Film
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Drive My Car (2021)
After Yūsuke Kafuku’s wife dies, he must navigate his way through a world without her. The movie starts two years prior to this, where we are introduced to the couple in the opening scene of Drive My Car, where actor and director Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a screenwriter who brainstorms story ideas with her husband during the afterglow of sex. At this time in his life, Yūsuke performs in a multilingual theater production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and the film switches between scenes in the play and the complications building in Yūsuke’s real life, touching on parallels between the two. Two years later,…
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Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
When a young witch leaves home on a clear night with a full moon, as is customary for witches, she and her cat Jiji start a new life and find new possibilities in the city of Koriko, where Kiki starts a flying delivery service as she becomes independent. This delightful movie, created by Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, Spirited Away, When Marnie Was There, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and more), is the fourth film in my year of watching 50 Japanese movies. Kiki’s Delivery Service (originally titled Majo no takkyûbin) was produced and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and based on the novel Kiki’s…
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My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
A Japanese movie marathon wouldn’t be right without delving into the wonderful world of Japanese animation, and I’m starting with my favorite out of the few that I’ve seen, the beautifully hand-illustrated film My Neighbor Totoro. Set in 1950s Japan, My Neighbor Totoro tells the story of a professor, Tatsuo Kusakabe, and his two daughters, Satsuki and Mei, who move to the countryside to be closer to their mother who is in the hospital recovering from a long-term illness. Once they arrive, the children start to explore the old house that they are moving into, and discover that it’s inhabited by dust bunny-like spirits called “susuwatari” or “soot sprites” that…
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Shoplifters (2018)
Father and son team Osamu and Shota Shibata, respectively, are experienced shoplifters, working together with hand signals to procure some items from the supermarket in the opening scene. Clearly, they’ve done this before, they work well together, and afterwards, the two look happy just to be together. They stop at a street vendor’s stall to buy some warm croquettes, and then on their way home, they see a frail, young girl, who they’ve seen before, sitting alone in the cold. We soon learn that her name is Yuri (played by Miyu Sasaki) and she is around four years old. Osamu offers her one of their croquettes and lets her come…
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Perfect Days (2023)
With films directed in at least five different languages, perhaps most notably the Spanish language documentary Buena Vista Social Club; the primarily German language film Wings of Desire; and 2023’s Japanese film Perfect Days, Wim Wenders is no stranger to international work. This has shifted my radar a little bit more in his direction lately as I look for more foreign films as part of my language learning process. But that aside, Perfect Days is a quiet masterpiece that I would recommend to anyone. Capturing the spirit of zen, Perfect Days is a slice-of-life style film which follows Hirayama, a Tokyo public toilet cleaner who appreciates the everyday, especially music…
