I remember intentionally postponing watching this show because I heard that it was about sexual assault, a difficult subject to experience across a dozen episodes. Now that I have finished the show, I now realize that how shortsighted I was on this masterpiece. It is based on the show creator, Michaela Cole’s actual experience of […]
Many directors tell stories of children. In this movie, Kore-eda tells a story of Minato and Yori from three different perspectives. He slowly reveals the true nature of the story by moving from the parent’s, the teacher’s, and finally to Minato’s perspective. This hopping of perspectives makes us realize how much patience and sensitivity is […]
I found from Sunwoo’s Instagram account that my Eglooos blog server would be shutting down soon. It’s been almost ten years since I stopped writing there but I used to write there a lot, especially in my 20s and 30s, including movie reviews. According to my blog, I apparently watched “She and Her Cat” by […]
One of the main joys of watching movies for me is that the movies give me an opportunity of discovering humanity from the characters in them. I had the exact experience while watching this movie. None of the situations that Sandra was going through were something I have experienced personally: raising a young child as […]
The movie drops a bomb in the first few minutes: a family of three generations who’s been farming peaches from their orchards will soon lose their land, which will become a solar farm. Throughout the movie, I as an audience member accompany the various members of the family who each process the loss and grief […]
I am slightly exaggerating but I can easily identify Kore-eda’s movies by how the light touches people’s faces. It’s lonely but warm, and realistic yet soft. And this mood of light resembles how the camera looks at the characters in his movies. <Broker> had a thicker plot than his previous movies but the message and […]
Movies about friendship always fascinate me. Growing up, even though I was a shy child, the intense loneliness inside me made me always seek out friends and intense friendship. So I quickly understood the nature of the friendship between Léo and Rémi. Because the movie is essentially split in two parts where the latter part […]
I probably have listened to “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” easily a thousand times, probably even more, in various versions. Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of the composers whose music provided great comfort and consolation in my adolescent years. And I am probably not the only one who feels this way about his music. Several years ago […]
What does it mean for a person to be truly free? Corsage (not the flower arrangement but the German word for “corset”) explores the idea by telling a story of a historic figure, Empress Elisabeth of Austria. While watching the movie, I realized that it didn’t matter whether the movie was faithful to historical facts […]
Ryusuke Hamaguchi once said he doesn’t believe there is no such thing as pure fiction or pure documentary. In a way, <Happy Hour> represents this philosophy of his. Thanks to the quiet camera work and the sheer length of the movie (5 hours), the characters are fully realized and so realistic that even after the […]
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