Like Father, Like Son (Re-watch)

This film is just fantastic.

So well written and filmed, with this deep layering in terms of themes, images, scenes and words. My favourite scene is still when the mother and son (?) are sitting on the train as it goes through tunnels making it darker and darker, meanwhile she suggests to the kid that they run away together. So well executed.

I think I've seen it four times now, but I see new things in it each time I watch. I mostly put it on because I wanted to show it to my viewing partner, who ended up enjoying it too.

So that was a success. 9/10

From Up on Poppy Hill

My 100th Review!!

Such a shame that I let my blog go to pot a bit just as I hit my 100th review.

It's now a few weeks since I watched this film, but I remember thinking it was all right. Nothing special. One of the reasons I watched it was because it is set during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and I thought it would be a good bit of research to watch this. However, the Olympics did not really feature that much in the story, and it was more like a standard coming of age love story (which at one point, could've gone down an extremely twisted and demented route. Luckily, it didn't)

Not a bad film, off the top of my head. But not one of the best from Ghibli. 6/10

Still Walking

After seeing Koreeda's latest film, I thought I'd catch up on one of his I hadn't seen.

I enjoyed this a lot, but in some ways I wish I hadn't watched it so close to After the Storm because the actors and the themes were too similar.

I did love a few of the scenes though, in particular the one where the grandma (Kiki Kirin again) confesses that she wants to make the young man her dead son saved suffer. I loved how the camera moved to a side on angle, and there was something so dark and revealing in the way she spoke at that point.

I liked the characters a lot. Good film. 8/10

After the Storm

Well, this film was just perfect for me.

The Japanese title is 海よりもまだ深く (umi yori mo mada fukaku), which translates to something like 'Even deeper than the ocean'. After the Storm worked nicely as an English title though, and I'm glad that's what they went with. Although it did lose the nuance of the Japanese title, which makes a reference to a song that's playing on the radio, causing the grandmother to enter into a very touching monologue – perhaps the climax of the film. I found it very moving, for reasons I can't quite put into words. It's that wabisabi, monoaware side of Japanese art that deals so well with sadness and death. Absolutely beautiful.

I just love Koreeda's way of telling a story through simple, everyday character studies. These are real people, living real lives, and facing the kind of real drama that affects us all. His films resonate with life so much more than other directors' work out there right now.

He keeps it simple, and there's beauty in simplicity.

I was glad to see a return to form after the slightly disappointing Our Little Sister, which I watched in February. This film just had more to it, and I thought the actress who played the grandma (Kiki Kirin) really excelled herself in this film. I've seen her in a few other Koreeda films, and she tends to play bit parts, but here she had a chance to craft an interesting character.

I also thought Abe Hiroshi was brilliant in it. I've always found he treads the perfect line between comedy and tragedy, and he managed to depict a really loveable, if slightly infuriating protagonist. He really cracked me up several times with his delivery, and he almost made me cry a few times too.

I'm sure I'll watch this film again, and I'll just have to wait and see whether it withstands multiple viewings.

But sitting here writing this now after coming back from the cinema, I'm happy. 9/10

Rogue One

This film just left me feeling cold, empty, and depressed.

To the extent that I had to stop watching it. Get over it people. It's done. It's dead. The originals were amazing, but stop milking it.

The constant music pissed me off, the storyline was convoluted, Forest Whitaker doing a silly voice was obnoxious, the whole thing stunk. The only thing I kind of liked was the robot with attitude (hence why I used his film poster for this review). Isn't it funny that the only real and human character they managed to create was a fucking robot? And don't get me started on the guy with the fake face! What were they thinking?

Let's make some new art. DNF

Stranger Than Fiction (Re-watch)

This film was kind of dumb.

I remember I watched it in Japan when I moved there and I thought it was a good film. Turns out I was wrong. It was pretty average.

I think my tastes must've changed a bit, but it seemed too schmaltzy and contrived. Apparently it was heavily based on a book written in Spanish where the main character goes to meet the author who is writing the story he's in. But in that story, the main character commits suicide at the end. Maybe that would've made this film better?

I dunno. I think it's tough when making art about making art – there's this bit where Dustin Hoffman's character (a professor of literature) is going on about how the character's death is so beautiful, perfect and meaningful, but ultimately I thought it was kind of shit.

You can't build up the fiction inside the fiction so much – it really is on trial here.

And all the stuff with Maggie Gyllenhaal and the cookies made we want to throw up. Blurgh! Sickly sweet unbelievable love story alert. Yeah, it would've been better if Ferrel died at the end. 6/10