I distinctly remember the first time I saw Lady Bird.
It was the sort of film someone like me (and basically any early-to-mid-20-something getting into movies) at that time was all-but-destined to fall in love with. Just days away from my 21st birthday as a second year university student where everything felt like it was falling apart personally and academically, I needed an escape. The support network I had at university in friends had disintegrated (later reconciled to an extent),…
‘Let Star Wars die, kill it if you have to’
The 2010s will be remembered as the decade the big-budget blockbuster irreparably changed. More so than ever the latest blockbusters are created not in the minds of the director or even the empty sacks greedy executives can’t wait to fill with the dollar bills received from box office earnings, but the bedrooms of often-privileged fans with a voice loud enough to come out on top in the social media hell-scape…
A pondering, considerate, ‘artsy’ compliment to Stand By Me in many ways, it at times feels lost in the atmospheric brooding of its distant characters to understand where it actually wants to go in exploring its complex relationship with grief and loss and how life moves on after things end.
Characters are frustrating by virtue of their sheer relatability to the painful withdrawal from the world around them in the face of the painful reality hitting them, which has a…
Caught this on accident again on TV, that final act of action is just incessant!
Since a lot of people are missing this very important context for the film based on the Letterboxd reviews: in 2016, a man who used to work at a care home for the disabled entered during the night and murdered 19 people, wounding 26 more. The motive came from their time working at the facility, fostering a belief he found that the disabled and older people living there were a burden that needed to be dealt with.
The opening scene…
Shinkai’s best talents are his effortless visuals and the ways he ties thoughtful character relationships and emotions into motivating plot points and story beats tying into the larger message. This is where he falls short for me this time.
We can’t relate to Suzume’s journey overcoming the loss of her mother, or Souta’s journey, and how both link in to the film’s overriding discussion of 3.11 collectivist grief and the memories of places and people lost, because the structure of…
