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Tag: Nonfiction
Minka: Now a Beautiful Documentary Short
by Dan
Architecture / February 29, 2012
Way back in 2010, I mentioned that John Roderick's charming architectural memoir Minka: My Farmhouse in Japan was being adapted into a film.
Almost 2 years later, the award-winning domentary short is now available in its entirety online. Filmed just following his death at 93, Roderick's adopted son Yoshihiro Takishita talks about the house they acquired together in 1967 (while Roderick was working as journalist for the Associated Press in Japan) and muses about the meaning of home:
Beautiful.
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film japan memoir minka nonfiction
Shakespearian conspiracy theories
by Natalia
Current Affairs + Film + History / October 31, 2011
I was pretty excited over the weekend to hear that Roland Emmerich's new movie Anonymous is out. I love me a good Elizabethan costume drama—the clothes, the language, the political intrigue! If you haven't heard of it, the film dramatizes the Oxfordian theory of authorship—the idea that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford (who, as various people have pointed out, died several years before the publication of The Tempest).
The film has triggered a positively apoplectic response from the scholarly community; the New Yorker's David Denby calls it a story "so rotten that, as Shakespeare, or, rather, Oxford, might put it, the kites wheel and shriek rather than batten on so foul a carcass."
Personally, I find the authorship question rather silly—I prefer to read the plays for themselves rather than scan them Da Vinci Code-style for hidden clues to their composition. And why fabricate conspiracy theories when so much historically accurate skulduggery exists? If you like your Shakespeare spiced with criminal intrigue yet still backed up by rigorous scholarship, may I suggest:
The Shakespeare Thefts
Stealing the World's Most Famous Book
Click on the cover for more info!
Chester Brown in Vancouver TONIGHT!
by Dan
Events + Graphica + Vancouver / May 18, 2011
As in TONIGHT-TONIGHT! At 7pm!!
Chester Brown will be reading from his new book Paying for It in the Alice MacKay room on the lower level of the Central Library. He'll also be answering questions, and signing books.
Did I mention it's TONIGHT?