{"id":17933,"date":"2025-09-25T21:00:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T01:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=17933"},"modified":"2025-09-19T16:33:41","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T20:33:41","slug":"after-life-1998-hirokazu-kore-eda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/17933","title":{"rendered":"After Life (1998, Hirokazu Kore-eda)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s me, the cynic who didn&#8217;t love <em>After Life<\/em>, a movie which appears to have stolen <em>Brain Candy<\/em>&#8216;s plot of people re-living their happiest moment and turned it into a dry, quiet portrait of a bureaucratic limbo (and film studio).  It&#8217;s also me, the guy who lost it at the end, when one of the counselors who&#8217;d refused to pick a happy moment for decades, relents: &#8220;I&#8217;ve learned I was part of someone else&#8217;s happiness. What a wonderful discovery.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image25\/afterlife1.jpeg\"><\/p>\n<p>Viet Thanh Nguyen <a href=\"https:\/\/www.criterion.com\/current\/posts\/7492-after-life-in-memoriam\">for Criterion<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One could ask all kinds of things about the functioning of this process: Who\u2019s doing the recording, and where are the cameras? How extensive are the archives? Instead of a god, is there only an archivist or archivists, working endlessly without judgment? But these are questions that <em>After Life<\/em> quite happily declines to answer. Kore-eda refuses to get bogged down in unnecessary details that might be interesting in world-building but that are extraneous to his central focus on character and feeling, as well as on the decision-making that has enormous consequences for individuals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image25\/afterlife2.jpeg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s me, the cynic who didn&#8217;t love After Life, a movie which appears to have stolen Brain Candy&#8216;s plot of people re-living their happiest moment and turned it into a dry, quiet portrait of a bureaucratic limbo (and film studio). It&#8217;s also me, the guy who lost it at the end, when one of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[451,2441,91,2561,36],"class_list":["post-17933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1990s","tag-afterlife","tag-filmmaking","tag-hirokazu-koreeda","tag-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17955,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17933\/revisions\/17955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}