Euthanasia

This is a short directed and co-written by Gabriel Miller. Told mostly in still photographs, the narrator is the son (or so it seems, I wasn't too sure) of an old man as he then plays him when telling of his last days of living as this old man is sent to a monitor room where he is to delete from a computer his memories of his life. This old man thinks of a day in the park with his wife and when they were on a bench and while embracing his wife, he sees a beautiful woman across from him, wife's back turned away, and thinks of what he'd say or do before she leaves, never to return. He wonders if that was the point in his life when things became too mundane for him though he does seem glad for the legacy of having that wife and a now-grown daughter as well. I'll stop there and just say this was quite a dramatically compelling narrative that had me riveted from beginning to end. So on that note, Euthanasia is highly recommended.

How ironic that this film cautions of a future in which people have put out so much crap on the internet, that there's no longer any memory to store it...yet the film itself is another example of crap that we could do without, clogging up our servers. Why did the director cast a guy with such an annoying voice as the narrator? It sounded like Saul Rosenberg was complaining to me about how he wanted his shoes and his glasses...so he could have them. What really sucks is that the idea to do a whole film with just photographs, reflecting memories of a person's life as footprints showing that they are still a part of this world long after they are gone, is a great one. Within the last year, I saw a collection made up of daily photographs that a man took over the course of about 20 years, during the course of which he contracted and died of cancer. Flipping through every day of his life, represented by one photograph, was pretty moving. Unfortunately, "Euthanasia" missed the mark...I'm going to resist the easy opportunity to turn the title back on the film itself.