As silly as it is satisfying, the Sushi Typhoon serving is both an update and a spoof of a live-action kiddie series from the 1970s, à la Ultraman, so the approach is both reverent and respectfully raunchy (think The Brady Bunch Movie). It’s about the love story between a man named Daimon (Yasuhisa Furuhara) and […]
fiction
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The Hunger Games
I also found it disappointing — not as a near-billion-dollar grosser, but as a movie purported to be both action and science fiction. It’s too inert for the former and not imaginative enough for the latter. The title references a brutal annual competition staged by the government of a dystopian future, of which this film’s […]
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Lockout
I know exactly what a Besson production will mean: high-concept action rendered as a high-octane cartoon in live-action, with a severe chance for martial arts. The French filmmaker’s name equals a style equals a brand. His aesthetic appears even when he doesn’t direct. His creative stamp supersedes all. And so it is again with Lockout, […]
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Feel the Bern
Ever had one of those days? Your co-workers are at each others’ throats, debt is piling up, you can’t get your mind off your ex no matter how hard you try — and then someone tries to shoot one of your customers. Charles “Shake” Bouchon is having one of those days. Whiplash River, the […]
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Perfect Sense
Spread director David Mackenzie’s movie imagines a new disease in which victims inexplicably become overwhelmed with grief, then lose their sense of smell entirely. While not thought to be contagious, the threat is so unfamiliar that the public overreacts, anyway. Meeting in the midst of this madness are epidemiologist Susan (Eva Green, Dark Shadows, Cracks, […]
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Fact and fiction
Tracy Daugherty considered himself a fiction writer with no ambition of writing anything else, but the Oklahoma City federal building bombing changed all that. Although he lived in Oregon, he had spent much of his childhood visiting his grandparents in southwestern Oklahoma, and he felt a strong need to come to Oklahoma City in the […]
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Graphic substance
It took a library to write “Inanna’s Tears,” the latest graphic novel by Rob Vollmar, set in 3000 B.C. Sumer, located in the southern part of modern-day Iraq. With a love for exhaustive research and deep character study, he stretches the expectations of the medium by introducing comics fans to high-minded historical fiction. The Normanite […]