Byôsoku 5 senchimêtoru

5 centimeteres per second is a japanese anime film that consists of three interlocking short stories. The only way I could describe it is by saying that it is truly captivating. Every single scene truly captivated every single sense of mine. Visually and emotionally, this film just takes you in that world of cherry blossom trees. It's a very sad yet very relatable film about memories from a distant past and the connection that happens between two individuals. The soundeffects were so well done that at certain times I actually felt that I was there inside the scene.
It had a poetic and somewhat innocent feel to it.

Malena

sad but utterly beautiful.

This is one unique film, that handles a topic that is sometimes overlooked in life. How beauty can be destructive.

Monica Belluci, who was a beautiful woman in an Italian town, gets gossiped at by jealous women and lustreous offers from hungry men. It is a depction of what a society is capable of and how it could turn a beautiful, faithful woman to a prostitute, how humans beings tend to destruct everything pristine, about the filthy human nature that surrounds us. The italian culture at the war, reminded me of egyptian culture. Where a word spreads out in seconds and the way, every person snoops in everyone's business.

Malena, throughout this whole film endures the pain alone, silently. The only person, who truly understood her in the film is the young boy on the bicycle, who always watched her from afar. The only person, who knew her real story. His love for her was different from all the others. He wasn't just a lustful creature, he was a young boy mesmerized by Malena's beauty, who held an unconditional love for her not expecting a return.

Monica Bellucia did a great job, everything she felt was there in her face, in her eyes. Not for once did she talk about how she feels, yet it was so well said through her expression.

This one got to me.

Very deeply.

It penetrated my chore.

The passion of Martin

Are humans animals? Or are they some form of a higher being?
It's something that I pondered on after watching the film.
Martin, throughout the whole film was looking for purity, eternity, but all he did was turn love into an obsessive, unhealthy thing.
Even at the beginning all his pictures were shooting the ugly side of life. It's very contradictory, but that's how human beings are, filled with contradictions.
It was a very interesting film, but I'm not sure I like the twist at the end. On one side, it captures the psyche of an obsessed stalker but on the other, the feeling it gave out at the beginning was so different from the feeling at the end. Maybe because at the beginning I related a lot to Martin, but at the end I couldn't relate.
There's a lot of washing throughut the film. Martin, in many scenes sits in the bathtub, and there's also the scene when he washes his laundry, with the closeup on the washing mashine. It gave a feeling of cleansing, which is somethng Martin wanted to do from the beginning of the short film, looking for the pristine. His mind always compares, the beautiful with the ugly, the angel with the devil.
He's very afraid of death and decay, that's why he keeps on looking for something to hold on to, something that would last forever. The film captures the lonliness of people, the yearning for someone who understands, "someone who understands my core" as Rebecca put it.
I liked the part when he analyzes everY sentence in the note that she left. The obsessive behaviour, of turning every word, every action into a long list of questions.
What I didn't undertsand is the fact that he was always looking for someone to talk to, someone he could understand, so how did he at the end enjoy her as she was a lying vegetable? That's something I didn't truly grasp.
But the qustion still lingers.....
where's the distinction between love and sex?
Are humas uncontrollable beings?

I definitly put this film on my list of favourties, not only because it's utterly beautiful and intimate, but also because I related to so many things in it. Eventhough I'm not in his position and never experienced what he has, I know what it's like to go through a disease. Javier Bardem did a great job in expressing the emtions 'Ramon'. His facial expressions said so much.

One of my favourite scenes was the one when Remon was recounting his incident and the moments that followed, the moments between life and death, when the most important moments passed before his eyes. I loved the way Julia (Belen Rueda) was looking at the photographs while listening to the tape she recorded of his voice. This scene made me think of my most precious memories. I wondered if I could put my most cherished memories in photographs. which ones would they be?

Ramón Sampedro: Out to sea. Out to sea, and in the weightlessness of the deep where dreams come true, two souls unite to fulfill a single wish. Your gaze and mine, over and over like an echo, repeating silently: "Deeper, and deeper," beyond everything that is flesh and blood. But I always awaken and I always wish for death, my lips forever entangled in your hair.

I loved it.

Ivan's childhood and Zozo

I put those two films in one review because they both tackle the same issue and there are many similarities between the two. Both are about a young boy, who lost his family in war. Aesthetically, both were really beautiful. I loved the cinematoghrophy of both, but the fact that Ivan's childhood is in black and white and was shot in 1962 left me dumbfounded. As a story I liked zozo more, it was more intimate and you really got the know the boy and you felt everything with him. Both films got scenes of the boy's imagination or scenes from the past. I loved the last scene in Ivan's childhood, when he was chasing around the little girl. It's also funny that both have a forest scene with same looking trees and everything. The two forest scenes were splendid, in both films. Even though they were both at a similar place, the emtions that these two scenes induced were very different. In Ivan's childhood I was more captivated by the beauty of the pictures infront of me, while in Zozo I was more drawn to the emtional aspect of it.

La greine et le mulet

It takes a closer peek at arabs living in france. very slowpaced, it takes you into their lives, you feel that you're actually living with them, that you're part of their lives. There are lot of unneccasry conversations and repetition, but this makes it even more real. There's something I realized lately, that humans in general repeat their conversations all the time, they see each other every day and talk about the exact thing they were talking about yesterday, maybe the choice of words would be different but people tend to do that, repeat conversations. I like the oriental feel at the end of the film. "Hafsia Herzi" did a splendid job, she deserves all the awards she got, I especially liked the close-up scences on her.

Utterly beautiful. I love it. Death in Venice, based on the novel by Thomas Mann, takes place in Venice where composer Gustav Ashenbach, spends his last days. The film is very slow paced, capturing every moment. It has many long shots that just depict the mellow mundane days in Venice at the beach. Kids are playing, people are laughing, strawberry sellers are walking around. However, I wouldn't put this film in the category of realism.

What is beauty? Is it aestetic quality or is it what lies beyond that? What is an artist? All those questions were raised in the film.

I especially liked the scene where the composer was watching the sand in the sanclock going down. The words in that scene were deep and thought inducing.In the film Gustav Ashenbach develops this infatuation with a boy called Tadzio. He follows him and watches him from afar. There was little dialogue but their expressions said it all. Eventhough one might regard such an infatuation as perverted, seeing that the man is old and the boy is in his early adolescence, in the film it didn't feel that way. It felt like it was the purest and most pristine forms of love.

Ghost of a smile

Ghost of a smile is a collection of 8 short stories in modern day Tokyo.
This was a very entertaining read. It is written by, Deborah Boliver Boehm, an American whose well aquainted with japanese culture. Her western take on things made it easy for me, a non-japanese interested in japan to learn more about this mysterious culture. There were many different charachters in her stories like a sumo wrestler, a goldfish seller, a teenage japanese girl, a librarian and many more. The stories combined the natural with the supernatural, the east, with the west in a witty delightful erotic way. The story takes you in, I personally couldn't put the book down. It just takes you to a different world where everything is possible and gives you a closer peek to the everyday life of Tokyo. Each story was unique in its own way, and totally different from the other yet there was a resemblance in some aspects in all stories. They all had some relation to japanese mythology and the supernatural world and most of them were about love, lust and desire. Her style is a comibination between american modern in search of romance type of novels, spiritual questioning afterlife and the unknown books and fantasy ghost stories. I wouldn't say that it is an intellectual literary book that you would think about when you put down, I would say it's more of cross cultural book that would make you well aquainted with japanese culture and a delightful collection that would transfer you in a three, if not 4 or even more, dimensional world.

Mummenshanz

How can silence say so much?

I never thought that toilet papers, playing dough and notebooks have so much potential to express human emotions so splendidly.

I'm not very familiar with Pantomime but I think that Mummenshanz have a unique approach to pantomime.

They engage the audience and capture them in a world so foreign yet so familiar, a world where everything is possible a world based on shapes a colors. Eventhough dominated by silence conversations take place through their movements and through different methods. For instance by using toilet paper as their eyes and mouth and crying by pulling out the roll of papers. The silence of it makes spectators make up their own version of it, their own story and it is very entertaining.

Silence can say so much more than words uttered uselessly and Mummenshanz is a great indication of that. The show made me laugh, amused, feel awed and delighted and it made me think. This is a must for art lovers.

Volver

Volver, like Caramel, is a film based on the lives and feelings of women. It tells the story of a mother, her daughter, her sister and her mother. It's like a generation story. The film takes place in a small town in Spain, La Mancha, which is the hometown of the director, Almodover. Through the film we get to see their culture and even their superstitions, like for instance, the way the kiss each other on the cheek and how they believe that they can actually see the ghost of a dead person. The film contains murder and rape but it's done in such a subtle way, leaving out violence. I like the transition in Penelope's charachter and the shift in her realtionship with her mother, the film shows clearly how women stick together fight for one another. It is a lovely film that celebraters the relationship of women. It is a very heartwarming film and the last scene ended it beautifully, when she told her mother "there's so much I want to tell you" and you see the strong, even somehow cold towards her mother Penelope, turn emtional.

Ladri di biciclet

This is one of my favourite genres, "realism". What I liked about this film is the fact that there was a plot , a man searching for his stolen bike that he needed for his job, but what was really going on in the film were the things outside the plot, like the daily encounters. The background happenings were both real and amusing and they were daily life sort of things. It reminded me a little bit of broken flowers by "Jim Jarmush". The little boy was adorable. Eventhough the film was about desperation, about suffering and pain it didn't fail to have its humorous moments.

The father son relationship was very intense, real, emotional and very endearing. The restaurant scene was one of my favourites. It showed something about human nature and how children can be. Children's spontanoutity makes us see raw humanity without pretensiousness, and in this scene we see how the rich kid is showing off with his mozzerella, and how excited the little boy got when he had opportunity to eat the mozzarella like the rich kid.

This scene also shows father son realitonships in its purest and most sincere level, they even had their little secret (the little boy got to drink wine).

Caramel

It was a really moving film and I related to many parts of it becasue I'm also an arab female.

Lebanon is much like Egypt in many ways. I didn't know that Lebanese women resorted to hymen reconstruction like Egyptians but obviously it does happen there.

The story of Layaly (Nadine Labbaky's charachter) was very real and I liked the fact that the "other" woman was not depicted as a villain. She was a woman in love with a married man and it was tortourous.

On their anniversary, she put so much effort in trying to rent a room for them, and that process was very hard because in arab countries a couple can't rent a room if they're not married. She eneded up renting a room in a whorehouse, or a smewhere slightly like it. She scraped the floors, changed the bedcovers and turned that filthy place into a beautiful place with balloons and even a cake... but all her efforts went in vain because he never showed up. Waiting by her silent cellphone on the empty bed, there was desperation in her eyes. Her lover bailed on her and I don't think he would've ever recognized or even appreciated all her efforts. I think the fact that the viewer never saw his face and even when he appeared it was only from his back was very effective. It represented how absent he was and even if he was there as a lover he was just like a ghost that is there in spirit, in the mind and in the heart but lacking in actual presence.

The encounter of wife and mistress was very intense, especially that it included waxing. It represents the aching that comes out of love and how women hate each other when they feel threatened but at the same time they relate to one another and in a way, have the same fears and go through exactly the same heartache.

The scene where the wife was telling Layaly that she wanted to make something special for her husband on their anniversary and then she was thinking if there's someting missing and sudenly mentioned that she still had to purchase balloons made me stop for a moment.... Even Layaly who bottled up rage and hate for the wife, for a moment there sympathized because she's been there.

Then she asked Layaly if that would make him happy... because that what she wanted to do for him, make him happy.

This is such a typical Middle Eastern problem, women take extreme measures in making unappreciative men happy... but to no avail....

I know that not every single case is not like that but it is a common Middle Eastern problem.

This film beautifully showes the frustrations of Middle Eastern women, and the sexual suppression, the restrictions of society and their hidden lives.

It consisted of a lot blabbering and women talk, which might not be appealing to male audiences, but this gave the film that touch of "realism", it didn't look made up and fake, for all I know, they could've been improvising.

It told the stories of everyday miseries, they things that go by, the things that we live by, the things we just let pass by.

In one of the last scenes, where the long haired customer runs around the street with her new short haircut represented for me freedom and going out of one's way. The little things we use as acts of rebellion and how when how we feel like we can conquer the world when we do them.