Change Your Image
jlager
Reviews
Past Lives (2023)
Culturally relevant and thought provoking.
This movie indeed display good layering of how often immigrants push ourselves to adopt to the expectation of what life "should be" in a new culture. It exposes the loss of the potential what-if's, had they never left their original culture. Unfortunately some of the turns are simply not solid. The main character gaslights her first love, an example being when her first love asks why she went ahead and married, and she quickly replies that he too did get a girlfriend, conveniently leaving out the fact that she is the one who one-sidedly decided to permanently end their contact last time around and only after that did he get a girlfriend, for a while. What should he have done? Waited forever. She leads a very self-centered life and I have to admit the acting was either off, or she was written to appear quite self-absorbed. It made me feel sorry for the men in her life. The movie was very touching at moments and did highlight how love sometimes is also an active choice, or at least a choice to believe. There are no ways of knowing if we've made the right choice or not, and that can be both incredibly relieving or disarming depending on how you feel about it. How much should we yearn or mourn the life we could've had?
Still (2023)
Humor, warmth and pain
This is not a velvety self celebratory biography, but an honest insight in to the actual man, pain bruises and all, behind the face we thought we knew so well. Giving the sense that life happens to everyone, also celebrities, you understand how absolutely critical family, especially his wife has been in reflecting back on him, so that he could make the choices to become the man he is today. Parkinson's is a brutal disease, as I've also experienced first hand with an acquaintance, but Michael J Fox story, well told through clips from throughout his career, gives hope that you can break through living in accordance with your own perceived expectations of how the world needs to see you, and actually just be your true self, no matter what life brings, and no matter how differently you may be perceived compared to your old ideals. The less polished, authentic Michael J Fox, is an inspiration, and this documentary lets you meet him closer than ever.