Roger Ebert Home

Mamoru Oshii

Reviews

Blog Posts

Features

Thumbnails 4/17/14

Cannes releases their lineup; Fargo, the TV show; Landmark anime; Under the Skin and Only Lovers Left Alive; Documentary subjects who don't want to be documentary subjects.

Far Flungers

Hostages to honor

The Kobayashi movie "Harakiri" is available on Hulu and Netflix. Miike's "Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai" is available on Amazon.com.

In this remake of the 1962 Masaki Kobayashi movie known as "Harakiri" in America, but "Seppuku" in Japan, Takashi Miike considers the value of one life or "Ichimei." (一命 Ichimei). In the U.S., the film is also re-named "Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai."

Scanners

Name That Director!

Click above to REALLY enlarge...

UPDATED 01/28/10: 2:25 p.m. PST -- COMPLETED!: Thanks for all the detective work -- and special thanks to Christopher Stangl and Srikanth Srinivasan himself for their comprehensive efforts at filling the last few holes! Now I have to go read about who some of these experimental filmmakers are. I did find some Craig Baldwin movies on Netflix, actually...

Srikanth Srinivasan of Bangalore writes one of the most impressive movie blogs on the web: The Seventh Art. I don't remember how I happened upon it last week, but wow am I glad I did. Dig into his exploration of connections between Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" and Jean-Luc Godard's "History of Cinema." Or check out his piece on James Benning's 1986 "Landscape Suicide." There's a lot to look through, divided into sections for Hollywood and World Cinema.

In the section called "The Cinemaniac... I found the above collage (mosaic?) of mostly-famous faces belonging to film directors, which Srikanth says he assembled from thumbnails at Senses of Cinema. Many of them looked quite familiar to me, and if I'm not mistaken they were among the biographical portraits we used in the multimedia CD-ROM movie encyclopedia Microsoft Cinemania, which I edited from 1994 to 1998, first on disc, then also on the web. (Anybody with a copy of Cinemania able to confirm that? My Mac copy of Cinemania97 won't run on Snow Leopard.)

Festivals & Awards

The business of controversy

CANNES, France -- Quentin Tarantino, Charlize Theron, Tom Hanks, Michael Moore, Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Shrek are converging on this balmy Riviera resort town today, and there may be trainloads of striking French show-biz workers to picket them. The 57th Cannes Film Festival is open for business.