87 lines
4.6 KiB
HTML
87 lines
4.6 KiB
HTML
<!doctype html>
|
|
<html lang="en">
|
|
<head>
|
|
<meta charset="utf-8" />
|
|
<title>Talking About The Asadas (2020)</title>
|
|
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
|
|
|
|
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles.css" />
|
|
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="data:image/png;base64," />
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<div class="header">
|
|
<a href="../index.html">Home</a>
|
|
<a href="../projects.html">Projects</a>
|
|
<a href="../tea.html">Tea Tasting Notes</a>
|
|
<a href="../rants.html">Rants</a>
|
|
<a href="../about.html">About Me</a>
|
|
</div>
|
|
<div class="body">
|
|
<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>
|