Greg Mako

One thing I’ve witnessed throughout my life that this movie validates is that you can fully get away with committing crimes as long as you can make people laugh. Funny people are among the most powerful in our species.

Just like a writer/director/editor to imagine an afterlife where everyone is forced to recreate a memory by being an executive producer on their own short film.  Some lovely sentiments about how the greatest meaning in life can come from what you mean to others (see The Wizard telling the Tin Man “…a heart is not judged by how much you love, but how much you are loved by others”). But predictably, what’s most interesting to me, is how this is a movie about movies.  And how they can sometimes be even more real than reality because of the way memory is an unreliable lie based on emotion anyway. Not my favorite Kore-eda film formally, but maybe the most inviting concept that asks for your own introspection.

Simultaneously made me really want to smoke again while also affirming that I shouldn’t be doing that. What might feel profound in your own head can turn out to be loose threads when you try to communicate them to others. There’s a lot here I’d love to support, from the anti-capitalist political stance on workers rights to the originality of the filmmaking that takes risks to push the boundaries of what visual language can be. But the execution of those ideas just didn’t communicate effectively or clearly for me. Never felt engaged. Thought a lot about *Everything Everywhere All At Once *while watching. Both want to preach collectivism but also desperate to be individual in a way that doesn’t gel with me.

Only Robert Rodriguez could make a Mexican strip club look like a family-friendly theme park dining experience.