Posts

Showing posts from September, 2020

255. Japanese director Takashi Koizumi’s film “Hakase no aishita sushiki” (The Professor and His Beloved Equation) (2006), based on an award-winning Japanese novel by Yoko Ogawa: Melding the magical world of numbers and mathematics with invisible eternal truths existing in the universe, for adults and school-going students alike

Image
    To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the Palm of your Hand, And Eternity in an Hour                         ---opening lines from William Blake’s poem                             “Auguries of Innocence” S ome people don’t like numbers or mathematics but many do. Whether you belong to either category, the 2003 Yomiuri-prize-winning novel by the Japanese lady Yoko Ogawa called The Housekeeper and the Professor (the English translation has been published by Picador) and Takashi Koizumi’s film The Professor and His Beloved Equation based on that novel lead you gently into the mystical world of numbers that have captivated great minds like Pythagoras and Descartes over the centuries. What Ogawa and Koizumi achieve is to make an average person look at numbers with respect and realize that numbers...

254. US director Abel Ferrara’s semi-autobiographical feature film “Tommaso” (2019), based on his own original script: Trying not to be himself, the director reveals more of himself

Image
T he year 2019 saw four directors from four different countries make semi-autobiographical feature films: Spanish director Pedro Almodovar made Pain and Glory, Palestinian director Elia Suleiman made It Must Be Heaven , US director Abel Ferrara living and working in Italy made Tommaso and rookie British director Joanna Hogg made The Souvenir. Each of them found different groups of cineastes being enamored by their creative products using distinctly different approaches to filming the problems they as filmmakers face in real life. Some hide their thinly veiled identity by choosing a nom de plume such as Tommaso (played by Willem Dafoe) in Abel Ferrara’s film which will not fool any astute viewer. Tommaso is a fictional name of a filmmaker resembling Mr Ferrara, developing his own original screenplays for future directorial projects, and he too lives in Italy and is learning Italian and teaching acting to potential actors as he has chosen to live and work in that country. Tommaso is...