Sunday, February 13, 2005
the twilight samurai
i've taken the first week and a half of school as an opportunity to extend my vacation. i haven't chosen a fourth class yet, haven't purchased books, haven't gone to class since tuesday. aside from sleeping too much and drinking too much, one thing i've been doing with all of this extra free time is watching movies. i activated a two-week free trial at blockbuster.com... and i chose movies in two ways: first, i chose the boring way, choosing movies i'd wanted to see but for one reason or another had missed in theaters. second, and much more interesting, i used rottentomatoes.com. rottentomatoes.com is a website that compiles critics' reviews of films and shows what percentage of them approved. so i looked up the most approved movies of 2004 and put a few of them that looked interesting to me in my queue. although i did not get to many of them, because the movies chosen through method one were already ordered, i did find one that i loved.
the twilight samurai is a movie about a single father samurai and his struggle to balance his job, his obligations, his family, and his desires. in the end it ends up being kind of sappy. but it was so resonant! i'm still trying to work through the reasons why. i think that, beyond me being a sap, a lot of it has to do with the process of translation. it's a japanese film, set in a context i have absolutely no familiarity with. so my process of understanding the film comes without many of the cultural signals that may exist with understanding of the japanese language or japanese culture. and i feel like there's a significant degree of personal interpretation that occurs in the process of grafting the words at the bottom of the screen to the actions which they describe. in a way i guess i'm saying that the combination of unfamiliarity with language/culture made the personalization process much more profound than i would have thought. the movie really grabbed hold of me and i think it's because in the translation/personalization many of the normal distractions were lost and i received the story in a more pure form. in that way it kind of reminded me of fairy tales i used to read when i was really young - how everything was so fantastical and so moving. i haven't been this wide-eyed in a while. (and i love it) ¶ 7:46 PM
the twilight samurai is a movie about a single father samurai and his struggle to balance his job, his obligations, his family, and his desires. in the end it ends up being kind of sappy. but it was so resonant! i'm still trying to work through the reasons why. i think that, beyond me being a sap, a lot of it has to do with the process of translation. it's a japanese film, set in a context i have absolutely no familiarity with. so my process of understanding the film comes without many of the cultural signals that may exist with understanding of the japanese language or japanese culture. and i feel like there's a significant degree of personal interpretation that occurs in the process of grafting the words at the bottom of the screen to the actions which they describe. in a way i guess i'm saying that the combination of unfamiliarity with language/culture made the personalization process much more profound than i would have thought. the movie really grabbed hold of me and i think it's because in the translation/personalization many of the normal distractions were lost and i received the story in a more pure form. in that way it kind of reminded me of fairy tales i used to read when i was really young - how everything was so fantastical and so moving. i haven't been this wide-eyed in a while. (and i love it) ¶ 7:46 PM