GTO: The title refers to neither a car nor a Beach Boys song, but Great Teacher Onizuka, a 22-year-old homeroom teacher who gets in hot water after admitting on a TV talk show that he once almost buried a female student alive. He plies his trade at the educational institution known as, of all things, Kissho Academy.
This is the setup of Vertical Inc.’s latest manga imported for American audiences. Tohru Fujisawa’s series — in this initial volume, at least — plays an oddball mix of mild T&A horniness and a little less mild schoolyard violence. It is a tad more than mildly enjoyable.
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Sometimes the most interesting stories in cinema take place behind the camera. Ben Taylor’s APOCALYPSE ON THE SET: NINE DISASTROUS FILM PRODUCTIONS proves that page by glorious page. While hardly the first book to tackle the subject of problematic shoots, it beats the pants off the more superficial entries, such as FIASCO by James Robert Parish (who, incidentally, provides the back-cover blurb).
One smart decision that Taylor has made in choosing which films to focus on is that he didn’t pick the obvious. Another is that roughly half of the movies turned out to be widely considered as good, such as Werner Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO or Francis Ford Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW — it just took a boatload of blood, sweat and tears to get there.
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Now updated from its 1999 publication, the paperback release of Kenneth E. Hall’s JOHN WOO: THE FILMS is able to tell a more complete story of the Hong Kong director. At the time, Woo’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II hadn’t been released, which would mark his American commercial peak, followed by the disappointing underperformer WINDTALKERS and the downright disastrous PAYCHECK, after which the filmmaker retreated to Asian cinema.
Now, you get the whole Woo, and nothing but, in a book that doubles as biography and critical assessment, covering the director’s entire career, from his early start in throwaway martial-arts pictures and comedies to the recent epic RED CLIFF. Naturally, the focus is on his late-’80s/early-’90s body of work that redefined the action film, both at home and abroad.
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It’s with both great sadness and a sigh of relief that BLACK JACK: VOLUME 17 arrives — sadness, because this marks the end of Vertical Inc.’s trade-paperback reprints of Osamu Tezuka’s “peerless medical drama” manga; relief, because the publisher actually saw it through to the very end, as promised. I guess that meant the thing continued to sell.
If so, I’m not the least bit surprised. From the start, Tezuka’s series — first serialized from 1973 to 1983 — was a work of creative excellence, and stayed that way, through all these thousands of pages. If you’re looking to make an investment in a series that will pay off more than what you put into it, look no further.
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Not one who could afford a subscription to THE NEW YORKER, I had read Pauline Kael’s movie reviews in sparse instances over the years. In other words, my exposure to her — this was pre-Internet, mind you — was limited compared to other film critics.
It need not matter when presented with PAULINE KAEL: A LIFE IN THE DARK, Brian Kellow’s biography of the woman, who passed away in 2001. The author does his job in letting readers know why she was important. He also does his job in not deifying her, allowing her own words and actions to stand for themselves — sometimes, that doesn’t show her in the best light, but she had only herself to blame.
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