Logging

Film: Ikiru  

One of my mantras of late - grippy loglines and concepts don't matter so much as the filmmaker believing in a premise and making us care. The Brutalist being an example. No one was screaming for a film about a fictional Hungarian architect fleeing Nazi Germany. And yet...

Kurosawa's Ikiru is the epitome of this type of film. It's about a bureaucrat who builds a playground. There is more of course, but for my money the most astonishing storytelling element was how he told the story in the entire third act through a dinner party and flashbacks after the main character dies. His peers debate amongst themselves how much impact the lone bureaucrat actually had. It took me a moment to adjust to this way of telling the story, but was won over in the end.