The Wasteful Things

We've just watched a Japanese movie called I Wish. That's the English title, of course (in Japanese the film is called Miracle).  The cover quotes the New York Daily News, who says it's Extraordinary.  The Guardian calls it A Gem of World Cinema.  And there are more lines from other sources telling us how brilliant and revelatory and delicate and observant it is....and so on.

Well, it's quite a delight, but extraordinary it isn't. Its script is very loose, and the long-awaited 'miracles' at the end of the movie turn out to be something of a fizzer. Sure, there's a more settled feeling in the air amongst those participating as the credits roll, but to all intents and purposes, life goes on pretty much as before.

The film is about two young brothers (perhaps eight and ten, and played by real life brothers) who live in separate cities, one with his mother and grandparents, the other with his muso father. The father is the 'problem' according to the mother, and there's a brief flashback about halfway through showing what life was like for all members of the family before the split. The two boys have telephone contact with each other, and after it's announced that the new bullet train will be starting up in a couple of months' time, the boys decide on asking for a miracle at the moment when the northbound train passes the southbound train. Quite why this is significant isn't clear, but then a lot of things in the movie aren't clear: you just accept them because you don't have a choice. The director, Kore-Eda Hirokazu, isn't into explaining things. Certainly you can pick up most points in some measure - and no doubt there's a bit of a cultural gap to cross - but Hirokazu just drops stuff before us and shows us something and leaves us to deal with it.  Because the movie has an immense amount of natural charm, and because the younger boy in particular is an absolute delight, with a face that lights up at the drop of a hat, and because there's no real villain in the picture, or any sense of an evil world out there (even the smoking volcano is fairly benign) you enjoy the movie as it wends its quiet way along (it's 128 minutes).  There's enough of a story to keep us interested, and the performances from the kids - the two young leads, their assorted companions, and various other children who get a few seconds of screen time - are so natural and enjoyable that the fact that there's little else going on barely matters.

There are a number of adults in the picture, but their lives are almost secondary to the children's, and for the most part they're a pretty amiable lot (the squabble flashback between the parents is the only grim note in the piece). The two grandparents (a taciturn grandfather and a grandmother with lots of hand-me-down information) and the elderly couple who suddenly find themselves landed with seven children late in the movie, are genial and pleasant people. Even the grandfather's drinking companions are played more for comedy than anything else. Compare the elderly people in some older Japanese movies, such as Ozu's Tokyo Story, for a quite different picture of the older generation.

The film doesn't disappoint, in spite of the hype on the cover. If you're prepared to take the movie as it comes, you'll enjoy it. Much of what happens skims across the surface like a breeze. And perhaps that's the director's intention. At one point, the father says to his younger son: "There's room in this world for wasteful things. Imagine if everything had meaning. You'd choke."  A lot of the detail in this film is trivial, seemingly unimportant; even the events are small-scale. But the father's point is that not everything has to be significant - children, for instance, are often seen as unimportant - and Hirokazu has managed to make something of considerable value out of 'wasteful' things.

Grandparents

I once got into a little bit of trouble for writing a poem about grandparents - you can see the poem here and see why it might be misinterpreted.

On the other hand, one of the most popular articles I've ever published online was also about grandparents.  For a brief spell, it received dozens of comments (some entirely missing the point that it was tongue-in-cheek, as was the poem mentioned above) and earned me a bit of cash via Google Adsense.

I was reminded about these two pieces when I came across the phrase personalized grandparent gifts just now.   Hmm...personalized grandparent gifts; so like our dear friends in the US of A to find yet another marketing ploy.  Next we'll be celebrating Grandparents Day (or maybe it'll be split into Grandfather Day and Grandmother Day) - in fact, if it wasn't for the fact that the Internet is having one of its occasional down moments I could tell you whether any of these days already exist.  And I suspect they do!

Okay, an hour later...and the Internet is back again (in the meantime we've been out to see one of my aunts - for the first time in some years) and yes, there is a National Grandparents' Day, and it's been going since 1978, and, as I suspected, some places even separate out a Grandfather and Grandmother day.  Good grief.  Next it'll be National Auntie Day or Uncle Day...wait.  No need to wait - here's the gen on the Aunt and Uncle's Day.  Supposedly it's celebrated on July 26th.  I suspect it might be a bit of a have, along with Creative Ice Cream Day or Compliment Your Mirror Day or Amelia Earhart Day, and a bunch of others.

Oh, dear.

Very sweet peas

This year we planted a large number of sweet peas along the fence surrounding our potato patch, and over by the fence between us and the neighbour.   Sweet peas should produce multi-coloured flowers, and certainly the picture on the packet informed us this was so.  One of my earliest memories of flowers is that of the colourful sweet peas growing in the garden beside the old shed at my grandparents' house.

Anyway, out of the sweet peas that came up, only one has coloured flowers: the remainder are all white, which makes me think they're actually ordinary peas.  Besides that we've had a lot of ordinary peas growing of their own accord because we used pea straw on the garden in different places.

The other day we cooked up a pot of the peas from the supposed 'sweet peas.'   They were delicious: in fact we were eating some of them raw as we shelled them.   According to various online sources, the peas from the sweet pea plant are poisonous.   Hmm.  We're still alive.

So plainly we planted a lot of ordinary peas that had been mislabbeled.  I think we'd have noticed if the peas we were eating were poisonous; I'm sure they would have had a different texture and taste, one that would have put us off eating them.

Flying car doors

Reached the tidy sum of 1200 posts on here yesterday with my piece on webinars. And my fun piece on Grandparents' Rules that I posted on Gomestic yesterday has taken off; for some reason it appeals to other grandparents, who seem to like the idea of a bit of anarchy amongst us older bods.

I was reading on Facebook a few minutes ago about a well-known church leader in Australia who was just opening his car door when someone drove past and blew it off its hinges. I saw this happen in town once, many years ago. A woman opened her door to get out of the car and a passing truck struck it and sent it flying way down the road. You have to be driving close to a car to do that. And hopefully not still holding onto the handle.

You might not mind such an event if your car was a cheap and nasty little vehicle, full of rust and about to be sent to the tip. But if you had something a bit more classy, a Lamborghini, Maserati and Ferrari, then the thought of replacing the door would be very upsetting. Ferrari parts, I imagine, ain't cheap - nor are those for Lamborghinis or Maseratis - though I guess it would be your insurance company that would be upset more than you.

I suppose most Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati owners would have insurance - unless the car had cost them so much they had nothing left over to cover the car.

Photo of the Ferrari by Bob Henry