The Life of Pi: To Believe or Not to Believe
I am trying to understand why I came out grumpy rather than enthused from Ang Lee’s spectacular CGI movie, The …
Category Archives: Asia
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry — An Artist, An Organizer, A Movie
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is a documentary film that’s a three-fer. It will be interesting and instructive, even moving, to …
Burma –Resistance In Raw Footage
Making a movie, anywhere, anytime, is a tough enterprise. Doing it the middle of a civil insurrection, in which the …
“It’s Time,” a Poem by Zhu Yufu, Gets Him Seven Years
It’s time, people of China! It’s time. The Square belongs to everyone. With your own two feet It’s time to …
Hula Girls: Coal Miners’ Daughters in Japan — a Movie
Around our house there are two streams of movie selections: dark, meaningful films, preferably by “auteurs,” about people overcoming terrible …
All This Belongs to Me: A Novel of Mongolian Sisters; Or Is It?
I decided to take a break from the run of Arabic fiction I’ve been reading to catch up with a …
Buffalo Boy — A Film of Vietnamese Herders
The incredible, beautiful green of trees, grasses and rice against the blue rivers, blue skies and white clouds at the …
The Color of Paradise — A Film from Iran
It’s hard to convey the feeling of seeing Majid Majidi‘s wondrous 1999 The Color of Paradise from Iran. We watched it on …
Liu Xiaobao Wins Nobel Peace Prize
A Small Rat in Prison for Little Xia a small rat passes through the iron bars paces back and forth …
Record Sea Temperatures in Japan: Fish Flee
From the indispensable EarthWeek Sea temperatures around Japan during August reached the warmest levels ever recorded since reliable measurements began …
Muddy River: A Town in China
The greater the flood of news the faster we are carried along. We have time to see only the surfaces …
Nanking: 1937
In the macabre history of human horrors the Japanese Army’s Rape of Nanking, China, December 1937, stands in the first …