Best Bureaucratic Black Comedies — II

  Wag the Dog (1997) Barry Levinson’s malefic satire deals with an outrageous and exaggerated scenario, where a Hollywood producer joins hands with a White House spinmeister. In order to divert the public’s attention from presidents’ sex scandal, the duo creates a fake news story about a non-existent war in Albania. The film loudly remarks on the...

Best Bureaucratic Black Comedies — I

  Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of new bureaucracy. --- Franz Kafka A century ago German sociologist Max Weber esteemed ‘bureaucracy’ as ‘superior to any other organizational form’ because of its precision, reliability, discipline and stability. Bureaucracy was/is an advance in solving problems in a larger, efficient scale. But, when its...

“Real World” – The Angst of Japanese Teens

Japanese crime-fiction writer Natsuo Kirino first garnered international recognition, when her novel “Out” got translated to English. “Real World” was her third English translated work (her translator, Philip Gabriel has also translated several works of Haruki Murakami). She has won many mystery and crime genre awards and her writing is publicized as ‘Feminist-Noir.’ Her novel...