Watch Still Walking For Free

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Blistering performances.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Slowly evolving family drama with the plot built around the visit of adult son and daughter with their families on the anniversary of the death of the older son. It is the first movie from the director and writer Hirokazu Koreeda that I have seen and I felt immediately in love with his style of telling the story. Formally focusing on everyday activities during the visit - preparing the food, walking, taking the bath - "family truths" and biases of parents towards children and vice versa are revealed. Focusing on common activities the movie provides its apparent simplicity, but each time when the viewer starts to be almost bored by its naturalism, he is surprised by some revelation of family relationships. In these small details the family relationships are becoming complex like the life itself. For me, as a person with an European cultural background, it was also very interesting to see how this family story that includes problems between parents and children characteristic for every culture, looks in the context of Japanese Shintoist and Budhist traditions. That is what I expect from a good movie: to touch topics common for the all human race and to show it in the context of specific cultures.

The acting is fantastic in that it is all natural- there is no scenery chewing, and Kore-eda's well-paced and naturalistic script, the understated but deftly placed musical score by Gontiti, and the unobtrusive, yet evocative cinematography Yutaka Yamasaki, all work synergistically, but in the curious way of adding up to less than the sum of their parts….which is somehow perfect, because less equals more, at least in terms of naturalism. There's not a forced moment in the film, and it is not a tearjerker, even though it left my wife weeping, and me profoundly moved. This is because it is a deeply and genuinely affecting film. The closest film, in tone, that I can think of, in terms of American cinema, is Woody Allen's 1988 masterpiece, starring Gena Rowlands: Another Woman, wherein drama, on a grand scale, is achieved by focusing on people who do not live on such a scale. Still Walking is an example of cinemature in both senses of the term: mature filmmaking and literature-like in its depth and profundity.As for Still Walking? The old saw about them not making films like that any longer is true, at least for Hollywood. But they do make great, mature films still….elsewhere. Go East, young man! Go East!

'Still Walking' is a quiet film about a Japanese family which gathers annually to commemorate the life of a now dead member; perhaps you could say it's too quiet, especially as half of the visitors depart just half-way through. But it's shrewd on perceptive when it comes to observing the frailties and sensitivities that define us all, especially (although not exclusively) the natural cantankerousness of the old, even those who love us. For a westerner, part of the interest in this film is the way that it addresses universal themes, but from a peculiarly Japanese perspective. The resemblance of the grandfather to Colonel Saunders is purely superficial.

I very much enjoyed Nobody Knows (Dare Mo Shiranai) and After Life (Wonderful Life) immensely and found another good and engaging movie with Still Walking. Kore Eda seems to be in a small group of directors who use minimal music and other traditional movie elements in order to convey the story to the viewer. Just as talking in a low voice will elicit the heightened command of a listener, so too does Kore Eda use subtle dialogue and action to focus the viewers attention to what's going on.I can totally relate to the family in Still Walking because they come across as anyone's family. Literally. I felt as though I could have been watching my own family and not some Japanese family to whom I could not relate. All the elements are there from the big-city adult children coming to visit their small-town parents with their children en tow. The interplay between the fast pace of urban life and slow pace of rural life meet somewhere in the middle. Throughout, I felt as I usually do in a Kore Eda movie: a silent and invisible observer.The premise of the movie is that the family gathers together once a year on the anniversary of the death of the eldest son who we learn had drowned saving the life of another person who himself was attempting to commit suicide by drowning in the sea. As you may know, in Japanese society, if you save the life of someone who wishes to commit suicide, you effectively are responsible for their life going forward. In this case, the person doing the saving, the eldest son, had died in the process. So we see the person who he saved return year after year to be reminded in an indebted but somewhat cruel manner that he is alive and that he will be, for the rest of the parent's of deceased lives, be required to suffer the (cultural) humility of "being alive" while their son is dead.We also see the typical social dilemma of what to do as ones aging parents and additional interplay between the surviving son and his new, but widowed, wife and her child. We've seen the transaction a million times in other movies: mother in law has her comments and opinions, wife complains to the husband about her and her son's treatment, son has to either stand up to the parents or find some middle ground.All in all, it's well played out and I was very pleased by this film. It's an amalgam of growth, change, sacrifice, forgiveness, and the road we all have to travel as we get older or if we have children ourselves. Oddly though, the film's title doesn't make sense until near the end of the movie.