These phantasms are concocted from a little kernel of conscience, or guilt, or fear, or loneliness. Sometimes others see them, sometimes they don’t, they’re shifting and dreamlike, and they operate according to their own rules. They’re unreliable narrators. They’re wise or foolish, in turn; they speak in riddles, they speak a questionable truth, changing and suspect, like all truths.
It boggled my mind that all of these birds had been here, all along, so vivid, so loud. They weren’t new. I’d never bothered to look at them, I’d never taken the time to look up, and discover the colorful teeming world in the tangled branches of the trees.
Hidden Fortress was an inspiration for George Lucas in the making of Star Wars, and it is every bit as thrilling and swashbuckling, full of adventure and romance. But whereas Star Wars seems to operate on an almost mythological idea of good and evil, Hidden Fortress is more nuanced.
This is written not as an art historian, a poetry professor, or an academic or expert of any kind. This is written as a lover not a scholar. Though I’ve probably said too much, there’s so much more to say.
I have long been fascinated with the motion of human hands. Gesture is one of my favorite languages. It’s oddly both universal and specific to one place at the same time.
It’s so simple, in the end, it’s so raw and so sweet: to know one another and to love one another, this is what will wake us from the hypnosis.
Two days later he called me and told me he had something I would like to see, so I arranged to meet him. He had a large brown envelope with only a date on it: 1912.
In English “Ikiru” means “to live,” and for the rest of the film Watanbe examines what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, and what makes being alive valuable to him.
This is a painfully relevant film, and everyone should watch it.
“They would only need a little bread to eat; and even if there was only enough for one of them, he would give her the whole piece. What was the point of wanting anything else? Was there anything in life worth more than that?”
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