Friday, March 21, 2008

I can't afford to hate people; I haven't got that kind of time

Still loving Ikiru. It's worth watching just for the faces Takashi Shimura makes, although it effectively makes the point that giving up my television was for naught if I'm just going to watch DVDs all night. My NetFlix queue is so long, though!

So, guy gets stomach cancer; guy takes some time off work to reflect on mortality; guy has night on town with novelist he meets in bar; guy starts spending time with a girl who's quite the Public Affairs office, of which guy is section chief; guy interrogates girl as to why she seems so alive, which guy has resolved to feel, to which she responds that she makes stuff; guy resolves to make something.

Then it skips to the wake. The deputy mayor and various section chiefs poo poo the idea that Watanabe-san (which is guy's name) turned this open cesspool into a public park on his own, and as the cast of characters at the wake shifts, we get a series of flashbacks as to the process by which he'd made the park. It's a nice narrative device! The blog post title is from a comment Watanabe-san made after being dissed by Administration, which he was trying to get to approve a budget.

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