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+ <title>Talking About The Asadas (2020)</title>
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+ <h1>Talking About The Asadas (2020)</h1>
+ <p>
+ I finally got around to rewatching this movie last night after watching
+ it on a plane one time. It really stuck with me because of a scene near
+ the end that made me cry. I usually don't really talk about movies all
+ that much but I felt the need to discuss this one.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ On rewatch, the film did not hold up as well as I remembered. I still
+ enjoyed it, but I found the plot and pacing to be somewhat odd. It felt
+ like two disjoint movies, one about a struggling photographer trying to
+ follow his dreams and one about trying to find hope in the aftermath of
+ the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. I think both stories worked well on their
+ own, but I think that they failed to transition effectively between the
+ two.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ The first half of the movie shows Masashi taking up photography after
+ seeing his father gifts him the old family camera. He is very interested
+ in photography as a child before becoming directionless after graduating
+ from his university with a prestigious award for a family photo he took.
+ Years later, he becomes inspired once again and begins taking many
+ family photos, each with funny themes where the family pretends to be in
+ various different scenarios such as pretending they were all on a car
+ racing team or that they were a family of gangsters. He publishes a book
+ of this photography and initially has little success before winning an
+ award for it and achieving a lot of success. I found this section to be
+ very poorly paced. He pretty quickly goes from his book being an abject
+ failure to a huge success. It feels like it was missing something, but
+ the family photos were cute and fun and the struggles of wanting to do
+ something, but never doing anything to satisfy that urge to create is
+ immensely relatable to me.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ The second half of the movie was significantly more emotionally
+ stimulating and I think that it deals with the devestation of such a
+ natural disaster very well. In particular, I appreciated how it dealt
+ with a young child who had lost her father in the earthquake. After his
+ death she was very distraught because she could not find any photos of
+ her father in the collection of photos that protagonist Masashi Asada
+ and other volunteers had helped salvage. At the same time, Masashi's
+ father was having a medical emergency and his family thought he may pass
+ away. Similarly, there were few photos of him before Masashi took up
+ photography as his father was always the one behind the camera.
+ Realizing this, Masashi quickly comes back to Tōhoku to take a family
+ photo for that child. Wearing the father's old watch to take a photo, he
+ made the family realize that their father was actually in every single
+ one of those photos, just behind the camera instead of in front.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ The movie ends with a fake-out about the father's death. It shows the
+ family surrounding him as he lays down as though dead. His wife falls
+ forward to sob, and then you hear a camera shutter and the family all
+ start laughing. This was just another of Masashi's fun themed family
+ photos. The scene gave me a good chuckle.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Overall, I found the movie to be very cute and I found that it did a
+ great job of dealing with the tragedy of natural disaster. I really wish
+ that it did a better job of pacing the first half and tying the themes
+ of the first half to the second half. It felt disjointed and that is
+ disappointing to me because I think it could have been a really
+ fantastic movie if those issues were worked through with a little more
+ script editing.
+ </p>
+ </div>
+ </body>
+</html>