A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
March 20, 2017
Original Title:
The Strangest Stranger
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 73
A Jewish man in Tokyo named Joni Waka, who used to call himself "Johnnie Walker", is the model of a character in Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore. Joni Waka also claims that he is the only Jew left in Japan descending from the old Jewish families in the country: a self-proclaimed outsider, a mythomaniac, a homosexual, and the natural center of every party. Confronted with a social pressure, he seems to ignore dominating norms and morals while using his outside position as a henna gaijin (the "strangest stranger") as a space of freedom to stage his life and create an everyday comedy.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.