Category Archives: Uncategorized

Given that this weekend marks the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and that the Chinese government has prohibited any memorial of the incident in Hong Kong for the first time, the opening of Sue Williams’ documentary about pop … Continue reading →

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about coverage of local governments’ handling of the vaccine rollout. The main theme would seem to be that, while each municipality is running things their own way, they all have to deal with … Continue reading →

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about how the national newspapers are talking about the scheduled discharge of irradiated ground water from the stricken Fukushima No. 1 reactor into the surrounding sea. One of the purposes of editorials is to put … Continue reading →

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the ignominious end of the petition drive to recall Aichi Prefecture Governor Hideaki Omura. Though I purposely played down the ideological forces at play in this drama, it mostly came down to what one … Continue reading →

First-time director Shannon Murphy is obviously the type of storyteller who, when confronted with a decision that proffers two extremes, will go with the cheekier option. Though this tale of a teenage cancer patient who has mostly given up on … Continue reading →

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the government’s extension of a tax break for home buyers. Due to end-of-year deadlines, the column was written at the end of 2020, about two weeks before the current state of emergency was declared, … Continue reading →

This year, the Asian Film Awards were presented at BIFF for the first time. Of course, the organizers hoped to have a real ceremony with a real audience, so transferring the awards to Asia’s biggest film festival made sense, since … Continue reading →

I haven’t seen that many Vietnamese movies, but all the ones I’ve seen I’ve seen at BIFF, and I’m pretty sure all of them were about people of limited means, which I interpreted to represent the bulk of the population. … Continue reading →

Debut features, especially by university trained directors, are a crap shoot, since they often replicate graduation projects. That isn’t usually the case, however, in South Korea, where film students with real ambition and talent are put through the ringer, and … Continue reading →