chaos-rampant This review is dedicated to Chris Marker who passed away earlier today, the man who showed so little of himself because he was busy showing so much of everything. RIP.Good film, a good life in general, is not just about a view of the ocean, that may be beautiful one day but stormy the next. Good film is reflections on the waters of the moon that adjusts the tides. This is a recurrent insight of Zen among other things, and you can't be a Japanese filmmaker and not respond to the conundrum posed by Zen, even if it means outright rejection (as many Japanese New Wave-ers did). So it is not just a view, life isn't, it is both reflection and mechanisms that control the view, and these mechanisms entail motion and flow, and that flow is only near the surface the everyday narrative of life. The conundrum? You have to express complicated in-sight with a simple view.This guy, Koreeda, is still in his early steps here, but wants the adventure. In Maborosi, he chiseled a bit at the transcendent flow, even if it came across as a simple homage to Ozu it was good work. This time he challenges himself with layered narrative.He's still in his early steps means, in our case, that the mechanisms are entirely movielike, usually they are. The premise is that a group of people die and come to a house where each one will have to settle on a single memory to carry with them to eternity, this is the part that references old Hollywood fantasy (A Matter of Life and Death, the Capra Christmas staple also referenced in the title).The French touch (most notably Resnais and Marker): each memory is going to be made into a film, and films are going to be screened for the audience in a way that they grant transcendence. Each film poses a challenge to the crew, so the filmmakers have to seriously puzzle: how to film a flight on ground level, the sound of darkness, or the simplest thing, the feel of a summer breeze. Another problem is that others won't or can't even choose their film.In new Hollywood hands, say Jonze's, this would be done with an abundance of quirks and forced cleverness. One or the other from the usual group of selfaware actors - Julianne Moore, Seymour Hoffman, Malkovich - would be likely brought around to be the center of multiple overlapping vision. We'd get a big, complex synecdoche of the various threads, that is in line with the Western understanding of life as a complicated narrative.But, this is Japanese and derives all its power from subtle flow in the view: one aspect of this, is that we never see the actual transcendent films except a few glimpses, and only glimpses of them being put together, usually involving camera set-up and rehearsals from memory. The action often takes place in some blurred foreground. See, it was never about the actual films as vaguely artistic tokens. It was about sculpting a feel that guides you back to the light, and that is left entirely in our sphere of having discovered our cherished moment, and rehearsed that moment as the film provides the framework of cinematic space around it. It is pure Zen: cultivating the air you breathe.The other aspect is that we have actual people reminiscing. Oh, some of it was staged, some of it real, but you can't know most of the time and there's no point to that. It matters that all of it impresses as a seamless flow of graceful reminiscence.I'd have liked less obviously scripted romance and more of these people and filming the air, which is one of the coveted memories anyway, but Koreeda probably needed a safe anchor he could control using ordinary - dramatic - means. That should be his next adventure.I recently discovered a wonderful Russian film a bit like this, that one a documentary, this one ostensibly a drama, but the boundaries are slippery, about aged ballet dancers in their 80's and 90's conducting between them a wonderful ballet of remembrance. It felt graceful because the people telling their story were, and each breath from that story infused the cinematic air, and so it is here, except in a much more quietly ordinary way, since the people are ordinary.Chris Marker would have liked both, I like to think. He did his own film about a Russian filmmaker reminiscing on a journey of staged dreams and fleeting memories. It's called The Last Bolshevik, the Russian documentary is Ballets Russes. You should look them up.And so it comes full circle.

rooprect The underlying premise and theme of this film is extremely thought-provoking. Within the first 20 minutes, your brain will light up like a Christmas tree as you think of the implications and how you would react in a similar situation. It has the magical ability to awaken nostalgic memories of your own, and several times I had to pause the film so that I could indulge my own private thoughts for a while. Hats off to the director/writer for achieving the necessary balance between fantasy and realism (i.e., taking you to a surreal place whilst not destroying the human perspective).But the downside... I feel that the director failed to cultivate some of the excellent philosophies which were barely touched upon. This could have been accomplished with more dialogue. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of *talking* in the movie, but it's mostly anecdotal (people wistfully reminiscing about the past). There wasn't enough analysis and barely any *dialogue* (people communicating with each other).Without ruining anything, I'll give you one example. The premise is, of course, "if you had to pick one memory to relive forever, which would you choose?" One character simply refuses to pick. This is brilliant. As soon as he takes his position, which he does in the first 10 minutes of the film, it woke me up and made me wonder why he would choose this unconventional act of defiance.But much to my disappointment, this central theme is abandoned. The character is hardly seen again. He does deliver an interesting monologue towards the end which is encapsulated in a single powerful statement he says (I won't tell you what it is). But I couldn't help feeling as if the director didn't really follow through with his philosophy.Perhaps that was the intent of the director: to present us only with fragments so that we may ponder the philosophy ourselves. But that approach somewhat betrays the nature of art. Art, I believe, should do its best to communicate a complete idea, and *then* open up the floor for discussion. Anything less is a mere Rorshach test. Or whatever you call those inkblot thingees that psychologists use to probe your mind.As you can probably guess, I'm not a big fan of the Minimalist movement.Another gripe... Some of the interesting philosophical points were shoved aside to make room for the romantic sub-plot, which I found to be a bit forced and unbelievable. I would have preferred to see the director stick to the heavier issues. If this is truly a film about deep spirituality, why dedicate so much time to a teenage girl's crush on a guy?So my overall criticism is that there wasn't enough substance presented. I admit there IS the possibility that the dialogue/philosophy I craved was lost in translation. It is possible that the English subtitles didn't convey the philosophy inherent in the original Japanese. That's been known to happen.But still, I think this film could have truly benefited by a good old fashioned Shakespearian soliloquy, like Hamlet Act III Sc 1, to help clarify the director's message.Well, here I've wasted my whole review babbling about philosophy, and I haven't touched upon the technical merits of this film. Let me just wrap up by reiterating that THIS IS A GOOD FILM despite my criticism. I love the way the director achieved a surreal feeling without using gimmicky, schlocky clichés like pearly gates and angels and pixie dust. Everything about the production is firmly rooted in reality despite the very unrealistic nature, and that achieves a very bizarre and clever paradox. Also there's no music at all. It's an original, I'll definitely give it that! Give it a whirl. I'll probably watch it a 2nd time myself.

Paul Martin I saw After as part of the Hirokazu Kore-eda retrospective at the Melbourne International Film Festival. This film should be compulsory viewing for film students. It proves that a good story put together inventively is all it takes to produce a compelling film. With scarce resources and mostly non-professional actors, Kore-eda has ingeniously contrived an alternate reality, where people go at the time of death. No pearly gates, no angels, no hell-fire - just bureaucrats in government buildings (or so they seemed to this writer), processing the dead, and extracting from them their lives' fondest memories to be made into videos.This idea is almost comical, yet it works beautifully. Clearly there's a humorous element, but Kore-eda plays it matter-of-fact serious, almost like a documentary. For me it strongly recalls some of the early fiction films of Kieslowski (like Camera Buff) which evolved out of the documentary format. The film shares the beautifully raw aesthetics of Camera Buff and Blind Chance and with the latter's metaphysical exploration. Having seen at MIFF all but one of Kore-eda's films (Distance, which I plan to see on Tuesday), this is my favourite so far. But each of the films I have seen thus far are very different in content and style to each other. This film is both enjoyable and moving.

Meganeguard What happens after one dies? Does one's soul ascend to heaven, descend to hell, or is it reincarnated into yet another earthly form? Does an individual simply cease to exist after he or she dies? In Kore-eda's second feature length film Afterlife one goes to a way station where one selects his or her favorite memory to be filmed and then one takes that memory and that memory alone to one's final destination.In order to help individuals decide which memory to keep counselors help individuals comb through their lives to find important memories. Many of the individuals, of course, select times from their childhoods as their best memories. One man selects a summer day in which he rode a tram and enjoyed the scenery and the cool breeze that blew through the window. A radiant older woman chooses a time in which she was dressed in a red, Western dress and danced for her older brother and dined on chicken rice afterwards. One bitter man chooses a time in his life when he had a small fort and was able to hide away from the world.On its surface Afterlife might seem a bit hokey and one wonders why spirits have to create videos of their memories, they also eat and drink, to take to the next world. However, isn't it true that are life experiences are nothing but memories and besides the current moment we live everything else is a memory? Kore-eda, whose other feature length films Maboroshi and Distance focus on death and memory and memory as well, delves into mankind's worry of being forgotten. One character in the film, an older man who considers every aspect of his life to be so-so, is reluctant to select a memory because he does not believe that he had a life affirming moment that will be remembered by others, but, as one of the counselors states very few people do.Slow moving, darkly filmed, and melancholy Afterlife is a deep film that takes an interesting stance to life and death and makes one reflect on one's own life and those small moments that makes each of us who we are.