Postscripts

Postscript One

I am doing the most mundane of things - peeling a long label off a plastic box in the kitchen - when from the far side of my consciousness, a film floats back to me.

Far Side Of The Moon...it's a lovely French Canadian film about a loser academic trying to get his thesis on the cosmos read, dealing with his mother's recent death and trying not to kill his only other loved one: his younger brother, an annoying weatherman. A fluid film, it can flow from a childhood memory about a day at the laundry - straight to space. One moment our eyes are on a boy who is watching a washing machine, the next moment we are on the other side of the machine door, and the next moment the round machine door morphs into the round window of a rocket and we are adrift. It's by Robert Lepage, who not only directs and portrays both brothers - it was his auntie-like face which bobbed, without warning, to the surface of my memory today, which is not as scary as it might sound, seriously - but also directed it when it was his one-man play!

Yep...because I didn't know Lepage the film director was the same man as Lepage the stage director. I loved his first film, The Confessional, and I knew Ms O loved his plays and I didn't know it was the same man. I just didn't. Not until I heard he would be here in June last year with his play, The Busker's Opera. Then he was here, in my country, and I was there, at his play, and he was on stage for a Q & A and I asked him a question!

But I digress. What I mean to say is, with Far Side Of The Moon, I have six and three-thirds fave films...

Postscript Two

There I am at Kaiju Shakedown, my fave Asian film blog of the moment, and what have we here?

Chen Kaige has given a quote on his own film, The Promise, that goes, "I think the way I did The Promise is very interesting - I told myself that the first thing to consider is not the story, not the characters, but the imagination. Yes, you have some real material from life, but you have to eat it up and make it yours to express. Adults eventually lose their imagination about everything. Only children can have a great imagination about everything, because they have a whole future. You can say you are old if three things around you start to occupy your mind: one is that you start to love money; second, you're afraid of death; third, you don't have any imagination." (Kaiju Shakedown, Monsters and Critics.)

Maybe, just maybe, what we have is an instance of yan gao shou di, when the eye is high and the hand is low i.e. when there is too much imagination but not as much inventiveness to express what was imagined.