This blog entry is part of my “movie year countdown”. To read more about that check out my first Spout filmblog entry.
Ruang rak noi nid mahasan (Last Life in the Universe)
Honestly, it's hard for me to conceptualize a different identity for a lot of countries in The Orient. After living in a big city for a few years I'm starting to differentiate between different types of food, but even that all seems to blend together pretty closely. I've seen movies from China, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and others most likely.
In the specials features of this film the filmmakers often comment on how they were really trying to bring their feelings and images of Thailand to the screen. The only other movie from Thailand I've seen is Ong-Bak, which had many scenes in the city as well. But Last Life in the Universe seems to give you more of the real modern sense of the place.
Of course half of the movie is really Japanese. The story is about how to different but lonely personalities come together, different even in that they are from different cultures, speak different languages. And Japanese I do feel much more of an affinity for. Not just because I've seen so many more Japanese movies and because it's influence in our culture seems so much more prevalent somehow. But I also studied the Japanese language in college for two years. Not that I can remember much of anything of the actual language. My professor was in serious contention for the absolute sweetest and nicest guy I've ever met at any stage in my life, but he was also a sap and let people pass without really learning or retaining much. Nonetheless, I feel some kind of affinity for Japanese and see how it is separate from other Oriental cultures (even though it has assimilated so much of them).
The Japanese character is played by Tadanobu Asano, who is quite a different personality from the last movie I saw him in, Ichi the Killer. The movie actually acknowledges this in an amusing way. There is a scene with two gangsters chatting in some kind of prostitute bar, when one makes a violent suggestion to another one. The other's response is that the first guy has seen too many yakuza films. The image immediately cuts to a poster of Asano's masochistic character Kakihara. We then realize the poster is on the wall of the library where Asano's timid character of this film, Kenji, is working.
I guess I don't have much of a main point or anything to say about this movie. There actually are a lot of really interesting themes in this movie that I won't go into. I was actually for some reason expecting to like it more than I did for some reason. But in the end I actually did like it quite a bit.
Takashi Miike has an amusing acting bit at the end.
The obligatory score: 8/10 stars