Agree that the treatment of nihilism is shallow, but it didn’t matter to me because it wasn’t the heart of the movie at all. The heart is, hmm, being a failure? Letting your relationships decay because you’re neglecting them, because you don’t have a “show up for my people” attitude about them (maybe because on some level you expect both yourself and them to be better, but you aren’t, and this is discouraging)… letting (career, family, time management) problems build up that you dismiss as chronic irritations rather than the defining, central challenges that you have to tackle… and then managing, somehow, to change, to choose love, to choose commitment to your own life.
(stares at that paragraph) Okay, yes. That’s it for me. This movie is good because it shows a wreck of a person choosing to commit to their own life. I don’t commit enough to my own life, my friends don’t commit to their own lives, and it’s very potent to watch someone turn around on this! It turns me a bit in the same direction.
I cannot ask for more from art.
Found the movie hilarious and it never crossed my mind that the protagonist being a middle aged immigrant was part of what made it funny, btw.
Found the movie hilarious and it never crossed my mind that the protagonist being a middle aged immigrant was part of what made it funny, btw.
Yes, I agree here, and I wonder how OP ended up with this impression. Her being a middle-aged immigrant is important to the family story the movie is telling because her relationships with her dad, husband, and daughter, and who each of them is, are all affected by this fact and by the protagonist’s experiences and choices. Those relationships both drive the plot and form the emotional core of the movie.
I think if you just view this movie thru the lens of one genre, it’s going to seem lacking because, what genre is this movie? It’s everything, everywhere, all at once.
Agree that the treatment of nihilism is shallow, but it didn’t matter to me because it wasn’t the heart of the movie at all. The heart is, hmm, being a failure? Letting your relationships decay because you’re neglecting them, because you don’t have a “show up for my people” attitude about them (maybe because on some level you expect both yourself and them to be better, but you aren’t, and this is discouraging)… letting (career, family, time management) problems build up that you dismiss as chronic irritations rather than the defining, central challenges that you have to tackle… and then managing, somehow, to change, to choose love, to choose commitment to your own life.
(stares at that paragraph) Okay, yes. That’s it for me. This movie is good because it shows a wreck of a person choosing to commit to their own life. I don’t commit enough to my own life, my friends don’t commit to their own lives, and it’s very potent to watch someone turn around on this! It turns me a bit in the same direction.
I cannot ask for more from art.
Found the movie hilarious and it never crossed my mind that the protagonist being a middle aged immigrant was part of what made it funny, btw.
Yes, I agree here, and I wonder how OP ended up with this impression. Her being a middle-aged immigrant is important to the family story the movie is telling because her relationships with her dad, husband, and daughter, and who each of them is, are all affected by this fact and by the protagonist’s experiences and choices. Those relationships both drive the plot and form the emotional core of the movie.
I think if you just view this movie thru the lens of one genre, it’s going to seem lacking because, what genre is this movie? It’s everything, everywhere, all at once.