Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Today I wanted to go out and shoot some photos around Lincoln, but as I got in my car to drive downtown it started raining so I had to give up just as soon as I started. Hopefully tomorrow it’ll be nice and clear. The only thing I have to share are these two self-portraits (which pretty accurately capture the amount of me that feels like me right now), taken right before the rain:






Last night I watched a five-star Japanese film called Tony Takatani, directed by Jun Ichikawa, based on a short story by Haruki Murakami. Ichikawa does a bunch of interesting things in this film: he has the characters interact with the voice over, he slides the camera from side to side to enter and exit the scenes, he uses unique camera angles, and he has Ryuichi Sakamoto doing the music, just to name a few. Plus, the story is so melancholy, about an illustrator who's desperately lonely until he finds a woman to share his life with, only she's addicted to buying designer clothes and when he asks her to cut back on her shopping it all ends up badly. I could so easily empathize with his character, the intensely debilitating sadness of being alone, the aching desire to share your life with someone. I really, really liked this movie.

You can read the Murakami story here.
You can read some of the film reviews here.