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Last Life in the Universe Actors: Tadanobu Asano, Sinitta Boonyasak, Takashi Miike Director: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang Number of Items: 1 Format: Color, Widescreen Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Studio: Umvd/Visual Entertai Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2005-02-15 Buy from Amazon |
 "Lonely/Beautiful/Haunting/SUPER movie""Last Life in the Universe" is such an incredible movie. It's such an incredible character study, letting you to just watch two desperately lonely people start to come together...the imagery and backgrounds are all so eerily beautiful and the acting's so nuanced and subtle...I especially liked the actress who played Nid. Anyway, I really liked this movie. It's sort of like a different spin on "Lost in Translation", with the characters brought together by loss instead of culture. Like I said...it's an incredible movie. :)  "Very good film, but a little over-hyped"Last Life in the Universe was conceived as a way for friends Miike Takashi, Asano Tadanobu, Christopher Doyle, and Pek-ek Ratanaruang to work together. All of them share the same philosophy that the making of a film, rather than the final product, is the truly enjoyable and worthwhile aspect of filmmaking. Their enjoyment on set creates a very engrossing cinematic experience and quite a good film, but it is not the "perfect masterpiece" that it has been made out by many to be. First off, the ambiguous ending of the film is not profound, it's abrupt and lazy. Ratanaruang needs only look to filmmakers like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Shunji Iwai, or Chen Kaige to understand the difference between unnecessarily and uncharacteristically abrupt and profoundly open-ended. Also, at a few rare instances the film does fall ever so slightly over the line into pretentiousness. 90% of the time it's masterful at treading that line, and even when it begins to stray from the balance it succeeds much better than, say, Garden State, but there is no doubting the films occasional pretentious aura. The story is appropriately thin, and the characters are quite nearly perfectly developed and performed. While Asano's reasonless suicidal tendencies to get a bit repetative and are never fully convincing, the rest of his role is so real that you often feel as if you're watching a documentary instead of a narrative film. Christopher Doyle's cinematography is good and appropriately subtle, but don't look for any of his trademark colors or stylized segments (a good choice in this case, in my opinion). Contrary to the rest of these revies, I feel that Last Life falls slightly short of Lost in Translation's near-greatness. Both film are terrific and, despite some similiarities, perhaps should not be compared, but I feel that Last Life still feels a little more "student film" and less "cultural character exploration," which could entirely come from the fact that Ratanaruang is filming his own country while Coppola was in the same boat as her characters and audience. Anyway, it's unquestionably a worthy film. I wish they had half stars, as 4 stars does kind of cut the film short, but I just do not feel that it's quite deserving of a full five stars. "Recommended to all!!!"this movie was a great and i definitly recommend it to everyone. The stroyline and the way this film was directed is briliant "A good moody film, with a mild aftertaste"This is a movie in a minor key and mainly revels in giving us as little as we need as audience members to understand the action. It's both romantic and anti-romantic I would say, regarding labels. An interesting thing about the movie is the visual style which is used to create images within the characters heads(events they imagine, or hallucinate happening). This imagery is both real and unreal, which makes you as an audience member sometimes question whether something is actually happening. Also, an important thing to note about this is the suicidal subplot. It makes the film reminiscent of "Harold and Maude" or even "Better Off Dead" in which the subject matter is treated with gravity and then levity as well. I can honestly say that this is the first Thai film that I have seen and I'm very impressed. I think that I'm most impressed by the fact the film ends while the characters lives are reaching another crucial period and we are OK with the film ending at this point because what's happened to get them there is enough. I highly recommened this to people who like "Lost In Translation" because it contains many of the themes that play out in that film: 1)language barriers 2)alienation from close relationships 3)seeming life crises 3)opposite attraction. Sorry, these two are closer in age than the other film, but I consider that a positive. "wow this movie was great!!!"i think this was a great movie, the story line of two people who are totaly opposite coming together the way they did was great. This movie really kept my attention, great story line, and cinematography!! |
