Tag: antique shop

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Whisper of the Heart
(Mimi o Sumaseba,
耳をすませば,
lit. If You Listen Closely)

Whisper of the Heart

(Mimi o Sumaseba, 耳をすませば, lit. If You Listen Closely)

Director – Yoshifumi Kondo – 1995 – Japan – Cert. U – 111m

*****

A bookish high school student falls for a boy who makes violins – out in IMAX cinemas in 4K on Wednesday, September 16th and regular cinemas from Friday, September 18th in the UK and Ireland

The John Denver song Country Roads, Take Me Home, sung by Olivia Newton-John, might not seem at first glance to have anything much to do with Japanese culture. Yet it provides a foundational starting point for this extraordinary Studio, Ghibli movie which is essentially a girl meets boy story.

High school student Shizuku (voice/1995 Japanese dub: Yoko Honna; 2006 Disney dub: Brittany Snow) lives at home with her parents (voices/1995 Japanese dub: Shigeru Moroi, Takashi Tachibana; 2006 Disney dub: Jean Smart, James SIkking) and her elder sister Shiho (voice/1995 Japanese dub: Yori Yamashita; 2006 Disney dub: Courtney Thorne-Smith), a university student. Shizuku is in the habit of taking American song lyrics and translating them into Japanese for her girl classmates’ informal singing group.

Thus, she has written a translation of the song Country Roads, Take Me Home which she doesn’t think is very good.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Cronos
(Cronos)

Cronos (Cronos)
Director – Guillermo del Toro – 1992 – Mexico – Cert. 18 – 92m

****1/2

An antique shop owner is transformed by a strange, hand-sized device he finds in a small statuette – back out in a 4K restoration in UK cinemas on Friday, May 15th alongside a Guillermo del Toro season at BFI Southbank

The auspicious debut of Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein, 2025; The Shape of Water, 2017; Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006) upsets the joys of family life in old age by means of a small golden device which confers immortality on the user – at a price. The narrative opens with a preamble about the alchemist (Mario Iván Martínez from Clear and Present Danger, Phillip Noyce, 1994; Like Water for Chocolate, Alfonso Arau, 1992) who created the device and who was found dead beneath the ruins of his vast mansion in Veracruz apparently aged four hundred or so years and with a pallid skin in the 1930s.

The present day. Jesús Gris (Frederico Luppi from Pan’s Labyrinth; The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo del Toro, 2001) runs an antique shop and enjoys the company of his small granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath). After a suspicious character visits the shop, possibly looking for something, Jesús is playing a board game with Aurora when cockroaches appear from the small statuette in which the stranger has shown an interest.… Read the rest