Sho mo nai!

Gus Van Sant double header

Eikaiwa movie night.
Oddly, only a few people ever come. This time it was three. We watched Good Will Hunting, which was potentially the best choice we have had so far in regards to overall enjoyment and things to say afterwards (if there is a second place, it is strangely held by A Knight's Tale). Taku-chan, who usually says the least after a movie because his English is the lowest in the advanced class, had a lot to say. He made a convincing comparison of Will, the main character, and Ultraman. He thought it was very much a guys' movie. The other two, both women, liked it well enough, though they found the story very simple. Having had rented Elephant at the same time, I had no idea that both were Gus Van Sant movies. When we got on to talking about how it was filmed, I threw on Elephant and turned the volume down. The pacing in Elephant made it okay to talk through and over a bit. Somehow after Good Will Hunting, Elephant's tense calmness, or perhaps its everday quality kind of caught everyone up. One of the women had to leave for work. Elephant is an excellent film, and though it's less than 90 minutes long and covers only the space of an afternoon in the life of a few students, you feel like you know what their entire year, or even whole high school life has been like. I would have suggested it for the evening in the first place, but it's hard to say, "Hey, let's watch a movie about a high school shooting," you know? However, it is filmed ever so well, and I imagine we could end up using most of the next class to continue talking about both movies.

The result of the double header was that we didn't finish until nearly midnight; I hope that it doesn't wreck the other two for whatever they had going on today.

posted by Fletcher @ 5:58 p.m.