Sion Sono, having directed 46 films since 1984, is one of the most prolific filmmakers of Japan, excelling, since the beginning of his career, in everything grotesque, abnormally erotic and exceedingly violent that can be found in a movie. He is considered one of the artists that finally modernized the preterit genre of J-Horror, transforming it into something closer to the ero guro style that includes, besides terror, eroticism, sexual corruption and decadence, both physical and spiritual.
Sono, who is also an accomplished poet, started his career by winning a fellowship from PIA Awards, a competition aiming to finance, produce and promote films by new directors. Having secured funding from the festival, he then went on writing, directing and starring in Bicycle Sighs that played in over 30 venues in Europe and Asia, establishing him, from the beginning of his career as a global presence.
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Noriko's Dinner Table (2011)
Though screened after Suicide Club, Noriko's Dinner Table is a prequel of sorts; an endeavor of Sono to clarify the incidents of the former, thus taking place before, during and after the former's timeline.
Noriko is 17-year old girl that feels unhappy with her family, until she finds a web page frequented by girls her age, from all over Japan, experiencing the same sentiment. For the first time in her life, Noriko feels that there are people who can understand and sympathize with her, thus she decides to leave her home for Tokyo. There, along with another girl from the site, Kumiko, they become members of a corporation that specializes in offering the illusion of family, to those who are not experiencing it.
Sion Sono deals with the concepts of friendship and family in contemporary Japan, by focusing on individuals, chiefly the relationship between the two aforementioned girls, the story of Noriko's sister, Yuka and the growing distress of their father, Tetsuzo, who experiences the demise of his family, through the disappearance of his
As a teen, Rayona is in a confusing period of life. The gradual breakdown of her family life places an addition burden on her conscience. Without others for support, Rayona must find a way to handle her hardships. At first, she attempts to avoid these obstacles in her life, by lying, and by not voicing her opinions. Though when confronting them, she learns to feel better about herself and to understand others.
Chapter 7 In this chapter, a war becomes abrupt in the capital, and it forces everyone to leave. Takiko’s mother hears about it and tells her husband that she is worried about Takiko.
Sone describes the relationships she had with her parents and siblings. She seems very pleased with and delighted by the differing, yet caring personalities of each person in her family.
Kathy Harrison starts her personal story happily married to her childhood sweet heart Bruce. Kathy was living a simple life in her rural Massachusetts community home as the loving mother of three smart, kind, well-adjusted boys Bruce Jr., Nathan, and Ben. With the natural transitions of family life and the changes that come with career and moving, she went back to work as a Head Start teacher. Her life up until the acceptance of that job had been sheltered an idyllic. Interacting in a world of potluck suppers, cocktail parties, and traditional families had nothing in common with the life she would choose after she became a Head Start teacher.
At the start of the book, we are introduced to a young Jeanne Wakatsuki. Out of ten children, she is the youngest and as a result is more sheltered than the others. The Wakatsuki family is fairly well off. Ko Wakatsuki, the family’s patriarch, owns two fishing boats and with his oldest sons fishes commercially. On the day the story opens, Jeanne and the women in her family are watching the men set sail to fish. However, they return to shore with the news of Pearl Harbor has been bombed by the Japanese. Jeanne’s father, Ko, burns his Japanese flag and anything that shows his Japanese identity, though it does no good. Ko is arrested on charges of supplying oil to Japanese submarines and sent to South Dakota.
Nisei Daughter is a memoir of the author, Monica Sone’s experience growing up as a Japanese American in the United States prior to and during World War II. Born in America to Japanese immigrant parents, Sone is referred to as a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese American. Sone’s parents, Issei, the first-generation Japanese immigrants to America. Because Nisei were born in the United States they were considered to be an American citizen, but due to immigration laws any Issei was forbidden from becoming a U. S. citizen. Sone recollection of this time period of her life illustrates many themes throughout the memoir. One of these themes that Sone touches upon is the conflict between old and new, the Issei and Nisei.
Nisei Daughter, written by Monica Sone, is about a girl, named Kazuko, a Japanese American born and raised in Seattle during the World War II. As Kazuko grows up, she finds herself unable to fit in either Japan or American society. To Americans, she is Japanese and to Japanese people, she is more like an American. Since Kazuko was born and raised in a traditional Japanese household, she was highly expected to think, act and behave like
When an immigrant from a foreign land comes to America, immigrants hope to fulfill their golden dreams in the land of the free; however, as they quickly learn shortly after they arrive in America, their new lives are filled with hardships and disillusions. A picture bride, who arrives in America with a dream of living with a wealthy, successful, and handsome young man, is frequently disappointed to discover the realities such as the appearance and lifestyle of her future husband. When Hana first meets Taro, she discovers that “[Taro] no longer resemble[s] the early photo [his] parents sent [Hana]…he was already turning bald” (Uchida, 12). This shock of reality is not uncommon to picture brides, in fact, “many men in America send pictures to picture brides of themselves from when they were ten to twenty years younger…next to a beautiful car—owned by their boss” (Bunting, 1). Picture brides and immigrants arrive in America filled with hopes for a better life for themselves and their children and a wonderful new life in America. The shock and dissatisfaction immigrants and picture brides experience when they first arrive in America greatly contribute to their change in attitude from an optimistic mindset to a cowardly, hesitant behavior. Furthermore, picture brides quickly discover that their husbands were not wealthy business owners, as the men claimed in their letters, but their husbands were rather poor men, trying to scrape a living, and this reality check contributes further to immigrants’ hopeless outlook to their new life. Hana is stunne...
His experimental and unique perverse screenwriting has shocked and inspired numerous people. His aesthetics painted horror vividly and presented itself dramatically. His musical and cinematic vision was a healthy extension of his devilishly, clever, and demented mind. His modes of publication with music, film and print, had and still a tremendous fanbase. He has gained our attention in every media related forum and we can’t look away, even if we try. He has left us cheering, screaming and on the edge of our seats. We leave feeling bad about ourselves for watching his visual storytelling unfold. “You know, it’s like, I’m going to sit here for 90 minutes and watch these guys get fucked up with no hope. That’s what I love about these films, you walk out feeling bad about yourself, saying “Why did I enjoy that? What does this say about me as a person?” It is a cathartic experience that horror lovers can have again and again. Not acting on those horrific urges, but instead, becoming one of his characters that were just never really understood and that evil is real. Evil never dies and revenge always wins or at least in horror
The genre of horror films is one that is vast and continually growing. So many different elements have been known to appear in horror films that it is often times difficult to define what is explicitly a horror film and what is not. Due to this ambiguous definition of horror the genre is often times divided into subgenres. Each subgenre of horror has a more readily identifiable list of classifications that make it easier to cast a film to a subgenre, rather than the entire horror genre. One such subgenre that is particularly interesting is that of the stalker film. The stalker film can be categorized as a member of the horror genre in two ways. First, the stalker film can be identified within the horror genre due to its connection with the easily recognizable subgenre of horror, the slasher film. Though many elements of the stalker film differ from those of the slasher film, the use of non-mechanical weapons and obvious sexual plot points can be used to categorize the stalker film as a subgenre of the slasher film. Secondly, the stalker film can be considered a member of the horror genre using Robin Wood’s discussion regarding horror as that which society represses. The films Fatal Attraction, The Fan, and The Crush will be discussed in support of this argument. (Need some connector sentence here to finish out the intro)
A main theme throughout “Coming Home Again” is the connection that cooking authentic Korean food brings the mother and son together. This connection became apparent early on when the author mentions that, as a child, he always stood beside his mother while she was cooking so he could absorb her techniques (3852). The author briefly described one of Korean meal—kalbi—that he watched his mother make. Kalbi is butchered short rib seasoned with Korean spices and sauces; Lee states:
Since Sister was affected the most by certain actions of the family, Welty narrated this short story through Sister’s point of view to show how the function of the family declined through these actions. Sister was greatly affected when her sister broke the bonds of sisterhood by stealing her boyfriend and marrying him. Secondly, Sister was affected by the favoritism shown by her family towards her younger sister. Since her sister was favored more than her, this caused her to be jealous of her sister. For example, Sister shows a lot of jealousy by the tone she uses when describing what Stella-Rondo did with the bracelet that their grandfather gave her. Sister’s description was, “She’d always had anything in the world she wanted and then she’d throw it away. Papa-Daddy gave her this gorgeous Add-a-Pearl necklace when sh...
One strand of auteur theory, as Graeme Turner explains, concerns the identification of a director's visual style (Turner 44). When it comes to talking about visual styles of Asian directors, particularly in the context of Hong Kong cinema, one name that immediately comes to mind would be none other than Wong Kar-wai. Any Asian film student would probably be familiar with his signature works. Wong Kar-wai has been considered as "the very latest auteur produced by the second wave" in Hong Kong cinema (Teo 193). His passion for stylistic filmmaking and pursuit of film artistry gave him the recognition as a Hong Kong auteur. His auteur status arose from the distinctive visual style and individualistic visions evident in his films. Apart from directing, Wong Kar-wai also writes the screenplays for his own films. That gives him almost complete control over the entire film production and reinforces his authorship. He is famous for shooting without scripts, improvising the narrative as he shoots the films. With all his films being labelled as independent art-house and in contrast to the many commercial Hong Kong products, Wong Kar-wai stands apart from other directors (Stokes 186). In this essay, I will examine and discuss how academic film critics and scholars such as Stephen Teo, David Bordwell and others have talked about his visual style, in relation to one of his many award-winning films, Chungking Express (1994).
The films of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa have had wide ranging influence over contemporary films, with his ronin films Seven Samurai and Yojimbo influencing countless westerns and mob movies. Arguably, however, Rashomon has been the most instrumental of all Kurosawa’s films because it asks a question that lies near the heart of all cinema: what is reality? Today, any consumer of television or cinema has seen various permutations of the plot of Rashomon numerous times, probably without realizing. In the film, a rape and consequent murder are told five different times, by a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) who seems to have witnessed the event, a bandit (Toshiro Mifune) who committed the rape, the wife of a samurai (Machiko Kyo) who was raped, and the ghost of the samurai (Masayuki Mori), who is channeled by a medium after his murder. In each telling, the viewer is presented with five realities that, through the use of various frame stories, are totally incompatible with one another. Throughout, Rashomon is a study in simplicity. The beautiful yet frugal cinematography of Kazuo Miyagawa and the minimalist plot, skillfully directed by Kurosawa, force the viewer to contend with two dissonant notions: that everything they have seen is real, but that none of it can be true.
In addition, shortly thereafter, she and a small group of American business professionals left to Japan. The conflict between values became evident very early on when it was discovered that women in Japan were treated by locals as second-class citizens. The country values there were very different, and the women began almost immediately feeling alienated. The options ...