Tatsumi
Eric Khoo joins Amanda Palmer to talk about his animated feature based on one of Japan’s most important manga artists.
Singaporean director Eric Khoo joins Amanda Palmer and The Fabulous Picture Show audience to talk about Tatsumi, his animated feature based on the life and legacy of 76-year-old Yoshihiro Tatsumi, one of Japan’s most important manga artists.
Khoo interweaves elements from the artist’s award-winning graphic autobiography, A Drifting Life, with five of his adult manga stories, or Geikiga, which Tatsumi began creating in the late 1950s.
These dark and dramatic tales revolutionised Japanese manga with their gritty, adult themes. By turns both bizarre and explicit, they range from a horrifying depiction of post-war Hiroshima in Hell to the alienation and loneliness of a city factory worker in Beloved Monkey.
The film’s visual style directly references the one-colour printing technique of the original comics and by remaining faithful to the original drawings, Khoo shows how Tatsumi developed his graphic style over time.
The original score was composed by his 13-year-old son, who became the youngest composer ever to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival.
In our Q&A, Khoo discusses the process of transferring these acclaimed graphic works from page to screen, and gives an insight into a man who had a remarkable capacity to imagine weird, painful and dramatic stories, despite the very ordinary life he himself led.
Coriolanus
|
British actor Ralph Fiennes makes his directorial debut in a modern interpretation of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s exploration of the emotions behind power and authority.
Having played the lead role on stage more than a decade ago, Fiennes again takes on the character of the ruthless military commander who turns renegade after being banished from his city.
He retains the Shakespearean dialogue, but re-sets Coriolanus amidst a modern-day Balkan battle-ground.
Filmed documentary-style by legendary shooter Barry Ackroyd, the precisely executed conflict scenes have an eye-watering immediacy.
Although Fiennes’ anti-hero commands considerable attention on and off the battlefield, it says much for his directing style that he allows his fellow actors, such as Gerard Butler’s brooding Aufidius, to make their own mark on the film.
Fiennes talks to The Fabulous Picture Show about the challenges of handling a major role on both sides of the camera, and explains how he relied on his crew to help judge his performance.
Beloved
 |
| Beloved |
Beloved is a passionate and melancholic musical by French director Christopher Honore, following the ill-fated love lives of a mother and daughter.
Spanning four decades of misadventures that take us to
Paris, London, Prague and Montreal, the film’s enthusiastic and star-studded cast includes real-life mother and daughter, Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni.
Honore is something of a devotee of the classic French musicals such as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
But while paying homage to the genre in Beloved and his previous film, Chansons D’mour, Honore has a contemporary style that is very much his own. And, of course, unmistakably French.
Bollywood
|
Bollywood: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told brings together the best of song and dance from a century of Indian cinema.
It is a film which is part documentary, part music video monster mashup.
Director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra spent months sifting through thousands of titles.
Mehra created a 140-hour compilation before honing his selection down to a toe-tapping, sari-waving celebration of the movies adored by two billion Indians around the world.
This episode of The Fabulous Picture Show can be seen from Friday, June 10, at the following times GMT: Friday: 1930; Saturday: 1430; Sunday: 0430; Monday: 0830.