Sekai wa tokidoki utsukushii

I was fortunate enough to attend the International Premiere of "Life Can Be So Wonderful" at the Miami Film Festival this year. At the premiere Director Osamu Minorikawa presented a question and answer session after the movie to explain his creative process behind the film. He described his movie as turning pages through the lives of five wandering Japanese people. It is perhaps better to address this movie as five different movies, presented in a way that was incredibly different and fresh to me--movie poetry. Each of the five movie poems followed the mundane life of a person living in Japan. The first, a nude model, is a woman who is tangled in the beauty of modeling for art, its connotations, and her desire to be a muse of art. The poem incorporated a weave of images that captured different visual aspects of her story--interview-like images of the woman talking on a couch, lush plants outside the subway station that she passed everyday, and other flashes of scenes that portrayed her thoughts. While there was an absence of plot throughout the majority of the poems, which I can only guess will irk many of those who do not appreciate the essence of poetry, the movie served a different purpose: catering to the visual and auditory senses, Osamu Minorikawa accomplished with film what Ezra Pound managed to do through words. Many of the images will remain to haunt me, others were completely temporary, but it was the sensitivity of the film that really carried it to a different level. While many will disagree with its slow unraveling beauty in a culture of instant gratification and reason, personally, I found this film to be a breath of fresh air and an astounding journey. Not eligible to be branched in the category of Academy Award dramas, the film is of a different genre. The only way to describe the five movie poems of "Life Can Be So Wonderful" would be to compare it to watching the beauty of waves on a beach-- it enables you to see the wonder in life.

This film is anything but wonderful. Consisting of five short films by Minorikawa Osamu, it's one of those pretentious flicks that try to pass itself off as art, and there's nothing worse than stringing together a series of short films with nary a common theme and passing it off as a feature film. Sure, there are the usual notions of loneliness, solitude, melancholy and the likes that it would like to pass off as, but sadly, neither is the individual shorts or the sum of the whole remotely good.

The five shorts are also clumsily titled, and they are "Life can be so Wonderful", "Bar Fly", "Her Favourite Solitude" (isn't that a tad too obvious?), "Snusmumrik Liberty" and "Reasons to Live". In most shorts, shots of nature and the natural environment are included ad nausem, trying nothing more than to make up for time. The stories are a bit of a yawn too - the first short tells of the struggles and exasperation of an aging nude model, the second an alcoholic man's passion for the bottle, the third features two lovers in bed talk (and for a rare moment I thought the nudity was unnecessary), and the fourth tells the story of a pregnant woman and her lover (Ryuhei Matsuda who did Nightmare Detective). Only the fifth contained some semblance of coherent story, but it was too little too late.

The stories have nothing fresh to offer. Too many narrations, too many poetic quotations trying their very best to impress. But seriously, it tries too hard to connect with the audience. Or maybe perhaps it was so successful with the exploration of its themes, it managed to alienate itself from a regular audience. And those today can't wait to bolt for the door once the end credits start to roll.

Only recommended if you want something uninspiring or badly shot to test your patience.