The Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards this year were a bit of a mixed bag. The 10 films nominated ranged from a quirky 1970s love story, ...
By Irene Wang and Elaine Lies TOKYO (Reuters) - From Tokyo streets to the highest levels of government, Japan on Monday cheered the Oscar win of "Driv...
The film, which has garnered other prizes including a screenplay award at Cannes, became Japan’s second regular winner in the International Feature Film category and the first since “Departures” in 2009. “Given that the mainstay of the Academy Awards is American movies, I’m really happy that a Japanese film was able to win this prestigious award,” said 60-year-old Osamu Kaneko, who was looking at film posters in downtown Tokyo. “It’s a high hurdle for a Japanese movie to win Best Picture, but I hope more Japanese movies will be recognised in the future,” said Azusa Shimizu, a 31-year-old media worker in downtown Tokyo, who said she was nonetheless quite happy.
Japanese drama "Drive My Car", an adaptation of celebrated writer Haruki Murakami's short story by director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, won the best international ...
“Drive My Car” had its world premiere in competition at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where it won best screenplay. “Drive My Car” bested fellow nominees “Flee” from Denmark, “The Hand of God” from Italy, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” (Bhutan) and “The Worst Person in the World” from Norway. The film follows Yusuke Kafuku (Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, who receives an offer to direct a production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at a theatre festival in Hiroshima, two years after his wife’s unexpected death.
The one thing you won't hear in Drive My Car is The Beatles' song 'Drive My Car'. That's because director Ryusuke Hamaguchi couldn't afford the rights to ...
Stunningly shot and acted, with one of the best scripts in years, it’s a film that deserved to be named Best Picture yet will probably be remembered as a Best Kept Secret. Slowly unpeeling the leftover feelings of the opening act, the rest of the plot finds Yūsuke at a theatre residency in Hiroshima as he prepares to direct the play Oto was helping him rehearse for. A prologue (lasting a full 40 minutes) introduces us to theatre director Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his writer wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima, who also starred in the adaptation of Murakami’s other Beatles-inspired story, Norwegian Wood). Grief haunts their relationship, but so do the fuzzy definitions of love – with Oto freestyling her best written work during sex so that Yūsuke can retell her own forgotten thoughts the next morning.
By ANDREW DALTON AP Entertainment Writer. LOS ANGELES (AP) — The emotional epic from Japan “Drive My Car” won the Academy Award for best international ...
He then thanked his actors, “especially Toko Miura, who drove the Saab 900 beautifully in the film,” and paused again for applause. The win for the three-hour journey through grief, connection and art spawned its own mini-drama when Hamaguchi took the stage at the Dolby Theatre to accept it. “Just a moment,” he said, to laughs from the audience.
Drive My Car is an adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story of the same name, and these are the biggest changes that were made to the story.
Kafuku reflects on all of that in the short story, but the movie has a stronger moment of emotional catharsis with Kafuku crying about how he wished he could have talked to her about everything, but still needs to find a way to move on. Not only that, but while the Uncle Vanya play was largely a footnote in the original story, in the movie, it's central to the plot, as many of the characters, both old and new, have their arcs happen from being involved with the play. HBO Max's Drive My Car is an adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story of the same name, which was part of a larger collection called Men Without Women. Both versions of the story are centered around Kafuku, a theater actor who was widowed two years prior before he had the chance to confront his wife about her multiple affairs.
TOKYO -- The Oscar win by "Drive My Car" shows once again that Japanese movies can compete artistically on the global stage. But it also underscores t.