Retro Reels

In memory of her late friend Drew, Hanna introduces a special series on the movies of Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, starting with the 1949 movie Late Spring.

Hanna talks about the character Charlie Chan, the actor Warner Oland, and fake Chinese accents, and shares her final thoughts about yellowface and whitewashing in the American film industry.

Just for the excuse to talk at length about Anna May Wong, one of America's first film stars of Asian descent, Hanna deigns to watch Daughter of the Dragon, another problematic pre-Code Hollywood movie this time directed by Lloyd Corrigan and produced by Paramount studios.

In a discussion on Josef von Sternberg's award-winning 1932 movie Shanghai Express, Hanna makes her case for watching these nearly 100-year-old movies that isn't based purely on seeking out the shock factor of old-fashioned Hollywood racism.

Hanna begins a series analyzing the representation of Asian people in old Hollywood with a laughably offensive pre-Code movie, The Mask of Fu Manchu, directed by Charles Brabin and produced by MGM.

Although it's not quite to her taste, Hanna endeavors to cover the 2003 revenge thriller Oldboy, which helped establish director Park Chan-wook outside of his native South Korea.

To finish out the ghost month series, Hanna tries a bit of comparative analysis between Japan's classic horror film Ring, made in 1998, and America's take on the same movie, made in 2002. The results are more than a little embarrassing.

Four separate stories comprise the 1964 anthology horror film Kwaidan, directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Hanna makes her best effort to squeeze it all in one episode.

Hanna talks wartorn Japan, ethics and morality, and deep dark holes in this episode on Kaneto Shindo's 1964 movie Onibaba, the second in a series of four Japanese horror episodes for Ghost Month.

In celebration of Ghost Month, Hanna launches a series about Japanese horror, starting with a discussion about the strange and cartoonish cult classic House (1977) by director Nobuhiko Obayashi.