Issue 62: Manga Adaptations


Crows Zero

Manga Adaptations: Tackling Fukushima, delinquent school boys and vengeful women

As the Terracotta Festival presents the UK premiere of Sion Sono’s Himizu this month, using a comic to tackle the fallout from Fukushima, we take a look at manga adaptations with Takashi Miike’s stylised, violent high school movie Crows Zero, Toshiya Fujita’s 70s revenge tale Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld, Korean manhwa vampire Western Priest and SF actioner Gantz while the Reel Sounds column focuses on Ichi the Killer.

La Grande Illusion, Aki Kaurism&#228ki’s light-hearted fable Le Havre, Pablo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place, Norwegian crime thriller Headhunters, revisionist Western Blackthorn and striking Austrian debut Breathing, about an ex-convict. In DVDs, we look at Pasolini’s The Gospel according to Matthew, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree and Peter de Rome’s erotic gay films.

We have an interview with French director Dominik Moll for The Monk, adapted from Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel. In Short Cuts we report back on the Flatpack festival, in Alter Ego Darran McCann is George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life and the Dominion of Canada column looks at ice hockey movies.

PODCASTS:
Roee Rosen: Vile, Evil Veil: Israeli artist, writer and filmmaker Roee Rosen talks about his first UK solo exhibition Vile, Evil Veil, which consists of the installation Live and Die as Eva Braun, exploring the life of Hitler’s lover in the bunker at the end of the Second World War, and the film Out (Tse), which stages a sado-masochist exorcism between a queer left-wing activist and a possessed ultra-nationalist woman. Rosen discusses the dynamic of power in human relationships, both personal and political, the importance of the victim/victimiser dichotomy in Israeli identity and how to exorcise the demon in all of us.