Photo by Mahsa Habibi on Unsplash
Lately, movies haven’t really been at the top of my watch list. For a while, I feel as if prestige TV really killed my desire to watch movies. I was so in love with the deep characterizations that seemed to only exist in the world of TV. Here, with multiple seasons to develop, you could fall into or out of love with characters as their story arcs slowly unfurled against the backdrop of fully realized worlds. I’ll talk about my favorite show of 2023 in a separate post, but whether it was a limited series or a longer series that covered multiple seasons, there were so many great stories with amazing acting happening on TV that I had lost my appetite for movies for a while.
That appetite was really tamped down by the rise of the Marvel and DC superhero movies. I admit it; I’m old and I feel old. And these gargantuan technological wonders filled with CG animated battles and explosions left me feeling cold, bewildered, and frankly exhausted. I have liked some superhero movies in the past, but most of these were ones that broke familiar storytelling tropes. Think of the first Wonder Woman, where her agency and power were the central story catalysts. Every element of the movie focused on her being the prime mover, and it was glorious. The symbolism of her crossing No-Man’s Land brought chills down my spine. I felt the same when I watched the first Black Panther and Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. These were movies with atypical protagonists and thrilling and unique storytelling methods, and I was here for it.
After that, however, as the movie names got longer and less comprehensible (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), I just felt no desire to subject myself to churned out movie thrill rides that were made by market-research-driven executive committees and relied on crappy CG technology (usually the result of rushed and overworked VFX studios).
So, it sounds like I just don’t like movies, right? Well, the problem was that I hadn’t been selective enough. I needed to start watching movies that worked for me. So, similar to my book dilemma, this meant that I wasn’t going to watch a movie just because it was released recently. I was going to take my time and watch movies that sounded interesting to me. I recently finished Promising Young Woman, for example, because the director, Emerald Fennell, had a newer movie, Saltburn, that was receiving a ton of buzz and seemed to be the kind of quirky, character-driven narrative that I was interested in. Carey Mulligan fantastically inhabited her character in this story of female rage and revenge, though the movie could have gone much further in that narrative, in my opinion.
So, that finally brings me to my favorite movie that I have seen this year, and that is:
This is a quiet but thoroughly moving story that follows the lives of two Koreans as they meet as young children and then bump into each other multiple times over the years and across countries. The movie investigates the Korean concept of In-Yun, which is about the exploration of the destiny between two connected souls. What are the threads, the connections that cause you to move together and apart from each other in this life and in all of the lives you have lived and all of the lives you have yet to live?
The quiet storytelling and the truly gorgeous acting by Greta Lee (I remembered her as the “sweet birthday baby” friend from Russian Doll) had me gripped and then sobbing into a massive puddle of tears by the end. Truly a great movie for 2023 and really a movie that has touched me more than most movies I’ve seen in a while.
I will most likely have to write a completely separate post about all of the recent amazing Korean movies that I’ve seen (Parasite, Minari), but for now, I highly, highly recommend watching Past Lives if you haven’t yet seen it.
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