Ikiru
生きる
1952 · Film · 143 min
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.
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This reminded the movie Ikiru (いきる), basically a elder discovered he will die and after some time he finds a purpose to its meaningless life, transform a wasteland into a playground.
All these stories have one thing in common: be obsessed with something that will improve other people's life.
Japanese films are notoriously bad. You found a few gems. They are rare. This topic comes up often in Japanese learning groups.
There's also just personal takes. I had to shut off Memories of Matsuko. Maybe the end saves it but it was way too over the top and not in a good way.
Some good older Japanese though
Kurasawa: Ikiru (1955)
Teshigahara: Woman in the Dunes (1964)
These are 2 movies you won't forget.
Conversely, even though I enjoyed Shoplifters I remember nothing about it except the guy celebrating he had sex and the girl burping. Similarly with After Life. I just watched it 2 months ago and had to go look it up to remember what it was about. It was interesting because of the premise but not because of the movie itself.
That statement reminds me of ikiru.
(an akira kurosawa movie about a japanese politician)
Writ-large, isn't what the article is referring to the plot of 生きる(Ikiru, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru)? My suspicion is that the solution to lack of ability for government to enable building in the US will be the same, writ-large, as in the movie. That is, it will happen, but (I'll stop here, least I spoil the movie for you).
If you're only interested in great movies, no others allowed, then the top 50,000 is bound to disappoint as there aren't that many great movies yet. Setting it to 10k this is what I got in my first 5 (well spread) clicks:
- Ikiru (1952): A fantastic movie, also in the above list
- A Clockwork Orange (1971): Alright, nobody is going to believe these are random if I keep pulling these...
- Tracks (2013): Haven't seen this one, doesn't seem particularly astounding but I'd probably watch it, especially if my wife was wanting to watch something we haven't seen together.
- Songbird (2020): This one looks a bit garbage to me, probably wouldn't watch.
- Osmosis Jones (2001): Watched a few times, maybe a bit of nostalgia but it has been a few years so I would throw this up. Not deserving of the top 1000 by any means... but also not Leprechaun 5: In the Hood (2001).
And that seems pretty reasonable. I'm only about 800 movies in (since I've started tracking), of those only ~400 are in the original 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list. To me watching straight through the various compendiums of the best movies is actually more dull than mixing in other things like the latest pop films or some stuff that wouldn't make many "top" lists but isn't necessarily bad. It's a bit like touring the best restaurants in a new area - if you do them all in a row then you just lose some of the feeling of variety. I doubt Tracks will leave an impact on my soul to the level of Ikiru, but I still want to watch things like that often.
Reminiscent of the Akira Kurosawa film 'Ikiru' (1952):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru
Thanks for the word Ikigai. I might actually remember it because it is related to the Japanese word Ikiru, which is the verb to live. Ikiru is also the title of one of Akira Kurosawa's finest films [1], which deals with the life and death of a Tokyo bureaucrat, and more specifically his discovery of meaning and purpose in life. I cant recommend it enough. It is generally ranked in the top 100 films of all time, a personal favorite, and reliably moves me to tears every time I watch it.
The concept of Ikigai seems to be broader than the professional sphere, so it makes sense that some people may have Ikigai, but it is unrelated to their work, or their work is merely a necessity, to support their passion.
I personally believe happiness is a spectrum, so people may have some level of happiness without Ikigai, but it is not qualitatively or quantitatively the same as that with it.
I have personally found great satisfaction and joy in my work at times in my career, and not at other times. In my experience, alignment of work, your skills, and passion is a glorious experience.
Almost like a drug induced euphoria, it can be an eye opening experience, which you can't help but place other experiences into the context of. It makes sense that those who haven't experienced it dont know- how could they.
My professional work isnt currently aligned with my passion, which severly limits my feeling of ikigai, but getting back there is the goal and destination. After getting a taste of it, life without it is certainly lacking.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044741/
"samurai" movies:
- Seven Samurai
- Rashomon
- Ran
- Throne of Blood
- Kagemusha
non-samurai:
- High and Low
- Ikiru
I would say that the essentials are Seven Samurai, High and Low, Rashomon.
There is a Kurosawa movie showing how hard this could be:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru
(wikipedia is always a spoiler if you read the Plot section)
Recommend reading "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.
Kurosawa film, "Ikiru" is worth a watch too
Otherwise I believe finding purpose is a deeply personal journey for every single person on the planet. Good luck!
You should watch the Japanese movie ikiru - that’s how I felt when I tried to navigate the kafkaesque GST system. I received a letter, and just to find out who I received from, I was shuffled around between 7 offices in just my cities with a total travel of 60 kilometers (my city is itself only 15km across lol).
What’s happening is that you’re entering a flow state, albeit one that is distressing you.
You need to jam the flow. And jam it frequently, bc most likely if you take a 5 minute break you will gravitate back towards an LCD screen again.
Look up the prerequisites of a flow state- a task that is at the sweet spot of difficulty and novelty. Another way to think about it is a flow is a very high bandwidth (in an information theoretic sense) experience. Tells you what you need to do: live via non-digital, high-bandwidth experiences!
Challenge yourself! Do something semi structured yet semi scary- dance classes? Public speaking? Something where to do it right, you need to be processing more life ‘data’ than sitting in front of the screen
Also watch the movie Ikiru - it is a classic, extremely moving, and very intelligent movie from the 1950s. The main character is a man who realizes one day that he has not been really living - but then, he really manages to change his life quickly, and he manages to live. May be some real and recognizable inspiration and beauty in it for you :)
> Good luck telling a 22-year old that they must prioritize spending time with their parents because life's too short. They'll just dismiss you in seconds.
Reason number 100 I’m glad I watched the film Ikiru in my 20s! Helped me realize what’s actually valuable
Despite the title, people who have never lived in Japan probably still don’t have a great idea of how it runs after reading the article.
So here’s a quick rundown of how the decentralisation mentioned in the article is structured: Japan is split into 47 todōfuken (都道府県), their closest analog to a US “state”. You’ll hear these called “Prefectures”, but just like the US has states (Washington) and territories (Washington DC), Japan only has 43 prefectures, the rest are technically different types of district. Tokyo is (the only) “metropolis” region directly under the national government.
Across Japan every local district is split up into shichōson (市町村), cities, towns, and villages.
“Central” Tokyo is a special area where that standard shichōson system doesn’t apply, except really it does, we just call things “wards” instead.
Every local district, whether city, town, village, or ward, is essentially the face of government in that community. They provide public services like sanitation, education, and community engagement events. When it’s time to vote, you will go to your local [city|town|village|ward] office and do it there.
These local offices have quite a bit of power (and are what people are talking about most of the time when they refer to the “infamous” Japanese bureaucracy. For an excellent film looking at this world, I cannot recommend Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” enough. I believe it’s in IMDbs top 10 of all time), while they are often ridiculed for being slow and stuffy, they are a very real check and balance against the prefectural and national governments.
Tokyo has a city-wide government (analogous to a state government) that is politically important at a national level, an example of the more illustrious institutions run by this level is the famous Tokyo metropolitan police.
As the article stated, Tokyo is rich. 10th largest gdp nation in the world if it was an independent nation, this means there’s a lot of money flowing through that city government. Depending on who you ask, this is the level that shady deals, and blatant corruption happens most. The tabloids are always busy in Tokyo.
The point is, all these powers seem to be quite well-balanced, and the citizenry engaged enough to keep them in check, in other words, like a well functioning democracy. I’m not saying it doesn’t have its downsides, and I’m no fan of Tokyo after living there for four years, but it is a remarkably well-working system. I’d still rather be in Osaka, or better yet, the countryside tbh.
Nearly everyone involved in this debate is "fake".
The people railing against Amazon are mostly people who have never done manual labor in their lives and (wrongly) view people who have as little better than slaves. Even the Amazon (or ex-Amazon) employees who speak against the company are doing so in an environment where the only tolerated sentiment is attacking Amazon. There's no room for nuance. Perhaps that's okay and reasonable new provisions for Amazon employees will come out of all this or perhaps the debate will get less and less rational.
This situation makes me think of Ikiru, a Kurosawa movie. The main character is dying. He looks around for meaning in life and eventually settles upon a former employee of his, a young girl. He spends time with her and buys her things just to be around her, not out of any romantic of sexual motive, just because he's drawn to her liveliness, her attitude toward the world. Eventually she gets tired of this situation and no longer wants to see him. As she leaves, he begs her to tell him how she's so happy. She explains that she now works in a factory making toys for Japanese kids and this gives her life meaning. The main character decides that he can make his life meaningful by creating something durable in the world for other people before he dies.
My point is that we often view workers as oppressed but an Amazon warehouse worker contributes in a very real way to billions of people getting things that they need. I write code for a living and I'm not convinced that I contribute any more to the world than an Amazon warehouse worker. And don't think the workers are unaware of this, some of them take pride in it, whether or not they express it on twitter, and they should.
A lot of this comes down to your attitude toward the world. Are you a pessimist? Do you view human interaction as oppressive, is it mainly comprised of corrupt, powerful people manipulating kind, weak people? Or are you an optimist? Do you find it remarkable that things work as well as they do, do you take pride in your part, no matter how small, in keeping civilization afloat?
Neither of these sentiments is wrong but only one is taken seriously in certain circles.
You're wrong.
For me, Ikiru and Dersu Uzala are the best, but the usual ones mentioned are great too. Some I didn't see mentioned on this page yet that I also really like: One Wonderful Sunday (1947), Red Beard (1965), Dodesukaden (Clickety-Clack, 1970). First one I saw was The Hidden Fortress (1958), remade in the west as Star Wars – and Yoda, it seems to me, is Dersu Uzala.
I think his movies seem so good because everything about them is good. Screenplay, camera angles, editing, actors, music..etc.
There's a whole bunch of his films I'd put squarely in my all-time list. Ikiru, Ran, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, High and Low, Dersu Uzala, Rashomon. It's one masterpiece after another. Try watching Seven Samurai and Ikiru back to back to really appreciate the genius of Takeshi Shimura as an actor.
Kurosawa-san may be too humble to add his own Ikiru (生きる, "To Live") to this list. But it well deserves its place in the pantheon. A film to restore your faith in the simple act of surviving ;)
I agree with your point but i would also want to point out this has been a problem since the dawn of man. Governments and organizations have been plagued by unending bureucracy and corruption that grows worse the longer it has been in existence. Humans have a tendency to protect their belongings or ego more than altruistically help others so it makes sense.
Democracy has, as a general idea, been a way to solve this problem by creating a counterbalance that should prevent important decisionmakers from being overly selfish and at least show they are being effective and altruistic. But that system isnt really applicable for smale scale power dynamics. Unless efficiency, or in some cases having just common sense, is not monitored by anyone aka. there are no consequences for making poor decisions sooner or later no one will pay attention and they will be doing whatever they _think_ is best (or easiest) but without reality checks.
But how to evaluate performance when dealing with abstract things? At least in the case of GoT the ratings did deteriorate so one could point out a problem in the system (albeit way too late, IMO s6 was when it should have been fixed). In other cases no one can see the damage they are doing (especially if they have never been really doing anything) so how to even tell it needs to be fixed? I think best cure to this problem is a great culture where being efficient is praised and rewarded. But changing already terrible culture, well, that's tough...
(Interesting film on this matter is Ikiru by Kurosawa)
If you have a library card, your local library may provide free access to Kanopy, which has Ikiru, as well as a couple other Kurosawa and Jarmusch films.
I have not seen "I Live in Fear" yet. That being said, Ikiru is my favorite movie.
Thanks for sharing this.
> A government entity in terms of public services tends to have "getting their job done right" at the top of the list, albeit at a lower cost when possible.
not my experience. Most government entities try to raise as much money as possible to protect their jobs and raise their salaries. gettingthe job done right is not remotely near top of the list. See SFMTA or MTA (new your public transportaion) as 2 examples. Or watch IKIRU to see the same attitude in Japan. Yes it's a movie but it rings true to people's experience that goverment never tries to "getting their job done right"
Die Wand (The Wall, 2012, Austria) - A woman on holiday in the mountains is suddenly trapped behind an invisible wall, with only animals as companions... The movie goes deep into human nature, how we live with nature and other life forms, and is comparably profound with the best writing on those subjects. Incredible.
The Sea That Thinks (2000, Netherlands) - About the self, self-reference, meta-(meta-meta-)narrative, consciousness, illusion.. Wonderfully well-constructed.
2 of Kurosawa's: Dersu Uzala (1974), the story of the friendship of a Russian military map-maker and a Siberian hunter. Fascinating encounter of city man and nomadic hunter, two incompatible modes of living. (I think Yoda is based on Dersu, as Star Wars was based on Hidden Fortress) ..and Ikiru (1952), about a boring goverment office worker who learns he's dying and wants to do something meaningful with his life at last.
Series: My favourites are from France (Engrenages, Les hommes de l’ombre, Le Bureau des Légendes, Un Village Français) and Denmark (Borgen, Arvingerne, Herrens veje/Ride Upon the Storm). Maybe Un Village Français gets my top vote, the epic (7 seasons) story of a French village under Nazi occupation - the politicians, Resistance, communists, militia, Nazis, collaborators, Jews, businessmen etc. Unforgettably touching.
Completely non sequitur but if you've never see it check out "Ikiru" by Akira Kurosawa. It's a movie about a government employee that's been doing nothing but serving the organization customers his whole life until he finds out he has cancer.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044741/
> known for it's xenophobia
Broad brushes like these are usually dangerous to paint with. Japan has it's xenophobic streaks but is also one of the most cosmopolitan cultures around. For similar reasons, lines like the following in the article piqued my annoyance as well:
how very un-Japanese it seemed: in the broadness of its satire, in the zaniness of its switches from one genre to another, in the almost violent simplicity of its message and story
Author's certainly entitled to his own reaction but I don't find these traits uncommon in Japanese cinema (and literature). I'm not contesting the whole 'Kurosawa is the least Japanese of Japanese directors' trope but that reputation was largely earned for his later career. Imho Kurosawa in the 50's was as Japanese as anyone, and that's especially true with Ikiru, a film that fits perfectly alongside the better contemporary efforts from directors like Kinoshita and Ichikawa.
You can purchase it from the Criterion Collection: https://www.criterion.com/films/353-ikiru
Not only did they restore it, there are extras like a commentary track, documentaries on Kurosawa and Ikiru itself, and some writings. Yeah the streaming wasn't as convenient as one would like but we should support the Criterion Collection, which goes all out for its films and restores unappreciated masterpieces. It's a much better experience than watching a horrible compressed-to-hell encode by YIFY with inaudible audio.
The most likely way in which you can be impactful is just to be stubborn about your work. Slow and steady, trial and error type work is less easily explored and thus more bountiful if you can persist. Everyone uses their own particular strategy, but your strategy is defined by your personality. Lots of creatures in the wild can be observed solving big challenges like "how to escape" or "how to get the food" just with persistence, without being particularly crafty or skillful. With ideas and social problems, the same kind of persistence is important. If it were easy, it'd already be done.
See also: the Kurosawa film "Ikiru".
I don't think it would make much odds for IMDB. Sure you'll maybe negate the overly high proportion of extreme votes, but I don't think that effect is large. I did once take the top films on IMDB and remove the extreme votes, and the effect was marginal - a few films shuffled a place or so. In exchange, if you use the median, you could have polarising films - like Twilight, having their ratings change markedly over time, as people decide to start warring over it and the numbers swamp the small number of ambivalents.
For your other point, there will be voting patterns for various demographics and certain groups of people prefer certain movies. But I think the phenomenon I'm describing is a bit too extreme to be merely a bunch of old women disproportionately taking a dislike to Ikiru and then rushing onto the internet to tell the world they hate it. It is the smallest demographic IMDB has, so it's not hurting the ratings of the films in general, it's just an oddity.
One thing I was hoping this series would shed light on was an oddity in demographic voting patterns with the ratings system.
From my own (anecdotal) observation, there's a class of films where the 'Females 45+' rating is a big outlier in the voting, with a large proportion of '1' votes. it's as if there's a gang of a few hundred users consistently downvoting films who are classed by IMDB as being part of that demographic - I don't know if it's a default setting that some bots or trolls have used or if there really are a bunch of cinephobic old women out there just watching and hating on films, but it did spark my curiosity as to what the pattern was. It doesn't happen in every film, and it's rare that you see any other demographic sticking out like this.
The best examples are critically acclaimed films with low voter counts. More popular, or less well-received films tend to have a lot of negative noise to begin with, so the effect is less noticeable, if it's there at all.
Here's some examples:
Army of Shadows : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064040/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Spartacus : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054331/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Ikiru : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044741/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Passion of Joan of Arc : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019254/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Breathless : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053472/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Z : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065234/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
Barry Lyndon : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072684/ratings?ref_=tt_ov_rt
These are some movies/tv series that I deeply enjoyed and (some I) wish I had known about earlier.
9.9 Hitchhiker's guide to the universe, BBC TV series
9.9 Contact (1997) based on a novel by Carl Sagan. Very few people seem to know about this movie.
9.3 War Games
9.0 most Akiro Kurosawa movies:
Seven Samurai
High & Low
The Bad Sleep Well
Ikiru
Red Beard
9.0 Terminator 1 (watch again)
8.8 Terminator 2 (watch again)
8.7 Pirates of Silicon Valley
8.7 Matrix 1 (watch again)
8.7 The Italian Job (featuring Napster's original inventor)
8.7 Live Free or Die Hard
8.5 Track Down or Takedown (about social hacker Kevin Mitnick)
8.5 Revolution OS (2001)
8.5 Dr. Strangelove
8.5 2010 A space odyssey
8.3 Antitrust (2001)
8.3 Sneakers
8.3 COSMOS
8.2 Minority Report
8.2 2001 A space odyssey
8.2 Paycheck (2003)
8.0 The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
8.0 The Net
Deru kugi wa utareru
Cross-reference with "An Innovator Leaving Japan"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325704
http://synaptify.com/?p=613728
OT: Ikiru "To Life" (a 1952 film about one man and Japan's human crushing bureaucracy) is one of Kurosawa's best
http://www.acepilots.com/discussions/ikiru.html
Ikiru is one of the few movies I bought on DVD. Such a special movie, I don't know any other movie like it.
Apart from those already mentioned by others, some challenging classics:
Zorba the Greek Ikiru (Living), by Akira Kurosawa Babette's Feast La Strada La double vie de Véronique Lawrence of Arabia It's a Wonderful Life Jakob the Liar Citizen Kane Deliverance Dogville
Worth noting that none of these are "feel-good" american movies. They're "kick you in the balls and get you busy living" movies. I much prefer those to simple feel-good movies. If you want feel-good, just go watch some reruns of Friends (I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing; I do it quite often; but those are not the best inspirational movies by a long shot).
I had the opportunity to recently watch an Akira Kurosawa film called Ikiru. A beautiful, not overly sentimental film about what someone can do with their life once they are determined to make something with it. Reading this article saddens me because it's positioning failure as an inevitability - but what is really failure? Isn't failure just part of the learning curve?
As someone wiser than me said, it's:
you -> failure -> failure -> success
not
failure <- you -> success
I'll check some of these I haven't seen out. He's got a Hitchcock and Kurosawa film on there, and they're two of the finest directors of all time. Rashomon is actually one of my least favorite Kurosawa films, but it's still great - I just much more greatly like Ran (English: "Chaos", his best film), Ikiru ("Life", it drags towards the middle but the government council scene at the end is incredible), Kagemusha ("Shadow", wow what an incredible premise - really an overlooked masterpiece when looking at his career), and of course Seven Samurai. Then you've got Yojimbo which is an interesting story but kind of campy, and Rashomon which is a great piece of storytelling and a great piece of directing, but just isn't as satisfying of an experience as Ran, Ikiru, Kagemusha, or Seven Samurai. If I was recommending Kurosawa to a new viewer, I'd say watch them in that order, and then perhaps Rashomon.
I haven't seen all of Hitchcock's films, but it's something I've been meaning to do. The thing both of these directors (Kurosawa and Hitchcock) have in common - they're both absolutely obsessed with presentation. They don't waste a single scene in their movies. In their better films, Kurosawa and Hitchcock don't even waste a single shot - everything is perfectly constructed for a very specific reason. Really incredible experiences to watch them, and highly recommended for people who love movies, stories, or simply just art.
I believe doing your best work, is the best way of helping the world. If you love what you are doing, if you are one with yourself when you are doing it, you are giving the most you can ever give to the world.
All religions say that selflessness is the path to happiness and enlightenment. I think true selflessness can only be achieved when you are truly at one with your work and its flow, when you see it all around you, and you loose yourself in it...
Even though Michaelangelo didn't cure any life threatening diseases he did make something that gives everyone who watches it, a moment of beauty, a moment of perfection, a moment of heaven. I think that gift is no less than any other.
I hope I gave you something to think about. This was my good deed of the day... :)
I also recommend an old Japanese movie by Akira Kurosawa called 'Ikiru'. It has a nice perspective on the topic.