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Reviews
Ima, ai ni yukimasu (2004)
A love story that will pierce hearts selectively.
This is a simple story about love in it's best context: Two shy people who fall in love, with a mystical occurrence added. It does not lecture; it demonstrates through kindness, gentleness and selflessness by all the characters. Before I review it, let me add that humans have generally the same set of emotions, in varying degrees, dictated by life experience, culture and genetic makeup. If you are young and inexperienced, or if you are cold hearted, this movie may mean nothing. If you are happily married, or have been married a long time, it may mean little. If you are a grandmotherly matron, or just old, you may dab your eyes a bit and move on. But if you are a person like me, who has known women like the one in the movie, and who has lost them through mistake or circumstance, it will strike a chord that will course through your soul and strike all the other chords of loss and grief that have lain dormant, until your body is ringing in a cacophony of resonating notes that pierce your heart and tell you once more your chance will never come again. Neither I nor the movie are religious, but somehow I kept thinking of First Corinthians:13 all through the film, because that is the best definition of true love that I know.
Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972)
Only for the mindless
Not only are the lives of the bourgeoisie characters in the film pointless and irrelevant, but the film itself is pointless and irrelevant. To have people astounded by the "brilliance" of the film and the "genius" of Bunuel is to me astounding in itself. While someone like Fellini can entrance, Bunuel might have well produced a film based on alcoholic, drug-addicted ne'er-do-wells that said nothing worthwhile or did nothing worthwhile. A disjointed, badly acted, phony presentation of a group of individuals that are worth nothing yet somehow cunning enough (in the film) to elevate themselves to positions of importance. I found myself asking "What is the point of this film?" and the answer kept coming up "There is no point and the whole production is absurd." Contrived and unrelated dream sequences that go nowhere. Actions by the actors that mean nothing and make no sense in any context. Perhaps because the majority of viewers are in the same category as the actors in the film, they can relate to it. I cannot. There is nothing worthwhile to be taken from this film. If one derives intellectual meaning from such as this, I feel sorry for them.
My inner self insisted on adding the following:
A knock came on the door of my subconscious. I opened it, and it was a vacuum cleaner salesman who pushed past me and sat down on my couch.
"Did you have an unhappy childhood?" he asked, and continued without pause: "I did. I used to have a recurring dream where I was walking down a road. Did you eat lunch? It is curious that it is not raining out, is it not?" He then proceeded to begin a one-sided conversation of mechanical engineering from a feminist perspective. Without stopping after he had finished his discourse, he began to relate the mystical aspects of flatulence. Midway through this conversation, he stopped to say "I'm sorry, I have to leave now. I have another appointment. Thank you for your order." And left, leaving the door open.
They Might Be Giants (1971)
An off-beat romantic comedy that makes one look closely at the real world.
The movie is full of charm and wistfulness. So many people living in their own world. Admittedly a bit of a comic stretch in some of the scenes, the ending struck me emotionally. What it seemed to say was It is better to die on your feet with your own sense of reality than die on your knees with the reality forced on you by others. And the ending is a composite of that and the true reality of imminent death. That last scene allowed me to take the spiritual (if you will) content of the movie above what went before. A small gem hidden in the earth.
Scott and Woodward hold up their end as far as the acting goes. Jack Gilford is miscast; Lester Rawlins speaks his lines woodenly; Al Lewis reminded me of Peter Laurie at the end of his career walking his shark around the swimming pool on a lead; Ron Weyand could pass for a Hassidic Jew with a southern accent in his part. It puzzles me often that supporting actors can come across so badly while the costars rise to the occasion. Yet other actors playing bit parts are quite entertaining.
At any rate, if you can swallow some of the acting and get into the movie, it can hold you with its subliminal sense of other-worldliness.