Monthly Archives: December 2022

Review: Never Goin’ Back

Posted on December 16, 2022 by philipbrasor

This seems to be the season in Japan for delayed releases of American comedies set in Texas and centered on female characters. Though I think Support the Girls, which came out here two months ago, is a better movie, Never … Continue reading →

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Number 1 Shimbun December

Posted on December 15, 2022 by philipbrasor

Here is our media column for the December 2022 issue of Number 1 Shimbun, which is about the media’s lack of scrutiny over the government’s push for a much larger defense budget.

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Review: Blind Ambition

Posted on December 15, 2022 by philipbrasor

Robert Coe and Warwick Ross’s subtly effective documentary about four Zimbabwe emigrants to South Africa walks a careful line in explicating the men’s difficulities in adjusting to new lives in a place fraught with risks for outsiders—doubly so in a … Continue reading →

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“2046,” October 2004

Posted on December 11, 2022 by philipbrasor

The movie reviews I wrote for the Asahi Shimbun between 1996 and 2010 are not available on the internet, so I am slowly trying to add them to this blog. Someone once said that it wasn’t until Wong Kar Wai’s … Continue reading →

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Review: A Year-End Medley

Posted on December 9, 2022 by philipbrasor

I’ve never been a big fan of holiday movies, whether they’re Christmas-, Hannukah-, Thanksgiving-, or New Years-themed. There’s something a bit too circumscribed about them, and the effort to maintain a contextual holiday “spirit” is, I find, dispiriting. This Korean … Continue reading →

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Media watch: Starting deadline for paying back COVID loans approaches

Posted on December 5, 2022 by philipbrasor

One of the government’s countermeasures to address the economic hardship caused by COVID-19 was interest-free loans, called tokurei kashitsuke, for households whose income had dropped appeciably due to the pandemic. Though these kinds of loans have always been available, the … Continue reading →

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Review: Pictures of the Old World

Posted on December 4, 2022 by philipbrasor

Filmed in 1972 but not released until 1988 due to censorship by the communist Czechoslovakian government, this documentary by filmmaker Dusan Hanak qualifies as the Slovakian cognate of Griel Marcus’s description of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes as a window into … Continue reading →

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Review: Mad God

Posted on December 3, 2022 by philipbrasor

Sometimes the back story of a movie is more interesting than the movie itself. Phil Tippett is a legendary special effects maven who has worked on some of Hollywood’s most prestigious and popular sci-fi and fantasy films, including Robocop and … Continue reading →

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Review: Black Adam

Posted on December 2, 2022 by philipbrasor

What’s most compelling, if not downright shocking, about Jaume Collet-Serra’s attempt to inject some much needed thematic mojo into the so-called DC Extended Universe is that while the origin story of a character that was mostly relegated to either villain … Continue reading →

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Media watch: Death row inmates question the way they meet their ends

Posted on December 1, 2022 by philipbrasor

Several days ago, most major media outlets reported on a ¥33 million lawsuit filed by lawyers for 3 inmates on Osaka Detention House’s death row to change their execution method due to the cruel nature of the way those executions … Continue reading →

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