Japan crises echo its pop culture disaster narratives - latimes.com

It’s uncanny. It’s as though a feature-writer from the LA Times has been rooting around in my brain:

Like Hollywood in the 1970s, with its queasy procession of upside-down ships, crippled airplanes and towering infernos, postwar Japanese popular culture has had a taste for disaster.

The sublimely cheesy, enormously popular “Godzilla” films launched in the 1950s depicted a dinosaur-like monster, spawned by underwater nuclear detonations, crashing through the streets of Tokyo. The popular 1973 novel “Japan Sinks” envisions the island nation being physically split in two by a combined earthquake-tsunami. And in the landmark 1988 animated sci-fi film “Akira,” adapted from a manga epic, a nuclear explosion levels Tokyo and precipitates World War III.

The three-headed calamity of earthquake, tsunami and near nuclear meltdown that has ravaged Japan this month has awakened some of the country’s most familiar disaster narratives. From short stories inspired by previous natural calamities to comic book series based on survivors’ accounts of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some of these apocalyptic narratives are being evoked by commentators in and outside Japan to draw meaning from the latest catastrophes that have rocked Japan.

These disasters are going to inspire whole new “end of days” narratives. It’s highly doubtful that a stuntman in a rubber suit, stomping through a movie set, is enough to convey the tragedy that has befallen the country.

Movie review: 'Toy Story 3' - latimes.com

According to Kenneth Turan, Pixar’s winning streak is set to continue:

If Pixar is the only sure thing in movies today — and it is — then the “Toy Story” franchise is its most reliable component. So while it’s not exactly a surprise to say that “Toy Story 3” is everything you hoped it would be, it is something of a relief.

For as survivors of say ” The Godfather, Part III” remember, the third time can be the death knell for a much admired series. “Toy Story 3” has prospered where others have faltered because it has simultaneously stayed true to its roots and expanded its reach. And because in ways both small and large the people behind the franchise simply love movies to death.

Directed by Lee Unkrich and starring the familiar voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn and the rest of the toy gang, “Toy Story 3” pays attention to the reasons we return again and again to the motion picture experience.

Christopher Nolan's dim view of a Hollywood craze: 'I'm not a huge fan of 3-D' | Hero Complex | Los Angeles Times

The director of The Dark Knight is complaining that 3-D films are too… dark. Quite literally:

Nodding to the movie screen behind him, Nolan told the audience of 500 that he, literally, had a dim view of the 3-D releases he’d watched: “The truth of it is when you watch a film in here, you’re looking at 16 foot-lamberts, When you watch through any of the conventional 3-D processes you’re giving up three foot-lamberts. A massive difference. You’re not that aware of it because once you’re ‘in that world,’ your eye compensates, but having struggled for years to get theaters get up to the proper brightness, we’re not sticking polarized filters in everything.”