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After Life Director: Hirokazu Koreeda Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Letterbox Format: Color, Widescreen Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 118 minutes Studio: New Yorker Films Region Code: 1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2000-08-29 Buy from Amazon |
 "See This Movie!"This has got to be at the top of my list of all time favorite films. It is really a beautifully put together piece of filmaking that deserves much more recognition than it received here in NY. It makes a beautiful statement of how the human race perceives the importance of, life, love, death, themselves, and eachother. Very psychological and well thought out. If you like movies that make you think once in a while, you will definitely enjoy this movie. "Must see"I would have to rank After Life up with Life is Beautiful, Wings of Desire, and Seventh Seal, as my favorite foreign films of all time. Anyone who won't watch foreign films just because of subtitles is missing the movie watching experience of a life time. The movie is well put thought out, wonderfully filmed, and with enough quirks to endear it to the viewer. Definitely a must see for fans of foreign. I am glad to hear that this is finally getting released "subtle and mesmerizing"A journey of mystery, humor, and thought provoking ideas that is filled with memorable images. A great dinner movie; it inspires conversation and thought. "You don't know about life--how can you ask about death?"A masterfully humorous, compassionate, quiet and moving film by a Japanese director whose work has primarily been in documentaries. The premise is strange but thought-provoking: after death, you have to choose one memory to take with you into eternity; everything else will be forgotten. In a brilliant series of cuts the staff at a run-down, out-of-the-way establishment explain this to the weekly intake of their "clients"--people who have just died. They have three days to decide; then the staff, with summer-camp-like enthusiasm, stages tiny films that recreate the memories. On the last day of the week the films are shown, and the clients vanish, one by one, as they relive the memories that are projected. Kore-Eda worked with actors and scripts, actors telling the camera their own memories, and non-professionals; the marvellous cast mixes all three and it's impossible to tell which is which. A young girl wants to relive Splash Mountain, only to reconsider after a worker gently tells her that thirty others had made the same choice that year. A boastful roue explains that the memory of course has to be of sex--and then chooses something quite different. An old woman remembers dancing for her older brother's friends in a red dress, and shyly coaches the little girl who will play her in the memory film. And a seventy-year-old salaryman can find nothing worth remembering, so videotapes of his life are requisitioned--touching off what plot there is. There are no flashbacks and little overt drama, but as the clients look back at their lives the staff are drawn in, and the viewers, too, can't help but wonder what memory would be worth living with for ever. What glows from the placid surface of this extraordinary film is the wonder and mystery of everyday things, the tenuous but rich beauty of merely living. "After Life"-- the Japanese title is "Wonderful Life"--is only ostensibly about death; no film of recent years has been more life affirming. |
