Colin Burdett’s review published on Letterboxd:
The impact of the film is immense. The way it perceives life as so beautiful is so profound to me. It's honestly what I've been looking for in films for a long time, and I think I might just have found it. The way our protagonist devotes all he has to something as simple as a park. Didn't Optimus Prime say we can be heroes in our own lives? This man was a hero. We can all be heroes if we only live our lives as beautiful people, not mummies. What is living though? It certainly can't be living the same day over and over again, living your life 9 to 5 or whatever. The scariest part about this movie for me was just that. Living like that seems like hell. I want to make an impact, even if it's just tiny. I don't want to be stuck doing the same old nothing shit every day for my whole fucking life until I'm just a GODDAMN FUCKING CARCASS. I truly believe that I am living right now.
The pandemic fucked me over though. I wasn't living, I was a mummy. I'd wake up, go to online school, not learn a thing, and then waste the whole day. What was the point of all that? Nothing!! I'm super duper extroverted so I basically had nothing to do. I could've though, and this movie shows it all.
This film is an outpouring of love to me. I just can't believe it. You have 6 months to live and what do you do with it? You change yourself. It's such a romantic idea to me, but this is how I hope it happens. Actually no. I want to live my whole life like this. Have everything in order, always trying to live. I can't die with regrets. If I only live like I have 6 months left then I'm really living, aren't I? Yeah. This movie shifts my whole perspective honestly. I probably vaguely thought of it this way before, but this is such a sharp call to live.
Am I living though? How the fuck do I know. I'm having the time of my life watching movies. I wasn't living a couple months ago. I was in a real slump. My sleep schedule was fucked over, I wasn't there mentally. I wasn't there emotionally. It was all a veneer. Then I went on a trip. I got back and I was beyond jet-lagged. This made me shift my sleep schedule forward so I could get more sleep. I had motivation to do work. But of course the effects wear off, so I had to have a new motivation. Once the first semester ended I felt like I had a fresh start. The day it ended I watched a couple movies. Then I watched 10 movies that weekend. Life on track again. I'm living again. I'm so happy. This movie is proof that I'm living, not an undead creature moving between home and school.
I started listening to an album today and the first song on it caught me, it grabbed me. I've been nonstop listening to that song "Silk Chiffon" for the past 5 hours or something. One of the lines from it goes "And life's so fun, life's so fun" ... "If it feels good to me, it feels good to me" God it feels so good right now. This is living. This is Ikiru. What an amazing movie. Thank you Mr. Kurosawa.
Not sure if that was coherent but it's midnight so fuck if I care.
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