As the men wait it out at the secluded beach house, they play Frisbee, dress up as geishas, practice sumo wrestling and engage in a bizarre version of rock-paper-scissors in which the winner gets to shoot a beer can off the loser’s head. The point, as far as we can see it, is to show the banality of passing time. But Kitano’s directing style—which verges on slapstick at times—becomes campy and occasionally downright silly. As Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote, “The picture ricochets from random urban mob hits to horseplay in the sand that wouldn’t have looked out of place on The Monkees.”

This article is filed under 100 Greatest Gangster Films, Japan, Movies, The Fourth Wall.

Quentin Tarantino proclaims ”My favorite movie of the last 20 years! I wish I had made this movie.” That is as perfect an endorsement as a film distributor could hope to have, especially when selling a film like Battle Royale to a hungry cult audience.

This article is filed under Best Books, Best Movies, Books, Graphic Novels, Horror, Japan, Movies, Psychology, Satire, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Sociology, The Fourth Wall, Thrillers.

A cleverly rendered fantasy world has the power to make us believe astounding things, and to transport us to places we may never have imagined ourselves. In the history of film there have been countless attempts to take real-world places and performers outside the realm of what has been seen before, and into far-off lands where the amazing, the terrifying, and the marvelous lurk around every corner.

This article is filed under Art, Best Movies, Horror, Humor, Japan, Literary Themes, Movies, Mythology, Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Fourth Wall.

James Bradley doesn’t like Theodore Roosevelt. Let’s get that clear from the get-go. Nor does he have much time for William Howard Taft, the gargantuan gourmand, Roosevelt’s right-hand man and his successor as president. And after reading The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, I have the sneaky suspicion that there’s not much love lost for George Bush, either.

This article is filed under History, Japan, Non-Fiction Reviews.

The cult of Einstein reached the point where university officials in Fukuoka preserved the blackboard on which Einstein had scribbled during a lecture and forgot to erase. Shikanogi Masanobu, a professor in the humanities who sat in on Einstein’s lectures for six days, recalled: “I heard the quiet, serene sounds of his spirit. His thinking progresses steadily, quietly, like the melting of spring snow, without running, while sprinkling the meadow of knowledge with his jewels of mathematical equations.”

This article is filed under Japan, Non-Fiction Reviews, Science.

“Around the entire world what I see is Europe and China investing into and buying greater shares of foreign economies—and thus gaining significant political and even military leverage over them—at our expense. Power has to be a fair balance among a range of tools, including the military, in order to be used effectively. We’re not doing that now, and I don’t see a good strategy coming out of Washington as to how to do it better.”

This article is filed under Africa, China, Economics, India, Japan, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics, Russia.

This relationship — Mari, plain and studious; Eri, “gorgeous” and shallow — is our first intimation of where After Dark is really looking. Takahashi addresses the question to Mari this way: “I wonder how it turns out that we all lead such different lives. Take you and your sister, for example. You’re both born to the same parents, you grow up in the same household, you’re both girls. How do you end up with such wildly different personalities?” Here is After Dark‘s central preoccupation: different lives and different states of being, this side and the other side, within ourselves and between ourselves and other people.

This article is filed under Fiction Reviews, Japan.

I’m not sure what category A Grand Tour of Asia by Hania Tallmadge and Beverley Jackson should be put in. It’s certainly not a novel or narrative non-fiction or even a coffee table book (unless a downsized model). Other than the fact that it has a hardcover and pages inside, I’m not all that sure this one is really a book.

This article is filed under China, History, Japan, Non-Fiction Reviews, Southeast Asia, Travel.