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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.
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