About every month or so I feel generally empty and frustrated with the world. Living aimlessly, going through the motions of what I know I’m supposed to do, talking very little. While in this state I’ll observe others more closely than usual, somehow making connections to what they’re doing to what I’m feeling. And then I’ll decide to take a quiet moment given to me for a bit. I don’t really think of my frustrations in that moment, I don’t think much of anything, really. Sometime after that things go back to normal. I have energy to do things, and I’m not frustrated. I’ve been aware of me doing this for a while, but I don’t think its been put into a full perspective until I watched this movie.
I was catching myself feeling this way before I watched this movie, so I felt particularly seen by it. Usually these feelings would last a few more days, but this movie ended up being cathartic. While I have seen lots of movies that speak to me personally, I don’t recall it being this comprehensive. I hope to hold this movie close to my heart, and to revisit it many times.
There’s this one point that Brennan Lee Mulligan makes about living in New York where he talks about how the population density results in being near so many people who are at life defining points in their life, and how this can result in you easily realizing that “today is really about them”. I feel like what Susumu’s character feels relates to this but expands upon it a bit. He goes around and watches people at defining points in their life, today IS about them, but he needs to see them so that today can also be his day.
Sometimes I get a bit pissy about the Hollywood style of filmmaking, and I’m sure it gets annoying, but I don’t care. This movie and the experience it provided should be normal. I took a film class in college which opened with the instructor talking about how most people consider movies to be in two camps “entertainment” and “art”, and how he knew that students would find the fact the class would delve into “art” films annoying. I’d rather the opposite be true.
Also yay! First movie where I get to see Susumu as the lead actor, he’s great.
This week I had enough time to do another radio show, and made an effort to get the log writing done before the show. Because of that I ended up feeling boxed in to what I wrote about, which is in contrast to the previous show where I talked then wrote, then felt boxed in with writing. I ended up reciting the log since I couldn’t think of anything off the cuff about the movie that I didn’t write about. Overall the show was better in my opinion, but I still think I can do better. Maybe I’ll be better at talking after doing a dozen or so more shows and will be able to say more than what I wrote, similar to how I started writing about movies.