Nick Wood Movies

In preparing for this film, director Nobuhiro Suwa wrote an detailed script and then threw it away at the last moment. Instead, in a manner reminscient of Mike Leigh and John Cassavetes, he worked intensively with the actors to develop their characters and allowed the script to develop from there. Though the film appears to be a standard work of fiction depicting the slow collapse of a relationship between an out-of-work actor (Nishijima Hidetoshi) and his girlfriend (Yu Eri), the dialogue seems fresh and real, filled with sentences that trail off and the Japanese equivalent of "ums" and "ahs." At one point, the director breaks in and barks questions to the actors off-camera, throwing the film into that fuzzy zone between fiction and documentary. This impression is underscored by the handheld camerawork of Masaki Tamura, the cinematographer for legendary documentarist Shinsuke Ogawa. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

Debuting September 3, 1991 over BBC1, the long-running British sitcom 2.4 Children was all about an ostensibly typical family, the Potters. Despite their veneer of normality, the family invariably found itself experiencing all sorts of abnormal and surrealistic adventures, in the manner of the American comedies Married: With Children and Malcolm in the Middle. For the record, Ben Porter (Gary Olsen) ran a plumbing business with attractive assistant Christine (Kim Benson); Ben's wife (Belinda Lang) held down several dead-end jobs before launching a catering business with her friend Rona (Julia Hills); and the couple's kids, Jenny (played first by Claire Woodgate, then by Claire Buckfield) and David (John Pickard), were like most other wisecracking sitcom kids, only more so. One of the most endearing aspects of the series was its endless stream of pop-culture references, including Ben's referring to son David as "Puggsley," and the contemptuous nickname "Jake the Klingon" bestowed upon Ben's main business rival Jake Klinger (Roger Lloyd Pack). The 57th and final episodes of 2.4 Children was seen on December 30, 1999. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi