless Rich Guy
Akira Kurosawa makes a daring attempt to tell an epic story of rich businessmen, determined cops, and the low-end criminals and drug addicts struggling to survive.
Friday, July 22 2011
‘Pale Flower’: Living for Death
Into this movie's milieu of prison terms, all-night gambling sessions and literal and figurative back-stabbings arrives a dewy young woman named Saeko (pronounced, more or less, 'psycho') who is very young and very tired of life.
Friday, October 22 2010
Comparing Akira Kurosawa’s Early and Late Films
There are some striking differences not only between the earlier films of Kurosawa and the later films, but in the very different ways that people have responded to these two different groups of films
Kurosawa 101: Day Ten, 1991 - 1993
Today we bring to an end our examination of each of the films of Kurosawa directed in his amazing career. After the ambitious epic Ran, Kurosawa embarked a three smaller but more personal films.
Thursday, October 21 2010
Kurosawa 101: Day Nine, 1975 - 1985
The three films featured today represented the director's ascendance to greater international acclaim, even while he struggled to find financing in Japan, where the movie industry was shriveling. All three of these films were made either in whole or in part by Soviet, American, or French financing.
Wednesday, October 20 2010
Madness and Goodness in ‘Dodeskaden’
Rather than portray Dodeskaden as many have done, as the imperfect film whose failure pushed Kurosawa over the edge to a suicide attempt, one could see it instead as a cri de coeur by Kurosawa for the sort of independent production that he favored, in which the director had his freedom, both to film the way he wanted and also the freedom of the final cut.
Kurosawa 101: Day Eight, 1963 - 1970
These three films by Kurosawa represent the end of one phase of his career and the beginning of another. High and Low is a police procedural that is regarded as one of his greatest films, while Red Beard represented the end of his so-called "Creative Period".
