Grave of the Fireflies

agreed. painful movie

Bullshit movie and totally unworthy of the favorable reviews. AVOID.

Heh... sounds like you've never seen Evil Dead II.

Maybe I'm a small time here, but I've never been so emotionally disturbed as after having watched Requiem for a Dream... I was totally out of it for a few days.

SPOILERS

Requiem for a Dream didn't make me feel anything, I felt like they all deserved it. Well, except for the mom...that part hurt.

If you want emotional, watch Taegukgi. Great Korean war film.

I didn't see it as "they all got what they deserved", to me the feeling was pretty depressing. My impression was that these were all people who were weak, and overpowered. They were taken advantage of by others and abused themselves. It made me feel like the world is a nasty terrible place just waiting to screw you, all rather demotivating. Sort of just a glimpe into how bad things can get, how terrible life can be.

Its all part of that pathetic Japanese victim complex. Ask any Japanese how the Pacific war started, and 99% won't know. Answer; They bombed Pearl Harbor without declaring war! Ask how it ended, and they'll all say they are the only people to have gotten nuked.

Seriously, if the Japanese weren't so hypocritical about their own history, whitewashing their own part in what were truely monumental acts of barbarity that ranks right up there with the holocaust, I'd be more sympthetic about these films. But nowhere, anywhere is there anything from the Japanese media about how others suffered at the hands of the Japanese. Its all about how they themselves suffered.

You might say that such crimes were perpetrated by powerful cruel men long gone, who used their stormtroopers to keep the general population in line. And the current generation shouldn't be held accountable for whats done in the past. Really? Tell that to the German government. They are still apologizing and compensating for the crimes commited by powerful cruel men long dead. At least they own up to it, admit it, try to make amends and are commited to making sure that it never happens again, including educating their children truthfully about it no matter how embarressing it may be. Even now, Nazi memorabilia and images are illegal in Germany and IIRC Austria. The Imperial Rising Sun flag? You can still see it almost everywhere in Japan. Replica Japanese Kempeitai (secret police) uniforms? You can buy them in most major hobby shops. Thats why the Germans have respect in the international diplomacy circles, for their historical integrity, not because they have the lion's share of the electronics and automotive industry and the second largest consumer market in the world.

In Japan, there are still middle school textbooks that describe the Japanese invasion of China as an "advance". Other pieces of embarressing history are outright ignored or glossed over. The Japanese government is still outright denying the Naking Massacre even happened despite the eye-witness accounts of Chinese, German, French, English, American and even Japanese witnesses. Thats why these Japanese animators, raised on this whitewashed crap have no qualms about portraying how their own people suffered at the hands of the western powers, and yet have no intention of showing the tragic story from the other side.

Japanese children dying of malnutrition? Tragic. Lets make a movie about it so people know how much we suffered! Chinese children dying by bayonet practise by Japanese troops? Never happened! English, French, Dutch and Australian children dying of malnutrition in civilian internment camps because they weren't provided with the food and medical supplies the International Red Cross delivered in copious amounts, but were kept for the Japanese's own use? Shhh, lets not bring that up, shall we.

Life can sometimes be worth than death. To quote Philip K Dick, "They played, like children, and were punished too harshly for it. Let them play again."

Honestly, I feel somewhat the same way about Grave of the Fireflies - the older kid was a brat, and I lost all sympathy for him when he refused to do anything. Sure, his younger brother got the short end of the stick for following him, but that's only one I feel for whose life is gone, rather than three whose lives are looking like a shit salad with little to no hope of redemption.

^^ Hurm, I was, albeit rather loosely, paraphrasing the epilogue to scanner darkly. I thought he wrote that (the epilogue). Perhaps I am mistaken. I agree with you that the tragedy of Grave of the Fireflies could have been prevented, and I will admit that a fair bit of my own reaction was as much to the artistic side (a slow paced sledgehammer, seemed to me) as anything else. However, the big difference is that he could have prevented it, and comparatively rather easily at that. I'm just saying I found it hard to sympathize with him, because he acted very selfishly, and I got the definite sense he would have been just as selfish if he had a job, and I've worked with people like that. That said, again, it's something of a personal reaction. I have a number of good friends who can't believe I don't like the movie, and who I exaust with my arguments to this effect.