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GUARDIAN Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:15:00 GMT
A heartfelt, beautifully-made homage to anime director Yoshihiro Tatsumi, that fights a little shy of investigating exactly what inspired his bizarre style
Here is a striking study of the Japanese manga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi (now 76 years old) who invented the adult "gekiga" form of the genre: a kind of psychological noir. The film is rendered in the hand-drawn style of Tatsumi himself: both in the telling of his lifestory, and dramatising some of his classic tales of sexual obsession, violence and fear, particularly the extraordinary Good Bye, the story of a self-hating prostitute in postwar Japan, despised by both her neighbours and clients, who winds up drunkenly seducing her pathetic old father so as to nullify his emotional claim on her. But the slightly slushy tone of celebration rather obtusely fails to engage with the nihilist, pessimist nature of Tatsumi's work. Anyway, an intriguing event.
Rating: 3/5
Animation
World cinema
Peter Bradshaw
guardian.co.uk © 2012.....
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GUARDIAN Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:59:19 GMT
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 5 January 1957
FROM OUR LONDON FILM CRITIC
The film of the week is called "Giant," and gigantic it is. It goes on for three hours and eighteen minutes – or only a little less than the film time of the recent "War and Peace". It was taken from a novel by Edna Ferber about three generations of Texans. It cost some £1,750,000 to make – incurred by the building of a life-size working facsimile of an oilfield, among other devices of scarcely less expensiveness. It was, however, made by George Stevens, who made "Shane"; so, because or in spite of its elephantiasis, it is quite a film.
Mr Stevens is adept at creating or capturing an authentic seeming atmosphere of the great open American spaces. It is a matter, partly no doubt, of excellent work by his cameraman – there are landscapes with figures in "Giant" which are breathtaking, but it is also a matter of tempo and of arrangement, and these are in the director's province. There is,..
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GUARDIAN Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:11:31 GMT
Artist and cartoonist best known for St Trinian's and Molesworth
The artist Ronald Searle, who has died aged 91, will always be associated with St Trinian's, the anarchic girls' boarding school he created in pen and ink in the 1940s, which inspired a long-running series of films. Searle and St Trinian's go together like Petruchio and Kate; except that Searle created his own shrews and lived with their reputation for the rest of his life.
Before he left for second world war service, during which he would be held captive in Changi jail, Singapore, Searle posted off several cartoons to Kaye Webb, the assistant editor of Lilliput magazine. One of them showed a group of schoolgirls clutching hockey sticks gathered around a noticeboard; the caption read: "Owing to the international situation, the match with St Trinian's has been postponed." This is only obliquely about St Trinian's, but is always known as the first in the genre and has some of the characteristics of the mature........
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GUARDIAN Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:52:41 GMT
Former Olympic swordsman who staged fights for films including the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series has died
Bob Anderson, a former Olympic swordsman who staged fights for films including the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series, has died, British fencing authorities said today. He was 89.
The British Academy of Fencing said that Anderson died early on New Year's Day at an English hospital.
Anderson donned Darth Vader's black helmet and fought light saber battles in two of the three original Star Wars films, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
The villainous character was played by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones, and Anderson's role was not initially publicised.
But Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, said in a 1983 interview that "Bob Anderson was the man who actually did Vader's fighting."
"It was always supposed to be a secret, but I finally told (director) George (Lucas) I didn't think it was fair any more," Hamill told Starlog....
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GUARDIAN Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:05:22 GMT
It was a dark, bleak, Dickens-filled Christmas – and really rather captivating
Great Expectations (BBC1) | iPlayer
Mrs Dickens' Family Christmas (BBC2) | iPlayer
Doctor Who: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (BBC1) | iPlayer
Downtown Abbey Christmas Special (ITV1) | ITV Player
The Borrowers (BBC1) | iPlayer
Felix and Murdo (C4) | 4OD
It was a Dickens-heavy Christmas and all the better for it. By that, I don't mean the rosy confected one of bantering ho-hos and seething subterranean hypocrisies which Charles essentially invented. It was a dark, bleak, clever one, with ghostly waving branches and awkward truths – possibly rather suitable to end the year we've just had.
There was, of course, Great Expectations, over three grimly fabulous nights. You knew it was going to be good from the off, when a muddied Ray Winstone as Magwitch grabbed Pip's foot from under the bridge, those skies above the marshes a cloying grey shroud of claustrophobic tension. This segment seems to..
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GUARDIAN Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:05:01 GMT
The fourth in Tom Cruise's international-spy series is an efficient and effective thriller – and is given an extra comic dimension by a scene-stealing Simon Pegg
Cinema's most respectable hoodie Tom Cruise is back, slouching moodily out of the poster for the latest enjoyable Mission Impossible caper, directed by Brad "Incredibles" Bird. He is Ethan Hunt, leader of the International Missions Force or IMF – wiry, taut, fiercely focused, unfeasibly buff for a man of any age, never mind 49. He must now lead his crew in disguise, in disgrace, in the shadows, because an event repeatedly forewarned in his mission briefing has come to pass. His team has been disowned by the US government who have invoked something solemnly called "ghost protocol". They have been stitched up for a bombing at the Kremlin and are now on their own, needing to restore their good name in the action-adventure community and, unaided, recapture a nuclear activation device invented by a crazy terrorist (Michael.....
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GUARDIAN Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:05:44 GMT
Shane Meadows's This Is England '88 provided the outstanding dramatic moments of the week while there was worrying news for bookworms in Imagine
This is England '88 (C4) | 4OD
Tourettes: I Swear I Can Sing (BBC3) | iPlayer
Imagine: Books – The Last Chapter? (BBC1) | iPlayer
Class Dismissed (BBC2) | iPlayer
This Is England, Shane Meadows's coruscating, dark, joyous and hauntingly watchable drama following a gang of friends, desperately amiable misfits, growing up before our eyes in a chill northern town, first exploded on to the big screen five years ago and has now had two TV sequels – the film was set in 1983, the follow-ups in '86 and '88. It is fast becoming not just a drama but our collective memory of the years most of us have lived through together.
We can relive them, and reflect. On all the changes, for good and for ill, the speed of which we never really notice because we're sitting on the train, not observing it. Changes in racism, sexism, aspiration, power,........
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